So after a smidgen of testing it seems like ammo crates have four uses, and each use refills a user’s ammo to full, regardless of how much ammo they were missing. (I tested this in the Meat Grinder with a mod that let me spawn ammo crates, so if there’s some additional logic that comes into play when there are multiple people around, I didn’t see it.)
So this is a pretty awful system, for a few reasons.
Most obviously, it’s not only possible, but very easy to waste the majority of the ammo of an ammo crate. But, the real trouble starts when you actually TRY to be efficient. Once you realize that the ammo create has four uses that get depleted no matter how much ammo you have left, the obvious way to use an ammo crate efficiently is to only take from one when you’re completely out of ammo, and so if an ammo crate is dropped you should take any opportunity to spend ammo right away.
This means that trying to use an ammo crate efficiently turns it into the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which is appropriate if you think about it I guess. If all four players only take from the ammo crate when they’re completely out of ammo, then that works out fine, but if only SOME players are trying to be efficient, then players who AREN’T trying to be efficient can very easily just eat all the ammo without noticing that some players didn’t get any, especially with how little the average player already pays attention to how much ammo their teammates have.
My neuroticism about ammo efficiency notwithstanding, generally all this isn’t much of a real problem of course. After all the majority of players will just dump the ammo crate down when they need a refill regardless of what their team is doing, or will forget they’re carrying an ammo crate at all, or just never pick them up in the first place no matter how many times I ping it. But, it is still a thing that could be improved quite a lot without that big of a change in function.
A simple solution:
The amount of ammo crate used up should closely match how much ammo a player actually needed to take out of it to be restored to full. This would prevent a lot of waste, which would be especially useful in scenarios when the players have to stay in one spot and defend for an extended period of time (I really started to notice the inefficiency while playing Mortis Trials, where ammo can be a lot more scarce, and where one person mindlessly grabbing ammo twice from the same crate just to top off can really hobble someone else with an ammo hungry weapon). I think that would be a lot more satisfying as well, since it just makes intuitive sense that only getting a few rounds out of an ammo crate only uses up a tiny portion of it.
Instead of having four flat full refills, I propose ammo crates have a stack of “charges” and each charge represents a small percentage of any given player’s maximum ammunition, say, 1%.
If a player has half ammo when they take from the crate, they will use up 50 charges. If a player has no ammo left at all, they’ll use up 100 charges. If a player is only missing 1% of their ammo, they’ll only take 1 charge. Etc. This means that players don’t have to ever feel self conscious about how much of the team’s potential ammo they’re taking out of a crate, because there’s almost no waste. Just topping off is fine.
The question then becomes how many charges an ammo crate should have at maximum. If we’re going with how much a current ammo crate can potentially supply, four full refills, and each charge is 1%, the maximum ought to be 400. But, like I said, most people don’t use a crate only when they’re at 0. In practice, having 400 charges that can be used up with very little waste would mean a pretty big effective increase in how much ammo players actually get out of a crate. I would estimate at present an ammo crate will generally be used to replenish anywhere from 100 to 300 charges worth of ammo, so maybe 200 would be good maximum? Not sure, probably needs playtesting to nail down something that’s helpful but doesn’t provide too much. 200 would be my pick for a starting point at least.
