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Ramalina

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Everything posted by Ramalina

  1. My suspicion is that it's an artifact of the start of the GSF development process basically consisting of opening the Warzone code and going Ctrl-C, opening a new file, and hitting Ctrl-V. I'm pretty sure that at some point there was supposed to have been a housecleaning of legacy PvP code effects on GSF, but it's easy to miss stuff. Haven't tested recently, but in the past certain DoT damage effects on a character would transfer to your ship if you accepted the match before the DoT was cleansed or expired. I once died very quickly in a match because I was doing the Pub side Heroic on Balmorra where you collect droid intel in the toxic sludge, and the DoT from the sludge kept ticking on my ship when I spawned in. It's not much on a character, but on a ship hull it's pretty rapidly fatal due to the small health pools. Honestly, our characters should probably all get wireless controllers, don spacesuits, and get out in front of the ships to intercept incoming damage. After all, if you and your spacesuit can soak up a few hundred thousand points of damage, why aren't you protecting the ship with it's paltry 2.5 to 4 k combined health pool instead of hiding behind the ship's shields? Spec as a tank, grab ten medpacs, slap Guard on your ship, and get out in front of it with a jetpack, and there you have it: an invincible* GSF ship safely hiding behind its pilot. *Offer not valid if your ship gets within 0 to 35 meters of another pilot and is one-shot by their class basic attack.
  2. What engine ability and what upgrade level? Upgraded Power Dive for example should be free, and unless there's a lockout affecting you from Slicing or EMP should always work regardless of engine pool. Barrel Roll with no upgrades on the other hand is pretty power hungry, and it's easy even for an experienced player to get a bit low on engine pool try to Barrel Roll and then be unpleasantly surprised when it doesn't work. Though personally my favorite Barrel Roll error is forgetting that the Pike despite being shaped much like a Starguard does not have Retro Boosters and being very surprised when hitting the missile break catapults me forward into terrrain instead of catapulting me backward into terrain. Oh, BTW @Hefaiston, popping in here to ask questions and find out what's going on in a GSF match instead of automatically assuming it's hacks already puts you way ahead of a lot of GSF players. Keep learning and pretty quickly you should be a terror in the skies of SWTOR.
  3. You forgot: 4) Lockdown crew skill. Drains 40 engine power, range 5 km, base CD 45 sec but possibly affected by Alacrity equipment on character. Hangar UI implies it is, but hangar UI is not always entirely trustworthy. Alacrity probably shouldn't affect GSF, but it's always possible that it slipped through (obviously it did in the UI, but not sure about actual matches). Note, given the scale of max alacrity gains, not sure an absurd alacrity gear set for about a 5 sec cooldown on Lockdown would be really worth it in any case.
  4. There are multiple reasons people self destruct. There are multiple reasons that people chain self destruct many times in a single match. However, for the specific reason that you like to go on about at great length: people thinking that self destructing is a more time efficient way of getting non-GSF rewards from GSF than learning to play and winning, decreasing the peak respawn rate so that SDing is very obviously no longer time efficient literally removes the entire foundational premise of SDing to accelerate matches. I question the premise that switching to a medals based reward system would improve much. Not that I object to medals based rewards mind you, but these are already people not willing to put any effort into achieving victories in GSF. If you gate rewards behind effort in GSF more effectively, the likely outcome is that they decide that the Return On Investment is no longer worth the time spent, and they just shift to whatever the next best rewards/time activity is. Not sure anyone will be sad to see them go, but in terms of solutions for self destructors, vote kicks, respawn timers, and medal based rewards all ultimately use the same method of "solving" SDs. Driving those players just in it for low effort loot out of participating in GSF. If you wanted to change their minds about putting effort into GSF, you'd probably need: A high quality single player PvE series of tutorial missions for GSF. Otherwise the learning curve is just too brutal for most players. Hybrid maps that allow a mix of PvP and PvE goals so they can earn rewards beating up low challenge scripted objectives. Exhaust ports don't break your torpedo lock or shoot back after all. Vastly improved matchmaking that takes into account indicators of skill like: Average kills, Average damage, Average accuracy, K:D ratio, a grouping factor, and that actually double checks for horribly skewed teams before starting a match and rebalances the teams if they are. All of which would take considerable skill and effort, and are therefore unlikely to ever happen. If self destructs are taken on by the devs it's not so much a matter of whether they try to drive SDers out of GSF but how. The good solutions realistically aren't on the table, so it's a matter of picking which bad solution you want. Timer is relatively easy coding as far as the options go, and if the values are set correctly on the respawn delay a timer should be highly effective. So it's probably a "best" bad solution, or possibly second best after the, "do nothing," solution, from the dev perspective.
  5. I figure that clusters of 3 to 4 deaths shouldn't be punished harshly, and that a good faith noob might easily die 6 to 8 times during a match. I didn't do any tuning on the math figuring a max of a 15 min match, but in that sort of tuning I'd probably look to not make getting nine plus deaths impossible, but to make it so that by death five or six you're spending some time twiddling your thumbs waiting for the respawn counter, if all five or six deaths are closely stacked on the timeline. One free death and then one additional un-penalized death every three minutes already puts you at up to 5 deaths with no consequences at all if you spread them evenly through the match. Depending on your rate of stacking the penalty, that means that 7, 8, or even 9 deaths may be fairly tolerable. Of course, you could also do non-linear penalty stacking along the lines of .25 min, .5 min, 1 min, 2 min, 4 min. You could also make the test condition be recent_deaths - 2, or recent deaths - 3, which gives the player more leeway on clusters of deaths before penalties start being implemented. So your counter is accumulating deaths, but it doesn't do anything about deaths until you've reached a threshold of deaths so quickly that the decrement hasn't had time to lower the counter. I mean, I feel like 6 or 7 deaths is something that an ace can carry to a win, provided it's just one or two people, it's the stacks of multiple double digit deaths from people who are faceplanting into the cap ship on spawn that really grate. So an equation that catches max rate deaths, but isn't that fussy about high average deaths seems like the best approach. Interaction with the non-participation timer is a valid concern, but really, spawn waits probably shouldn't count against that in any case, and as long as you're tweaking timers you might as well verify that spawn time isn't getting counted as non-participation while you're at it.
  6. A more aggressive kick isn't the only way to do it. A stacking respawn time increase would do it. You die, and it increments a died_recently flag by +1 from a default value of 0. Every three minutes died_recently is decremented by -1 until it reaches 0 again. For each respawn you look at died recently, and evaluate died_recently - 1, then multiply that by a time delay say one minute, that then gets added to your respawn timer. So two freebee deaths, and then a ramping respawn delay that abates if you stay alive for a few minutes. Set the delay value as you please to rate limit self destructs without being too harsh on new players dying through sheer inexperience. Given how hard it is get people to focus on vote kicking a bad actor during a match, an automated rate limit may be a more viable approach. I think that's what ultimately drove the decision to have auto-kick for non-participation be implemented.
  7. Those medals already exist and are properly awarded. The scoreboard doesn't show medals, and the legacy achievements don't do a great job of explaining medals, but the medals system works fine and registers almost all easily measurable aspects of good GSF play. I'll also point out that there is no factor that influences match outcomes more than skilled play. Throwing games just guarantees that you will likely have to play 1.5 to 2 times as many games to finish the daily and weekly, and SDs don't accelerate game outcomes enough to overcome that penalty in most cases, even in TDMs. From an optimization standpoint you're better off just finding a quiet asteroid to chill out near, and either dropping a healing beacon, or taking the occasional potshot at strays with a gunship. When the non-participation timer chimes in, charge into the fray and lob a torpedo, if it hits, run back to you spot, if not just plink at things until you hit or get shot down. Minimum effort, no real skill required, you don't piss other players off, and there's a reasonable chance that the rest of your team might be able to carry you to victory. It's win-win.
  8. Most of the builds are pretty good, but I'm going to argue against charged plating and deflection armor, especially for beginners. Armor piercing is practically everywhere in the current state of game balance. Charged plating is basically signing up to equip "extra vulnerability to AP builds." There are a handful of niche applications for it still, but they're uncommon and based on fairly high player skill. For a new player at present, equipping CP is basically just asking to die quicker and more often. The reason being, that if you make a list of the deadliest weapons in GSF right now, almost everything except Light Laser Cannons has armor piercing, which means that against them Charge Plating provides 0 benefit, and comes with some penalties retained from when the distribution of Armor Piercing was significantly different than it is now. For the T3 bomber, Directional Shields beats Charged Plating by a huge margin in terms of suitability for the build, it's not even close. If worried about getting shields facing the wrong direction in the heat of battle, just don't press the button. Directionals, just sittting there, are still better than active CP use. For the minelayer, there's not really a great substitute, but Shield Projector, Reinforced Armor and Large Reactor at least let you scrape by without seriously penalizing your survival chances. Yes, it sucks that Shield Projector more or less cancels out Large Reactor, but effectively giving up shield regen, or giving all enemies a free 23% shield piercing on you and coupling that with damage reduction that doesn't work against most of that piercing damage are both worse than a wasted reactor component. It's a ship that could use some love from the developers on defenses. There are other places I'd probably recommend different choices, but none that make enough of a difference to felt performance for a beginner to meaningfully notice. Practice and learning how game mechanics like range, accuracy, evasion, tracking penalty, line of sight, etc are more important than getting the last few percent of performance out of your component choices at that stage.
  9. SF is my home server, and the premades there don't worry me. There are 3 specific players that sometime play in groups (usually pairs or threes), that worry me, but it's entirely down to their personal skill, not to their grouped/not-grouped status. They also solo queue quite a lot. There are also some players that predominantly solo queue that worry me about as much. For the premades in general, you've got a decent shot at victory with two good players on your team and nobody at the bottom actively trying to sabotage the team. I should probably visit SS and DM at some point and see how they're doing GSF-wise these days. My understanding is that the queues are smaller, so a premade might tilt things a bit more on them.
  10. This does not require a full premade. It just requires everyone on your team to be bad at GSF. I can think of at least 10 people who are active these days in GSF, who by themselves, are capable of pulling off this sort of thing against a really weak team. It's sort of diagnostic of crappy matchmaking where for reasons known only to devs that probably moved on from SWTOR years ago, the matchmaker decides that putting all the weakest players on the same team is the thing to do. It happens. Back when GSF and SWTOR had populations much bigger than now and a GSF Scoreboard Records thread was maintained, the record entries were mostly that sort of game, where one or two skilled people rampage over a team that contains zero players that know how to effectively counter them. I 100% guarantee that grouping is not needed to do this, because I've done it solo myself. I'm at the bottom of the ace level skill spectrum, so I need an especially weak team to fly against in order to pull it off, but this is doable by a solo player, and fairly easy for a pair at the right skill level. I'm curious though, what server and what times does this premade run? Cause I'd actually like to fly against a premade skilled enough to tilt the win/loss odds as much as you say they do. Small pool of players, players tend to play at routine times that fit their personal schedules, matchmaker uses the same algorithm for every match. It's not really surprising for teams to be more or less the same multiple matches in a row. You sir, are a true scholar of GSF history, as shown by this very accurate assesment.
  11. I've had plenty of fun games solo queued against premades. I've had plenty of fun games where a purely solo queued team beat a premade. Pressing the Group Battle dialog button does not make players more skilled. I would be nice if it did, but it doesn't. Throw a bunch of noobs in a premade, and they're just as doomed as they were in the solo queue. There are 2 or 3 exceptional premades, none of which fly regularly anymore as far as I'm aware, where if you're not one of the other exceptional premades, then yeah, your team is probably doomed. For the more average guild or casual GSFer premades, the premade really isn't determinative of match outcome. There might be one or two people on the team to really worry about, but what matchmaker does in terms of filling the non-grouped slots on both teams is typically more important than the mere presence of a premade. Having the 3 or 4 people who are AFKing, or busy whining in Ops chat instead actually make a cursory effort to play well, is about as good having the average casual premade on your side. There's a world of difference between an ineffective player who dies 8 times vs 4 times, or who get 150 objective points vs 25. People who kinda suck but put in at least minimal effort can be carried against a premade. People fully dedicated to doing the "moping potato" style of play usually can't. Premades also aren't as common as some people think they are. Match maker is fairly consistently stupid. Given the same small pool of people in the GSF pool, it will tend to group them similarly from match to match. It doesn't learn from making horribly imbalanced matches, so it's happy to repeat the same team composition mistakes multiple times in a row. Seeing the same people in a team 4 matches in a row really doesn't tell you anything about whether there's a premade queuing or if it's just matchmaker being matchmaker. You have to actually message one of the players and ask in order to find out. The core complaint against premades really boils down to: "I want to win more games." To which the answer is legitimately: learn to play better. Get to the point where 80000 damage, 20 kills, and 50% accuracy (70% or better if in gunship), are fairly routine for you, and premades become not that much of an issue. You'll have a sporting chance of beating them on your own, and your team will have a sporting chance of winning by taking advantage of the premade focusing too much on you. I'm not quite there myself, but I'm close enough that aside from the 2 or 3 specific premades I mentioned, if matchmaker can throw me one other fairly decent player, and avoid lumbering me with people who are arguably flying more for the other team than for the one they're on, I'm not bothered by premades because two decent players + a remainder that aren't actively sabotaging have a reasonable chance of winning. The hard part is getting good at a game mode where there's not good in-game learning experience, you have to go out and pretty much literally do your own homework. Once you are good though, the barrier to beating a mediocre premade is not really that high. The crapshoot of matchmaker is still the crapshoot of matchmaker regardless. Besides, how would people explain away their losses if there weren't premades to blame? It could cause a mental health crisis for people who are convinced that their incredible loss rate doesn't have anything to do with their lack of comprehension of even the most basic GSF game mechanics.
  12. I've got a fair number of GSF memories. Facing Tommm and SammyGS (the original, and only true Aimbot), on Jung Ma. Having RamaStock characters on I think 10 or so different servers for community stock ship nights. Losing both TDMs and Doms horribly to collections of noobs, because the entire team of 2 or 3 premades was chasing Drakolich on the other team during his birthday events. Being one of the prime contractors on "The Great Wall of GSF text" back when this thread https://forums.swtor.com/topic/734258-lets-talk-about-strike-fighters/ was all the rage. Being part of the closed PTS testing running up to the GSF balance pass of 5.5. Doing community events: strike nights (back when they sorta sucked), stock ship nights, super serious nights, etc. Being kinda pissed that my very first GSF records thread entry was for a match with a dronecarrier bomber. Why did it have to be one of my least favorite ships? Seriously. Those rare games where I'm just in the GSF flow or get mad for some reason and start flying like a real GSF ace. Transcribing game stats into a spreadsheet and doing math modelling to back up balance changes I was arguing for, and sometime being surprised by the results. I think overall, GSF has been the most memorable part of SWTOR for me.
  13. It's been at least six years since I've seen that, and that was on a community organized theme night. But yes, wild exaggeration aside, it can be really rough to fly against 4 or 5 decent gunships, or even just one truly top notch gunship, if you don't know what you're doing. So learn what to do, by reading guides, asking questions, checking out Despon's GSF School youtube channel, and then of course . . . practicing.
  14. Logging in is taking around 3 minutes, compared to about 10 seconds or less normally. Once logged in FPS are normal, but going by chat, most group finder activities are buggy/crashing out, or just being really wierd. Also had one log in where instead of displaying normally, a single pixel of color filled the entire screen. IDK, maybe the pixel at the center of the screen or something? It changed with mouse movement of the camera, and sound was fine, maybe infinite zoom in? Anyhow, tell the server admins to disable -lickedpsychedelicstamps in the console, eh? Cause the server is tripping pretty hard right now.
  15. @Caleb_Nokama If you're really truly at your wits end with regard to contributing, there are a few ways to cheese your way around that mechanic. On a scout, equip EMP Field. It does a trivial amount of damage, but the only requirement is that you be within 4.5, or upgraded 5 km of a valid target. Get close, press button, boom, you have now contributed, technically. The down side is that unless your team is facing a bomber heavy situation and you really know what you're doing with EMP Field it's probably an overall handicap, because it's a specialist team support anti-bomber build that is strongly skill dependent to really be worth passing up other ships that are more useful most of the time. It will cure your non-contribute fairly easily though. Ion railgun on a gunship, once upgraded 4 tiers has AOE damage options. You can target turrets at satellites, or bomber deployed mines or drones that have no evasion and don't move, making hitting easy, and the splash AOE can hit any nearby enemies. This also works with locking EMP missiles on the same types of targets. Finally the Lingering Effect crew skill will debuff a target, and if anyone hits it, it will apply a 200 damage DoT, which should probably lift the non-contribute timer, though I'm not sure on that because: a) I only ever get non-contributes if I'm actively working on getting them, and b) Lingering Effect is so weak compared to other crew skill that I've never equipped it, so I don't have any experience with whether it works or not, but in theory it should. More generally in terms of hitting things in GSF: Make sure "detailed tool tips" are turned on in your hangar UI so you can see the full stats of each component Know the range of the weapons equipped on your ship. Shooting at things too far away works 0% of the time. Know the accuracy falloff with range, at to hit roll of 120% at 500 m may turn into a hit roll of 80% at 4000 m, some weapons are not good at their max ranges. Understand tracking penalty. If the lead indicator of the target ship is not near the center of your firing arc circle, your chances of missing are high. Understand accuracy and evasion. It's basically like accuracy and dodge/parry in the ground game. Stack accuracy, and wait out evasion buffs on scouts and gunships before shooting at them. Choose arc increase and accuracy increase crew passives. On strikes choose efficient targeting as the magazine option to speed up missile locks.
  16. Cause this came up in a thread likely to get admin-deleted, and it's probably still useful for some people: Basic diagram of how to shoot people with a gunship in a way that they can't shoot back. Note, there are terrain elements in some of the GSF maps where you can use gunship strafe movement to slide into nooks where pretty much only your railgun sticks out of cover. Also like a lot of older game engines HERO defines collision surfaces with normal vectors of polygons in object meshes. Which means if mapmakers are lazy or careless you can get terrain surfaces where you can shoot through in one direction, but not in the other because from one side you are "inside" what is supposed to be a closed solid. There are a few such places in some of the GSF maps, and if you know where they are you can exploit them a bit against people that don't know the map well enough to fly around the incomplete surface and shoot you from the other side. It's unsporting perhaps, but the blame there lies primarily with the terrain making team at Bioware who has probably never made an environment in SWTOR (that I know of) without some stupid terrain glitch that's just a byproduct of not paying attention to detail.
  17. They didn't hide medals. They broke the scoreboard UI. The underlying code that tracks the objectives is still there, but the GSF scoreboard is just a modified version of the pre-7.0 warzone scoreboard, that the devs didn't have enough sense to fork into it's own independent module. The result being that every time they do something to mess up or change warzone scoreboard functionality it also messes up the GSF scoreboard. The cherry on top is that at this point they've lost so many devs that they don't even know how to fix what they've broken, so we're stuck with a broken GSF scoreboard. As far as the medals spread goes, I think it's something like 19 or 20 possible medals in TDMs and 21 or 22 in Dom. The biggest medal earning difference is that in Doms "park under green sat" is all you need to earn a modest stack, while in TDMs in order to earn any medals at all a modest amount of competent participation is required. Mind you, a modest stack from parking under a sat is still only 20 to 25% of what you could earn, but it's more than the 0% you get for making no effort in a TDM. Most skilled players I know of don't really see much of a difference in total medals earned between TDM games and Dom games. There's not really a significant bias toward the Dom game mode. I've solo captured enough satellites at this point to pretty strongly disagree with the premise that the whole team deserves sat capture credit when one sat is captured. If you're not in capture range, in general you shouldn't get credit.
  18. Defense medals are by far the easiest medals to earn in GSF. You find a green sat, park your ship under it and AFK. As long as you're in range to get the defense medals the game counts you as participating, so you aren't even at risk for an AFK timeout auto-kick. All you have to worry about is someone one the other team coming over and blowing up your ship. That means that in a medals only reward structure, the toxic reward farming strat is: bail from the first TDM that pops because the queue timeout is probably quicker than waiting for the game to finish even if you SD as hard as possible. Queue again, and if it's a Dom take a bomber, find a nook under a green sat, dump out all your mines and drones, strafe a bit to hide behind them, and then AFK while you farm a big stack of defense medals. If it's a TDM serial SD as fast as possible because there will be no rewards without effort, so you need to end the match so you can get a Dom match. Medals only reward structure is pretty much a recipe for turning every TDM in to a SD festival and every Dom into a camp the one green sat game. Attempting to win and attempting to meaningfully participate go from being merely irrelevant to things to actively be avoided, if you're that kind of player. The reward scheme that might turf out the SDers would be Ship requisition, Fleet requisition, XP, and nothing else. No fleet coms, no gear, no currencies, no anything that is of any use whatsoever outside of GSF. Nothing to bring people to GSF other than the inherent enjoyment of GSF. That's the solution for all areas of play though. Warzones, Areanas, FPs, Ops. No loot for anything, just the intrinsic fun of playing the game. Then we'll all just have to buy all our gear from Crafters, and they will be SOOOOOOO happy. Win for everyone I guess. Wouldn't hold my breath for it though.
  19. Yes. Not very effectively, but they are playing it. If they're actually getting kills rather than just pew-pewing RFLs into empty space because they don't understand how aiming works in GSF, then yes, they probably are playing the objectives. Especially in a strike or gunship going well off of the satellite when attacking can be the right thing to do. Establishing yourself where your long range weapons like railgun, torpedoes, and HLCs can hit the enemy and they can't hit back, and distancing so that it's harder for enemies to exit the central region of your firing arc can significantly reduce time to kill on targets defending a sat. So being 8 to 15 km away from a sat, isn't really a mistake, if you know what you're doing and are employing that distance effectively for gains. Anyone who has enough of a kill count to be able to effectively pad it is almost certainly going to fall in that group. And if they can't then honestly it's not that much of a loss for them to be off a sat because the chance that they were doing anything useful in the first place is pretty low. If they learn how to shoot, defend, and get kills by chasing other clueless noobs around the match, then eventually they'll be able to translate that to doing useful things on the sat, so it doesn't bother me all that much. You can also have cases where interdiction of enemy ships makes sense. If you can find a competent or even a semi-competent bomber, it is much, much, much better to zip 20 or 30 km off the sat and kill them in transit than it is to wait for them to get forted up on the sat. Once they're on the sat they're going to decimate your team's noobs, they're going to be much more time consuming to kill, and because weak players are generally very ineffective at dealing with bombers it pretty much forces good players on your team to drop what they're doing and go pry out bombers even if that's not really the best use of their time. Even for non-bomber targets there can be benefits. If you can kill enough enemies fast enough to keep 4 or 5 of them stuck on the respawn screen or shuttling from their cap ship, then your team effectively gets a 3 to 4 player advantage in numbers, and if the rest of your team can't turn that much of an advantage into a win, then victory probably wasn't in the cards anyway. So the summary on this one is, if they're good enough to effectively play objectives, then yes, odds are that they're playing objectives, and if they're not good enough then it's not really much of a detriment to your team. Very rarely. Tensoring and suiciding is enough of a tactical strategy that it has it's own name, tensorcide. The T3S is good enough now that you don't really need to do that because being stuck in a tensor scout for a whole match isn't really the handicap that it used to be, but tensor field is game changing enough and other ships are sufficiently more potent on offense, defense or utility, that in some cases tensorciding may give a team a slight advantage. There are also people who when on the wrong side of a big map, low on resources, or recognizing the flow of the match has led their initial ship choice to be significantly inferior to another ship on their hangar bar, will choose to do a tactical SD so that they can respawn in a fresh and appropriate ship in the right place. That's different from chain SDs of course, but chain SDs aren't really about optimization for rewards anyway. They're about childish spite and throwing a tantrum because the player who hasn't bothered to learn the needed skills for a skill sensitive game is doing poorly due to their lack of skill. Incentive structures tend not to do a great job of curing immaturity. The existing reward structure already biases rewards moderately strongly toward effective participation. You get more stuff faster if you participate effectively. As very much a former "srs bzns" type raider who optimizes gameplay almost reflexively, I assure you that going all out in every match in the long run is the most profitable pattern in GSF. For the griefers it doesn't matter. They don't want to optimize. The want to spawn in, put their companion on auto-attack, and collect rewards. It's resentment that this doesn't work in GSF that drives the bad behavior. Making rewards take longer for non-participators is just going to mean the non-participators are queuing and not participating in more matches, as they SD through TDMs and park under the one green sat for Doms, until they collect enough defense medals and cycle through all four ship classes to get the objective. Wins count double in the current structure. If a 100% increase in rate of return isn't enough to motivate participation, then I'm very skeptical that a medal based structure that lends itself very easily to a "SD through all TDMs, and park a ship under a friendly sat the whole match for defense medals," is going to do any better.
  20. I think you're letting some of your Warzone/Arena gripes bleed over to GSF in ways that don't really apply much in observed behavior in GSF matches. DPS isn't even an item on the scoreboard, it's only a tooltip popup if you mouse over the damage score, and I'd wager a sizable chunk of players in GSF matches aren't even aware that the popup exists. DPS chasing also isn't really a thing in GSF the way it is in warzones. Starfighter health pools are generally under 5k, and a lot of them are under 4 k, so you really have to work at it to do significant amounts of damage that aren't tactically relevant to the outcome of the match. High DPS won't always win a match, but it's almost never useless. Not playing objectives is also pretty rare in GSF. Not playing them effectively is super common, but the static two red one green with most of both teams around the green type match is usually a symptom of too many people on the weaker team not knowing how to recognize an underdefended sat, not knowing how to effectively attack an underdefended sat, and not really having a good grasp of how close you actually have to be to turn a sat once it's been cleared. They just realize that they can't manage taking a sat, so huddle under the friendly sat and try to stop a three cap. They are playing objectives, they're just not much good at it.
  21. Experience and requisition rewards tie directly to individual performance. If you are still leveling GSF ship upgrades or character level there can be on the order of a 4x times difference in how profitable a game is if you keep fighting vs. just giving up. Losing in those cases actually doesn't make that much of a difference in rewards, but not making an effort will absolutely tank them.
  22. Poorly. There's not a shortage of queue time with groups absent from the queue. In terms of lopsided disasters of matches the presence of one better than average player is all it takes. If the matchmaker would consistently split high matches played/well geared characters fairly evenly between teams, that would make some improvement, but unfortunately it's quite happy to lump globs of players that ought to be on opposite teams together even when they're not grouped. It's a routine occurrence.
  23. First of all, "in a working matchmaker" requires a working matchmaker. Which we don't have as far as team balance goes. Secondly, from the player experience and overall population standpoint, a half pro and half scrub team is not likely to be a good match. People like to win. If you give a player a "fairness knob" to turn, and ask them to adjust it so that the game is "fair" expect them to keep turning it until they're winning 80% to 90% of the time. Because they're not really after fairness, they're after dopamine release in their brain. The player-emotionally correct ratio of wins to losses is: just enough losses so that you can fool yourself into believing that your personal skill is the primary determinant of victory. So a kiddie pool isn't as good as PvE, because real players will feel that losing half the time is excessive, whereas a scripted object doesn't care at all if it gets obliterated 90 times in a row. Still, it's better than the general queue, because aside from losing an "excessive" amount with a 50% win rate, a new player can also generally tell if the victory had nothing to do with their contribution, or happened in spite of their presence. That's discouraging. In a kiddie pool environment, the new player's play is just as bad, but since everyone else's is also just as bad, if they make any useful contribution at all it's likely to be a meaningful contribution. In principle I believe GSF has, or at least at one point had, a limited kiddie pool system, in that for some condition like "matches played less than x", it was supposed to preferentially form matches with just players meeting that "new player" criteria. Not sure if it still exists, not sure if there's the population for it to still work, as Bioware strongly subscribed to the, "any match, no matter how horrendously bad, is better than no match," philosophy and even back then if there was too much of a pause between matches it would dump the kiddie pool players into the shark tank, but there was a clear qualitative difference in the noob only matches. Also it was a total disaster with even a single competent player mistakenly being put in the pool (I got to experience this a few times when creating new legacies on EU servers back many years ago). Which shows the chief problem with kiddie pools, by the time a player knows enough to be safely out of the kiddie pool, a player is way too advanced to be allowed in the kiddie pool. There's no good place to draw the line on skill, just less bad places to draw it. Says the person accusing others of coming up with a GSF licensing scheme when they are in fact the first person to bring up a license scheme in the thread. 🙄 A GSF license is actually a pretty good idea though, now that you bring it up. Lots of racing games work that way. The problem is that it absolutely wouldn't work going off of player stats in PvP matches. Or at least not without a GSF player population hundreds or thousands of times bigger than it currently is. There aren't enough people in any particular skill strata to make the skill spread in any given match be narrow enough. It would have to be based on PvE GSF content, that's unfortunately extremely unlikely to happen. How is having an "unlicenced" player pool and a "licensed" player pool fundamentally different from having solo and group queues? Either way you're classifying players and grouping like classification with like classification. Based on experience I can tell you that if encountering a skilled premade, player skill on the opposing team is much much more predictive of competitiveness of match than group status of the teams. If there's a team with 4 solo aces playing against a team with 4 grouped aces, the group status is basically meaningless. For your desired outcomes, skill based segregation is far more effective than social habits based segregation, and a license scheme would be a skill based segregation. Your license idea, which you appear to hate, is actually one of the best solutions proposed so far in this thread. Still problematic, but it has some fundamental merits. I'm more optimistic than Sriia is on the possibility of improved matchmaking. As in technically feasible, not likelyhood that Devs will ever do anything about it. Personally I think that there's a fair bit of space to improve matchmaking. There are tracked GSF match stats that correlate very strongly to skill, for example accuracy (yeah, you have to pull out gunships as a separate group, but that's not that hard as per ship stats are tracked), average damage, average kills, average assists, win rate. Things that correlate better than matches played or ship gearing status. So the player sorting probably has scope to be improved. More important though, is you could add a team balancing step after teams are pulled out of the queue to make a match. A look at: with this sub-pool of already selected groups of players (solo being a group of 1), is there a better way to balance the teams than the way that the current (terrible) matchmaker did as it pulled them out of the queue? That'd fix a lot of the matches where there are a bunch of solo queued aces stacked against and all low skill team, because the answer would be: yes if you put half of the players with GSF records correlating with high skill on each team, instead of all on one team, the balance should be better. The queue we have has enough population to support better matches, what we need is an algorithm that has at least a cursory team balance error checking function. Bioware has generally expressed a "fast pops are the only thing that matters" attitude, but given computational speed, adding a balancing step after the teams have been plucked from the queue wouldn't make a meaningful change from current rates of match formation. Granted late joins would be an issue, and the UI might have to be changed a bit to account for that, ie it would have to be more like a FP groupfinder where you need confirmations from the minimum number of people before you can load into the pre-match screen, but it's really just swapping one wait time graphic for a different wait time graphic. The issue is that implementing something like this requires at least mediocre programming talent, understanding of which player stats in GSF correlate strongly with skill, and a feeling by supervisors that trying to significantly improve the GSF play experience for a lot of players is a worthwhile endeavor. A match maker that's making a decent attempt at team balance even if it doesn't always work is a lot more palatable than one that is clearly not even trying to balance (or is so bad at it as to be indistinguishable from not trying). Yeah, this is pretty much the same "how matchmaking could be improved for GSF" argument I always bring out in these threads, but based on how many arguments it took on "fixing disto-missile balance is important for fixing strike ship class balance," I'm hoping that maybe I might be getting close to the halfway point on improving GSF matchmaking.
  24. It's more that a functional matchmaker is a prerequisite. Disable group queuing. Fine. What happens. Aces solo queue, matchmaker sucks, weak players get obliterated on teams that never had a chance regardless. To a certain extent there's really nothing in team balance that helps new players unless there are enough new players to support a "kiddie pool" queue. Even with balanced teams, weak players still get obliterated in a flash, and in TDMs if the teams are closely matched there's a fairly strong incentive for skilled players to use targeting weak players as a way to rack up a winning kill count rapidly. What a person who doesn't realize that firing a cannon with a range of 4 km at a target 9 km away is useless really needs, is to be playing someone in that gunship 9 km away who is trying to close to 4 km so that they can dogfight with their short range cannons. Then once they both figure out the reasons why their gameplay is so horrendously ineffective, and it starts to show in their match stats, they need to be booted from the kiddie pool. Not sure if we have the population base to support that, though the number of zeros I see on scoreboards says, "maybe?" Kicking noobs out of the general queue is probably a better bet than kicking out groups.
  25. Absent a matchmaker that's better at balancing teams than pure random chance, I'm not sure it would really help much. I don't think you appreciate how frequently the matchmaker will put all of the skilled players on one team even if they're solo queued. If I'm doing the weekly on 3 alts on an evening, I generally expect that to happen at least once and more often than not several times. I frequently keep a silly/stupid ship build on my bar because stomping the crap out of helpless randos gets stale pretty quickly, as there's no challenge to it. At the end of the day the people who stomp the crap out of new players are the people who stomp the crap out of new players. Grouped or solo, the crap still gets stomped. The issue is that GSF is a game mode that is hyper-sensitive to player skill. If you lack basic defensive skills, you will be utterly demolished any time you encounter someone with basic or better offensive skills. If you lack basic offensive skills, you'll pretty much never kill anything except by accident. If you lack strategic skills, your team will never really respond effectively to what's happening in the match, and will likely lose. None of those skills are taught well in the tutorial (which I'm convinced most people don't even know exists), so unless a player makes the effort to find resources to learn those skills, they are doomed to get stomped, again and again and again, until they go learn them. Most people don't bother, and therefore are doomed to be perma-stompees. Learning how to exit that state is not that hard. Someone who knows what they're doing can teach all the basics in probably 3 hours or less. Figure maybe twice as long plus a lot of practice if you just read/watch videos instead of having a real live teacher on voice chat. The lack of a structured PvE introductory experience for GSF is a gaping hole in the game design for GSF, and absent a reasonably safe PvE learning environment players just have to learn the hard way. This has always been arguably the greatest weakness in the design of GSF. If it's any consolation, as SWTOR's population has dwindled over the years the population of GSF aces has dwindled even more. You're less likely to be farmed into oblivion today than you would have been 6 months after GSF was released. Ship balance is a lot better too, so farming new players takes more work and time these days. Oh, for another value to add to your list, given that most players can't be bothered to look up anything about GSF outside of the game, a premade of skilled players is probably the only chance most players have of seeing what skilled play looks like, and possibly learning by trying to imitate it.
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