Ideas for Teamwork friendly maps

[Jacouille 0]

I created this topic as a reference list for ideas and suggestions that will make a multiplayer map tend to be more teamwork friendly.

The most obvious reason for this is to favor a natural teamwork play style as most of the current maps seem to be totally forgetting this part and take given that players are all pro/experts with voice comm and well knowing each other.

I think most of you will agree that, from now on, if we want the growing multiplayer community around Arma II to evolve in the good way, we must praise the newcomers and host teamwork friendly maps.

In order to do that, and as the game is still very new, maps must include many tips and stuff in the way they are designed that would tend to make the game more "teamworkable" on the fly.

Basically it means that, i.e people not knowing each other and with little experience such as newcomers, should be helped as much as possible by all means through the map / editing ideas available.

Still, we all know that the best way to have a good game in Arma II is to be part of a clan. However, it is not that way that the community will grow, and as most of you said, if we do nothing the huge amount of people playing currently will slowly diminish until it vanishes into a few hardcore clans.

Also, it is acknowledged that a teamwork friendly map is nothing without good admin kicking TK, lonewolfes etc.

Ok so, here are a few ideas that I think might help designing "natural teamwork" maps :

• A good teamwork map should have its objectives clearly defined, if there are multiple objectives they should only be assigned in a specific order : i.e you can make them appear later in the game. Also make sure the current objective is well known by everyone (updated for all players).
  
• It should be mandatory to divide each side into squads of 4-5 players max as it is well know that little groups do help teamwork. Also, make sure that objectives of each squad are listed if they are different.
  
• A good teamwork map should never last too long : a few and nicely scripted objectives is always better than lots of poorly designed objectives. Besides, you should be aware that most people will leave after 1-2h, this mean that new people will come into the game not knowing what to do and start fooling around. If you really want to make a long mission, make sure that JIP players appear close to current objectives / existing squads or be forced to wait and regroup somewhere until a full squad is made.
  
• Veteran/Expert game mode is good for immersion and can help teamwork, but you should keep the waypoint and squad leader marks. Even with a good teamwork it is hard to stick together : the squad leader mark is great to help one find his way back to the team. Visible waypoint markers will also help make the leader what he is supposed to be : a player giving orders and leading the way to complete an objective.
  
• Arma II map is gigantic, most of the people tend to get lost as you could potentially walk 25km in one direction. Why should you get the whole map available for you mission ? Instead, place triggers / markers that will limit the size of the map to a short distance around objectives. This strongly helps getting the squads grouped. Of course, a map designed for 60+ players should allow bigger part of the map available than a map for 10 players. For pvp, it can be interesting to have smaller maps for more chance for a fight to happen.
  
• Vehicles are perfect for immersion and transport, but having too many vehicles is always nasty : most players will take them alone and end being killed which is not useful at all. Instead you should have few vehicles dedicated to special pilot/drivers slots.
  
• If you are making a pvp map, it is better to make few objectives that will conflict at the same time for both sides : this way sides have more chance to meet themselves. But more importantly, the WHOLE sides will go to those objectives, meaning that you have more chance to have teamwork involved and memorable fights.
  
• You can have respawn in your map, but it is always a problem : people don't die at the same time and this does increase chances for players to start getting on their own once they get killed. That's also why many JIP people want to restart as they find the good groups/squads far away and/or dispatched. As said before, a good solution is to have few vehicles with dedicated pilots / drivers slots (this also mean no TK, but that's another question). You can also have respawn moved close to the fight once an objective is completed (some maps do have mobile respawn vehicles, but most of the time they remain unused and i believe it is not a solution). I am quite sure there are other ways to solve this problem and it should be thought about.
  

Those are the few ideas I could remember, but there are much more available and possible.

I would be glad if all of you could help and contribute.

Thanks.

[Murklor 10]

Personally I think the key to teamwork friendly maps is to acknowledge that teamwork is basicly just guys bunched together in the thick of battle. What I want to see:

A single target at any given time to focus the team

A clear (and close) point of insertion.

Unrestricted respawn.

The last thing is the key for casual gameplay in PvP (Coop is a whole different beast) and thus any teamwork it creates. Arma fans apparently get a heartattack when you mention it, but as I said: teamwork is nothing more than a bunch of guys in the middle of battle. In PvP, teamwork, being in the middle of combat and fear of death doesnt mix very well. Some say its an incentive to "stick together". I say it just makes people stay away. Literally, it breed snipers. Which upsets the battlefield strength. There is no way to accurately depict untrained masses vs trained elites by imposing limited respawn on everybody.

[KorJax 10]

Veteran/Expert game mode is good for immersion and can help teamwork, but you should keep the waypoint and squad leader marks. Even with a good teamwork it is hard to stick together : the squad leader mark is great to help one find his way back to the team. Visible waypoint markers will also help make the leader what he is supposed to be : a player giving orders and leading the way to complete an objective.

Yes yes yes and for the thousdandth time YES

I'm tired of playing of veteran/expert servers because of this reason alone. This pisses me off to no end. How in gods name is not having a marker on your map saying the objective and not knowing where your squad is IRL terms ever "realistic"??

In reality making it so any JIP players who join a match have no possible idea what is going on in a public server by removing vital gameplay elements such as these, does nothing but ruin teamwork and gameplay realism, and only promotes lone-wolfing.

Seriously, if you actively support such a movement, unless you are doing some kind of strict clan play in your own locked server or some kind of co-op, this is perhaps the stupidest thing you can disable in a game. It pisses me off that the devs even make such a thing an option because 99% of the time all it does is ruin a perfectly good multilayer match, and makes the server absolute shit to play on for any kind of public play.

Sorry it's just I hate the above being done because almost every server I played on in the demo had it and all it did was cause a bunch of guys to go "what the hell do we do??", which lead to teamkilling and carelessness. Never mind the fact that all these servers just had it so wherever you died, you respawned exactly where you died, which is a terrible system.

[acadiancrusader 0]

well, if CoC gets ported over from arma1 to arma2, refined to make it easier to use, then i predict that most of these issues will be resolved.