I'm also in favor of personal resource trees.
First I'd like to explain why I don't see any good way to make team-wide trees work. There's basically three approaches that I can think of.
With path I'm describing the order in which technologies are acquired, no matter whether there's really a path between the tree nodes in that order in a mathematical sense. With specialized and wide I describe pathes that aim at the higher level skills or try to go down many branches at the same time, respectively.
Democracy
The players either 1) have to agree on one path or 2) have their individual wishes averaged. In both cases, this will lead to very similar pathes being chosen in every public game. Because of the restrictions in public communication, unorthodox pathes will fail in (1) because no one is aware that the one who proposes the path (or just a part of it, depending on the implementation) has put some thought into it. Even if they trust in the proposing players ability to make a good decision, they would still not know the strategy he or she has in mind. (2) would fail because any uncommon approach will just end up making the average path less specialized.
The democratic approach, even if it yielded interesting and varying results, will be very inflexible to adjustments to the chosen path. In the case of (2), it doesn't really have a strategy-changing impact if a single player changes the path, since the averaged path won't change much. In the case of (1), I sense bad blood if two players compete with alternating votes. Being forced to continuously take part in those votes will also interrupt the game for all the other players.
Dictatorship
Aka Commander Mode. A single player is elected or chosen automatically to decide on the teams strategy. There are two possible extremes that can make the game less fun: If the commander does a bad job and the decisions lead to a defeat, players will blame the dictator and be generally in a bad mood (we know this from alleged bad building already). On the other hand, if the well known (election) or skilled/experienced (automatic assignment) players become comanders most of the time, this will exclude unexperienced players from the tech trees alltogether, making the learning curve even steeper.
I also think that having a half-assed commander mode is much worse than having none. If there is a commander position, people accustomed to Battlefield and co will expect a lot more features than that, like tactical maps with the ability to set targets, squad management, support abilitys.
An argument totally unrelated to gamedesign is that not having a commander mode will help us staying different from our only relevant competitor.
Hybrid
If we want everyone to participate but still get varying results each game, we could go for weighted voting. The players that have a greater impact on the progress of their team (total confidence earned, score) will have a greater influence when all personal wishes are averaged into one team-wide tree. I like this approach more than pure democracy or dictatorship since it poses a good tradeoff of both issues outlined above. However, in the sum not much changes: The average solution will still prevent unorthodox strategys in every game where the players of a team have a roughly similar skill and newbes are still mostly excluded from the decision making.
There's a completely new issue introduced by the tradeoff: Public teams that consist of a few extremely good and many inexperienced players will have a significant advantage over teams with players of about equal strength, since a dictatorship decision will always be more specialized and thus efficient than that of a democracy. (For a completely made up example, if half of the latter team prefers energy and the other half plasma weapons, they will have both lasgun and flame thrower but neither pulse rifle nor lucifer cannon.)
Now I'd like to explain why I think that personal trees can work and also be a lot of fun. Here's a possible implementation of those:
The team earns a resources such as confidence together. Each player gets to spend (if the resource doesn't deplete) or allocate (current confidence) a copy of this resource to plot a personal path through the tree. This can be done 1) once when the player joins the game, 2) once whenever a new technology can be unlocked (like Diablo 2) or, my favorite, 3) once in the beginning but altered any time which leads to a cooldown phase, where the newly chosen upgrades subsequently become available again (similar to Diablo 3).
Personal trees have some advantages over the team wide:
Each player can individually choose a specialized path and play out the full potential of the tech trees, without being restricted by the decision of other players.
Unorthodox pathes can be tried out in every game, the risk of being defeated by chosing a non-optimized tree is low since the bad decision of a single player doesn't directly influence the teammates.
Mostly in scrims but also in public games there is the added strategical element of varying specialization. One player could tank with heavy armor and a close range weapon while another one could scout with a helmet and a mass driver. A third player could specialize on tearing down buildables by focusing on the grenade and later on the lucifer cannon but not putting much emphasis on armor.
I'm aware of a single drawback: Unlocking buildables is a bit more problematic than with the team-wide approach. Giving each builder indidvidual choices will make a group of two coordinated builders very strong. Having players specialize on building instead of heavy weapons could be a nice way to solve this, too. Since there are just a few buildables available, I could also imagine that they are still bound to some form of stages or just available all the time (better buildings get more expensive).
Ishq wrote:The main reason I am less favorable about personal trees is that the good players will get hugely better weapons and the worse players will stay at the bottom. They will remain irrelevant, and the game will be a battle between the people at the top. This won't be fun for everyone.
This doesn't apply when the resource that is used by individual players is gained by the team, which I would take as a premise to personal trees for that very reason.
