Something that goes round the office and forums every now and again is the issue of enemy infantry inside a depot or barracks. There are a huge range of opinions about it from "a factor of all out war" to "cheating". I tend to side with those who say "if the game allows it" on this one, right up until it's my turn to get shot ;)

The topic has come up a few times in the office recently and I tried looking at it from a casual player perspective. It is something that happens from time to time to all of us. I've gone AFK and returned to find myself "camping" inside a (now) enemy spawnable.

We had several in-house and player suggested solutions on the table and I found most of them to be severe (make it a TOS violation), unfair (kill the intruder), detracting (remodel the buildings so you can only leave them - which means no normal roof access) or gamey (invisible one-way walls).

There is one very simple solution that we are currently trying out on our internal development server: if you enter an enemy barracks or depot, a bright red warning message and a buzzer sound notify you "Enemy Spawn! Your weapons will be disabled until you leave".

That doesn't mean if you see an enemy inside a depot you can't shoot him from outside. You can still enter the buildings to use them for cover from, say, an enemy tank outside. Paratroopers won't have a good reason to try and land on depots but those who land by accident will have an incentive to get off/out quickly. And the feedback is clear and simple with no guess work involved.

This is one of those features that takes but a few minutes to implement and can then be handed over to our producers/designers to experiment with and tweak as and when they have time, while the coders go back to bigger and more pressing issues.

I hope this one will prove simple and straight-forward enough that - after it has been play tested by producers, closed betas and finally in open beta - we'll see this make it into the game as early as 1.29.