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SlightlySychotic

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Everything posted by SlightlySychotic

  1. Tried after everything else this and it made it worse. It reinstalled the launcher but now the launcher apparently can’t connect to the Internet. “Unable to retrieve patch data. Please check network connection. (206)” Clicking repair under settings doesn’t do anything. Starting to suspect I’m really just screwed. Guessing my next step is installing through Steam?
  2. To those still asking for a new game engine, the Friday the 13th game actually decided to upgrade their engine this year. It took them four months during which time they could release nothing else. This is because every single asset has to be reworked into the new engine. When it finally did come out, the bug count was as bad as it had been during the beta. Every single map in that game could probably fit on Tatooine, absolutely Alderaan. SWTOR might have more money, a bigger team, and a simpler engine but you're looking at at least a year between updates if they decided to update the engine. It is a bad idea.
  3. I’ve always wondered about this. It’s a part of a lot of those classes default sets (or at least it used to). Did they really throw a completely useless stat on a lot of classes gear? That’s not just bad design; it’s borderline sadistic. Most people aren’t going to go the extra step to min/max.
  4. So … teach them. I play enough lowbies and midbies that typing, “Mark and kill their healers. Defend our own,” at the start of a map is just ingrained.
  5. Know this post predates the announcement, but it now sounds like solo ranked is being made cross-faction. That will make this considerably more difficult.
  6. Well, first and foremost, a new player probably hasn't learned to keep an eye on ops chat. I sincerely doubt someone has been PvPing for over a month and just never played ACW. Second, you can see the grass and snow sides of the map from the spawn. Third, what I said earlier about looking for allies on the minimap whenever you see any callouts.
  7. I’ll say it again: the problem with saying east or west is that people have a tendency to think they are facing north and believe those indicate their right and left. Honestly, on most maps you could just type “INC:” my reaction is to check my mini-map, see which direction has teammates, and head there.
  8. I’m actually kinda shocked that they haven’t already converted Huttball and arenas to cross faction. When the game first came out, Huttball was the only same-faction map explicitly because it was so easy to justify in terms of lore. No real reason why that shouldn’t apply to cross faction now. As for converting all maps to cross faction, I’d rather they keep to the present trend of “re-skinning” older maps with different world tool sets. Part of me really wants a Belsavis “Voidstar” map.
  9. I find people tend to fall into two camps: 1) “I picked a faction and I want that to mean something!” Basically hardcore RP or team-focused players. Lore is a good reason but it shouldn’t be an end-all be-all rationality. 2) (More commonly) “The other faction sucks! I don’t want them on my team!” This one is completely unjustifiable. The point of cross-faction is to help even out the shortfall the losing faction typically suffers. It helps them catch up in terms and (hopefully) develop the skills they wouldn’t develop getting stomped one-sided.
  10. Ah, it’s a question of orientation. There’s a tendency for people to assume the direction they are facing when they start is north. When you spawn, you tend to think, “North is ahead of me, south is behind me, and west and east are to my left and right.” The fact that the maps tend to be oriented north to south reinforce that feeling. The problem is that you still tend to feel that way when you spawn facing south. On Voidstar I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a callout for “West” and turned to my left because I forget which way the map is oriented. The one exception is NC because the map does everything it can to encourage the player to look north: both spawns are located toward the southern side of the map and the capture “cabins” all require the player to look north. For every other map, callouts are either non-existent or focused on a geographical landmark (snow, grass, or pylon).
  11. No, what we need is solo objective ranked. The general queue is supposed to be for everyone who wants to PvP, ideally so they can acquire the gear and skills they need to progress to ranked. If you want matchmaking that provides enforced skill and class balancing so you can have the most competitive match possible, guess what? You want solo objective ranked.
  12. To be fair, other games have figured this out. When the queue pops you get a prompt to accept and it holds the match until everyone excepts. Group finder already uses something similar but this one would be blind so you can't game the system and tell who's in your game before you accept. If someone doesn't accept, they get a 5-30 minute lock out before they can queue again so they can't troll the system that way and waste everyone's time.
  13. Just wanted to touch on a few things: First, I absolutely agree that matchmaking needs a rework. However, it’s not a mutually exclusive solution and I just don’t believe there is any solution that would actually fix arenas. Worse, if matchmaking changes were implemented now then it would require that arenas be offered another “fair chance” to see if the changes make them work. If they don’t, that just means more wasted time. I’d much rather they add objective matches to ranked then rework how matchmaking works. Second, to the “more people means more problems,” I’m sorry but I just don’t agree or I don’t see your point. The only point of concern is that, in theory, it increases the opportunity for collusion but, in practice, I don’t think it will be an issue. Most groups just cannot field 8 players — if they could, we’d still have 8v8 group ranked. That means they have to rely on PUGs to pick up the slack. And since the point of queue syncing is to take advantage of the lower numbers of the weaker faction aren’t likely to be the most skilled or best geared. Most syncers aren’t going to have the patience for that. That’s on top of cross-faction already existing in 8v8s. The benefits to queue syncing just aren’t as free as they are in arenas.
  14. I find it utterly baffling that solo ranked hasn’t already been converted to cross-faction and am incredibly disappointed that there aren’t a dozen threads on this forum demanding it. This is coming from someone who’s made it crystal clear that he thinks any improvements to ranked arenas would be a waste of time. Even I think cross-faction ranked arenas should be a no-brainer.
  15. Unless they’ve changed it, you can’t get kicked while guarding a node. You get defensive points every so often and it counts as activity, canceling the countdown. The only way you would be kicked is if you’re too far away from a node to get defensive credit.
  16. It absolutely is though. Obviously, a completely lopsided team cannot be saved but a good team can make up for the shortcomings of one or two players. If there's one keyboard turner on your team in arenas and the other team is on your level, guaranteed you're going 0-2. Ignoring the ever present and unfixable class imbalances, arenas typically come down to whoever has the worst teammate.
  17. Balance changes will need to be made, there's no denying that. However, it's important to remember that this . . . I'm going to call it a "tanky meta" . . . only came about to facilitate arenas so that squishier "glass cannon" classes could be viable. Moving on to a game mode where dying isn't the end of the world, you can afford to increase damage values and pare down some of those invincibility buttons. It won't happen over night but . . . well, let me put it this way: do you think arenas are a patch or two away from being balanced? How about two or three? Six or seven? And, if you said "Yes" to any of these, would you have said the same about a year ago? Or two years?
  18. I've long been a proponent of this. In the past it's seemed to have a lot of support and there's never really been much of an argument against it outside of some fairly weak excuses. One of the better excuses, however, was that the player base on individual servers wasn't large enough to support it. Over the past year, I haven't really been able to disagree with this point. However, now that the servers have been merged I feel that this point no longer bears merit and it's time to revisit the subject. Put simply, I feel like ranked arenas have been nothing short of a failure. The only metrics by which they could be said to have succeeded are metrics that the old 8v8 system was never afforded: primarily, a solo queue. Arenas were also sold on the premise that they would be easier to balance. Four years later, it's become crystal clear that this couldn't be further from the truth: at no point have arenas ever been close to balanced and attempting to do so only creates gross imbalance elsewhere. Simply put, it's time to try something else. What I propose is adding objective 8v8 war zones to the solo queue. I have, in the past, suggested adding them to the 4v4 queue as well but the general consensus is that group players don't want that. If, for reasons I am unclear, that isn't feasible then I still think it would be preferable to remove the solo arena queue and replace it with a solo objective queue.
  19. It baffles me that they STILL haven’t converted arenas to cross faction. I actually really want to know why. Lore? The Giradda-themed war zones are so loosely tied to lore as to be laughable: they could easily justify cross faction arenas. It can’t possibly be that much work to convert them and even if it were, even if they would have to delete everything and start over from scratch, if they changed (or even added) just one cross-faction arena you’d see a massive drop in this sort of behavior.
  20. Most people aren’t patient enough to climb that mountain. No real incentive to do so either. Why pull teeth and smash fingers trying to gear up your off-faction characters? Same thing happened before bolster: one faction (more often than not Pubs) fell behind and the gear gap became so intense that playing the weaker faction became excruciating.
  21. Which is why arenas are broken and will never work. Sorry, which among the reasons why arenas are broken and will never work. The solution in this case would be cross faction. The reason why group queue sync is because it allows them to feast on the low hanging fruit that is disorganized PUGs. What you are proposing is picking the fruit and setting up a buffet. Getting rid of solo queue to stop groups from abusing it is a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to protect it from the pedophile next door. As for Overwatch, I haven't played it enough to know all the details but there's one thing I know and the second I am fairly certain of. The first is that it has a built in chat server that everyone is put into and can hear regardless of whether or not they're miked. The second is that matchmaking prioritizes parties against each other so that teams are more likely to be pitted against other teams (with a margin of error for mixed groups). And while we're on this topic, LoL, Smite, I'm fairly certain DotA, every single major MOBA features solo/duo ranked play almost exclusively. So, no, every modern game most certainly does not merge both queues. Semantics. Arenas will never be balanced. It cannot be done. They've never been balanced they will never be balanced. Even if you force trinity you're still stuck with imbalances between different support classes. You might not be saying that it "automatically" fixes arenas but you are strongly implying that forcing trinity will make the solution readily apparent. At best, forcing trinity makes balancing the game just as murky as it is now and at worst it continues to be impossible. I could go further and point out that the defensive skills you're complaining about are already a part of the game and aren't likely to be removed without major class overhauls. That probably isn't going to happen, period, and certainly isn't going to happen until the next iteration a little less than a year from now. Again, what you're proposing would take years to implement and adjust before it becomes readily apparent whether or not it works and I would say most people aren't willing to give ranked arenas that much more time.
  22. You say that lack of participation is the problem, which is accurate, and then you propose an idea absolutely guaranteed to reduce it. Good Lord. The first problem is that this will increase queue times, substantially for DPS classes. There just aren't that many support classes. As a tank, my times were already in excess of about fifteen minutes at peak times when I used to play on Shadowlands. That's what everyone is going to experience at best. Realistically, a lot of people will drop out due to those queue times only increasing the waits further. The second problem is that you basically want to do away with the only queue that has any participation. What this looks like is that you're proposing doing away with the solo queue and forcing solo players to PUG in the group queue where they will feed organized teams. Don't say "No" because that's how people are going to see it and is certainly going to be the way I argue it. Again, participation drops, queue time increase. The third problem is that you're assuming that the holy trinity automatically fixes arenas. Again, as a tank who sees that holy trinity about as much as anyone, it doesn't. If the teams are evenly balanced matches end in stalemate, almost always ending in acid at which point the victor comes down to either luck or whichever team has the classes that better survive the acid. The fourth problem is that, I'm sorry, a lot of people, people like me, are just done with arenas. We aren't going to try what you're proposing so you're not really increasing participation. Worse, I don't quite think you understand what you're proposing. I'm sure you think if we try this and it doesn't work then they can just roll it back. In reality, you're asking for almost two years. If they decided to implement this today it would take three to six months to implement. It would take another year AT LEAST of fine tuning and experimentation before they give up and try something else and another three to six months to implement that. I am not willing to give arenas that much time and I really don't think I'm alone in that sentiment. Easily one of the worst idea bandied about on this board. Do you want to fix ranked and increase participation? 1) Either add objective war zones to solo ranked or replace arenas entirely. Keep group ranked focused around 4v4s and if enough people show interest re-implement 8v8s down the line. We need to stop pretending that arenas aren't the problem. They aren't balanced, they have never been balanced, and they never will be balanced. 2) Scrap ranked altogether. Yes, I'm serious. It's very possible that, at this juncture, there aren't enough PvP players to make any incarnation of ranked successful, not just 8v8s but arenas too. If that's the case I see no reason to continue wasting resources on ranked rewards. Instead, have regs award season tokens that are earned by wins at all levels to subscribers. Have rewards release over the course of a year so each season has a armor set, weapon set, mount, color crystal, etc. Long term shift focus to developing cross-faction maps and soft matchmaking to reduce the impact of premades. It's not an ideal solution but it would work.
  23. That's better but still not necessarily good. Spending two weeks to get a piece that you're missing and then finally getting a duplicate drop from a command crate two days later would be absolutely rage inducing. You know what weirds me out about all these changes? They're giving PvP a raw deal because they're afraid it will trivialize PvE progression but the entire command crate system by design seems to trivialize PvE progression. It seems like it was added to prevent casuals who aren't part of larger guilds from dropping out after they finish farming story mode Operations because they just don't have the option of doing harder modes and getting the next gear tier. Command crates give them incentive to keep plugging away because eventually they will get top gear levels as long as they keep playing. Unfortunately, that process is particularly unfriendly to alts and discourages having several endgame characters which is particularly problematic for this game as its selling point (multiple class stories) strongly encourages (even depends upon) players creating multiple alts.
  24. You are correct and I was going to say something similar to this. However, there's also another side to this story. When an Op boss wipes a raid group that Op boss does not permanently get stronger, eventually capping out at a level where you need full gear equivalent to what it drops to clear it. If the other team beats you, they more than double your progression towards their next gear and when they get the next gear piece it makes it just that easier for them to beat you. And since the game is faction based, if (and when) one side gets a victory lead over the other that just makes it that much harder for the losing side to compete. It gets worse if you're just starting out and the other side has literally hundreds of matches of progress ahead of you. That sort of lead is insurmountable by your average player. I get that they don't want to trivialize PvE gear progression and that tier 3 gear for PvE is meant to be the ultimate accomplishment for that play style, but at the same time it's been proven that a daunting gear grind for PvP has dire consequences, creating an environment of Haves and Have-Nots. I just don't think they've thought these gear changes through.
  25. Honestly, I'll say it again: we might as well scrap ranked altogether and just offer reward tokens for victories. If it's between between nothing and the next desperate idea to make arenas work, I'd rather have nothing. I think most people would.
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