The new Scout Update has brought Crowd Control (or CC as it is known in MMO land) to my favorite online shooter.

This was rightly feared by players as perhaps being overpowered at worst and annoying at best.

Well after a quick lunchtime session I can confirm that right now I don’t think the stun effect is Overpowered at all. The difficulty of actually pulling it off versus the lost utility by carrying the Sandman has pretty much balanced it out.

It is however Annoying.

One of the cornerstones of multiplayer game design (well one of MY cornerstones anyway) is to never take away the all of a players abilities all at once.

If you’re going to stop a player attacking then you don’t stop them being able to move. If you want to stop them moving then let them attack.

Left 4 Dead does this very well when you get incapcitated (and I expect this to get ripped off by more games please). You can’t move but you can still shoot (albeit at a reduced rate with horrible accuracy). 

If I was making a war game with multiplayer then I would ensure that a “Dead” player can choose to either stay still and shoot with reduced accuracy OR they can try and crawl around to try and pull themselves into cover.

To remove all capability of interaction results in players essentially waiting to Die.

So how should Valve fix this mild annoyance from an otherwise fairly balanced ability?

1. Allow Stunned players to wander around very slowly in cartoon fashion. 
2. Do not force the camera into third person. 
3. Play some birds circling the Players vision and some Tweeting sound effects.

None of the changes above will change how the Stun affects gameplay. The Stunned player is still largely helpless and unable to defend themselves but they are still interacting with the game.

They are no longer waiting to Die.