Spawn Camping has become a mainstream attack method and needs to be addressed

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
41

Aye, I completly agree that my team failed in protecting our left flank.

But that’s not the problem.
The problem is that we had no way to actually try to fix this misstake as the match went on.
And that isn’t a good design.
A good design would allow both teams to correct any misstake that would’ve happened. Of course at a loss in both tanks and tickets as the enemy team problably would be able to cap the point and take several vantage positions.

But having a match end because the team was spawn camped without any way to counter it is not. It isn’t fun for either team, especially not the one getting spawn camped on an open field.

And it is very easy to fix, just have two spawn points.

6 Likes
42

You’re right. I can understand that frustration. There is already very little room for error in the hightier. The high speed of the vehicles which can very quickly secure important positions. The high penetration values of the cannons, etc.
As long as the situation is as it is, you can only try to react as proactively as possible. You were in a good position early on. Your team was asleep. Everyone will be penalised in the end. Unfortunately …

But when I think of the Carpathians map, how long it took to get a second spawn …

o7 good luck for your future battles

1 Like
43

Maybe but OP is talking about people who rush spawn camping locations in less than a minute which is just bad map design in my opinion. It’s a legitimate tactic but one that severely impacts gameplay and just leads to ODL.

1 Like
44

No, there was time for people to pull their heads our of their collective orifices and go do something about that gaping wide open left flank - because the longer it stays open, the more happy fun time you will have with enemies camping your spawn especially when they see nobody’s really paying attention.

There is a 2 spawn Maginot - “suffers” from the same problem: you leave a flank open, sooner or later (most likely sooner), someone on the enemy team will make use of it and will either camp your egress from spawn, or will just balls to the wall camp spawn when they notice nobody’s doing anything about it.

1 Like
45

No, you are completly wrong.
As the game has no way to effectivly tell you what is going on with the rest of yourteam as you play the game and try to achive whatever you try to do.
Most people will not relize that the spawn is gettng camped as they are engaged around the point at this time.
Nor will they have the time to go back and counter the camp as they are engaged inside the town.

In any case. Two people shouldn’t be able to completely dominate a map due to a single mistake being made.

Say we compare it to Legue of legends as a random example. The first engagement in the north ended with one team losing thier champion. That “flank” is now open. But even if they push and destroy the first tower, the game isn’t automatically lost.

It’s a matter of game and level design. Warthunder is a game where you spawn multiple times based on your performance. So by design people are supposed to respawn in case things went badly.
Now, when 20 respawns are killed off in spawn by two people. Then there is something wrong with that spawn as the people spawning there can’t get back into the game as they are supposed to.

And there were attempts by the people spawning in to counter the spawn campers. Smokes were placed. One or two campers that got to close were taken out.
But when you have 600m of open terrain to cross to get to any form of cover and actually put up a defense, you don’t stand much of a chance to actually fix the situation.

A insta lose senario due to a single misstake is not a good design when you have multiple spawns.
it’s like you fall down a pit in Mario, and each time you respawn you do so right on top of the same pit.

And yes. Having 2 spawns doesn’t completly remove spawn camping, but it is a very easy fix to lower the chance of spawncamping happening.

1 Like
46

Heh… I miss the old days when ONE player was enough to dominate the tomato team. Great times. I used to stream back then and explained what I was doing to while playing; aka going around and picking the most lucrative targets, destroying them and cutting of reinforcments of the enemy team, counting planes and comparing this to the players left in game so I could make a good guess to where they could be, including information from the team and latest kill feed. This was match deciding fun.
This stopped working when they halved spawn costs.

1 Like
47

This game needs a massive and entire gameplay overhaul.

We need maps to be massively increased in size, and the average game to be 20-30mins, not 6-12minutes…

This would also massively fix RP/SL gain issues that still can plague non-premium players who suffer from these 6min games, and even as a premium player 3k rp at top tier is horrible, because of these small games.

Gametime is single-handedly one of the largest reward modifiers

3 Likes
48

I will never understand players defending spawncamping…

It is simply unrealistic…

Tanks don’t appear out of thin air suddenly beeing surrounded by 500 enemy tanks…

Spawns should be 100% safe and there should be multiple ways out… if all ways out are stacked with enemies… then yes your team has f*ed up… otherwise just unrealistic

And honestly people who like spawncamping… why arent you just playing cookie clicker or something like that?

4 Likes
49

They constantly made it worse until recently… someone camping spawn should not see that they are beeing shown on the map for it… not to long ago this wasnt a thing… and it was better that way…
Some time ago the spawn was protected by a killbox that would destroy enemy vehicles inside them like driving out of the map… that was better than what they have right now…

50

Okay, and where is the argument to back up that claim?

It does, it’s called the kill feed and the mini map. You can see where people are getting killed, and what by. If you pay a minimum of attention to it, you can see exactly what is going on with your team. I know, paying attention to the minimap is a pro skill, but the game most definitely has ways to effectively tell you what’s going on with your team.

And that’s why you communicate the fact to your team by way of that weird chat function that seems to be present in the game. And people can then choose to disengage and sort out the spawn camper situation before resuming point shenanigans. Not just that, but people who got spawn killed should probably remember how they died, and do something about it. Won’t claim it’s 100% effective but personally, if I’ve gotten spawn killed by an early-game spawn goblin, I’ve a 90% success rate in killing them on my respawning because I know where they are.

Why shouldn’t they? Counter argument please.

That’s comparing apples and oranges. You can’t compare a MOBA with what’s basically an FPS with vehicles. Different mechanics. You can’t make this comparison.

You can argue the inverse of that as well; that there is something wrong with the people who will merrily keep respawning and trundling off into the distance without actually doing anything about the spawn camper(s) in question. I’ve seen this happen on many, many occasions.

Smoke isn’t he answer.

Then it goes straight back to: why the [bleep] was that flank left open? Let’s be real here, you can have all the security locks on your doors but if you leave a side window open someone’s going to make use of the opportunity.

You can argue the e-honor point all you want but that doesn’t make the outcome any different.

What you gloss over in every response is that people made a mistake and didn’t learn from making a mistake so that they can stop making a mistake and then we wouldn’t be having this debate.

It’s simple: you leave a flank open? You’re going to get enemies posting up in spots where they know you will be. You’re going to get some coming close to spawn.

Because tell me, honestly, have you never done this? Noticed a flank is open and decided to park yourself in a spot where you can see people come out of spawn so you can shoot em? If you have, then your entire argument is void. If you haven’t, then you’re either telling porky pies, or you have a seriously misplaced sense of e-honor that you want everyone else to have as well.

51

Well I’ve been working as a level designer for the past 13 years,focusing on combat encounters and player movement. So I think I have a pretty good understanding in how to design a level where you can have multiple lines of combat.

If you would read the next segment about the LoL example, that a single mistake shouldn’t throw a match, there you have my counter argument. And yes it does work as an example the minute by minute gameplay here is irrelevant. It’s the act that a single mistake doesn’t throw the match and the team still has a chance to get back.

Things were done to try and counter the spawn campers. People were firing back. They manged to knock out a few of them. Smokes were shot at the spawn campers location to block thier line of sight.
The two enemies I engaged when I respawned three times still managed to lock us down due to the open terrain and height advantage.

Yes the flank was left open for some reason. I was on the other flank at the time so I have no idea why.
But that doesn’t mean that it should completly throw the game. The thing is, it’s not the fact that a flank happend and the team was punished for it. It’s that a flank happen and there was no way to counter it to correct that mistake.

Yes I’ve done it. Of course I’ve done it. And I’ve laughed and cursed bad level design multiple times being in both situations.
I’ve had games where we’ve steam rolled the opposition and I have had games like the one mentioned above.

And in many cases it’s not about one team being worse than the other. It is litterally just bad level design.

Because a match is often most fun when it is balanced. If two spawncampers lock down the spawn then they don’t just ruin the fun of the opponent that can’t get out of their spawn. They also ruin the fun of their team as there won’t be any enemies to engage.

It’s a matter of good design, not e-honor or whatever you call it.

1 Like
52

It still boils down to: why leave a flank open? You know what will happen when you do. If you end up on a team where the majority can’t comprehend that, well, so sorry, but you lose the match and get spawn camped.

I hate it just as much as you do, but when you do end up in that situation it means someone, somewhere, made a mistake or we just weren’t good enough as a team. Considering you’ve done it yourself (as have I), there’s no moral legs to stand on and it just boils down to “how dumb do you want gameplay to be”. Hasn’t got dick to do with level design either, by the way…

Yes, okay, maybe a little - the maps where you can drive 10 meters and have clear line of sight to the enemy spawns are bad. They’ve been bad for years and it’s unlikely to ever change. So yes, point made on that.

But if you sit 200m away covering exits from spawn, well, fair game. How far do you want to go before it’s no longer spawn camping? 300m? 500m? 1km? At that point you might as well simplify the game down to rock paper scissors.

I fondly remember the good old days of BF:V - where you could, in fact, as a sniper, spawn kill the everloving [bleep] out of people by positioning properly. Of course it’s a cheese thing to do. Of course it pisses off everyone and the kitchen sink. But it was a mechanic that was deemed valid.

Going back to addressing spawn camping, what do you suggest? Longer invulnerability? Doesn’t matter if people don’t use it to take care of business. Bigger warn radiuses? Doesn’t work because Gaijin is averse to having big maps. If you want to press people into ever smaller lanes, well… there you go.

In the current state of the game, people firing into spawn are clearly marked - and can be dealt with, by a half competent team. Even if they are outside of the detection radius where they can be seen on map.

tl:dr; if you have more than 2 people spawncamping you, then your team did it wrong. Whether by leaving a flank open wide, or by losing all caps. Such is the nature of this game, and there is no solution to spawn camping that doesn’t lead to either dumbing down the game even further, or making it yet another world of tanks boring AF game.

1 Like
53

It happens. Aral Sea is a map that you can literally drive up the middle of the map and then proceed to spawn camp either spawn. The problem is, no one covers the middle, they all lemming to A and C is a quagmire where a few venture. So the middle is left unattended. There are time in which I have capped and realized NO ONE from the other team spawned on that side of the map, so here I am near their spawn because no one is around and I’m not about to get ganked by the next person who spawns because I decided to drive away from it.

54

Also known as “mistakes were made”. The key to a good match on Aral Sea is to get in and cap C, then make a mad dash for B - if you’ve got 2 people with you, you can keep both of those locked up solid. Well, right until the CAS revenge kill happens, but anyway…

1 Like
55

Your not wrong there

1 Like
56

City maps are the worst for it like swden conquest #3. You goto the cap, die spawn, goto in direction of cap and get shot in the ass. Dont anyone say open your eys because there are way to many street corners/ clutter to hide behind you could spend allday looking

2 Likes
57

it enemy’s fault to let that happen

1 Like
58

I do like that Hurtgen Forest or whatever it is… It got some good changes. Even Poland and Europe too.

I do want to see Fire Arc again.

59

If less peope decided to stop making a lemming train and spread out more and watched the map for gaps it would happen less. Atm many are forming a conga line to point X, its the same cap on nearly every map it happens on, also these lemming trains would not die so often to proper squads if they was not so predictable

3 Likes
60

That’s mostly because people know where the easy action is going to be (i.e. plenty of cover, and no lack of targets because the enemy is in the same boat).

I kind of like it. I usually spawn on the “undesired” side, make a beeline down the map border to intercept enemies (usually 1 or 2) that had the same idea from their end, and if I win that, I go set up to cover that flank and have side shots for days into all the people rushing to that juicy cap everyone goes to.

That aside, it’s just human nature. You can easily see this if the spawning is spread for some reason and you will see people drive across the map to the other spawn because there’s more people there. Safety in numbers, or some such thing. Doesn’t work, most of the time…

Potatoes are gonna potate, is all I can really say.