Idea: Fake Message

What if each team could vote to send a fake team chat message to the other team? Each team would get one fake message per game. Would this even be useful?

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What would this accomplish?

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Like counter intelligence?

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Nothing other than a random message from the enemy team:

*<{Helper Bot: Windows is bad in the corner of your screen.

What does this even mean? Are you talking about the Windows® from Microsoft®?

robotyes2

Tremulous: Mad Libs Edition

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The idea as presented in the original post of this thread could present a strategic value to the team sending the “fake message” if sent at a key time and induces the enemy team to behave a certain way that is beneficial to the first team at that time. The “fake message” could provide misinformation about the state of the enemy/friendly bases/players perhaps conveying a the impression of a moment of strength/weakness which is opposite of the reality inducing a desired attack/retreat.

For example maybe your team is in need of rebuilding their weak base and you would want the enemy team to think it is not an ideal time to attack so perhaps the “fake message” might indicate that it is dangerous to attack the enemy at the time, or that the friendly team is under attack or in need of defensive attention. Another example might be an opposite scenario where your team might be in a position of strength and to help with a strategic attack you send the “fake message” “the enemy reactor/overmind is down! rush!”, which may may get the enemy to leave their base mostly unguarded. Other kinds of useful “fake messages” might be related to misinformation of enemy positions, or even of friendly positions at key times.

One well timed inaccurate statement could make a enough of a difference to make or break an entire match.

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There’s a few problems here. There are no game messages that are displayed automatically for a team to see (let alone for the enemy team to fake). The exception is when aliens or the humans (who built a DCC) see “our base is under attack!”. So, the problem of a lack of base/situational awareness remains- regardless of whether any info is real or not. Aside from that, its hard enough to coordinate the actions of your team to clinch a win after the enemy base is hurt, so meddling with that to make that processes worse would probably be infuriating. At its core, this is still an action game - with no room for “tricks”, IMO.

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This discussion somewhat reminds me of the paint7 map’s troll button room, where one of the buttons globally plays the overmind’s “voice” that says “The Overmind needs spawns!”, although it is relatively easily tipped off as “non-official” with the silly broadcasted center print text saying “The Overmind need spoons! Do you have some?”

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I don’t even think we need these messages in general. Yes it does sound like an interesting idea, however I still think that, yes it can be a bit of a distraction to see or “maybe” fool people but there will always be that 1 person who will be at the base or run into the enemies bases, etc despite whatever warning/fake message may there be and dismay it.

Perhaps there could be some alternate way to distract the enemy team? The way people already use is attacking their reactor or overmind, and that works fine.

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What could be some other potential ways? One example possibility that comes to my mind might be a decoy deployable that may show as a player in radar and give off foot step sounds. Another might be a radar/sense jammer. What if there was a “communication jammer” that would disable team chat in a given area? Smoke nades could be another approach. I think someone may have previously suggested a “holographic projection nade”, that might show a projection of a base in a part of a part of the map that base is not actually located. What are some other possibilities?

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Practically stuff like this. In-fact, probably those

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