How much preference should the game give to offense versus defense?

None whatsoever. Offensive behaviour should be dealt with by muting; persistent offenders should be banned. :)

Well yea, but what he means is the offence in militairy terms, the action of attacking an enemy, not as in someone trying to hurt your feelings. :P

I think there should be a balance should be slightly shifted towards offencive as this would prevent camping and will give more active gameplay.

Anomalous wrote:

None whatsoever. Offensive behaviour should be dealt with by muting; persistent offenders should be banned. :)

what?

kharnov wrote:

How much preference should the game give to offense versus defense?

I think offensive behavior should be encouraged, it's just a matter of finding a way to encourage it.
(for example, in counter strike you have a time limit in which you must either: plant the bomb, or eliminate the other team. If you fail to do either within the time limit the other team wins, so there is an incentive to be aggressive)

That being said we don't want to encourage feeding (or just mindless offensive attacks).

Defense is important but only to protect the base and points in the map, but ultimately camping for 35 minutes does not win you the game.

One thing I don't like are draws... perhaps there would be a way to decide a winner if time limit is reached (perhaps what ever team has the most structure kills / player kills or score combined?)

Khaoz wrote:

what?

I think offensive behavior should be encouraged, it's just a matter of finding a way to encourage it.

No. Offensive behaviour will just drive people away.

(for example, in counter strike you have a time limit in which you must either: plant the bomb, or eliminate the other team. If you fail to do either within the time limit the other team wins, so there is an incentive to be aggressive)

That's not offensive. That's attacking.

This is probably the wrong question to ask as both are necessary and the amount of both are dependent on the situation. However, in general, we want to force both teams to be aggressive.

Anomalous wrote:

No. Offensive behaviour will just drive people away.

Please do not troll, it's childish.

Anomalous wrote:

That's not offensive. That's attacking.

shhhh

Khaoz wrote:

That being said we don't want to encourage feeding (or just mindless offensive attacks).

I'd rather say remove feeding from the game. Completely. Newbies should be allowed to do mindless attacking, it just shouldn't be efficient.

On topic: Offense should continuously be enforced in some way. Unlike counterstrike, there shouldn't just be some sort of timelimit that forces you to get more aggressive at the end of the game but instead I'd like to see the constant urge for expansion (same link as above) that is present in many RTS games.

I agree with Viech. I think the gameplay design doc that Ishq posted will have a decent chance of accomplishing this.

There are at most four courses of action a player or team can make in competitive multiplayer games:

• Active Offense - Performing whatever action that directly contributes to winning (dealing damage in a fighting game, scoring points in basketball, whatever).

• Passive Offense - Foregoing a direct attack to position yourself for a greater offense later (collecting resources in a strategy game, stunning an enemy in an RPG, etc.). Some games are almost entirely positioning (chess, up until you start directly threatening your opponent's king).

• Active Defense - Reacting to a direct offensive for the express purpose of regaining the ability to go back on offense. Active offense is (by my definition above) doing exactly what the game requires of you to win, so why would you ever stop doing that to defend? Only when being attacked disrupts your own ability to attack, and defending enables you to start up again.

• Passive Defense - This is like active defense, but what you're reacting to is the threat of an attack (e.g. building defensive structures). It is a form of positioning that is still reactive (you wouldn't do it if you hadn't decided you had to).

Most multiplayer games will have all of these things, but they don't need to have more than active offense. Golf is an example of a game that is nothing but doing the one thing that gets you closer to winning (moving your ball closer to each hole). We obviously want Unvanquished to be more than just racing to a goal independently of the other team, so defense has to have some place. What we don't want, as much as possible, is for the game to reward passivity, because obviously the point of playing a game is to do something interesting. Therefore:

To avoid avoid encouraging inaction, defense should never be desirable unless it is forced, and its only purpose should be to recover the capacity to mount an attack.

Active offense is definitionally what a team should always want to be doing, though they might make a strategic decision to engage in passive offense first to amplify its effect. Any kind of defense that includes an element of offense (moves or helps indirectly move a team towards the win condition) encourages reactivity (e.g. camping). A corollary to this is that offense should never directly hurt a side, except in the lost opportunity cost (e.g., by attacking early a team might have wasted the opportunity to build up resources for a much more effective attack later). So, a fighting game in which reversals do much more damage than strikes discourages players from ever initiating an attack, and always getting funds from killing enemies in Tremulous encourages camping (because killing things in your base is easier than killing them in the enemies' base).

It may not be possible or desirable to completely separate offense and defense like I described, but hopefully this helps clarify the discussion.