The Summonable Discussion!

@TheSprinter85One thing I've noticed that has to be improved from bfn is the hit detection beacuse holy crap it's just garbage in bfn with the pots damage not even being counted.

I get what they tried to do with cooldowns but it doesnt work in ops with the pacing and just how darn many sreendoors and outhouses it throws at you. Turf also suffers in bfn because every zombie spawnable is armored to an extent and they all spam ranged attack like there's no tomorrow. I think the natural pot and dirt spawns cooldown after there elimated would work fine if we cna just buy spawnables with coins so we don't have to deal with outhouse spam.

Improving the accuracy of all pots and bots would buff them immensely as bfn had awful aim for every pot/bot and they constantly miss shots on targets standing still.

Gw1 had seasonables.

One thing I want back from gw1 is the damage numbers that were shown by pots to their planters. Advanced tutorials to explain their functions like armor piercing to newbies and the differences between pots and bots would help a lot.

Gw1&2 had pots on points and infront of them to try and slow down zombie advances in turf while having a few placed around cor ers like the dreaded corner choy on driftwood shores who claimed many zombie lives. Gw1 even had some on elevated positions that were still reachable by normal zombies but overall gave the pots a nice sniping position. They could also swing around to shoot into the garden, something bfn ops really struggles with.

In bfn the positions are all freaking over the place to where they: can't be supported, can't be seen from the point, and are hardly worth trying to defend.

Keeping spawnables if they survive ops is a suggestion I've mentioned before and I'm all for it.

Imo alot of this is gonna have to come down go how the next game works mechanically since bfn introduced shield, sprint, tv heads, and Overheal which works greatly against the pots.

TheSprinter85, as usual an impressive, comprehensive, and interesting piece on a future GW - game (as it is likewise with stukapooka and Iron_Guard8  with their commentary). Unfortunately, this is an area where I differ from the general idea behind your suggestion -  I don't remember whether this is applicable to BfN - but if it is, I have always found it grossly unfair that spawnables are able to take over a garden/graveyard (and in BfN's case, objectives) on equal footing with a player. In other words, the ability - or rather presence -  of the player is theoretically immaterial to the actual takeover.

For example. When I have been playing on a team with 3 or 4 team members less than the opposing team, our team has unleashed a swarm of the most effective spawnables and with their support managed to progress through the series of gardens/graveyards/objectives despite being fewer feet on the ground, so to speak. 

What makes matters so difficult with the spawnables, is that when you're defending you spend just as much time fighting off players as you do the spawnables, which effectively means that you're not up against 12 of the opposition, but theoretically double the amount. Visualise fighting off 5 outhouses with a mixture of 6 or more trap-door and newspaper zombies while at the same time trying to hold off a good team of zombie players which I tried recently  (and failed) and you get my drift.

I realise, that doing away with them will take the shine off the game, particularly for kids, but I would prefer - if they are to kept - that the opposite is done to what you suggest, namely by ensuring that

1) the spawnables, if as in GW2, are nerfed in strength ....and 

2) that their takeover ability is nerfed too

The reason for all this is that I honestly believe that a game should first and foremost reflect the ability of the player and not be dependent on his or her choice of spawnables.

I'm mostly happy with the spawnables in GW and GW2, barring some balance fixing and just having even more stuff to spawn, even if just flavor variants like pirate versions of regular zombies for example. Make the melee pots/bots more useful, adjust things so the stronger ones aren't spammed so much, and so on.

@PerniciousPea I'm in the middle on this one as I love the presence of spawnables. The only time I've found them oppressive is when they: A) are used when one team is down too many players as you point out (which is in itself a separate issue that needs to be addressed as well; teams need to be better balanced so that doesn't occur), and B) when the attacking team spams only the best ones. Part of why I don't mind BfN's spawnable system is that the timer limits the stronger summonable spam, although it has too limited a selection to choose from. This is where my cost in coins; buy the consumables you want, idea comes from, giving the weaker ones a lower cost in comparison to the more powerful ones. In GW and GW2, you will see a horde of porta-potty zombies or porcelain vase weeds coming at you, and not so many of the weaker ones, making the weaker ones cheaper, or some other system to balance them out would go a long way towards redressing this issue. Defenders spawning their own pots/bots to defend against them can help, but they have to be effective and well placed and not too good that they ruin the balance the other way. The Defender only has to win one point to win, the attacker has to win them all, that may part of why they've not bothered me much barring when the best ones are spammed.

@Iron_Guard8To combat armored spawnables requires one thing: armor piercing. In gw1 bonk choy, fume shroom, and chompers all had the abilities to destroy armored zombies which made them less annyoing. Gw2 nerfed bonk choy and fume and remove the chomper armor piercing. Bfn suffers even worse considering that bfn positionz are stretched out so much with like 3 pots while attackers have multiple dirt piles and every different player can summon outhouse at least once and hit detection for pots is downright horrendous.

Buffing fume shroom and bonk choy back to glory would help this problem alongside maybe nerfing outhouse.

The coin system is an idea that I hope we get in a gw3.

Having the strategy with pots and spawnables helps gw from feeling like other shooters with capture points and helps create strategies imo.

I really like some of the ideas that TheSprinter85 & Stukapooka have suggested regarding summonables. For a future PvZ shooter, PopCap definitely needs to add more variety of summonables and  buff them accordingly so that they maintain some presence on Turf Takeover & Ops maps. They felt like an afterthought in BfN.

For future iterations of Turf Takeover, what would you all think if both attacking and defending teams were allowed to place summonables? For the defending teams, everything would stay the same for the most part. For the attacking team, they would have their own spots where they can place summonables and would have the ability to take over the defending team's summonable spots and utilize those same spots.

Iron_Guard8 On afterthought, the spawnables, although often a pain, are actually good fun and I agree it would be a loss to the game doing away with them. Your suggestion of paying for them using a graduated scale is a good idea and would by reducing the number of the more powerful spawnables ensure that a takeover depends more on the players' skill rather than their choice and inclination to spam the more powerful spawnables. So I'm all for that.            

That said, my second problem with them remains, as I would still like to see their ability to take over a garden/graveyard/objective nerfed or preferably done away with completely. As it is now, they are on equal footing with the attackers in the game, and that surely must go against both the intent and purpose of gaming. 

Thanks for all your responses, I wanted to create a post like this for a while now. The summonable discussions have been fun to participate in and I wanted to also give my general thoughts into the summonables.

@stukapooka My idea of keeping summonables would apply to all modes including Ops and this mechanic would reward for players for protecting and placing their summonables well. This would be especially cool if players could recover Legendary and Seasonal Summonables this way. I actually realise that my cost ideas for summonables in the summonable discussion posts are quite expensive. For instance, I suggest 5,000 Coins per Doom Shroom, however if you only make 5,000 Coins in a game, then it may be costly to earn summonables and may not even be worth using, however being able to recover your unvanquished summonables automatically may make purchasing these summonables, even for these sort of costs, way more worthwhile. I did not know the seasonal summonables were available in GW. I did not realise that some of the BfN summonables sometimes suffer from the hit detection, that should be sorted out, and I agree that they should have an aim or accuracy buff.

@PerniciousPea Alright, I understand your points. In Garden Warfare 2, Summonables were quite powerful and in large numbers can easily capture a point. In Battle for Neighborville, however, the capturing system is different where even a single defender can stall the point and pause the capturing, so even if many summonables are together and jump on the point, it is completely possible to prevent them from capturing. Additionally, summonables have generally been nerfed across the board due to some direct nerfs, as well as mechanics such as overhealth which makes them less powerful. I would want to see summonables in a future shooter, although the basic aim is that it would be harder to spam strong summonables due to them costing much more currency and due to internal cooldown of the summoning piles, or the pot or bot locations. Maybe if a Pot or Bot is physically on the objective and is alive, it automatically contests the point as well to counter out the fact that the attacking summonables can count toward capturing, that or the attacking summonables are unable to capture on their own?

@Iron_Guard8 I have not really thought much about the "vanity summonables", such as the pirate themed zombies that are identical to the regular variants but are quite cool. I only normally see them in Ops, but it would be cool to have the option to summon them instead of the regular variants. They could be purchased in lieu of the regular counterparts if players want them for the same price, or they could perhaps be a free bonus if they are purchased along with a bundle of the regular summonable counterparts. Similar thing with some "vanity" plant summonables. Hopefully your idea to make stronger summonables cost more than weaker ones, to prevent overusing only the strong ones would help to prevent having teams need to deal with an influx of strong summonables in a future game.

@Positronic-Rift It was a direct downgrade seeing Battle for Neighborville host a much less variety of summonables. In a future shooter, I would want to see the regular summonables make a return, as well as possibly adding a small variety more. Not sure if the summonable Wildflower and TV Head should return, but would like to see them, maybe just not the playable variants though. With your other idea, do you basically mean the attacking team can also place Pots and Bots as well, and the defending team can summon the regular mobile summonables? I like the idea of the defending team being able to place the mobile summonables, but I am not sure how the attacking team would be able to utilise Bots and Pots as well. Perhaps the Pot and Bot locations can be available for the attacking team as well, if they manage to place something before the defending team does or something like that.

These are just my thoughts and opinions on the summonables and how they should be handled in a future shooter. 🙂

I may make posts like this in the future, I enjoy participating in these discussions.

@TheSprinter85Oh the hit detection in bfn is worse than you think for pots.

Fume shroom can literally not even touch outhouse and doom shroom can sometimes have a explosion miss a slow moving screen door. Browncoats dodging and tanking pea cannon blasts before murdering them easily.

The accuracy is also really bad as scaredy shroom misses a lot of shots and pea gatling misses me standing still at close range.

I've tested a lot of these guys in solo play and it's worse than you think in bfn and I'm honestly shocked popcap was never called out for it.

It wasn't simply a downgrade from gw2 to bfn in pots but more like a straight up freefall from orbit.

TheSprinter85 Thanks for the summary behind the mechanics of the summonables in BfN, as having left the game over a year ago my mind is pretty rusty on the intricacies of BfN, and with that distance to the game I shouldn’t really be taking part in these discussions.  

However, I felt that a possible future GW3 would have to incorporate the learnings gleaned from the previous versions of the Plants vs. Zombie games in order to avoid a repeat of the failings of BfN and to a far lesser extent that of the 2 GW games.

That said. Your suggestion of having summonables/pots/bots in the actual objective to counter the attacking summonables is definitely a third possibility, as long as there remains a proper measure of player ability. 

@PerniciousPea  even if you are a bit rusty on some aspects of BfN, I welcome your participation in the discussion! I'd like to see more folks posting and joining in the conversations, and glad to see it.

I got max rank in BfN earlier this year and haven't played much since, I did get some more GW TT and Ops in this year as well, but as always, I've focused on GW2. GW is good but too many roof top campers and teams full of toxic peas and super commandos can ruin matches, and in BfN, it still feels like chunks of the game were never fully developed, and with nothing to spend coins or prize bulbs on, and TT being less fun than in GW2 thanks to narrow map design and other things and no mixed mode to play, along with Ops being so lackluster, I'd rather just play GW2. 

The next game has got to do better than any of the current ones, including GW2, and spawnables will be a part of that. I'd like them to be useful, fun, humorous (hearing the pirate barrel zombie in his muffled voice state;' arg, brainz' always makes me smile), and as balanced as possible, would be great. Part of why TT is my favorite mode is the combination of using the spawnables, teamwork to get the points taken/defended, and the fun mini games at the end, so spawnables are a very big deal for me.