Campaign 3 - 3D spotting (poll)

[StarfisherEcho]

Just out of curiosity, did the old BF2 campaigns ever reach 32 vs 32 in size?

My main concern here is that "oh just learn to use Teamspeak" sounds completely unrealistic. I play paintball in big games from a couple hundred up to several thousand people. We use radios extensively and have spent years attempting to develop good protocol. Even in a real life situation where 95% of the communication I do is verbal and not over a radio, the radio net is still jammed most of the time. There's always more information than can be sent.

In BF3, TS has to carry the 5% of radio traffic I'm used to putting on the radio AND the 95% of traffic I just say to the guy next to me. 3D spotting cuts out some of that 95%. Not all of it, not by a long shot, but definitely some. "Hey there's a guy right there" becomes 'Q'. Which makes the problem of communications more manageable.

If you guys were doing BF2 with 32v32 for a while and still managed to make it work, then ok, let's give it a whirl. BF3's graphics make it substantially harder to see people, but if it worked in the past maybe we can make it work again.

[LCourage]

@starfisherecho

Almost every battle day last campaign we had 32v32 or two servers running simultaneously until near the end.

If you are in a channel with a 4 man squad you shouldn't be stepping on each other excessively while giving out enemy locations. Even with 3d spotting, most of the squads I'd played with last campaign still used teamspeak to spot enemies. So it's basically already going on, it's not something that will have to be learned. You can increase communications efficiency by using landmarks, using a basic sitrep format (type of unit, location, moving?). This could be considered a skill harnessed and increased through teamwork and experience beyond the basic level.

I can't speak radio setups for epic paintball battles but I can speak of how we did it in the military. Its actually pretty similar to how we normally run TS on a battle day.
Ideally an army would set up TS like this:
Field Commander has hotkeys for each infantry, armor and air squad channel commanders along with a hotkey to talk to the whole army. Most of the FC's communications should be to one specific squad leader at a time.
Each squad leader is channel commander and has hotkey for each other squad leader, especially one for air and armor support. Most of a squad leaders communications should be to his squad.
So communic


Hope this clarifies...

[TacticalVirus]

I've worked with radio nets that had multiple companies running concurrently. It can be challenging, yes, but comms discipline can be learned fairly quickly when everyone buys into the system. The way KI had TS running in C2 was very similar to the way an individual platoon would have comms setup. Took us a few weeks to get things running somewhat properly and we steadily improved upon it during the length of the campaign. I don't foresee it being that much of an issue.

[Chefcook]

In the good old BF2 days we had countless 32 vs 32 Battles.

Radio Chatter is something you can get used to. It just takes a little time.

Banning Soflams to bring back 3D spotting?

A Soflam is imho the best teamplay tool Dice developed in years. It takes a TEAM to do something.
Isnt that one goal, we want to achieve?

Have we ever tried to play like "its meant to be"? And by "meant to be" i am talking about how Dice wanted it to be played.
I still think, we should play this game on standard settings.
I joined this community 6 years ago, because it was a challanging but not hardcore gamer community.
The more we lean towards "High Skill Player settings", the more we will loose the interest of the "casual player", who enjoy the just some Battles on Battledays etc...

I know, that i should be wearing a Flamesuit right now, but here is my opinion:
3D Spotting - ON
Health - 100%
Regenerate Health - ON

No restrictions.

[styphon]

How can you trust DICE so much? You know they frak things up a ridiculous amount. I don't trust their default settings any more than any combination of settings we can come up with.

[Chefcook]

Because i still play public matches on default-Settings-servers and while playing with some folks here from GC its loads of fun. I dont need tweeked settings. The game works as it is. Otherwise this game would be dead right now.

[styphon]

Because i still play public matches on default-Settings-servers and while playing with some folks here from GC its loads of fun. I dont need tweeked settings. The game works as it is. Otherwise this game would be dead right now.

But you can't compare pubbing with competitive play, or organised play. They're very different from each other and what might be ok in one can be a problem in the other. DICE optimise the game for public play, so of course playing it like that is going to seem ok with all the default settings. That's no reason to assume GC will be OK too, especially after the problems we had last campaign.

[sushi]

on the other hand - and to pour more oil into the flames: there is also no reason to assume GC would not be ok if we use the default settings

[MotherFo™]

I love you chef. I'll stand by with an extinguisher.

[LCourage]

Have we ever tried to play like "its meant to be"? And by "meant to be" i am talking about how Dice wanted it to be played.
I still think, we should play this game on standard settings.
I joined this community 6 years ago, because it was a challanging but not hardcore gamer community.
The more we lean towards "High Skill Player settings", the more we will loose the interest of the "casual player", who enjoy the just some Battles on Battledays etc...

DICE used standard settings for pub play. We created this community to avoid pub play. So that argument is not valid.

Secondly, we are not catering to skilled players by forcing people to communicate on team speak, we are enhancing teamwork and camaraderie. Teamwork is an altogether separate skill that benefits everyone. So why should we not be pushing it to develop rather than trying to strangle it.

[styphon]

on the other hand - and to pour more oil into the flames: there is also no reason to assume GC would not be ok if we use the default settings

Personally I disagree, I think last campaign showed that.

[V_]

I've always seen GC to be a place for battlefield strategy, and communicative play. Having or not having Doritos will not change the fact that both armies need those two things to win. The doritos only dictate to what extent TS carries our comms. I'm down for whatever the majority wants.

[MotherFo™]

Have we ever tried to play like "its meant to be"? And by "meant to be" i am talking about how Dice wanted it to be played.
I still think, we should play this game on standard settings.
I joined this community 6 years ago, because it was a challanging but not hardcore gamer community.
The more we lean towards "High Skill Player settings", the more we will loose the interest of the "casual player", who enjoy the just some Battles on Battledays etc...

DICE used standard settings for pub play. We created this community to avoid pub play. So that argument is not valid.

Secondly, we are not catering to skilled players by forcing people to communicate on team speak, we are enhancing teamwork and camaraderie. Teamwork is an altogether separate skill that benefits everyone. So why should we not be pushing it to develop rather than trying to strangle it.

I thought this community was created for organized not restrictive pub play? I don't see how Chef's argument was invalid. He basically said, Dice has already created a rock paper scissors design. The problem with unorganized pub play is that it has no fair play rules (spawn killing, ramming, stealing) and that people don't work together more often than not. The structure is there though.

This is where the beauty of GC comes in. That's why I joined.

The more restrictive it becomes, the more it will drive people away and become similar to CAL, TWL where only a selective group plays.

There is plenty of teamwork that goes on with the air and ground already. I implore you to watch the videos Jobo put up if you haven't. 3D spotting enhances our ability to assist the ground and for the ground to assist us. It's a 2 way street.

With this change, you would be strangling the airforce. We already have numerous things going on. (no health regen, broken countermeasures, ace pilots) You'd also be putting the pillow over the head of anyone that wants to try. You also might make our current air guys quit flying. New potential players might decide they don't want to stick around.

What's next? Hardcore settings for the jet pilots? So they can't 3rd person look at their surroundings and are basically chickens in a cage looking in 1 direction?

I played a hardcore game (after trying to find a populated one for 10 minutes) last night to try this out and not surprisingly, the mobile AA was in first or 2nd place. Jet's could hardly dogfight and the helicopter could barely make it past A on caspian... There was constant whining about snipers every 2 minutes. It was long, boring, and not fun at all. I still was in the top 5 even though I was in the tard-jets. I spent half the time running away from the invisible and invincible AA.

Before this poll was brought up, I had spoken with both Haruky and Runaway about making some changes so that both airforces weren't in an all out bloodbath with each other. Both of them really want to focus on making C3 fun.

Also this nubsauce thing being thrown around needs to stop. Plenty of the airforce guys are just as talented in other roles or on the ground as infantry. 3D spotting is our minimap while in the sky. I'm really curious how some of you felt when IRNV dominated the ground game early on. Which was worse then...spotting or that? I say IRNV.

[.Sup]

Thanks for everyone's input. We will test it with the setting disabled so everyone gets a feel how it works, probably next Saturday.