You could always represent invincible players as such (maybe by having them glow, or another such special effect). However, for some reasons I just don't like temporary invincibility. In some cases it just seriously breaks the ambience and immersion of the game.

Permadeath is a solution, yes, but it's quite a radical one. Some games are designed to see 100-200 deaths happening per round, and this just isn't going to happen with permadeath.

Roaming spawn points is a good solution, especially in deathmatch games. Still, I love spawning in the middle of a deathmatch brawl, with a rocket launcher a few feet from me, and blasting half a dozen heads off before being taken out. Having to "find" the action when you respawn usually slows the game down.

An idea similar to temporary invisibility upon spawning would be having a flash occur whenever a player spawns. Any player looking at the flash when it happens would become blind for a few seconds. So whenever a spawncamper notices a flash is about to happen, he has the choice of looking away (and having to aim for the spawning player afterwards) or become blind and useless (and miss the spawning player). This would also be a good way to keep players out of the enemy respawn room.

As for detecting spawn camping, when a player dies before 5 seconds or shooting his gun (whichever happens first) it's usually because of this.

Permadeath is never a solution [unless of course your problem is that too many play your game.

Doc also makes note of another solution: Voting. If players are allowed to boot someone doing the camping they can at least deal with the worst offenders. Nobody likes spawn campers.

Permadeath has been implemented in some games already (such as the half-life mod, Counter-Strike) and works out well in some cases. The point is simply that players do not respawn: they simply spawn at the beginning of the next game. The real problem with permadeath is that without respawning games are shorter (the average deathmatch game can be anywhere between 2 and 10 counter-strike rounds, even more so for team games with respawn).

Voting can be abused. First, it is not certain that killing a spawning player is spawn camping. Maybe a lost player wandered through there. Maybe the way out of the base was through there, and the flag carrier had to kill that respawning sniper dude. Or maybe the very target location for the enemy is a gunshot away from the spawning location.

Second, usually only one team will be complaining about a given spawn camper. If the entire enemy team votes against the best player on the other team for "spawn camping", even if that player didn't do anything close to it, this is abuse.

How about awarding negative points to anyone who kills a player that has just been spawned? A freshly spawned player might be worth -5, and that increases by 1 point per second until it reaches the usual value.

I'm a fan of temporary invincibility. I'm not sure how a person spawning in out of nowhere isn't a break of immersion as it is, but lets pretend you don't want this immunity, theres always temporary invisibility, where you could give the player a second to get off that spawn panel and then they gradually fade back into existance.

Edit: Whoops, I should have read the whole thread before replying, OrangeyTang already suggested this.

when it comes down to it, if the designer has done his/her job, then you cant spawn kill, i personally always design my levels so that the other team cannot reach each spawn point (unless its a perma death game / such as tac-ops where it works in game-rounds)

To add to number 1, temporary invincibility, you could make it so that the person who has just spawned cannot shoot until the invincibility has worn off. That reduces what the AP was talking about:

Quote:The problem with spawn invincibility is that, depending on the map or gametype, this can work poorly. Hidden & Dangerous 2 had the option of spawn invincibility, but this led to many cases of an Axis player (for example) running into a freshly-spawned Allied player over the natural course of a game (the Allied player had unwittingly wandered into view), putting a couple of bursts into his head, only for the Allied player to turn around a waste the Axis player.