Interested to get the community's thoughts on this: after giving it some thought the past couple months of 64+ play I think we need to consider removing the ability for tanks to be repaired by passengers riding along the tank.
To be clear right off the bat: I don't want any changes made to how tanks are repaired. A soldier standing next to it with a wrench should be just as effective as they are now. I have no problem with this.
But, we need to keep in mind 128 play is only going to get more popular, and the following aspects of tanking must be remembered:
- Any player in a tank potentially has the ability to endlessly shit out nine engineers off the back of the tank, and no grease monkey will ever have to wait more than 20 seconds to get right back at it. It is simply overwhelming, especially since it happens nearly ever round of Ramelle, Sidi Bou Zid etc.
- Players can glitch by teleporting between passenger seats, making them nearly impossible to kill.
- Not all tanks have this ability (spare seats for mounted infantry), when most should.
- The tanks that do have this ability (Tiger, King Tiger, Jagdpanther, etc.) are the last tanks that need it, whereas other tanks that we can find countless pictures of with inf riding on them don't have this ability.
- Hitboxes are unreliable at the best of times, and it shouldn't take five shots to kill a guy sitting on a tank, but it usually does.
- It will always be impossible with the BF2 engine to simulate damaged tracks, disabled gearboxes etc. but you can go some small way to simulating that when a tank must stay stationary/crawl slowly to be repaired by infantry on foot. Somehow, it seems a bit unfair that a Tiger with a giant cloud of fire pouring from the engine deck can blast off down the road at full speed with 5 guys sitting on it repairing it as if they were polishing the paint.
So if you disagree it's all well and good, I'd like to hear your reasons. I think tanks generally should be harder to knock out than they are, but this isn't really the way I want to go about it. I want more teamwork, but having 9 grease monkeys in your uber Tiger squad doing nothing all round but keeping you alive is difficult to warm up to. Again, all I'm asking for is that people repairing tanks have to be standing next to it like anyone else, and if a guy can have 9 engineers spawning on him then, it's fine with me. They'll be the same as regular infantry, no bullshit with hitboxes and switching seats and teleporting across tanks and grenades not killing them and HE shells magically not hurting them and all the rest of it.
But as ever, happy to be proved wrong. Opinions?
