After seeing vids of Black Ops 2 and Playing a bit of BF3 made me realize how would I force teamwork in these games.

My Ideas:

1. No regenrating health, One shot one kill and if you live through the first shot you are wounded and you will not be able to run.

2.You die you will not respawn and you have to wait until the round is over and play in round 2.

3. No Unlockables, it forces gamers to grind like Spaming grenade launchers a number of times to unlock something.

The first 2 would really work because they deemphasises running and gunning and promotes slower, strategic, cover and flank gameplay.

Not playing with irrational teenagers.

;)

To be honest I made this thread because I got my ass handed to me in Battlefield 3 today to the ppoint of one round and no kills and I had better days where I was badass.

The game is structured for teambased gameplay, but everyone is running and gunning.

STAND STILL SO I CAN LINE UP MY SIGHTS ON YOU!!

Makes me wonder if Arma 2's Multiplayer has what I want.

Actually, the results of the first two would probably result in nothing more than sniper spamming.

You can't force teamwork. You can encourage it by giving people an incentive to play different classes as they should...the best example of that is probably Team Fortress 2. People actually will play medics as healers, for example, because they're rewarded for doing so.

Rewards go a Hell of a lot further than restrictions and penalties.

Not unless there is bullet drop which battlefield 3 does making sniping more realistic so you have to be really pricise which is a challenge and I if people stick together.

I assume you've played Counter Strike? (1.6 or Source, not Global Offensive)
That's exactly the game you've just described with these three points.

It still has the same problem as all other multiplayer FPS games though. bad players.
If you get a good team with people you can work with, almost any of these games can be good. That's probably the reason clans are so popular in these types of games.

It's also one of the reasons I think old-fashioned LAN-parties were better, because you were always playing with a group of people you probably knew, who were fairly serious about having a good game, rather than obsessing over playing as many hours with weapon X to get on scoreboard Y in the rankings.

It still isn't going to do anything to 'make' people play as a team. It IS going to piss off a vast majority of the player base. And the fact that you're talking one hit kills still encourages snipers above anything else, regardless of how difficult you make them to use.

Think about this...you have a tactical shooter going with 32 players and everyone taking their time. You get shot first through a good shot by the other team, and you now get to sit there waiting for a new stage to start for 20 minutes while everyone else takes it slow and easy. Why in the Hell would ANYONE stick around for that?

I expect it would be rather unpopular but: Anonymity.

No names, no stats, no reputations to gain or defend, just anonymous soldiers both on your side and the other.

Again, I imagine this would be highly unpopular, but it would be interesting to see how people behave in multiplayer games if they were completely faceless with no reputations to pursue or personal stats to brag about.

I should state, in fairness, that I don't play these types of games typically. The closest I have come is battlegrounds in WoW, but I saw plenty of evidence in my time there that people often abandoned team goals in order to pursue personal glory.. to top the "charts" as it were. I'd be curious to see how such a competition would be if those involved had nothing to prove or to lose.

As I said, it probably wouldn't work out well, but it would be different.

It didn't used to be that way though. There was a time when people either played or did not play a game based on whether or not it was simply fun. Now a lot of games have these reward structures involved. When did it become necessary for that? Why do people have to 'earn' things in a video game? Nothing is really ever earned by playing video games anyways, unless you think obesity and lack of a social life is a reward, since most of the reward structures (especially those in MMOs) are massive time sinks to keep you paying and playing.

As far as the original topic goes though, I think objective based gameplay is the best way to encourage teamwork, but even that isn't a perfect solution. But at least, if you're playing a mod of a game where gaining objectives (like taking over nodes ala Onslaught mode in UT2k4), most players will have to participate in the team effort in order for your team to win. Also, keeping the game focus away from your own personal contribution (such as not focusing so much on individual damage or total individual kills) and placing more on the overall team contribution, would probably help.

Games like Tribes: Ascend do that to an extent. That game is a reward focused game, but you get more experience (used to buy rewards) if your team actually wins, so it's beneficial for each person to help the team as much as possible so that more points are earned and thus more individual rewards can be purchased. It also helps that in the case of Tribes, it's a team game by nature since it's primary focus is capture the flag, which falls back on my original point, that the type of mod played will have the greatest impact on teamwork most likely. It's going to be hard to get a bunch of people to care about teamwork in team deathmatch, or something similar, where all you really do is run around and focus on shooting other players.

Dae6 posted his while I was typing mine up, but what he's saying is along the same lines of what I was getting at by having less of the focus on the individual contribution. So, I agree with what he's saying, though it probably wouldn't be very popular. The namesless thing isn't quite as critical as simply not keeping track of statistics, because if you're completely nameless, than you wouldn't be able to make friends in the game and possibly form a group of 'regulars', which often happens in the online FPS's.

Very well than I thought of 2 things, one we will bring the Medic class to revive players and 2 you say the 2 things will promote sniper spamming well I got a solution.

The class system done this way you can only have a limited total number of people playing a certain class for example A team of 37 will consist of:

20 infantrymen

10 engineers (rocket launchers)

5 support (revive and ammo)

2 snipers

and when you take that class you stick with it until the end of round to chose another.

I think online gaming has become a little more competitive, and everyone wants to boost their kills/rep/stats/etc. But I think having mic chat with teammates helps to at least talk about strategy and whatnot.

Positive reinforcement. See points given to Medics in TF2, as well as spotter points in Battlefield: BC2 as good examples of what I mean.

Battlefield 3 has spotting points aswell.

See, I actually believe the opposite is true. I think games now are less competitive and far less skill based than they used to be. The old Quake games blow current shooters completely out of the water in terms of skill involved. The difference is that todays games are more mainstream. Part of how that mainstreaming was accomplished was by dumbing-down (or 'stream lining' if it makes you feel better to call it that) the games and adding in these 'feel good' reward systems as well as statistics tracking to more easily appeal to the masses.

I agree with what you're saying. I guess what I mean is that the dumbing down of the gameplay has made the multiplayer community more competitive-oriented from a stats/rep standpoint instead of a pure gameplay standpoint.

Still, people out there are pretty darn good at some of these shooters.