There's been a lot of discussion about the issues with POIs being cleared out.
Personally the part of it that bothers me the most is the lack of enemies, since it kind of invalidates the point of a shooter game.
I wanted to give my idea of how it could be addressed with an alternative, immersive way to respawn enemies - as reinforcements that spawn out of the POI and physically move in.
I imagine it something like this:
- When garrison starts taking casualties a countdown starts. After a while a "Quick Reaction Force" Spawns (in an area outside of POI away from any players) and moves toward the POI
- The QRF will attempt to sweep through the POI and engage any players it finds.
- If there are no players left the QRF takes over the guard duty, and any excess soldiers despawn
- If the QRF is eliminated or unable to take over as garrison, another QRF is sent (size and frequency could depend on amount of players at POI)
Why like this?
- It allows enemies to respawn even if players are present, without breaking the immersion as normal "out of nowhere" respawn would.
- It makes the combat zones more dynamic, with enemies not only just guarding a position but also moving in. Watching the rear would be more important, it would create opportunities to set up ambushes etc.
- It creates an incentive to clear POIs efficiently, as being quick might let you avoid the QRF.
- It could be automatically adjusted to account for the amount of players at a POI, so if there is just 1 player the response could be smaller and slower, if there's many players more enemies would arrive more frequently. This would reduce "dead zones" where enemies are perpetually dead.
- It could work alongside normal respawn behavior, the QRF only kicking in if players are preventing normal respawn.
Maybe there could be extra ideas for this, like enemies arriving in a helicopter like we do, but I just wanted to suggest the most basic version.
I'm not really sure if this could be used to address the other issue which is lack of loot -but I think it might encourage players to not stick around at POIs so much and give loot more chance to respawn