Allow players to hide their faction during match setup

[underlu]

Subject:
Allow players to hide their faction during match setup

Description:
This is a small idea that suddenly came to me. You see, in a game with distinct designs, take ZH for example, evident factional food-chain exists, knowing the enemy's standing is a great intel edge for choosing your own faction, planning the play and building the proper units, saving the expense of recon methods.

Even with fewer factions like RA3, due to the balance issues certain faction counters one other from patch to patch, smart people did use this to go further in the ladder. Sure one can elude that by selecting "random", but if he wants to win with equal efficiency he gotta master every faction.

I figure a little checkbox to show/hide the player choice could come in handy.

Positive Effect:
Fairer game with the pre-read advantage erased.

Negative Effect:
I dunno, annoys the opponent?

[stormgear]

I like this idea, it kinda reminds me of King of Fighters and selecting your player on fighting games. I don't remember what year KoF did it but you can't see which order of character the player chose. That gave that nice effect that you're suggesting here now.

The same goes for regular 1v1 fighting games, whenever you highlight a character you would like to pick the opponent would attempt to pick an appropriate 'counter' for your chosen character.

[Frankaz]

Good idea.

[GeneralSGJist]

agreed. Should be doable with minimal effort.

[Alaskan_Viking]

Bad, Bad, BAD idea.

Lots of people would host games with house roles, (which people could technicallt break but there was a kind of honour system) for instance, half the games in the C&CZH lobby had titles such as: "NoRush10/sw"

Now some generals were just not allowed in these games, for instance, the SW general was HUGELY OP in no rush games, and the infantry general was only good at rushing, so if somebody joined one of these games and wanted to play as infantry gen, you could be sure that he was going to break the 'roles' and rush. The answer was usually just not allowing players to use SW, or infantry generals, but if you could hide your faction, people would just join those games as SW general, or as infantry general and rush, it just worldn't work.

About half of the games in the C&C generals lobby where like that, and if you in effect stopped that by allowing hidden factions, you would alienate half the player base. Very, VERY bad idea.

Now, as a game OPTION for houst, it would be ok, also, making random show as random in the loading screen instead of whatever faction it turne dout to be would be nice. People who wanted to ban certain factions from their games could ask players to pick a faction, and people who play random in regular games wouldn't have their cover blown at the start.

[stormgear]

Just put a toggle button to enable or disable that function. You can then talk again on what will your house rules will be: "no rush 10 min peacetime no sw no hide faction"

Problem solved.

[Lord-Vale3]

10min no rush is stupid.

Especially when they rage because you sent one scout.

[RedShocktrooper]

Have the host be able to set if factions can be hidden or not, like how there was Superweapons On/Off, Random Crates On/Off, etc.

Also I tend to not rage over scouts. I tend to rage over people breaking a 10min no rush by sending proper military units and harrassment after two minutes.

[stormgear]

It just shows how much they suck at this game that they'd resort on breaking at their own rule just to get an upper hand, pathetic lol!

[R315r4z0r]

There should be no option. Chosen factions (including random) should ALWAYS be hidden to force you to scout your opponent and disallow you from starting to work towards your faction counter strategies right out of the gate.

If a server of people wants to share their factions, they can do it in the chat window. And if servers want to play "10 minute no rush games" then that is their own decision. What difference does it make for you?