@kilatamoro said in Why do so many things have friendly fire disabled?:
Even with splash damage. It's like people with bad micro don't want it to be enabled. It would add more realism and start requiring occasional micro.
Example: I fly above friendly cruisers with splash with my ASFs with impunity while we both murder enemy torpedo bombers. Enabling FF would mean I have to intercept them earlier.
Reason 1: for some units, friendly fire creates problems even in a 1v1 setting. It's not fun if people have to do things like disable their cruisers from firing and then turn them back on again later. And if you forget to turn them back on, that's a problem. Or you might have to manually target your T2 PDs to make sure they don't do splash damage when a bunch of LABs try to run by.
Reason 2: the exact same thing, but it's even worse in multiplayer games, because you not only have to do that for your OWN units, you also have to do that for your allies, and you need your allies to do that for you. It would be very frustrating to have an ally's cruisers shoot down my own planes and then we're both mad at each other ("why didn't you turn off your cruisers and turn them back on again" "why did you fly there, why didn't you ping me first")
Reason 3: friendly fire creates a lot of opportunities for mischief, like intentionally killing allied units in a team game. That's why TMLs don't do friendly fire any more. People used to use TMLs to assassinate teammate ACUs.
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One way to address this, without turning friendly fire back on, would be to reduce the damage that splash does to enemy units when friendly units are around. Every time a flak fired, the game would ask "is there at least one friendly plane in the splash zone?" and if the answer is "no" it would do full damage and if the answer is "yes" it might do half damage.
That would take away the potentially-unfair advantage of fighting over flak
But I don't know how eager people are for that -- I think most people don't want a fix for this