Alternative Method of Earning Evos/Creds

[Ishq]

Confidence does a fairly good job at preventing stagnation of the entire game due to camping, but there is one case that is not handled: when the momentum of one team has just been broken (ie, they just rushed, failed to win it all, and are now poor), but the other team refuses to counter rush. This is perhaps the most frustrating situation because here you are as probably a dretch or a naked rifle, when the other team is camping on rets with chainsuits or playing dretch soccer as tyrants. Ultimately, there needs to be a way to regain momentum even without being able to kill the enemy or, at the very least, prevent this case of stagnation.

[Viech]

Building a structure in your own base will get you 50% of the confidence the enemy would get for destroying it. Building it outside your main base's build range will yield 75% and building it close to the enemy base (currently up to 1.5x RC/OM range) will give you 100% of its value. If the enemy is camping for whatever reason you can keep your momentum by improving your own base, gaining territory or by building them in. At the same time the enemy will be able to generate confidence by rebuilding their base (which is a valid reason to focus on defense imo), giving them a reason to strike back soon (as the confidence earned that way will deplete, too).

I see the issue with the personal resources though. If you can't afford a gun or higher class it doesn't help much if you stay on a high stage and have a good forward close to the enemy. We have to make sure that personally resources either 1) only run out if you rush mindlessly or 2) can be generated in non-aggressive ways, too. I'm not sure what's the better approach. Personal resources are still a huge mystery to me.

Apart from that confidence is a very flexible system. We can reward whatever playstyle we want to encourage. Implementing new confidence sources is easy and if you think something is worth a reward, just post it here. The idea is that there should be many ways to generate 'momentum', preferably those that are fun for both teams and require some form of coordinated action. Keep in mind that some ways of earning confidence are prone to cheating or unintuitive behaviour, like intentionally getting hurt so a teammate can generate confidence by healing.

[Ishq]

Yeah, there needs to be a way to non-aggressively find a way to upgrade yourself (ie, without killing). In Tremulous, there was time, but quite frankly, that's lame. We should come up with another more practical approach to award non-aggressive people who are still productive.

[kharnov]

Earn credits for repairing structures. You now have an incentive to protect the base. Especially lucrative if the aliens go after the reactor and fail, as you now have some monetary assistance for making a comeback.

[Ishq]

Problem with this is that you can shoot your own base and earn creds from repairing. Also, how would this translate to aliens?

[kharnov]

Check to see if the damage was done by a human. I don't know. Aliens can have some different method of getting credits non-aggressively. I think it should work by giving an incentive to leave your base. One way to do this would be to have aliens perform some sort of consumption of dead humans. It would encourage aliens to follow around rampaging players, giving them a support group to fall back on when damaged.

[Anomalous]

Removing destroyed structures could provide a small boost since it prevents damage to nearby team-mates and structures. Repair and healing could too, so long as the damage was (as kharnov suggests) inflicted by the enemy. However, I'd keep such gains low compared to gains from attacking and building.

We can discourage bad building to some extent by providing less gain from placing two buildings of the same class close together.

In all cases, we must report why the gain is higher or lower (but maybe allow the player to suppress this information).

[Viech]

Repairing and removing structures that are about to blow up is something that only humans can do. If aliens had a counterpart that would let them profit from the early rush-recovery phase I'd consider it.

Healing your teammates from damage is very easy to exploit: Just run into a turret, let your teammate heal you, continue. If we only give a reward for healing damage caused by enemy players that would be unintuitive to the healer hwo doesn't know the origin of the damage. Also we would need a human equivalent for this.

Bad building is already hurting your team a lot so I wouldn't want to punish it in particular. On the other hand you could argue that very good building should get a bonus, but as long as it's just a psychological reward I fear it might make the system unnecessarily complicated since we already scale the reward based on distance. (I consider the reward for building close to the enemy necessary, as you'd otherwise not want to do this anymore because it would be considered the new feeding.)

I wonder whether it would be a good idea to give some confidence for escorting a builder or staying together with a player who is weak on eqipment and low on credits/evos.