Smoke artillery is one of the more under-utilized, but very effective tactics. I almost always use it and it makes assaulting the objective much easier as it allows our team to flank from 180 degrees. I believe it’s mostly not used since people would rather use explosive artillery and gamble on getting some XP from a few kills.
With that, there should be some sort of points for using smoke. I was thinking that you could give 5 points for each teammate, including AI, or just 15-25 points for each squad that moves through the smoke.
This would hopefully start to incentivize the one thing that severely lacking in this game so far: team collaboration.
I think what’s lacking are building rally points and actually playing the objectives. I just shake my head when I look at the mini map and see the majority of players looking for easy/safe kills on the perimeter, even while the point is being capped. They MUST be humans because bots actually play the point.
Agreed, partially, I understand you still get the capture point XP, but it wouldn’t be a bad thing to reward the person who single-handedly made the objective rush useful, with an extra ~50 XP. The alternative is that people never use smoke (like now), and we just never make it onto the objective.
Another benefit is, giving XP for the smoke coverage might make people stop sitting in the back spamming explosive artillery, and getting a couple kills here and there. If these explosive artillery spammers are present, it constantly locks out the artillery radio, preventing anyone from calling in smoke, ever.
That’s actually a really good idea Fenrikr, that would solve this entirely if they treated explosive and smoke artillery on independent lockout timers for the team.
That was a concern as well, they could add a blacklist to anywhere within 50m of the default spawn points, or only grant points if the smoke is within a 100m radius etc.
Even then, assuming it was only 15-25 points per squad that went through it, that’d be 150-250 points at a maximum, which is about what an explosive artillery gets you at its current state, so they’d be about on par with each out, except the smoke would allow the team to actually (potentially) capture the objective granting even more points, which in turn incentivizes using it on the assault front.
But yeah, I definitely agree, I could see people trying to abuse it and hopefully the Devs could find a good balance point with restricting it to a certain radius of the objective if people did start abusing it.
In a way it’s a bit like destroying enemy rally beacons.
You don’t directly earn experience base for either, but indirectly they do help earn by
helping to cap or defend objectives and win.
Look at rally beacons, you actually do earn experience base by building them, but how
many players actually do during a typical invasion match?
Maybe smoke for enemy moving through it rather than friendlies? It’d lead to the assumption that it blocked their view, and it’d lead to actually decent positioning of the smoke walls along vital avenues.
I actually like when the attackers use smoke.
I generally advance a bit in front of the objective, crouch or go prone, reload and wait for the shadowy figures to appear so that I can try to dispatch them. The smoke hides them, but it also hides me.
It should be rewarded better. Yes you are helping the team but flanking and avoiding detection to survive all the way to enemy rally means you are losing XP to those that sit by MG or tank and mow those hordes while you are dismantling enemy spawn and if it is really remote area far on the flank, you also need to waste time to return back to the fighting zone. So XP wise it is not worth it but it surely helps to win the game but again that multiplier is global so the one who farms kills is winner again.
I’m not sure if this is the best example; I usually get about 200-500 points just from people spawning on my rallies, it gives 15 XP/spawn, on top of the XP given for building it.
Right now, smoke coverage is the equivalent of if building rallies and teammates spawning on them gave you no XP at all. Building rallies helps your team and lets you win much easier, just like smoke, which means they reward one aspect of indirect team support, and not the other.
Then it’s like the part of my original reply that you did not quote….destroying enemy rally beacons.
One of the best ways to change the momentum of a battle…yet zero direct reward…or recognition.
Maybe they should have a battle award and xp multiplier for “best saboteur”
