Suggestions to increase the playerbase of GSF

[Verain]

As it stands, GSF has a few things working against it- it is three dimensional, it is mostly skill based, the gear based part has only one path forward, and the rest of the game neither twists your arm into doing it nor has much else interaction with it.

 

 

The big things work FOR it are in some cases those same things- it's three dimensional space combat in the Star Wars universe, and is highly competent at being that.

 

 

Many of us are X-Wing/TIE Fighter veterans. Maybe you were already an adult when those games came out in the mid 90s, chilling in your house with a flight stick and your crystal pepsi, maybe you were a little kid and watched your dad play them, or maybe you played them a decade later on recommendation- much of this forum, and a decent amount of the early playerbase, loved these games.

 

It's not *quite* enough though. The set of players of that game doesn't intersect THAT deeply with the set of players of this game. It's there, of course, but it isn't huge. So while the game should absolutely cater to us, it should also have better lines to draw in new players.

 

 

 

1)- Something besides pvp queue

 

Pretend that you decided to play SWTOR, WoW, or the now defunct Warhammer. You created a character, and then decided that all you would ever do was instanced pvp. You would have just really limited yourself, and also given yourself nothing much to do in between queue pops.

 

GSF isn't meant to be on the scope levels of those game, but it does suffer from only having the one thing.

 

Ideas on this level include:

-We should be able to enter a training zone with our ships, ideally every map should be accessible. This could be a "simulation", and there could be one terminal for each one if you want to make us walk somewhere.

-It would be really nice if there was a solo queue pve game mode. This mode could perhaps even be the subject of a daily quest if it was interesting or cool enough. This has some dev time attached, but I think it would pay off in bigs.

-There should be something else to do when in queue. This could be the equivalent of ground game daily zones, but it shouldn't be mandatory or lame- but it should let you play your ship in a context of not being the game.

 

This was really called out to me when some forumites and I were trying to figure out how energy regen works when your weapon is recently fired. It took so long to test because the only way to try out anything not in the tutorial was to actually queue a game and not contribute during the testing phase, so I would have to wait until we had an uncontested satellite I could guard- but I think it's far more than just that. We NEVER get to control our ships unless we are actually fighting.

 

 

 

2)- Newbs need more help.

 

This game is currently FILLED with bad pilots. Their experience is sure to be frustrating. It's a fine line, because while someone really passionate will just take it on the chin and keep driving forward, many others aren't so inherently sold on the game. I was sold on GSF when they mentioned they had a "super secret space project", and the rest was just a formality. Thus far, every pilot who is good at the game is also very enthused by it, and everyone who is enthused by it is quite a bit better at it than you might expect given their normal game play habits. This isn't bad, but lets RP for a second here:

 

-When this game came out, I grabbed every ship I could once I figured out what was going on. My first few matches were ludicrous, and the other players were definitely handicapped by my presence. But, I wasn't the only one in this situation. Wins and losses and trial and error, it didn't take much to beat through the initial unfamiliarity and become pretty good at many things and very good at a couple things. Now every daily gives me req on three scouts, three strikes, four gunships, and three bombers (and then double that because I run one character on each faction). It won't be THAT long before ships I barely play have several mastered components. My first match had three ships to try, each with pretty different playstyles, and very soon I had four different ships (cartel ship) to try out.

 

-Ned Newb starts tomorrow. We haven't met him yet. When he does start, he will have two ships. One is the finesse scout, a utility ship mostly loved by advanced pilots for its ability to be loaded out for relatively interesting missions. The second is the swappy-gun strike fighter, the type 1 strike, a relatively hard to use ship that can require rapid swapping of primary weapons to be worth flying. He doesn't know what a gunship or a bomber is, and he isn't clear on what mastered ships are. He believes at face value claims like "you can buy a mastered ship on the Cartel Network", and believes that the Enforcer or Occulus might come with all upgrades. His upgrades seem to be a long time in the coming, and he's not sure which gun he should be using. If he asks anyone at all, he'll simply ask them what the "best" is, even if he knows that isn't supposed to be a great question. It's very easy for him to believe that the game comes down to whomever has the best upgraded ships. If he doesn't believe that, he comes to believe that the game comes down to being in a premade, especially an opposite faction one. He proves this to himself by queueing for four consecutive games and sees the same guys in three of those games, and they clean his clock so quickly he has a hard time making the time to do it again.

 

So here's some suggestions:

 

-Lets assume there's a quest. In this quest, you meet a friendly NPC, who has access to a nice ship for you to fly. He might have a choice each day. Let us assume that you have to do some ground game quest, ideally gear/level invariant, but that isn't strictly necessary, to gain access each day. Once you have gained access that day, he'll lend you one of his mostly-upgraded ships, of which he has a BUNCH. You get to borrow it for just two games though (ignore for now abortive games, or super fast games where you hop in to 220-950 and win or lose immediately). It is temporarily in your stable of ships and good to go. You can't repaint or customize these ships- your interaction is just choosing which of this stable of cool ships you are going to mess with that day. This is enough to run your daily, and each day you log on in that newb phase you are legit curious what ship YOU will fly that day (maybe the stable of choices is two or three out of several, maybe you just want to try them all, maybe there's a long term quest to try them all out).

 

And pretend that each ship type has a description about the playstyle on each map. Now when you borrow the bomber, you are told what bombers are good and bad at. The bomber has a high "skill floor"- a newb will contribute more on a bomber than he will on a finesse scout or niche strike (I would argue it has a lower "skill cap", but not important for new guys). This way he knows the roles and can see what he likes.

 

-The only reward right now in the ground game is a handful of credits and some XP. I don't mostly play the ground game that much (I actively play WoW right now, so I'm not interested in running end game in this game), but this DOES strike me as odd. There should be more carrot than there is. What if the GSF daily quest also came with a bag, and in the bag was a chance at cool small things? Not something that would mess with the power structure of pve or pvp like gear, but something like the "yay you helped" kind of thing, with materials or pets sometimes in there. Now you have provided both an arm-twist to a mainstream SWTOR player, without swinging a mallet at his head and demanding his time, AND you have given him the means to run a short daily and gain access to a partially geared ship, should he despise going out nude in order to complete his daily.

 

With this situation, the matchmaking will be able to work better, the game will be deeper, and longer lasting.

 

 

 

 

The other thing I bring up in all the places is holy gods do we need cross server on this. Given the relatively lightweight nature of GSF, I would actually envision that it would be its own server that you would play from, communicating a few status pieces back and forth to your main set- but the tech details aren't super relevant. The point is that cross server GSF could be delivered without having to cross server everything else in the game, and of the two main arguments against cross server (can have undesirable effects on communities, has a large development cost), only the second applies, and not in the same magnitude.

 

 

Thoughts?

 

 

 

Addendum: The game should sort of hint that you should get a group for this to get maximum fun. While the game was fun before, it started really rocking when I joined voice chat with some great players, because now we get to joke around. Obviously a social game encourages this, but the game should maybe hint at it politely, you know? Give them the idea?

Edited February 7, 2014 by Verain

[Armonddd]

I like your idea for training new players with loaner ships. At the same time, it begs the question of "why have a vertical progression system at all?", which is outside the scope of this thread.

 

I would also really love cross-server GSF. Ideally, the starfighter area of the fleet would also be cross-server -- I'd absolutely love to be able to grab you for a group without rolling yet another alt.

[Kilora]

Point #2 -- I'm in 100% agreement.

 

I came back after a bit of a break, jumped into GSF, and immediately thought "I'm never playing this again. The tutorial didn't do anything to help me at all, and I'm being murdered while being nothing but a liability to my team."

 

 

I've never played anything similar to GSF -- so I don't expect to be good. But it would be nice to have some type of a way to train, or a ranking system that will only match me with other crappy players, so we can slowly get better by playing without being purely demolished.

[Gavin_Kelvar]

I like the idea of loaner ships since it would also give newbies an idea of what sort of combos the devs had in mind with each ship (less aggravation at spending requisition on components that you find out don't combo well with what you've leveled up already; also would give them ideas of the different components so they don't have to spend req only to find that it doesn't fit their playstyle).

 

Something I would add though: when using a loaned ship have it earn req for the relevant class of ship in their hanger (so a loaned Type 1 Striker would earn req for the player's Type 1) and have loaned ships earn a req bonus half of what you'd get with a mastered ship. The extra req would be in place to help encourage newbies to fly the loaned ships even if it didn't have a component set up they initially were thinking of.

[GOLANX]

not to hijack your thread but how about #3: GSF legacywide.

 

a complete sharing of ships, upgrades, and req. the only things not shared should be comps (as they obviously want us to pay for that, and i don't care enough to do it high expense small reward but the lamebrain who wants to i wont stop him) and no sharing across republic/empire divide

 

as it stands i only have 2 "Pilot" toons and 1 "Sandbox pilot" toon. and the reason i only have 2 pilot toons out of my dozen of toons is because it isn't worth it to play GSF with any other toon who will not have upgraded ships in my optimal setup, its a waste of time for other toons unless you want a sandbox lets see if this upgrade is worth anything?

[DEATHICIDE]

I have a great idea.

Give FTP a free dust-maker! (trust me, none of the subs will care one bit *evil laugh*)

 

Obviously the tutorial needs some bots to practice on.

 

How's this familiar quote?:

 

"Now let's do a barrel roll!" - Frog co-pilot (WHERE IS HE WHEN YOU NEED HIM?!?!?!)

Let them try everything on each class of ships in the tutorial.

"Now lets fire a proton torpedo!"

"Now let's try shooting from the same location with burst cannons this time"

"Fire the railgun with a partial charge"

"Use distortion field to navigate past the turrets"

 

It is not hard to leave the new players with no excuse to complain, just take the blindfold off, this isn't PvE.

 

Currently the tutorial is summed up with "well, now that you have seen a satellite and skipped through a bunch of boring text, join the game and get farmed by some premades! Oh and btw, LTP noob."

 

Last night I again rolled a new ship on harbinger, was in a match with several players with 5 ships on both sides, the match was close, I did not have a single upgrade on my scout, came in first place for kills and medals.

 

This is not a your ships are better than mine problem, it is a lack of training problem without a proper atmosphere to learn, as trying to grasp the game while being farmed becomes frustrating and causes players to quit and never look back before they even know what a co-pilot ability is.

 

___FIX THE TUTORIAL___

[Foambreaker]

The developers nailed the coffin shut.

 

One, when they decided to make it PvP only, it basically meant that completely new players have to "lrn their class" while being farmed. That is not fun and only a fraction of people who try GSF will want to bother with that.

 

Two, the staggered release just meant that everyone after subscribers was fodder. See number one, lrn to play whilst being farmed + add a gear in balance.

 

At this point the ramp up is way beyond what anyone will want to do.

 

Funny thing is rather than recognize their mistake, the developers added feature to punish new players who don't want to be farmed.

 

GSF is DoA.

[HoloGrinder]

As it stands, GSF has a few things working against it- it is three dimensional, it is mostly skill based, the gear based part has only one path forward, and the rest of the game neither twists your arm into doing it nor has much else interaction with it.

 

 

The big things work FOR it are in some cases those same things- it's three dimensional space combat in the Star Wars universe, and is highly competent at being that.

 

 

Many of us are X-Wing/TIE Fighter veterans. Maybe you were already an adult when those games came out in the mid 90s, chilling in your house with a flight stick and your crystal pepsi, maybe you were a little kid and watched your dad play them, or maybe you played them a decade later on recommendation- much of this forum, and a decent amount of the early playerbase, loved these games.

 

It's not *quite* enough though. The set of players of that game doesn't intersect THAT deeply with the set of players of this game. It's there, of course, but it isn't huge. So while the game should absolutely cater to us, it should also have better lines to draw in new players.

 

 

 

1)- Something besides pvp queue

 

Pretend that you decided to play SWTOR, WoW, or the now defunct Warhammer. You created a character, and then decided that all you would ever do was instanced pvp. You would have just really limited yourself, and also given yourself nothing much to do in between queue pops.

 

GSF isn't meant to be on the scope levels of those game, but it does suffer from only having the one thing.

 

Ideas on this level include:

-We should be able to enter a training zone with our ships, ideally every map should be accessible. This could be a "simulation", and there could be one terminal for each one if you want to make us walk somewhere.

-It would be really nice if there was a solo queue pve game mode. This mode could perhaps even be the subject of a daily quest if it was interesting or cool enough. This has some dev time attached, but I think it would pay off in bigs.

-There should be something else to do when in queue. This could be the equivalent of ground game daily zones, but it shouldn't be mandatory or lame- but it should let you play your ship in a context of not being the game.

 

This was really called out to me when some forumites and I were trying to figure out how energy regen works when your weapon is recently fired. It took so long to test because the only way to try out anything not in the tutorial was to actually queue a game and not contribute during the testing phase, so I would have to wait until we had an uncontested satellite I could guard- but I think it's far more than just that. We NEVER get to control our ships unless we are actually fighting.

 

 

 

2)- Newbs need more help.

 

This game is currently FILLED with bad pilots. Their experience is sure to be frustrating. It's a fine line, because while someone really passionate will just take it on the chin and keep driving forward, many others aren't so inherently sold on the game. I was sold on GSF when they mentioned they had a "super secret space project", and the rest was just a formality. Thus far, every pilot who is good at the game is also very enthused by it, and everyone who is enthused by it is quite a bit better at it than you might expect given their normal game play habits. This isn't bad, but lets RP for a second here:

 

-When this game came out, I grabbed every ship I could once I figured out what was going on. My first few matches were ludicrous, and the other players were definitely handicapped by my presence. But, I wasn't the only one in this situation. Wins and losses and trial and error, it didn't take much to beat through the initial unfamiliarity and become pretty good at many things and very good at a couple things. Now every daily gives me req on three scouts, three strikes, four gunships, and three bombers (and then double that because I run one character on each faction). It won't be THAT long before ships I barely play have several mastered components. My first match had three ships to try, each with pretty different playstyles, and very soon I had four different ships (cartel ship) to try out.

 

-Ned Newb starts tomorrow. We haven't met him yet. When he does start, he will have two ships. One is the finesse scout, a utility ship mostly loved by advanced pilots for its ability to be loaded out for relatively interesting missions. The second is the swappy-gun strike fighter, the type 1 strike, a relatively hard to use ship that can require rapid swapping of primary weapons to be worth flying. He doesn't know what a gunship or a bomber is, and he isn't clear on what mastered ships are. He believes at face value claims like "you can buy a mastered ship on the Cartel Network", and believes that the Enforcer or Occulus might come with all upgrades. His upgrades seem to be a long time in the coming, and he's not sure which gun he should be using. If he asks anyone at all, he'll simply ask them what the "best" is, even if he knows that isn't supposed to be a great question. It's very easy for him to believe that the game comes down to whomever has the best upgraded ships. If he doesn't believe that, he comes to believe that the game comes down to being in a premade, especially an opposite faction one. He proves this to himself by queueing for four consecutive games and sees the same guys in three of those games, and they clean his clock so quickly he has a hard time making the time to do it again.

 

So here's some suggestions:

 

-Lets assume there's a quest. In this quest, you meet a friendly NPC, who has access to a nice ship for you to fly. He might have a choice each day. Let us assume that you have to do some ground game quest, ideally gear/level invariant, but that isn't strictly necessary, to gain access each day. Once you have gained access that day, he'll lend you one of his mostly-upgraded ships, of which he has a BUNCH. You get to borrow it for just two games though (ignore for now abortive games, or super fast games where you hop in to 220-950 and win or lose immediately). It is temporarily in your stable of ships and good to go. You can't repaint or customize these ships- your interaction is just choosing which of this stable of cool ships you are going to mess with that day. This is enough to run your daily, and each day you log on in that newb phase you are legit curious what ship YOU will fly that day (maybe the stable of choices is two or three out of several, maybe you just want to try them all, maybe there's a long term quest to try them all out).

 

And pretend that each ship type has a description about the playstyle on each map. Now when you borrow the bomber, you are told what bombers are good and bad at. The bomber has a high "skill floor"- a newb will contribute more on a bomber than he will on a finesse scout or niche strike (I would argue it has a lower "skill cap", but not important for new guys). This way he knows the roles and can see what he likes.

 

-The only reward right now in the ground game is a handful of credits and some XP. I don't mostly play the ground game that much (I actively play WoW right now, so I'm not interested in running end game in this game), but this DOES strike me as odd. There should be more carrot than there is. What if the GSF daily quest also came with a bag, and in the bag was a chance at cool small things? Not something that would mess with the power structure of pve or pvp like gear, but something like the "yay you helped" kind of thing, with materials or pets sometimes in there. Now you have provided both an arm-twist to a mainstream SWTOR player, without swinging a mallet at his head and demanding his time, AND you have given him the means to run a short daily and gain access to a partially geared ship, should he despise going out nude in order to complete his daily.

 

With this situation, the matchmaking will be able to work better, the game will be deeper, and longer lasting.

 

 

 

 

The other thing I bring up in all the places is holy gods do we need cross server on this. Given the relatively lightweight nature of GSF, I would actually envision that it would be its own server that you would play from, communicating a few status pieces back and forth to your main set- but the tech details aren't super relevant. The point is that cross server GSF could be delivered without having to cross server everything else in the game, and of the two main arguments against cross server (can have undesirable effects on communities, has a large development cost), only the second applies, and not in the same magnitude.

 

 

Thoughts?

 

 

 

Addendum: The game should sort of hint that you should get a group for this to get maximum fun. While the game was fun before, it started really rocking when I joined voice chat with some great players, because now we get to joke around. Obviously a social game encourages this, but the game should maybe hint at it politely, you know? Give them the idea?

 

As far as training new pilots by adding more options in space i think that's an awesome idea. It could be as simple as a domination mode against NPC's with upgrades and AI that keep pace with the player or it could be something much more complex and enjoyable. No matter what it would give new pilots a chance to develop some skill and up grade there ships before they get tagged with the call sigh "Spawnman" by the opposing faction.

 

First flight sim I ever fell in love with was "Top Gun" on a commidore 64, 30 years ago. got 7 years in the **** pit of a Battlemech (MW3 / MW4) and 6 years as an A-Wing and Belbullab -24 ace and Master Shipwright in SWG so I totally get love of the game and as limited and slanted as this one is I love it too. We have to be fair to new players so that they too can develop a love for it.

Edited February 8, 2014 by HoloGrinder