Marking enemies is an incredibly useful thing. However, many players do not do so, partially because there is no incentive for doing it, and those who do will frequently see no benefits for sometimes massively important contributions to their teams (i.e. marking vehicles, emplacements, or rallies that someone else destroys, or even just marking large groups for an attacker pilot to bomb)
I propose giving some points to the player who places a mark equivalent to a percentage of the points gained by the effect, or perhaps simply half or a third of an assist. (I understand and agree that marking an enemy shouldn’t necessarily be counted the same as shooting at them)
For example, if someone puts down a normal mark, and a bomb kills five enemies within (lets say) 20 metres of that mark, then the person who marked should get (5 pts per person * 5 persons) 25 points
I don’t recall if assists for vehicles are larger than assists for infantry, but I would argue that a larger amount of points should be given for death of a marked vehicle, as they are radically more dangerous and important to mark. I might similarly say that for destruction of a marked emplacement (AA, machine gun, AT, etc) for the same reason.
A few notes:
This should probably be restricted so that you can’t gain points from targets you kill. After all, you got points for the actual kills, not for the ‘Mark Assist’
Emplacements and ‘fortifications’ become odd when we get to ‘machine gun suppressed’ notifications, which probably can just be ignored.
I would like to make you aware that I, among many others,
would spam marks everywhere all the time to try and farm extra EXP with them. No matter if I ever saw an enemy there.
Right now I’m already not a fan of marking the ground instead of targets - you often need to evaluate if you can even trust that allied marker before you decide to bomb/etc. there. But if this function were implemented, I think we’d see even more markers that are completely off-target and they would lose more of what little intel function they have.
Admittedly, I’d say that anyone doing that is wasting their time by putting marks for maybe 5 points, instead of playing the game and hitting the mark button when they actually see the enemies, guaranteeing 5 points.
Ignoring everything else, it’s 5-25 points realistically. It’s simply not worth spamming v “forward!”, instead of going forward and hitting v.
So lets say you spam v every time you see a guy. If you shoot him, you get 30 points for a kill.
If you don’t, and someone else shoots him, then you get 5 points for the mark assist.
So you’re going to still be trying to shoot the guy, but you’re also going to be bothering to mark him, right?
If you spam mark, now you have three marks around a guy. You still only get 5 points if someone else shoots him.
I understand the concept of ‘Well then I’ll just spam marks everywhere’, but (ignoring that it’s not exactly good team spirit) it literally would be more effective to bother to use the system correctly. Mark everyone you see, and shoot at the guys you can. Now you get points if people shoot them, and you get points if you shoot them. (Oo, look now people will bother to mark things and pay attention to marks, because there’s incentive for me to mark a person in order to benefit me, so it’s probably real)
Spamming marks at the world with a 25 or 15 circle diameter of benefit, with three max marks? Feel free. It literally won’t help you at all