So I was playing Big Teams and somehow one side had a near-full team with about 6-7 players. They were all medics.
Container City, they were security.
So after a few minutes I notice that they've made no real attempt to blow open the door at the start. I decided to watch them.
What I witnessed was amazing, hilarious, and disturbing...
They'd all delay coming out of spawn, presumably buffing each other like hell followed by rushing out, getting shot, then spamming health buff on each other constantly. They shortly stopped buffing followed by just rushing our spawn area and either dying from my team or from the turrets in our spawn. This repeated constantly for the whole match.

Upon checking the scoreboard I noticed that their scores were all insanely high... scores, of course, are also XP in BRINK.

Is a new trend of boosting emerging in public servers?

Closest thing i've seen is a team where 6 out of 8 (me included) players were engineers (but we were protecting a primary HACK objective and spammed it with mines and turrets).
Never seen a medic party on PC, hell it's hard to get even health-boosted there :V

And that's just one of the many problems plaguing this game...

I honestly think the game would have been better off forcing two of each class on every team (as long as it was full) to promote
even more teamwork and curb some of these teams that XP farm and care nothing about helping the team complete objectives.

read a poll somewhere and medics and soldiers where the least characters people were playing as so now i go into it as a soldier and soon to do more medic( im the engineer) and always hated being the medic but its fun to adapt what i find is where is our one medic!!!!!!!!!!!!

I haven't experienced this in Brink, though with the relentless popularity of engineers I'm certain it's happening. It reminds me (like a huge number of things) of Bad Company 2, specifically the idiot Recon hordes that occupy half the team slots and sit in the spawn doing nothing. Unfortunately, like in that scenario, a forced class setup just wouldn't work. People would be turned off if they couldn't play their favorite class and would just leave the game, and with Brink's population being what it currently is, that's most certainly not something we want happening. And this is ignoring the obvious problems of someone highly invested in playing Soldier getting placed in Operative boots, with not a single Ability to his name...

i personally havent seen anything like that in brink (yet) but i'm not surprised.
unfortunately its a problem plaguing the whole genre, this last generation of gamers have been overly indoctrinated with the concept that high scores via XP or KDR "farming "means that your a good player.......this is the concept that created camping, spawn trapping, any kind of of exploitable action.
This is why the TDM/ NO TDM is such big topic on the site, its not about the inclusion of a new mode ,brink definetly needs some additions , its more a problem about inviting the type of player who only thinks of his overall score rather than trying to actually achieve something for the team without thinking of himself.

certain games and modes nowadays actually encourage this concept, "you may lose the match but you'll still look like a winner" this is also a problem with xp-unlocks, killstreaks, multiplier systems in games nowadays ,its a structural issue on a dynamic level.

obviously brinks devs were trying to curb this kind of behaviour but people are going to play the game how they want, even if they lose or look like the most self serving idiotic egotistical douchebags.

I am still having problems with lag (I'm beginning to suspect it's just me...) so I haven't played very much with real players ([censored] you Splash Damage for not including LAN capability). However, I really don't think this will turn into any kind of major trend. Brink just isn't fun if your team isn't completing objectives, and to complete most objectives you need a decently varied array of classes. Personally, I play a lot as either a medic or engineer, as I find I can help my team the most as those classes, but sometimes a Soldier or Operative are needed to tip the balance and I'll switch to those.

Despite its flaws, Brink is still too interesting (at least for me) to degenerate into XP farming.

Hmm you can get high scores using a medic but that sounds a bit stupid. I've had people spawn camp though. It's even possible to get in the actual spawn area in some maps without getting shot by the turrets.

Honestly, it takes maybe 24 solid hours of gameplay to hit level 20 at an easy pace without every really putting effort into it..

In a single match of Container City, it's not a stretch to rack up 12,000+ exp by playing Resistance, then with 3 mins left, swapping to Security, blowing the gate, escort the bot to the lab, swap back to resistance for the rest of the match.

really? wow!

When they realise the stats site tracks your wins, and that having 200,000 XP per match average, but no wins is going to make them look like total (insert insult here)s, they'll stop.

I guess if you are being spawn camped and you are not good enough to break out... at least get XP?


Its still cheap as heck

EDIT: all-medics would probably be really good for pushing through with only 1 objective class. They'd be hard to kill definitely.

what about all universal skills that just lean towards certain styles instead of having classes? So, you could have an actual CHARACTER not be forced to play 1 of 4 ways but having infinite possiblities.

For example... all the starting class skills could be unlockable skills, and upgrades to skill effectiveness could affect more than one type of skill. This would require different skills, not just reorganizing what's there now of course.

I always loved the more freeform customization call of duty and some rpgs have instead of classes. You're actually playing the exact style you want not some weird offset you're forced into because of classes.

It's obvious why people play Engineer. He has the most firepower. Period.

I'm guessing people play operative because they think it's cool. Though I have yet to see an operative do well outside of a primary objective.

Why more people don't play soldier, especially on offense, still blows my mind. The grenade power alone has made the difference of win/lose several times. Those moments when you catch half the enemy team in a grenade/molitov combo and take control of the objective are priceless.

Medic makes sense. Few people want to be stuck buffing/reviving the whole game. The rest think they're Rambo because they can heal/revive themselves if things go sour. Having played a medic with support as my primary goal, I actually found it very satisfying. Knowing that the other team can't push in because those 4 people they just downed are right back on their feet 3 seconds later generates more smug then George Clooney's oscar acceptance speech.


More on original topic... that is strange to see a big team of medics. I guess the idea was they can heal/revive each other enough to control the map. Which is great in theory because then all you need is a 1 guy to blow the door and switch to engineer to bring the robot up. Sounds like it didn't work out for them though.

What an interesting way to avoid a spawn [censored].

Engineer, damage buff.
You never SEE operatives because they're behind enemy lines or generally being sneaky. Of COURSE you never SEE them.
more soldiers and medics, good idea.
the idea is that you get 75 XP per buff with a medic and you can get INSANE amounts of XP just buffing each other, and dying restores your MASSIVE SUPPLY POOL instantly instead of waiting like 2 minutes for it to regenerate.

maybe... but, why?....

Noone really cares about your xp total and there are no stats to speak of really. It takes like less than a day to get a character from 1 to 20 and there is no prestige. The fact is, they tried a tactic to not get spawnkilled on CCity and it worked but they still lost. No need for threads about it really.

but they weren't trying to not get killed. they died on purpose. They'd stand in front of me a few different times without shooting or moving and I thought it was odd, so I just kill them then they rush out again. It's obvious they were xp-farming.

Here is an idea but it's a bit extreme. How about the losing team gets 0 (yes ZERO) XP. Actually some sort of COD (yes, COD) Ante up system (similar to poker). The winning team would get ALL of the XP!

Everyone wants team work right? How about putting your XP on the line? If you continue to lose XP then you would drop down in level & even lose abilities. This will keep the selfish players offline until they learned how to play as a team!

Obviously the top player on the winning team would get the most XP, ante up XP along with the XP they earned in game. Once again, it's extreme but how freaking intense would it be? People will be selling their left nut to clan up with people.

Just an idea.

Kind of tired of the "everyone wins" crap. Let's get serious!!!!!!!!!!

Splash Damage already solved this by making objective xp superhigh

Maybe, but this would negate the buffing spamming that this original thread was about.

Thanks for the in depth feedback though.

I think a 50% "win" bonus to your XP would be nice. And maybe a -20% "you svck" modifier if you don't pass the first objective.

Sounds about right. Maybe actually tying the +?% to the main objectives selected?

I have been in a match where everyone collects around the CP when it starts, seeming to change from one class to another, buffing themselves and then ignoring everyone else during the actual match. At that point, the opposing team managed to capture the other CPs, defend them and then blow the blooming door off. Serious battle ensued, but hey ho. I guess that happens.

How about Rank matches win/loss ratio, level is left as-is, and ability unlocks go by level (they already do since rank is basically gained every 5th level.)

Finally, add a "play my rank and under" option and there you go, rank is now an indicator of skill as is desperately needed for "matchmaking"
It would be stupid to take away level-based unlocks and waste peoples' time with cod4's stupid leveling system by slowing it at all.

It would actually be wiser to keep rank linked to unlocked skills in addition to it being tied to w/l ratio since worse players can't handle as much. Would you give a lazy bum construction machinery and expect him to know how to use it? Like a whiny kid that want's to do everything at once, you make them do it right at their level, but people would whine about it and BRINK doesn't have a good enough structure to match skill and intelligence that well. (no game does right now, too much showy bs, too little precise focus on skill and intelligence)

Good call.

For each objective completed, attacking team get a different % modifier, from -20% if NO objectives are completed up to +50% if they win. Defenders go from -20% modifier for losing up to +50% for stalling the enemy before the first objective.

Would also help to balance out the lack of XP for short games.