SlightlySychotic
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Posts posted by SlightlySychotic
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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.
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Dont ever use accuracy on concealment, sorc or ofc any healer at all in pvp... Seriously. Dont.
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.
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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.
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people will just exploit for plat tier.
this will solve nothing just add more bonuses and incentive to cheat
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.
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How would someone know what snow and grass is if they've never played the Alderaan map before? Please explain how a new player would know snow from grass without having played the map before, read a guide beforehand, or asking where to go in Ops chat. If you used that tiny brain in your nearly vacant skull before posting, you'd realize it would be impossible to know snow from grass without any of those conditions first being met.
That makes the use of snow and grass an inefficient means of communication. A person who just downloaded SWTOR 20 minutes before jumping into PVP will know immediately where to go if east or west is called out.
You're right however that no one has probably gone to the wrong node. A confused noob will more likely stay put and let someone else worry about calls.
I use snow and grass because the PVP community in SWTOR already settled on those terms before I jumped into PVP, but I'd rather see cardinal directions used for Yavin however because even a player in that map for the first time should know east from west.
Cardinal directions aren't hard. They're also used for maps not named Alderaan. Do you find east and west in Novare Coast or Voidstar confusing? If you do get east confused with west perhaps you should unplug for a bit and comeback after you've asked a third grader to explain cardinal directions to you.
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.
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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.
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Yes, I think most QQ is about number 2.
Which just means they like be able to smash the less capable players. I have no sympathy for people who fall into category 2.
I think cross faction is the best thing for this game now because the populations are much lower. It also stops one faction dominating another and stops people from faction jumping just so they can dominate lesser skilled players.
Like when reps are dominating and imps jump to reps so they don’t lose as much and then when Imps start winning again, they jump back to Imps. What this means is we will finally see who the people are who need to be carried because they can’t faction hop to get the better teams
Sadly, unless they make all WZs cross faction, this faction jumping will continue to happen and one faction will keep getting told how bad they are and people will rage quit this new map if too many of that faction are on their team. This happens to often in odessen (besides people leaving because of the map).
IMO, what we need is cross faction in all maps and I would like to see this implemented sooner rather than later. They could at least introduce it to maps like Hutt Ball, which isn’t really RP faction dominated because you never even know if they are the other faction until you engage. It is rotworms and frogdogs and not imp vs rep. They could even introduce it to civil war because it’s a “civil war” of houses.
I feel bad for the RPers who like the faction vs faction, but the health of pvp is more important IMO and that means we need cross faction for “all” WZs, but not necessarily arena. IMO, arena should stay faction vs faction and also have it’s own queue like Ranked does.
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.
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Why is it ruined by cross faction?
Nothing in your OP supports the title of this thread.
If you don’t like the cross faction, at least tell us why
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.
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Please, yes.
I've always thought the use of snow and grass instead of east and west was completely idiotic, not to mention inconsistent since we use cardinal directions on other maps like Novare Coast. Sure if you've played Alderaan before you know where snow and grass are, but it's a bit unfriendly to new players that don't. Everyone however should know where to go if someone calls out east or west.
I don't doubt that the use of snow and grass are sometimes responsible for nodes being taken, because I've seen people occasionally ask in Ops chat where either one was. It's probably safe to assume that the people who ask, rather than say nothing and stay put, are a minority.
Old habits die hard and it's too late for the daft use of snow and grass to disappear, but we can at least keep similarly stupid terms out of the Yavin map.
Speaking of cardinal directions...I also prefer to use them on Odessen rather than hangar, or whatever. Whether people use cardinal directions or the node's name however mostly doesn't matter on that map however because for some bizarre reason 1) most people don't call incomcing, and if a call goes out, 2) most of the time it won't get a sufficient (if any) response. It's like people forget how to PVP when they step into that map.
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).
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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.
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Wow why don't you tell us how you really feel? lol
Btw they can't fix the matchmaking system. It's fine. The part you are complaining about relies on the player themselves. Not BW.
In regs, the countdown timer happens. If X player doesn't accept they will backfill.
In ranked, they will just cancel even Alt F4 so they don't get put in queue, but once it starts there is no backfilling. BW can NOT fix that. It sucks, but to blame BW when the players aren't playing properly is unfair & wrong.
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.
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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.
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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.
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I've seen this also happen when someone is guarding a node in 8 vs 8. The option to kick someone should be removed from pvp, because people are abusing it for personal reasons. I also heard you get a lockout if you get kicked out from pvp, but I can't verify it since it's never happened to me. So, it's really only a nice tool for trolling.
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.
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I didn't bring up how carryable games are as a factor in what format should be the ranked format - you did that. How the skill cap of various formats stack up should be taken into account in choosing the best ranked format is totally debatable.
I'm just addressing the idea that 4v4 is less carryable than 8v8. It's not.
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.
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This ^
I would take the word of people who thoroughly enjoyed and competed at the top level when 8s were around- it worked wonderfully when level cap was 50, but even at level cap of 55 there started to be serious issues as TTK got too long and classes became more mobile.
In games with even teams, civil wars were about whose combat sentinel popped transcendence fastest to cap the offnode in a 30 minute slugfest at mid. Voidstar became one of the first arenas essentially, the first door was never capped and it was about who had more kills. AH often ended because a hidden time limit was reached.
Novare partially worked because at the time, you could use seismic grenade mez rotations to cap the node. With the bastion debuff, that is no longer possible.
Vanilla huttball would still be fun, but unless it was a huttball-only queue, 8s would not be fun.
The tl:dr is the proliferation of defensive and mobility cooldowns outgrew the vanilla maps starting at level 55, and now at 70, 8s are not a viable form of competitive pvp. Arenas are what we have, and at this point, what I prefer.
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?
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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.
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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.
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And, of course, in almost a year they didn't have the time, chance and possibility to gear up their pubbie main.
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.
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Yes we can!
in PvP
this is true at first glance. However reality is more complicated. There are more dps players than tank and healers, thats a given. However, theres way more tank and healer players, than actually are playing now. In reality healers and tanks are carry roles, and on many servers getting one or the other healer/tank decides if you win or lose. This results in newcomers or not-as-good-players beeing met with toxicity and most of the time they will stop queing. This circle jerk needs to stop. Right now this community, and its really the same on all server ive been playing, absolutely hates on "new players" and asks them to stop queing. That system needs to stop.The other thing is this community tendency to use all advantages. I know a lot of healers and tanks that just dont que up in that specific role, when certain players are in que. They go dps instead, because it increases their chance.
And why wouldnt they? When theres the best healer in que, and youre the only other healer, why even bother to que?
third is class balance. Obviously without tanks, you dont want to face a sorchealer as an operative. Thats why you dont see many ops queing for solo right now.
You could fight all of these issues with the system i proposed.
Which is why arenas are broken and will never work. Sorry, which among the reasons why arenas are broken and will never work.
Stating solo ranked is more popular based on participation is absurd. Of course solo ranked has more participation, but that is because teamranked doesnt work right now. What you see in reality is Teams queing in solo, you see tons of q-syncing on all servers. There are plenty of voicechats full of solo ranked players. Its easier and better for most players to exploit solo ranked than queing up for team. Thats why solo has more participation.There is no other way to fight q-syncing and teams abusing soloranked other than merging both ques.
Splitting team and solo always leaves place for abusement, because there will always be ways for teams and groups to play as a team in solo. Thats why modern games like overwatch dont differentiate between solo and group. Its one que for all.
"solo players to PUG in the group queue where they will feed organized teams." Thats only side of the medal. The other is 4 highly skilled solo players may still win against an averaged skilled premade. Deciding who faces who is a powerfull tool that needs to be done by matchmaking and not players. Players will always abuse it.
If you dont merge ques you will always have "teams" playing in solo, and thus teammode will never properly work. Its human nature.
tl;dr
In order to have a system thats not easily exploitable and a system that encourages teamplay you need to merge ques. Theres no way around it.
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.
Thats a blatant lie. I never assumed trinity fixes arenas. period. I said its a requirement to fix arenas. I said without forced trinity there will never be proper class balance.Games going into acid is a problem based on the inflation of defensives which origins in the lack of trinity. If you want to properly balance classes and fix arenas, you need to introduce forced trinity first. But then you need to keep working on balancing classes, theres much to do. However, forced trinity would be a huge step to much more balanced games.
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.
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Yes we can!
in PvP
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.
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I think we should keep the pitchforks and torches in the closet a while longer. As I understand it, this SUPPLEMENTS the system already in place. In other words, we still have a random chance to get specific pieces, this just supplements that.
So if you already have the Tier 1 piece, you don't need to earn it again. The only real problem I see is that I'm sure I sold the shells for the Tier 1 pieces I've already earned so there's that.
If you get 4 or 5 pieces from the drops, then you might only need to use this system to finish up. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me, but I'll withhold judgment until I see it in practice.
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.
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I have a few comments.
1) The last boss will drop 2 pieces for 8 people. The other bosses have a chance (unspecified) to drop a piece. I'm assuming that chance is extremely low, based on the epic RNG grind fest that they have been going with.
2) Ops take way longer than an hour, even in Story Mode. Some of them are extremely long (SnV, TfB). Hard Mode ops can take all night, depending on the op. Often times your group won't even finish it in one night. EV / KP Hard Mode are pretty much cake, but that's just for relics and implants / earpiece. There is no NiM for EV / KP (for getting tier 3 stuff).
3) Some of the HM ops are borderline impossible for most players (HM Revan and HM Styrak, both at the end of the ops...SnV and ToS). Yes, there will be a few groups that will clear them all. But most of the raid teams capable of doing so have already left the game. PUGs generally don't even attempt HM Revan or Styrak. Failure is certain.
4) Ops have a weekly lockout. So if you have to run it four times to get a guaranteed drop for every member of your group, that means it will take four weeks for everybody to get that piece. Yes, you can run other ops and get other drops in the meantime, but I refer you to my previous points.
So yes, my guild will probably farm SM ops for easy tier 1 and run HM for tier 2, but we are certainly not going to be getting tier 3. Probably won't even get a full set of tier 2 anytime soon, because HM ops are only easy for a small group of players who are still around.
Yes, the pvp gear grind that they are pushing out is epic and horrific. I'm not debating that. Just trying to point out a few reasons why it's not all cake on the PVE side either.
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.
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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.
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.
Good Lord.
stuck on quick play mode until download finishes
in Bug Reports
Posted
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?