Playing squads lately I’ve noticed something that really bothers me: the “bot-cage”. Several player-built spawns seems to get the bots stuck and trapped near the spawn, being unable to move forward and follow the player. This is especially the case for spawns built on 2nd floors and such.
At first, I thought this was poor planning and that people didn’t notice that the places they were building their spawns tended to cause bugs. But then, after I told people several times to stop doing this, they said (and I realized) that they were doing this on purpose: to trap the bots away from the fight so they can always have a reserve available (because “bots are useless”, they said).
Now, I will not comment on that practice or on the fact that the AI still gets stuck and bugged by things as simple as a spawn built on a 2nd floor, but I will say that not everyone wants their bots to be stuck. It’s extremely annoying, it’s hard to notice (sometimes you only realize you are alone and your bots are way behind you… after you’re dead), it leaves you vulnerable (without bots to back you up and do things like throw explosives at tanks & such) and it sometimes leads to teams losing whole matches because players are unaware these poorly-built spawns are trapping their bots - so 2 or 3 people are going on point while 15 bots are behind still trapped in the spawn.
But the most annoying thing is that, right now, you can only notice these bot-cage spawns… after you’ve spawned in one of them, which can be extremely infuriating. A simple solution for those of us who don’t want to spawn on such points and want to be aware of them beforehand is to add some kind of an elevation marker to the spawns in the map (the one that appears when you’re dead), so one can know when a spawn is on a 2nd floor and then AVOID IT.
Such solution would also help give players a more precise location for spawns in maps like Monastery - where there are 5-story tall towers and you, currently, can’t know if you’re spawning on the first floor (to easily go somewhere), or in the fifth floor because some sniper squad put a spawn up there (taking you forever to get out of the tower and attack objectives elsewhere).
I really wish I could destroy such spawns when I see them as they inadvertedly harm other players (especially new ones who don’t know what is going on and the bugs it causes), but I realize that allowing this could easily lead to exploits where people destroy spawns from their own team in order to build one themselves and thus gain the experience. So I think that suggestion is a really quick-way to fix the issue, at least for more experienced players, and a generally-positive addition to the game.