One issue I find in games is a lack of teammates attacking or defending the point. I believe a solution to this would be assigning more value to activities while in the vicinity of attacking/defending and gaining value merely being inside of the strategic point.
The reality I find myself facing and I feel I’ve heard others complain about is that there is little reward for completing objectives. Doing the Objective/Win condition work nets you significantly less points as opposed to other styles of play…an important but thankless and unrewarding job. Even when you win in these situations it can feel exhausting and somewhat frustrating. You end up with a team where some are just playing CoD: Black Ops and throwing themselves into a meat-grinder of bullets while the rest are trying to strategically work towards objectives incrementally.
It feels like being on a soccer team where occasionally some of your teammates slide-tackle you because “spray-and-pray”, some sit in goal and lay down in protest, and a handful are trying their best to work around these obstacles alongside the opposing team.
A great example of getting to the top of the leaderboard without contributing much. Being in the air and taking out a bombing run after they have all dropped their bombs should award you nothing. The bombs were dropped, they won’t do anything else detrimental, but you can get over 1k points if you wipe them out at any time in their trip. You end up with someone in the air the entire time, top of the leaderboards but you are constantly sliding backwards in objectives. Getting points before they drop the bomb, sure. The second those bombs drop the planes should be worthless, same for paratroopers.
Players that are just throwing themselves into waves of bullets without pushing the objectives along should deal with some kind of pain. If they aren’t earning enough points towards “team goals” (killing enemies in attack/defense zones, staying inside of or maybe within a wider circumference of the attack/defense zone) then maybe a respawn timer starts penalizing them, maybe less classes are available.
While this is very close to a milsim in many ways, there are several areas that are jarringly arcade-like or janky. On a scale of pure arcade milsim like CoD - pure team based milsim like Hell Let Loose/SQUAD I think there is a happy medium somewhere in-between that this game can dominate. Currently it leans a little too hard into the arcadey-CoD style if you have just 1 or 2 teammates that are purely out to farm points. They are blasting the second they leave the spawn so now that SP is getting wiped. They aren’t building/defending/securing objectives just letting everyone know where teammates are at and burning through tickets like nobody’s business.
Building spawns in proximity to an objective (maybe more points → closer?). Points for every minute it exists, additional points for anyone using it…these would be a positive nudge for players to be more productive in creating footholds for teammates.
I think the scale of 0 - 10 for collaboration is ultimately where I see these games separating themselves.
0 being CoD and 10 being Hell Let Loose/Arma/SQUADS. On the low end of the scale there are more arcade-like games that benefit from collaboration but often end up in a free-for-all such as Battlefield, R6, and many Arena flavors of extraction survival shooters (Tarkov, Delta Force, etc.)
I think the 5 - 8 range of MilSim games is somewhat absent because of how difficult it can be to nudge a player in a certain direction from a behavioral standpoint while attributing that behavior to what actually drives it. I would say Isonzo is the only other one that comes within the realm of that 5-8 range although this game has many more layers of strategy and really does provide a good feeling of the “entire battle”
This game lets you play somewhat independently while being conscious of teammates and nudging them towards helping you. Having your own ai controlled teammates is a huge differentiator in terms of having an immediate support alongside relying on teammates who may or may not be helpful.
I hope that, depending on what mode of game you are playing, action/behavior and the points awarded can develop a level of adaptability or dynamism. Not many SP exist? More value in placing them. Everyone has a spawn point, that is divided up with greater weight given to those closest to the objective. I imagine developers have some form of “PointRewardController / Service” alongside a validation/acl on the backend. This service is essentially the General commanding the military with their only form of control is coercion. Having someone with a mathematical or at least statistical mindset could be a really interesting starting point in finding valuable heuristics.