So the alien team loses not because its good players are not good enough, but because its bad players are bad enough. Edit: I think that the cause is a combination of lack of skills and knowledge of the game dynamics, and a certain kind of selfishness: players try to get evos at the cost of sacrificing their team's position in the game.
How to solve it? Possibilities I came upon so far, which try to punish feeders personally in different ways:
- Reducing the reward for killing a dretch, or even setting it to 0. Problems: Unbalance - aliens would be able to swarm humans with dretches, gaining evos eventually, without losing anything. Humans would not have such an option.
- Preventing spawning too fast. I made an antifeed mod that prevents too frequent spawning. If a player spawns too fequently several times, the server will start to make him wait for some time before allowing him to spawn again.
Problems:- If aliens are low on evos and humans camp really hard, the only possibility is to attack human base with dretches to make a few frags. This mod eventually starts to delay spawning. A possible solution would be not to count spawns, but deaths, and differentiate deaths that give credits/evos the other team and deaths that don't (i.e. dying just by rets).
- [{USATREM}] !Gunther! pointed out that an alien team defending agains rushing humans will not be able to defend after some time, due to the spawn restriction. But I think if an alien team just feeds dretches against rushing humans, it's doomed anyway. Even if the dretches manage to stop the rush, humans will have more than enough credits to rush again and finish them off.
- Store kill/death ratio for players and give a higher reward for killing a player with a high kill/death ratio and vice versa. This would result in giving (almost?) no reward for killing players that just feed.
Problems:- I think the most fundamental problem with this idea is that it would greatly handicap the better team (and better players in general). Suppose there is a good team fighting against a weak team. The good team has a high kill/death ratio, so when the weak team manages to kill a player from the good team, it gains a lot of credits/evos. The result would be that the weak team would have similar number of evos as the good team.
- Do not reward credits when the player's victim dies, but store them in some buffer and give the reward to the player only after he returns to his base. For example, require him to get near an egg for aliens (get into the creep area) and to get to an armory for humans. If the player dies before returning back, the credits will be lost. So dying frequently would cause to lose most of the credits gained by killing victims.
Problems:- Rushes would get more difficult, so this would very likely encourage camping.
- There are still players stupid enough to just feed, no matter the consequences (like those just feeding with grangers during SD). These players won't care if they don't get credits. But I hope that most players would recognize the necessity to stay alive to get evos/credits with this mod.
- (And, most importantly, Lancer would have to abandon his practise of letting himself killed by an acid tube when he's to lazy to walk back to the base
.)
- Again, store rewards into a buffer and give the credits from the buffer to the player over time. For example, if I kill a goon and I'm supposed to get 300 credits for it, I'd get 10 credits every second for the next 30s. Problems very similar to the preceding idea. IMHO this variant would be slightly better for aliens than the preceding one, since one of the aliens' advantages is that they don't have to return to base so frequently.
Edit: This is currently my favorite. It's simple, and not only it discourages feeding, it also makes people play better. Not dying is a good strategy (in real life too, really!), since it deprives the other team of credits/evos. IMHO people playing with this mod would become better players and would play better in vanilla Trem too. . - Some combination of the preceding ideas: When killing a victim, the player could get part of the credits immediately (like it is now), part of the credits could be released over time, and the remaining part could be awarded when making it back to the base.
- Edit: Deduct let's say 0.5 evo (for humans 100 credits or so) for every spawn, if possible. Of course, spawning would be allowed with 0 credits/evos too. So, an alien who feeds 2 dretches to get 1 kill will remain on 0 evos. The same for a human who feeds 2 rifles to get 200 credits. This would motivate people to die less, since they would have to maintain the given minimum kill/death ratio in order to get credits/evos.
