First a little background for those not involved with last night's practice: We were experimenting with a new mod that allows you to feed teammates with the link gun. It is similar to UT2K4's link gun where you'd power-up your teammate's link gun by giving him the shaft with yours. Our mod also allows you to heal non-firing teammates just like you heal nodes. To give credit where credit is due, we got the idea from the mods running on the A.S.S. server.

Ok, so last night we noticed we were not getting as much boost from team linking as we would expect. It turns out that you would get more bang for you buck using a proximity link than you would from a direct link. Why?

With a proximity link, you have 2 people firing on the core, each with a link count of 2. So the core is effectively getting hit by 4 guns (ignoring damage scaling and link limiting). When two guys are standing next to each other and they both fire at the core, each guy has 2 guns in close proximity, his own and the other player's giving you a total of 4.

With last night's version of team linking, if one guy was hitting the core while another was feeding him, you only had one gun hitting the core with a total link count of 2.

The next version will attempt to fix this. The new algorithm gives you an extra link credit for each feeder plus 1 extra credit for the head of the chain. So now when one guy fires on the core while another feeds him the total link count will be 4... the same as standing side-by side.

Now let's look at 4 man combos. You can have a 4 man link chain which gives you one gun hitting with 8x damage after all 4 extra credits are applied. You can have a 4-man proximity group which gives you 4 guns hitting with 4x damage each: 16 total... damn! You could also have two feeder-hitter teams with the hitters in close proximity... I'll let you work it over in your mind but I figure that gives you two guns hitting with 7x damage each: 14 total. I can live with those scenarios. Proximity linking requires more coordination and is more risky... so you should get more reward.

I should also point out that, in the stock link gun, Epic caps the link damage multiplier for each gun at 2x. I removed that cap. So it is well worth your while to combine link guns whenever possible. In my tests, I can bring up a node in just a few seconds by feeding a bot that is healing the node. If you have a three or four man chain, no matter how you link, that node is going up or coming down almost instantly. I imagine there will be objections to that... and I'm open to slowing down weapon speeds or placing limits on link damage multipliers but I still really like the idea of rewarding every ounce of teamwork.