u/facetious_guardian

TL;DR. This is a proposal to introduce a “buddy system” mechanism that leans into temporary alliances, with guidance from the existing “crew fill” structure.

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Occasionally, you may encounter other runners that are friendly. These runners are runner meetups are not so different from crew fill, but you’re not afforded closed comms and they’re still subject to friendly fire. But what if they weren’t?

The pitch is simple: two hostile runners come together and hold out their little data pads for some duration and then they are “buddies”. A new inventory section (not your backpack) holds all of your buddy tags. If you hold someone’s buddy tag, you can’t damage them, they can’t damage you, and you are on closed comms with them. For all intents and purposes, this is the crew fill experience, but initiated in-match. Maybe you even see their contract list.

If you drop a buddy tag, that buddy is alerted and a timer starts. If your buddy drops their tag of yours or the timer elapses, both buddy tags disintegrate and you’re hostile to each other again.

To really help drive this mechanism, even your infilled crew shares buddy tags. The only difference here is that there’s no timeout and disintegration of the tags will only happen if both parties drop the corresponding buddy tags. Wouldn’t want to enable timeout-based crew fill griefing, after all.

Anyways, the point here is that sometimes trying to shout down emergent player behaviour isn’t the right path forward and instead the systems should be designed to lean into it. I think this would be overall beneficial and help the “temporary alliance” nature of the game feel more “real”.

Being forced to final exfil is taking away the “scavenger” option. 100% of the time, a team that’s in final will just full kill you, even if they don’t have time to loot.

Absolutely ruined all enjoyment of Rook.

Edit: In an attempt to short-circuit two of the comment types that have come up quite a few times, I’ll address them here.

> Just solo queue. Why play Rook?

I play Rook because I want to play Rook. This post is meant to provide a data point on player experience. I’m not looking for workarounds, I’m describing the current state of Rook.

> Skill issue lol

Missing the point, also. I didn’t suggest that it wasn’t possible to have lucrative Rook runs by PvPing, I highlighted specifically that “scavenger” is no longer viable. If my bags are full of good shit and there are still 5 minutes on the clock, I still have to wait for final. And I’m probably not feeling like risking my findings to go seek out the trio to wipe them and make it more likely that I exfil.

Restricting Rook runs to a single mode where there’s only one exfil just pigeonholes the Rook gameplay, and that’s the point of this post. To highlight that it is miserable to not have choice.