Squad Leader Archive

Ok see how you like this.If you think im going to nuts just stop me :-P

My idea is XP bonuses. To give credit where its due, I got this idea from the guy who said "marksmen have no reason to use suppresion fire on a mob just to help. What if you did have a reason? If you have played any kind of tournament FPS you know they have a score board at the end showing your frags. But some games also show things (mostly team games) such as "Friendlies hit" (bad) "Friendlies Saved" (usually done by checking if you hit/killed someone that was attacking a teamate) and other such medals. Well what if there was such a thing in group combat? Note that until the end, these bonuses are for all players not just squad leader. Let me give an example...

You have a balanced group. I am not gonna name the members but assume you have at least 1 of each profession I name later :-P. You decide to fight a NPC group of medium difficulty. You have the brawler pull (since you want them to target him initially) and then everyone opens up. First brawler gets in range and starts using his specials. A marksmen in the way back decides to use suppresion fire on him to help the brawler. BING "Team Aid Experience Earned" (insert xp gain delay here to prevent exploit). One of the NPC melee's runs up to a carbineer. A pistoleer nearby see's this and immediatly switches targets to focus on him, hoping to take him out or at least help the carbineer defend himself BING (or maybe at end of battle) "Team Defender XP Earned" (delayed or totaled at the end of combat). The Squad Leader notices that there is one NPC using a lightning gun. He sysgroups the party to attack his target. Everyone assists (but the one idiot who likes to go rambo) and they all manage to take it out. BING "Cohesion XP Earned" (probably given at end of combat to players who did damage to a mob that other players did damage to. The more players that were hitting that target, the greater the cohesion XP). Finally combat is over, XP is earned as normal and BING "Squad Leader Teamwork XP Earned" (Squad leader gets xp depending on how many of those "special conditions" were earned by his group and to what degree).

What is so great about these bonus xp's? It promotes teamplay. It promotes listening to Squad Leader. And most of all, a good squad leader will make SURE that his party is behaving in this fassion making good leaders get the xp the deserve (which i believe was one of the imporant factors about remodelling the squad leader). Finally, his xp will be based off of his groups cohesion which is a direct relationship to leadership. If everyone goes gung hoe, he won't get much xp if any. But if he finds a good group to party with (and they will wanna party to get the nice xp and passive bonuses off him) then all is golden.

Only one factor remains. He should obviously get xp for each bonus they do but should they get these new combat bonuses without a squad leader? Or is this idea worthy of general team combat as well? (its not like squad leaderless groups are great right now for teamwork either). Tell me what you think...

Dragoth Ardule
Architect/Squad Leader

Talus/Gorath

Fine fine ideas.

However, some of those would be very difficult to implement. The algorithm to determine "an add arrived and the pistoleer started attacking it because it was attacking a carbineer" is non-trivial.

I think thereisa simple, great, idea here: Any crowd-control type special (SuppressionFire, WarningShot, Knockdown, Pistolwhip, etc, etc.) should give a usage XP not based on damage. This value should be less than what you would get from a high-damage move, but it would at least be *something*

And perhaps having an SL in the group would give a modifier to those XP grants.

Couple things i wanted to add:

Another example of team aid bonus (and not team defender which is strictly damage) would be to use a stun/dizzy/blind attack on someone who is attacking a teammate.

Also, my point about brining up the "one idiot who doesn't" was that he WOULDNT get cohesion bonus XP at end of c ombat (or very little depending on what else he attacked earlier). I'm assuming the lightning gun NPC was a decent chunk of the xp so even if he had been accidentally hitting the same targets as everyone else before, the fact that he ignored the squad leader's command on the most important target means he won't get much cohesion xp. This promotes following orders. Also volley shot (which could validly be expensive) would be a VERY usefull attack since it gets everone on to the same target (of course thats assuming the don't change it, im not to privvy to forcing people to ack anything). Also, this works the other way. If a guy defends a teammate while we are targetting aimlessly, he isn't losing cohesion xp cuz the guys that the group is hitting probably aren't that tough anyway. But if the leader correctly recognizes a big/tough target and lets everyone know, its highly beneficial to heed his call and target it.

I dunno about how hard that would be.

It could be as simple as checking to see if you started attacking something that was already attacking an ally.

Section it out

(ENEMY) attacks (ALLY) ... we don't care yet...

(YOU) attack (ENEMY) for first time ... they check this anyway to see if you aggro something or iff it turns to attack you intead.

ALSO check (ENEMY) is currently targetting (ALLY). Thats easy to check. You can send you group a msg containing what you are targetting.

And finally, bonus xp is based off of how much damage you do to that target. sorta like combat xp but probably lower (we don't want it simply to be a double of combat xp).

(man iwish they had edit)

also my idea of 'checking' that someone used suppresion fire vs a brawler is unneccessary. Suppression fire is rather useless in combat if you aren't using it FOR something. The fact that you get bonus xp is simply an incentive to use it when you need it rather than just shooting to death. You aren't going to spam suppresion fire since it costs a bit off your HAM bars and doesn't do as much damage.

Hmm. The trick is to make the "support special" exp worthwhile in grouping, but not exploitable soloing or "soloing while grouped."

For example. If you get experience for using suppressive fire special based on other than damage, nothing stops you from going out to a lowbie mob lair and suppression firing a CDEF for a few minutes on each for great exp. If the support special exp for teamwork-tactics is only given while teamed, them team up with another fighter and then you both go solo in the same general vicinity with CDEFs to farm the bonus points.

That's the problem with trivial algorithms - they are very easy to exploit. Non-trivial algorithms for things like this are almost a requirement to prevent serious abuse while still providing a real benefit and incentive to using support specials in non-exploitativeways. Capping the amount of support special per kill is one way abuse could be limited with a simple measure - but it would not be eliminated.

The real question thus becomes... how much abuse of support special exp bonuses are the designers willing to tolerate in order to encourage teamwork in teams?

Personally I like the idea of creating some non-trivial algorithms for this as outlined in the first post, but I realize that resources don't always allow this. So probably a capped amount of exp and requiring people be teamed is the simple, fast, and more or less effective way of doing this.

Well yes you would have to be teamed but how is it that combat xp is worthless if you fight low level mobs? I think the solution is to base the bonus xp off of your combat xp (which makes the formula simpler and easier to scale with difficulty). This means yea you can suppresion fire all day a low level mob but if it never gave you good regular xp its not worth your time for the suppresion fire xp.

Ok I'm gonna take the first step in decicion making. I particularly like Voltaris's xp forumal for SL so here it is (correct me if im wrong)

Squad Leader xp = (Group Total Damage) * (Squad Leader Level / Average Team Level) + (Some relationship to specials used).

This formula only has one exploit i can see and that is if you party with a REALLY low level group you will get enourmous xp modifier but how could you get that much xp off of a group that is so many levels lower than you? What kind of mobs would you be killing? What good is a multiplier of 10 if you are only getting say 100 xp from damage (considering that levels of SL won't be cheap). I modified the end mostly because I'm not yet sure how that should work. Here is a hypothesis though:

Squad Leader bonus xp = (Number of Specials Used by group * A specific valueyet to be detetermined)/ (time taken to complete combat)

This does two things. One it stops exploitation by sitting in combat and using specials all day. The squad leader will not be happy about this since he won't get as much xp. Second, it contradicts the first forumal in a way that causes people to not spam specials but still use em a bit to gain bonus xp (squad leader will be trying to get people to use them a little but in the most efficent way possible while playeres will use them simply for the bonus xp). I realize this promotes a problem in that if players were simply allowed these xp bonuses they would team up WITHOUT a squad leader and just solo them. Well there is a solution but i was trying to avoid it. Only allow personal bonus xp if you are lead by a squad leader. How does this make sense? When you are in combat, its hard to understand everything that is going on. But at the end of combat, the squad leader can tell you what you did right and what you did wrong as opposed to just randomly grouping and firing away.

This promotes yet ANOTHER feature but its a lot more flaky than anything else i have suggested. This is a squad leader bonus XP tree (or maybe have this passive in an existing tree). Basically its a squad leader ABILITY to give this bonus xp and it can go up as you get tougher squad leaders. Im more reluctant to push this idea out cuz its rather hokey but it DOES make sense. The new branch could be called "Dicipline" or "Combat Tactics: :Lesson 1-4". What do you guys think of all this?

So many great ideas...

Another of my ideas for SL XP calculation involves how *little* damage the group takes...

That might discourage medics and encourage the use of pathing exploits though...

I don't agree with the little damage aspect. Its a good idea and i see where you are coming from but think about it. If there are 8 mobs and 8 pc's its usually certain that all 8 mobs will be hit but will all the players? Maybe not but SOMEONE will be hit. The only real reason taht a party would take less damage than normal would be if they all ran (not gonna finish that battle) or if they were exceptionally well leveled for the mobs (which isn't really a sign of anything.