Ramalina
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Posts posted by Ramalina
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Your official links are almost entirely devoid of meaningful content with respect to details of the development constraints. Yes, I read them in their entirety, even going to the trouble of figuring out the url of the one you mis-linked, which was the only one that mentioned development constraints at all.
From that post we can infer something along the lines of: "JTL, Elite Dangerous, EVE, type sandbox games are too big and too hard, and would break the heck out of the game engine, but at least some people (maybe even a lot) have been asking about X-wing, and we think we can do a miniature simplified version of that, so that's what it's going to be."
That's about all we can infer from the posts, since they're pretty vague and mostly serve as teasers for the Galactic Starfighter patches that were coming up.
When a developer flat out directly tells you that they can't change something that both the players and devs agree would be a good idea because the guy who knows how to code that isn't allowed to take time away from higher priority projects, then inference isn't really needed.
I could probably get away with ignoring the NDA at this point, but I'll keep it general enough to be in bounds anyway: When asking "This would be a great change, why can't you do it," the answer was almost always a variant of "not enough time." The engine's unsuitability basically makes all GSF content a clever workaround, and clever workarounds are labor intensive with expensive skilled labor. If they didn't have to fight the engine to make GSF happen, a lot more GSF development would happen.
1 hour ago, Nee-Elder said:Then again, none of those other games i mention are a MMO, so if by some miracle GSF got say a surprise expansion or like one Dev Cycle..... well.... if if if .
Having had a tiny glimpse of some of the things the devs were pretty sure that they could do from the list of cool stuff, "if we had time," I can tell you that the sad face is not sad enough. It needs ten or twelve sad-face friends. If that hypothetical GSF expansion hit then they could be a crowd of happy faces.
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On 3/31/2024 at 3:21 PM, Nee-Elder said:
That ^ is incorrect. We ( i was one of the original alpha/beta testers who corresponded with BioWare, since i had already officially helped with SWG's Warden Program & Events/Chronicles Systems ) were actually wishing/pushing for SWTOR to implement something more like SWG's JTL ( Jump To Lightspeed ) space expansion. Unfortunately, SWTOR dropped the ball and eventually ( ironically ) confined GSF to be strictly PvP only.
The initial Space-Flight-on-Rails mini game aboard your personal ship was just a stop-gap meant to placate, since obviously any logical player ( or fan ) was gonna wonder wait how the heck do you launch a STAR Wars game without the *STAR* part?!?!!?!
Later, after the mass outrage toward the on-rails version, we were told that SWTOR Devs had already put a so called "super secret space project" up on their supposed "wacky whiteboard-of-wishes" wayyy back in 2010, since they knew there wouldn't be enough time/fund$ to develop it properly for release because of 'STORY' ( aka "the 4th pillar" ) being their main focus + main selling point ( fully voiced story ) to differentiate from other MMOs.
Again you are incorrect and seem to be speaking out of thin air, without any facts and without providing any citations.
Since i was actually there helping BioWare ( even as far back as 2009, unofficially ) with testing & such , i will provide the actual proper/public intel ...
- https://www.swtor.com/blog/galactic-starfighter-development-introduction-part-i
- https://www.swtor.com/blog/galactic-starfighter-development-introduction-part-ii
.... just so you won't be confused and, more importantly, so your posts won't confuse others. ( like it just seemed to do for @StrixHiraeth , causing him to practically prostrate himself )
I mean, I was around during 1.x and 2.x, and I was one of the people asking for a better space experience than the ship class on rails stuff. In the threads I was in, X-wing lite was requested more often than JTL lite by a vast margin. JTL wasn't absent, but it usually came up in the context of having SWTOR endgame in general be a bit more of a sandbox once you got to endgame and ran out of story, or in terms of having more than just pure combat in the space experience. Maybe we were just reading different groups of threads at the time though. It's not like a GSF forum section existed at that point to concentrate space flight/exploration/combat wishlist threads in one place. From the design choices though, GSF is much more X-wing lite than JTL lite, so whatever the total balance of player requests was, X-wing lite seems to have won out in terms of design choices. That said, GSF is really only about 30-40% X-wing lite in terms of its design, and very much it's own peculiar little beast in the end. Engine limitations played a role, but also probably the devs' desire to put their own stamp on it and many choices that make it more accessible as a MMORPG minigame than a purist mini-X Wing mode would have been.
Your references are all well and good, but they have very little content about the practical limitations on scope of developer intent. They're a very broad strokes sketch of GSF design and player progression in GSF that can be paraphrased as: "It's going to have to be a PvP mini-game due to limited scope and trends in player feature requests. No, it's not pay to win. Yes, F2P players will have access to it. Thank you for reading." Also both links are to the same post, but I can delete an i from ii and hit enter in a search bar, so yeah, I read both of the ones you meant to link.
As far as the differences between "What we meant to build," and "What we were allowed the time and payroll to build," if you know a bit about software development, the tea leaves are not hard to read. How much well designed monetization is there in GSF? Not much. How much well designed tutorial is there in GSF? Not much. Was there tutorial material well within the scope of the sort of AI/script limits constraining GSF in one of the games that the designers clearly drew inspiration from? Yes, something like a hundred or so progressively harder levels worth of design template to draw on. Are there parts of the game that were mentioned in assorted developer posts or that exist as unfinished bits that can be seen in datamining (stealth ships say hi)? Yes.
Also having been involved in some closed beta testing for GSF, I have the benefit of having read and participated in closed PTS forum posts with a dev who was explaining to testers what the scope of potential changes to GSF were, and why some of the limits were what they were. Some of it was engine limitations, but the primary limit was available developer time. The devs, at least the ones that worked on GSF, thought that GSF was pretty darn cool. They didn't leave bits unfinished because they were bored of working on GSF, but because they were told that they had to work on other more important (which in business speak means more profitable) stuff. Honestly, that thread was probably the best dev-player interaction I ever saw relating to SWTOR. There was shared passion for the project from both sides, and a really deep honesty about why things on the "we all wish it could be this way" list were not able to be done on their end. It was very different from defensive corporate-speak we usually see in official posts. Can't say about post 6.0, but from 2.0 through the end of 5.x I can confidently say that "Devs don't care about GSF" was not an issue.
The programmers, artists, and designers were working on making a really awesome gameplay experience for a space combat mini-game. They focused hard on that, and they made a lot of progress and did pretty good work until their bosses told them to stop and do other stuff instead. Some of GSF's problems though, stem from neglect of aspects that don't fall directly into the gameplay category of game development. The monetization for GSF is basically: pay to mildly speed up gearing, pay for cosmetics that can't be flaunted in front of other players, pay for a few ships that are almost never available on the Cartel Market. It's poorly designed in terms of why SWTOR players tend to spend money on cosmetics, and it caps out after a fairly small number of purchases relative to the infinite CM cosmetic gear treadmill in the ground game. The beauty to players of the relatively short and easy to finish GSF gear grind is an Achilles heel for the GSF monetization scheme, when you're done you're done, and there's nothing left to spend on. It's more checking off a "has monetization" checkbox rather than a well thought out "how to make GSF have a self sustaining income stream." If monetization had gotten the same depth of thought and care in design as the gameplay, it might have earned enough to be worth some continued development. If I as a GSF enthusiast want to take my Clarion with 4 engines worth of pink-purple engine and flaunt it on fleet in a way that makes other players think, "Wow, I don't know what that is but I know that I want to spend however many cartel coins it takes so that I can have it too," there's no way for me to do that. GSF is excluded from what has been SWTOR's primary monetization driver pretty much since SWTOR went F2P. If that doesn't count as a design mistake, then I'm not sure what does. Especially when you consider that the devs already knew they were transitioning to a F2P cosmetics shop based revenue stream at that point.
Tutorial levels with static or easy to code moving AI targets/opponents were another missed opportunity. If you're drawing from the X-wing game design anyways, you make a map, set a bunch of coordinates for target nodes, and each tutorial level is actually the same map but the number of nodes populated by targets increases with each level and the type of target may change to a more difficult/dangerous target. Fly through waypoints (recycled TDM powerups work), learn to use cover approaching targets, learn to use engine maneuvers against targets that fire missiles, learn about range and accuracy, it's all doable with existing assets (turrets and drones) or minor modifications of them and good map design. Technical limitations are not the reason GSF's tutorial is woefully inadequate, it's lack of time to design and build the right map with existing assets. Track the stats that the game tracks anyway, hits, kills, damage, etc. and it becomes easy to have a "personal best" and also to have leaderboards or performance-gated cosmetic rewards by which e-p##$ can be compared, which seems to drive engagement pretty reliably in MMOs.
This all a "What might have been" conversation. It's true that there would still have been a chance of stranded development effort, but from a overall game design standpoint GSF might have been better served by starting with Battlescout TDM matches only, a highly functional infinite CM cosmetics treadmill for flaunting GSF swag in front of other players, and a scalable tutorial map with personal best records and a public high score leaderboard. The rest of GSF as we know it following on in stages. The point being that if you onboard and retain players well and convince them to pay money for that experience, then higher-ups are more likely to say "Yes" if you as a developer ask, "hey, can we spend some more time working on this part of the game?" Ultimately, that's what drives decisions in a for profit studio.
The fault here I think might mostly lie with the higher-ups. It should have been their job to make sure that recruitment, retention, and income were given adequate attention in terms of design, and those are clearly areas that didn't get adequate attention, thus dooming any significantly large future GSF development. It's possible that both GSF enthusiasts and devs wildly overestimated the appeal of space battles, and that GSF as a whole was doomed to be a development mistake. A complete well designed mini-game can still be a failure if there just isn't the audience to generate sustainable revenue. That said, I think that paying enough attention to the features other than gameplay would have increased the chances of GSF not being an overall development failure. It's cool, and I love it, but GSF does not do the core task of a commercial computer game very well (earn money), and in my view there's a strong chance that the incomplete features that should have been there have a lot to do with that.
Note: The devs' approach of building a core working game mode first, and then planning to build recruitment, retention, and monetization parts around that later is not necessarily a bad choice. For that to work though, you need to know that there are the resources and commitment to build those parts when "later" arrives. If not you should either scale back some components of the gameplay so that you have the time to build parts needed for sustainable future development, or make the painful decision to cancel the project as not currently viable. Ideally you make these choices and commit to them very early in the development cycle.
GSF effectively is a cancelled development project, and it was cancelled a long time ago. Is it great that it got so close to gameplay complete before getting cancelled, or is it sad that overemphasizing gameplay at the expense of other aspects created problems that likely forced the cancellation of GSF? I'd say both.
It ends up as a very niche game that's quite fun and engaging for players who fit that niche, and an instructive cautionary tale in some of the pitfalls you can run into during game development. At this point in SWTOR's overall design life and population curve, there's very little chance it will ever be anything more. It's too late to find out if any of the promising fixes would have done any good (from the devs' perspective, players would still benefit from for example a better tutorial, but there's no way a tutorial could pay for itself at this point even if it caused the retention of every new player trying GSF). It is what it is. Enjoy it until the queues die, the servers shut down, or you get bored of it.
I mean, we can all hope that both the developers and executives at Broadsword go completely insane for a brief period during which they embark on a major GSF development binge, but realistically I think we're in a world where fixing the scoreboard enough to display medals correctly again counts as a stretch goal.
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On 3/27/2024 at 5:57 PM, StrixHiraeth said:
It's not up to the devs to bring people in, it's up to us players.
Just going to point out that bringing people in, and doing it so well that those people are willing to pay for the product, is LITERALLY the core mission of the employees at a game development studio. There are lots of things devs can do, but bringing people in is the only thing they have to do if they want to continue being game developers as a paid career. Of course, an individual employee might have a somewhat indirect effect on bringing players in, but if they don't contribute in some fashion the person doing staff planning should probably be asking themselves, "Why haven't we reassigned them to do something useful or fired them?"
On 3/28/2024 at 5:18 AM, Wulfurkin said:Im saying that im disappointed that there is no way to come into this game being somewhat competitive as there is no place where the mechanics can be learned.. Im no fool either, ive played dogfighting games and ive done a lot of regular pvp in this game,, if i struggle with this imagine the difficulty for the people who havent done those things.
There are places to learn the mechanics, but unfortunately they're mostly not in SWTOR. GSF is a Frankenstein of MMORPG with classic RPG numerical combat rules that trace roots directly back to tabletop role playing games (roll to hit, etc.), an arcade style "flight model", and a very First Person Shooter gunnery UI. So basically you need proficiency in three very different genres of games, and then need to figure out how to integrate those proficiencies in GSF's specific blend, in a high pressure very fast paced game. It's not too bad if you happen to have solid experience in those genres especially games from the '90s and early aughts that the devs drew inspiration from, but if you're missing even one leg of the tripod it becomes brutal. There's no wading pool to learn in (the tutorial is pretty worthless) and beginner learning is slow, and slow in GSF is a recipe for fiery doom.
GSF is an unfinished product. Players in 2.0 were asking for a "space combat" element that was better then the on rails class ship missions, with "something like the Lucasarts X-wing series" being really high on the wish list. The studio basically said "ok" and set out a budget and schedule for space combat. It wasn't enough to get the job done. Development ended with the combat system pretty badly imbalanced, an entire planned ship type missing, and basically no work on effectively monetizing GSF. It was pretty well received overall, but with no income being generated from it because monetization had been neglected, there was no justification for completing things like a worthwhile tutorial or the stealth ship class. So because the devs neglected doing a good job of making an on-ramp for paying customers for GSF in favor of just making something that's fun to play once you get the hang of playing it, GSF became permanently crippled because the thing that would have allowed for continued development was the part of GSF that was most badly neglected.
As a playable game mode it's maybe 90% to 95% complete, but for monetization to justify further investment and new player experience/introduction it's maybe 10% to 15% complete. Disappointing that that's where it got stuck, but probably a good example of how "cool and fun to play once you've mastered it" are not enough to make a successful game mode. The boring and money grubbing parts are also important.
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On 3/1/2024 at 11:13 PM, Darkestmonty said:
I never thought to test alacrity on my character affecting GSF skills.
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.
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10 hours ago, Hefaiston said:
has anyone experienced other players removing lock on without using engine abilities or that when you try to use engine abilities yourself then the engine meter gets lower but the game refuses to use the ability. am curious if its a bug or if there is something fishy going on
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.
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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.
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6 hours ago, Darkestmonty said:
Rama's suggestion doesn't fix the reason why people are self destructing but certain will impact new and lower skilled players.
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.
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8 hours ago, DakhathKilrathi said:
This is a good idea. I was assuming the most we'll get out of them is a tweak to what already exists. My only issue is that I'm not sure what values would avoid punishing aggressive play while still limiting SDers. Maybe two different timers? One for TDM, one for domination. I can't speak for everyone but I am more likely to die in domination because I can afford riskier and more aggressive play. TDM on the other hand every point matters.
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.
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18 hours ago, DakhathKilrathi said:
That someone in this thread is seriously defending their decision to lose on purpose is why we need a developer solution, here. Clearly there is no convincing players who do it, so the game needs to actively discourage it by letting us kick the people who do it.
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.
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39 minutes ago, Darkestmonty said:
what's better, a bunch of defenders on one satellite or a bunch of self destructors in every match.
Medals in GSF need to be reworked anyway. There needs to be medals for resupplying team mates, healing team mates, landing hits on enemies, etc. Current medal acquisition is out of date.
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.
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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.
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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.
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5 hours ago, Warped said:
the core complaint is being curb stomped every single match by a FULL PREMADE. loosing a close or even lopsided match is part of the game, loosing 50-2 or 1000-5 match after match after match because of, (if it's not abundantly clear by now) FULL PREMADES, is the complaint.
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.6 hours ago, Warped said:really? then why are they almost always on? why does the match maker seem to always put them on the same side every match if they aren't a premade? Why is it that i can fly 10 matches in a row on different toons and I'm still against the same people?
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.
5 hours ago, Toraak said:The premades they are referring to are not the ones that are currently flying. Ramalina is referring to 3 premades that have long since stopped flying to my knowledge. One of them does make an appearance every few months but it's very rare.
Edit: I'd list the 3 I believe Ramalina is referring to, however since I think it would be against the forums rules I'll just say. One of them started off on Bastion I believe, another on Shadowlands, and I think the 3rd was on JC originally (tho I may have this one wrong).
You sir, are a true scholar of GSF history, as shown by this very accurate assesment.
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On 12/4/2023 at 4:57 PM, Warped said:
with all due respect, a full premade against a bunch of solo queing players, is never fun. there will always be blow outs, but being up against full premades every single time makes people not want to play GSF.
also, if I solo queue, I get put up against a premade,
If i make a premade..... I GET PUT UP AGAIST A PREMADE
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.
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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.
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20 hours ago, NeverSuffer said:
literally EVERY SINGLE player on a team will go Gunship-
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. -
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.
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@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.
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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.
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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.
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6 hours ago, Darkestmonty said:
if you can only advance your dailies and weeklies AND Galactic Season/PvP Season by earning medals, self destructors and AFKers will have a very hard time advancing anything because they won't earn medals (except for Warzones where team scores in huttball give everyone on the team a single medal).
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.
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21 hours ago, Darkestmonty said:
When half your team is sitting on the one satellite you own, are they playing the objective?
Yes. Not very effectively, but they are playing it.
21 hours ago, Darkestmonty said:When a few pilots ignore the satellite so they can fly around trying to pad their kill count, are they playing the objective?
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.
21 hours ago, Darkestmonty said:When people are self destructing, are they playing the objective?
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.
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On 9/17/2023 at 10:28 AM, Darkestmonty said:
Not in a lot of games. Sadly some people only join to pad their dps scores, not to play objectives and win, some have no clue what they are doing because they are new and some only join to afk their way through dailies and weeklies. Your participation may mean nothing with certain teams and no amount of participation will effect the outcome if your team doesn't play objectives.
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.
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On 8/4/2023 at 4:30 AM, Darkestmonty said:
There are games where you know your team can not win. Since there is no bonus for doing well, why try? Dishonor means nothing in a video game that was created with grinding as the focus for content.
If we had a bonus for being the top players on our team, maybe people would try more. If we had a bonus for each kill, maybe people would try more. If dailies and weeklies were based on medals earned instead of win/loss, maybe people would try more.
SWTOR is a grind, since skill does not matter in a losing game, there is very little reason to put in effort.
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.
Most inaccessible gamemode ive ever seen in any mmorpg.
in Galactic Starfighter
Posted · Edited by Ramalina
Yeah, sort of. I'm annoyed that your "corrections" don't actually correct anything I said, and that your "facts" are links that are basically marketing material that are at best tangentially related to the post you were "correcting."
My post was primarily about the general pressure devs face in the game industry, and how if your for profit software project fails to build the parts needed for actually generating profit, it tends to kill further development.
If you want to correct me with an actual correction, post something that shows that GSF monetization per player is equal to or greater than that in the ground game, or that GSF participation in 2.x and 3.x was so low that even with monetization rates similar to the ground game in terms of income/player hour or income/players active in game mode per month the audience for it was too small to earn back what was being spent on it.
That's information that would to some degree refute that claim that failure to build an effective monetization system into GSF was a major contributor to the end of its development.
Just because YOU really wanted more of a JTL type experience and were advocating hard for it, doesn't make anything in my post incorrect. If you want to back your opinion up with facts, then go get facts that actually back it up. To be honest, if you manage to do that I would genuinely love to see it. I like insights into the development, design and production of products I like, probably because I'm a terminally incurable nerd. So if you find such insights, please share. Just don't expect me to accept marketing teasers as insights. One of the sad things about Bioware was how the institutional culture was dead set against sharing any information with the customers if it didn't absolutely have to be shared, unless it could be protected with an NDA.
So I realize that asking you to back up with relevant facts may be impossible for you to achieve, and it's kinda unfair. But if you want to play the "Calling out your opinion with my facts," game please bring facts that are up to snuff.