Regicide

This is a thread for the discussion of the new H4 gametype Regicide.

My thoughts: I don't think that it contributes much to the Juggernaut gametype in terms of strategy. Like Juggernaut, with all other players chasing (and shooting) the king at the same time there is a large chance that kills will be "stolen". In other words, the amount of damage done to the king by a player does not make it proportionally likely that that player will finish the kill and get those points.

A player cannot use strategy to exploit a kill bounty- one can't simply wait for the king's bounty to go up because they can't know when the king will die. Players can still do what they did in Juggernaut, though: they can try to finish off the king with either headshot or power weapons, at a distance if possible, and from an advantageous position if possible, so that they wouldn't be gunned down in the fray around the king. The bounty will just increase the chance that a player who happens to kill the king (in the cases that their finishing blow did not match their overall slaying ability, which is what we normally think of as skill- the situational tactics involved, mentioned above, are quite similar to those in FFA slayer, especially if a player has a power weapon (12 round sniper) in slayer and is thus a "king"-like target) will get more points than a player who would more consistently outplay opponents.

Also, when the "best" (in the overall slayer sense) player kills the king, he/she is drastically reducing the skill difference that he/she would have over a worse player in the same position (as king), because they will have to face many other players at once. Imagine how much harder it is to get just one extra kill as a king, rather, how much more skill you would have to have than a player that would get one less kill than you in the same position (at the time you became the king) with the same weapons/ shielding. It's like the maximum skill difference between outDMRing/BRing 2 opponents at the same time and just killing one of them before the second one kills you (5 shot kill vs. 7.5 or 8 shot kill, IF the opponents need 15 combined shots to kill you- anything less and the king's kills would have to be between 0 and 1). EDIT: I forgot to mention that being swarmed by players is a disadvantage within the match itself- my previous point was comparing how different skilled players would perform in the same situation as king. Each player that the king does kill also gives another point to another player (eventually), whereas a worse king would not end up giving up as many points. It is still worth it to kill players as a king because your bounty only goes to one fraction of your opponents (just like it is better to get more kills as opposed to a high k/d in any FFA match), but the better king's advantage in skill is diminished as compared to the Juggernaut gametype. Of course, a good player can't gain anything by only going for non-king players, because that player would be missing out entirely on the bounty points which the other players would get (distributing points to each other faster that they would in Juggernaut).

I wonder if the game designers thought that this didn't matter much, or if they thought about it at all. I wonder if they were determined to create another gametype to give players a reason to buy it, regardless of how similar it was to existing gametypes. I can imagine that there can only be so many truly original gametypes before the rules become too convoluted to be fun or even tactical (because randomness), especially in an FFA gametype, where there are so many factors that a player can't have control over, because they can't match (or counter or prevent) the opponent's actions equally. Surely they know how rarely juggernaut, VIP or the new reach gametypes (headhunter, stockpile, and hotshot, each of which I thought added a slightly different type of gameplay) are offered in MM (which is an indicator of how rarely they were chosen).