what. No. that's ludicrous. The spawn timer doesn't need to be touched that makes no sense.
what does this even mean?
Again, players who find the gear they need shouldn't be punished by a lack of helis.
So this is going to be pretty disjointed in format but here's my full opinion on the Heli situation
First of all the rules the Server has regarding the heli
1. Its free for all
2. If more than one person/group take down the same heli they split the loot
3. See rules 1 and 2
Here is the biggest thing I've seen lately on pure
"Somebody stole aggro from me"
-The heli will fuck off from a tower if its not being shot at, and another tower is shooting at it. Threat level is a pretty simple concept. The heli is going to attack whomever is posing the most threat to it. If two players shoot the heli then one of those players tucks away into their base to wait for the perfect opening, the heli is gonna bug off and head to the people who are shooting it. Its not stealing, its a game mechanic.
Its a pretty simple concept. There are plenty of players who know that I have zero issues with abiding my either of those rules and we also expect all other players/groups on the servers to adhere to the same rules.
The Heli is a tough thing to balance, ESPECIALLY on a PVE server where the heli itself is the ONLY risk. Go to a PvP server and try fighting the heli and watch how many people come crawling out of the hills shooting at it, and you while/after you kill it. We run into alot of these issues because of the PvE nature of our server.
I'll use myself as an example here. Less than 24hrs into wipe, I was able to take it down solo with AKs, wood armor and a handful of syringes and a 4x4x3 shit-tower. It was an extremely difficult fight on its own. With buffs to the heli's damage that fight would have been impossible. Start by just buffing the heli's overall health. If you make the fight longer then you need more ammo and meds for that fight making some players second guess if they are in a "financial" position to even fight the heli. Adding to that, more health means a longer fight which means you will need a tower that can withstand that longer fight. My third or fourth fight didn't go so great this wipe and my tower was about 75% destroyed and i died.
Buffing the heli's HP pool makes the fight last longer, so even with M249s you are gonna take at least double the amount of rocket barrages which is going to double the chances of you dying in the fight and again adding to the already low risk factor of fighting the heli on a PvE server.
All in all this forces players to either team up to fight the heli so that you can do more damage than it can do to you, or forces solos to prepare for a much longer fight and inherently a much more difficult fight. I can speak from experience that once you take more than 2 rocket runs as a solo and 50% of your tower is engulfed in flames with 3 walls missing that the fight becomes exponentially more difficult
The most important takeaway here is that you can't nerf/buff the heli based solely on kill times of geared vs under geared players. If you try to fight the heli with wood armor and a SAR out of your house and you die...well that should be expected, but if you put in the time to build a proper tower, and gear yourself then you should not be punished for other players lack of gear.
Let's talk about tower placement now for a second. We have EIGHT heli towers within 2 grid squares of each other (Mine, yours, Macas, SyberTanks, Staticisdead, RoastedMeat, Cant See, and The Dying) That is a big part of the issue on pure right now. You aren't the only one that has had somebody else aggro the heli this wipe...its part of the fun of it, whether or not you'll get the heli or not but again, that chance of getting a clean solo heli kill can be increased by build your tower away from the 7 other towers.
The heli patrols the map and goes from monument to monument, so no spot is inherently better than another its literally random. Whether you are by airfield, launch site, water treatment, it doesn't matter the heli has a chance to patrol it. There have been plenty of times this wipe that the heli didn't come anywhere near my tower and just left at the end of its timer. Maybe one time it comes in from the north and heads to airfield first, then the next heli a few hours later comes in from the west and heads to water treatment first. Its random, and when EVERYBODY on the server builds towers right next to each other (like what happened this wipe) its going to cause petty conflict. Last wipe, after the first week we had a few people taking down helis, myself included and our bases were in totally different parts of the map. So if Cant See tagged the heli, it was far enough away from me that I couldn't even see it, and the heli couldn't see me and vise versa then there was no argument and no issues with the heli running away unless either one of us died. If one of us did die in the fight and the other was able to get aggro, we would split the loot down the middle because that's the rules and we are all adults here and we never had an issue.
Biggest takeaway if you want to kill more helis without being interfered with is to build your tower away from the other 7.