Originally Posted by
Poorlaggedman
I'll admit that I'm thus far mostly wrong that trolls would become a serious problem for this game. They aren't that bad yet, unless you just consider bad leaders trolls (a few are). I suspect with new waves of players we'll see more trolls but so far it hasn't been a catastrophe that it was a year ago before admin controls even existed.
Boom. Here comes the artillery.
What I see is a somewhat complicated device that requires teamwork to operate efficiently. Individual crew can (and should be able to) move about and activate or mount parts of the gun and make adjustments. Theoretically players could be working a gun in loading and such and then just have any old crew member come up and start performing tasks such as aiming or taking the lanyard. It's not hard to envision conflicts between players in these areas. You and your buddies are loading the piece and some jackass comes up and seizes the lanyard or takes the sights or starts moving a wheel.
What non-admin recourse does the artilleryman have to the actions of trolls or malignant players? Unlike an infantry formation, a lone artillery crew member player looks like he can be a real problem.
It's easy to envision a group of players operating efficiently and a fool is going to just say "Well, smart teams will work together" but at some point the developers are going to have to decide if they're making a video game for a few groups of friends or are they making a video game for the public. Don't stake the community's existence entirely towards the facilitation of organizations that will one day pack up and leave for the next best thing. BTW that will come a lot sooner if the size of the community is diminished by poor public gameplay.
You need systems in place to allow strangers to come into a server and play together. Without that, it's just an event-based game that covers a few hours of quality playtime each day. Nobody playing outside of set time windows is going to be happy for that long.
Whereas if you had a game where a group of players could create a gun crew, rank up with followers, and maintain exclusive control over a gun or a section of guns at a time ... what a difference that would make.
You want to work with us on these guns we're posted at, you have to join us. If you're an asshole, our leader boots you and you can't rejoin and can't work our gun(s). If your officer is a jackass you leave his section and make another and suddenly he's a private with no authority. It helps shut out trolls and helps guide player motivations to be aligned with their teammates.