1.31 sliding capture rate?

With the latest 1.31 Beta we've introduced some changes to the capture mechanism:

Each additional capper - or defender - in a building decreases the amount of capture progress earned each "tick". Instead of a flat scale, however, we felt that it would be better to have an upper and lower limit, so that once you get to a certain number of people in a capture building, it's still going to take a certain amount of time to finish the capture.

Player belnz wanted to know why we did this:

As a future capturer of buildings i want my capping contribution to be just as good as the next player.

Not a lousy 1.66% worth as the 13th player.

Why not have each additional player reduces the capture timer by the same ammount?

...

As for instant caps?

Why not? 

In this beta we're trying numbers that are a little on the over-zealous side: it takes 8 minutes for a single player to cap a facility.

Remember, however: Capture timers don'sot just go away if you die, fire your weapon or leave the building anymore. Instead they decay, very slowly. In this beta, 12 minutes for a building to completely uncap itself from 99.99%.

So the long timer is there to put a crimp in whackamole; it will create an opportunity for unintentional teamwork - 8 minutes is plenty of time for a friendly to come along; it will create more opportunity for fights. But it will also be an incentive to go back. If you have 35% on a depot and some s.o.b charges in and pegs you, that's 35 excellent reasons to hurry back.

To answer Belnz's questions: Why not instant caps?

Instant caps provide zero opportunity for engagement and zero opportunity for the side balance timers to be effective. And if the option is there, it will be the norm and not the exception.

That requires some kind of upper limit. We thought about just having a flat scale with a cut-off point, but that pushed the numbers around in ways we didn't like. Having the curved scale works on a number of levels: If you run to a remote depot and find one EI LMG who shoots you, you can still run back and maybe stop him capping. (If you are successful, he will probably have a lot of progress on the bar and a lot of motivation to come back again).

But we don't want to lock lots of people into depots. So we made the 5-8 range the "sweet" spot where each player is contributing the most per tick.

We also felt that if you have 20 players in a depot, that has it's own innate reward: you can afford to lose 7 of them before the capture slows down :) We really don't want to add any more encouragement to it than that ;)