Decapitation should be a rated victory condition

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In short, decapitation means you get to keep your stuff after your commander dies, but if all commanders on your team die, it's game over. Decapitation is currently an unrated mod.

I think it should be rated, or even better, just integrated into the game as an alternate victory condition - that would mean games using it don't show up as modded, and since the option to show modded games is off by default, the games would have higher visibility. As long , of course, as there are no glaring balance issues (discuss), and as long as that's not too much work for the Game development team.

Why should it be rated? It's a better option than fullshare for casual team games with wide rating distributions, and it's a better option overall than Annihilation or Supremacy, because the cleanup required with those is tedious and meaningless. Right now, in fullshare, people have to actively avoid killing an 800 if they've got a 1600 on their team ready to take over their economy. It might, although this remains to be seen, also encourage new players to be a bit more adventurous with their commanders, which is, in my opinion, a good thing, since making best use of their com is something they learn pretty slowly, with experimentation being very expensive (you die).

As far as I can tell, the benefits outweigh potential problems with this game mode, one of which might be com bombing by high rated players. I believe this is so rarely encountered that people haven't figured out how to mitigate it at the t1 stage, when t2 transports aren't available yet. It's also not something I think is that easy to abuse in order to farm rating. A decision to make it rated could also be reversed at any time, should com bombing or anything else prove to be a big enough problem.

All good for being rated, just shouldn't be part of the matchmakers. Also more of a suggestion than a balance discussion thing imo.

@ftxcommando As I understand it, from the discord chat, @Jip said he'd ok this, that just leaves the balance team to ok it as well

I'm fine with it as well

I wanted to do this post. We played a lot with the decapitation mod mode as a team, but it's complicated to play unranked with random player. No one want to join our game with the mod filter.

Decapitation has some flaws and doesn't play well on small maps, commander ctrl-k is too powerful but it's clearly an interesting option on medium or large maps.

@yojih what are your thoughts on decapitation vs fullshare, and how they work on different maps and with different player ratings? My experience with it is limited

To get around the fact that very few people join a modded game, I've been using Supremacy victory condition instead, and we just surrender when it's clearly over. But Supremacy is also unrated, sadly. Still, you might want to try that instead, until decapitation is in

this should be an official lobby option.

i also think the original share condition, where anything you had given allies remained after your death, but anything in your possession explodes. "Share after death" vs current "share until death".

share after death and decapitation should both become rated FAF lobby options.

That condition would just be used to farm unfamiliar players that aren’t aware it’s strictly dominant to donate everything immediately at death. One player in a lobby unfamiliar with it and their team automatically loses if he dies.

I'd like to see it ranked as well. I could see myself making my games Decap instead of FS from time to time.

Maybe we could change the "show modded games" option to "hide unranked mods" so ranked mods can get more visibility

The server doesn't currently tell you whether mods are ranked or not so this has the same problem of requiring API queries from everyone for every mod in the list as just the general requests for is this game rated or not.

So we would need a server change first to send the info if the mods used are ranked?

Yes, or even the full blown server implementation of is this game ranked check.

But would also need to be smart about how often the db is called and caching.

When you lose your com do you lose e and m storage as well?

if you mean acu's storages, it is tied to the unit itself so yes

Yes, yeah sound like a fun game mode

So... is this going to be implemented? I think it would be a really good game mode! especially in games that have a large variance in ratings between teammates.

is this still being implemented?

@Caliber you can track the progress on this feature here: https://github.com/FAForever/fa/issues/5347