This should be used to make an impact on the encounter difficulty. Some examples:
- Field encounters (resource mining, enemy patrol, some 'Brontodon King' type encounter): if your team mates/someone passing by fail to revive you, respawn at nearest base. Would be nice to have the base close by in the starter areas but quite far sometimes (higher downtime traveling back) as you go for activities further away from the 'safe place' (more lucrative mining, etc).
- Base defense: occasionally add some difficulty for some of those. Remember the melding bubbles? Something similar could be in place around the base so that players who die and fail to be revived or force respawn can't re-enter that fight (the only way to continue your participation in the encounter is by being revived by another player).
It kind of sucks to have a shield preventing entry for those who are just arriving late to the party, they still should be able to enter, the more players able to participate the better. There has to be a way to apply the 'impassable barrier' status only for those who were KIA (failed to revive) while inside the invasion/bubble area, like applying a debuff.
'No respawn' mode, which really isn't but let's call it like that (in any case, it would be 'no comeback' mode).
For some of the defensive encounters make 'revive' and some careful play be valuable. Allow the enemy to put some serious pressure when something big is at stake.
Regular/more common/starter area shouldn't use this. Being irritating and frustrating isn't the idea.
'Repair Cooldown' being too long or always resulting in immediate 'frame-switch' can get kind of frustrating. 'Respawn point distance' (travel time, related to world construction in the war effort) and 'yes/no respawn' should be tuning the encounter difficulty along with enemy type and enemy numbers.
To put it another way, if we are trying to discourage it, why are we "rewarding" (in your eyes) skilled players for the actions of others? then wouldn't you want to bring as many incompetent/lazy people with you as possible? to be challenged?
I get it, you want a challenge you believe worthy of you, but there are other players here too.
That's a good point. The number/types of enemies shouldn't increase SOLELY based on player numbers in the vicinity, it should also scale with 'general performance' in simple ways: if we are killing too many and too fast (aka 'roflstomping') then the bad guys should be pissed and 'open more portals' (not to the 'slide-show' crowd level, that shouldn't be needed nor its desired), call in bigger baddies, launch an attack somewhere else to divide player's attention or some other thing they can come up with.
'Trolls/afkers' will still make 'more enemies appear' but just by being absent/obnoxious and doing nothing will not be enough for them to make the encounter the most rewarding/hardest it could be (after all, they can't add to 'good performance' score).
I had doubts about scaling rewards as the encounter got harder due to screw-ups. Probably shouldn't have wrote that.
See above point.
The encounter should naturally get harder the better we're doing, up to a point and depending on the encounter (there needs to be an upper and lower floor).
Bringing 'alt accounts' to simply stand there to augment the reward will be possible but not as good as bringing more good players because only those will make the enemy try harder. Encourages better play but doesn't necessarily make the world end because of screw-ups (unless that was the intention for some particular encounter). This will also happen naturally because of buildings lost, vehicles destroyed, etc.
Why do we need to "punish" anything, I'd much rather prefer a bunch of carrots over a bunch of sticks personally. Reward good team play. Seems like that should be enough.
Revives are a good thing, it's fun, encourages team play, sociability, some players enjoy the support role more than anything. I'd rather have the revive mechanic instead of always being forced to travel back, always respawn on site by myself or simply stay staring at a timer.
Revives only make sense if you somehow make death matter. It doesn't matter if you get downed, someone nearby is likely to attempt a revive.
If you 'don't punish anything' then there's no way to make team play and good play matter. Not to abusive extremes, I'd agree there.