lobpot - jack drops

I'm done. Until jacks are deleted from the game or cannot be transported, I will not play.

I played this game for the lobpot - that's it. I liked landed swifts and because they were considered "op" or lame or whatever that ability was removed so I quit for months, but lobpot is fun so I returned.

However, MASSIVE numbers of players have complained about jack drops for A LONG TIME - YEARS - far far more than complained about landed swifts yet jack drops are not removed. It takes way more micro to deal with jack drops than landed swifts - in fact all you have to do to deal with landed swifts is drop a few razors or threshers and job done. Not so with jack drops - they are a problem for the entire game.

I'm done; have fun with your dying game (most hours there is nobody in lobpot anyway)

XD

Jack drops are annoying but there are ways to deal with them.

If your team has a good air player that isn't sleeping they can get shot down before getting to the target. High dps stuff like Scorcher can swarm jacks and kill them. Also, a heavy combat commander with dual heat ray can deal with smaller jack drops. Gnats and the like can freeze jacks up and turn something dangerous into a metal donation.

The problem is that teams generally dont play like teams but rather as a series of duels.

If a known jack dropper is on the other side the team needs to take that into account and work together to defeat the strat.

Based on what I read in previous threads about jack drops, I don't think jacks themselves are OP.
The problem is the charons. At only 100 metal (+ gsfac, but that is usable in lobpot) they give jacks 172.5 movement speed (3x normal).

It does take a bit micro, but probably less than pyro does..

Perhaps slightly increase the metal cost of charon? Or slow it down even further when carrying Medium units?

yes, thank you Hoppili . you are my hero!

A decent air player with swifts deals with jack drops indefinitely.

As for jack drops killing comms, if you morph up your comm so that it has 2 weapons (with the disruptor ammo upgrade it's even better) the jacks will have a hard time destroying it. A handful of riots accompanying it could also do the trick.

B1366240 15 on Alphabet Siege Dry v1.20 is more of a free win for our team. It's hard for anyone to stay calm and focused on the gameplay with disruptions like tking and votekicking. The psychological effect is huge and sometimes enough for deciding the outcome.

While they are unreasonably annoying, especially so if in hands of a good player and even more on bigger maps where a jack can cross from corner to corner of a 20x20 map in seconds, the main 'power' of jack drops or Pyro drops is precisely in the lobpots you like.

With 10v10 or more players you run into an issue of not having enough production to properly push the frontline if you're facing enemies of equal skill, either a single player that's dueling you or a disorganized ball of 3-4 players.
If you push in too hard you'll probably get swarmed from the flanks, your attack wasted and all that metal you invested now neatly deposited inside enemy lines for them to reclaim.
So considering average lobpot of 2-3 good players and 90% of the rest of us your choices are to either support other players, filling in gaps where you can, harrassing enemies and exploiting their mistakes or doing some meta works-only-in-lobpot strategies.

And right there comes in jack-drops, a more complex to do and direct version of creeping in a bunch of Scythes into the enemy base and dealing mayhem.
There's a lot of players, everyone's doing their own thing, the best players in both teams are probably doing tug-of-war on the front and relying on rest of the team to handle the rear and WHOOP, something flew over - eh the rear line players will handle it - oh nope there goes the geothermal - oh nope there goes 2 commanders - oh nope I can't help all my units are at the front - oh nope there goes another geothermal.
You're winning actually, more metal flying over you than your team is loosing. Oh but the constant rear-line nonsense now has the rear-line players running around like headless chickens, now there's no Eco being made, rearlines are becoming porc towns, someone made 15 storages because their AFK fac assist commander died.

It's not an effective tactic, it takes a lot of set-up to do compared to the scythe infiltration for example, or an even more similar tactic of sneaking in a Djin(or building one with Athena) to start mass teleporting an entire army behind enemy lines to delete enemy teams's eco.
Takes a lot of preparation that you enemies can exploit and if it fails all you did was give your enemy a donation.
Does cause chaos, just look how player cursors move like mad once a group scythe attacks is heard.



Granted I'd vote for a mechanic change that if a unit jumps while air-borne that it should could as an AA target until it lands. Like getting thrown by a lobster then using the units jump-jet.

Paladin rush, nuke rush, Dante rush, NERF THEM ALL

strikeshadow post replays. I don't remember whether I've even seen a replay where someone uses Jacks to be a lot more effective than everything else they could be doing. I haven't seen one recently, not since the speed of a Charon carrying a Jack was nerfed (around about the time of the initial complaints). It is hard to know what to do about complaints that a strategy is too effective when I don't see examples of the strategy being effective.

If complaints were the only requirement for nerfs then ZK wouldn't have so much interesting stuff, which I think would be a shame. It's unclear how many people complain about Jacks, but I get the impression that it is outweighed by people saying they're fine. There is some threshold where complaints are enough, but I don't think we're there. Also, replays would still be vital since I'd still have to figure out what was actually going on and formulate a change. Complaints are only really good for indicating that something is wrong, they're not good for figuring out exactly what is wrong.

B1366240 15 on Alphabet Siege Dry v1.20 has some ok examples at the start, but it is trolled pretty hard by two players on the losing team so I wouldn't put much stock in it. The first drop worked and the second one didn't, then trolling took over. Notably the first drop used an Owl so actually cost 1040. Tracking the success rate of early drops like these would be useful. The drops later in the game could have been achieved with cloakers, and were so expensive that they could have been a strider instead of a drop. When someone drops five Jacks you've got to consider that you could instead have faced a Dante or Merlin.