Save GSF before it flops

[zaskar]

I think everyone knew that Galactic Starfighter would be something that only a small portion of the greater community played. I don't think the estimated player base was as low as what we are seeing.

 

BioWare you have one chance to dress this wound before it festers, you need to create regional starfighter queues. The byproduct of this will be making the ground pvp'ers really happy as well.

 

1. Why Now?

It is getting harder and harder to get matches on many servers, offpeak times are insane and during primetime (regionally) the queue times have doubled or tripled. We can't merge entire 'servers' just for GSF, something else needs to happen. Something needs to be done to give new players an opportunity to learn, right now they join, get shot down 20 times and never come back.

 

2. Why Regional?

Because we already have lag issues, asking server software to work with all magic routing involved in US/EU wide queues is out of the question. The virtualized instances that are servicing a giving region in the same datacenter. That is a very different story.

 

Even if we don't see some sort of trainer/flight school/simulator to get experience under new pilots belts before they just give up on GSF, we need queues.

 

I'm sure this is not in the budget for GSF, if BioWare does not spend this money they will lose their investment in GSF.

Edited March 6, 2014 by zaskar
better title

[Kane_Ren]

PVE GSF would be an answer. Actually, how about having a single team defending a planet against something like a droid invasion or meteor shower? It might be a route worth taking, just throwing an idea out there.

[NathanielStarr]

The strategies to win are boring to play and to play against. It's all gunships and bombers. If you play anything else you are handicapping yourself. People are getting bored of gunship fights in deathmatch and bombers just crapping out bombs for assured wins in domination. It was much better before 2.6.

[Trevor_the_Bruce]

I think everyone knew that Galactic Starfighter would be something that only a small portion of the greater community played. I don't think the estimated player base was as low as what we are seeing.

 

BioWare you have one chance to dress this wound before it festers, you need to create regional starfighter queues. The byproduct of this will be making the ground pvp'ers really happy as well.

 

1. Why Now?

It is getting harder and harder to get matches on many servers, offpeak times are insane and during primetime (regionally) the queue times have doubled or tripled. We can't merge entire 'servers' just for GSF, something else needs to happen. Something needs to be done to give new players an opportunity to learn, right now they join, get shot down 20 times and never come back.

 

2. Why Regional?

Because we already have lag issues, asking server software to work with all magic routing involved in US/EU wide queues is out of the question. The virtualized instances that are servicing a giving region in the same datacenter. That is a very different story.

 

Even if we don't see some sort of trainer/flight school/simulator to get experience under new pilots belts before they just give up on GSF, we need queues.

 

I'm sure this is not in the budget for GSF, if BioWare does not spend this money they will lose their investment in GSF.

 

You seem to be awfully certain that the amount of people playing GSF is low. Are there certain stats you are basing this off of? Or is it just that on your server and at the times you are playing there aren't many queing up for matches? On my server the que times are very low, and we got a large community of GSF fans. I think from my obsevations on my server the community that plays GSF is actually much bigger than you think. How about we see where the game is a year from now and then start to give advice to supposed fixes? Honestly the GSF has been out to free to play players for little over a month now.

[Gavin_Kelvar]

Well I think the best solution would be to take the "bolstered" mechanic from the Tactical Flashpoints and apply it to players that only have the stock striker and scout. Make it set so once you get 5-6 enemy players with at least 1 mastered ship and/or 3+ ships available bolster kicks in to make newbies on your team be at less of a disadvantage. It could function where it effectively gives you a field upgrade equivalent to having of the next tier/two tiers of your equipped gear available (capping at unlocking the final tier before you get to the T4/5 branches or T3 branch in the case of engines).

 

Note that bolster would not apply if you brought only 2 ships but at least one was master/nearly mastered and/or one of the two was a fleet req/CM equivalent ship. This would be done to prevent people from intentionally entering with only two ships in an attempt to get their mastered ship bolstered.

 

They might still be at a disadvantage to a fully mastered ship kitted out to fit the pilot's playstyle but it would significantly decrease any real or perceived advantage upgraded components provide.

[Vialator]

"Something needs to be done to give new players an opportunity to learn, right now they join, get shot down 20 times and never come back." - Original Poster.

 

This is what I feel- I ressubbed the game to try this GSF out this month- after about a week of trying and having this happen over and over and over- regardless of who I asked to play with and such.... I have just not bothered to log back into the game...I cancelled my subscription again and doubt I will ever come back....

Not worth it tbh anymore...they treat people like cash cows with their cashshop and dont seem to care about anything else...... the horrendous lag as well!

I have a High end PC( which I recently upgraded for Star Citizen which is supposed to be the new benchmark for pc gaming ) ...so wanted a very good PC and I got a uncapped High end broadband line as well!

So the lag in raids is horrendous and not my machine and can only think its the game itself....they seem to be milking the players and thats all they seem to think about ££$$$$$ - I blame EA- they notorious for doing this to gamers!

[Yndras]

"Something needs to be done to give new players an opportunity to learn, right now they join, get shot down 20 times and never come back." - Original Poster.

 

This is what I feel- I ressubbed the game to try this GSF out this month- after about a week of trying and having this happen over and over and over- regardless of who I asked to play with and such.... I have just not bothered to log back into the game...I cancelled my subscription again and doubt I will ever come back....

Not worth it tbh anymore...they treat people like cash cows with their cashshop and dont seem to care about anything else...... the horrendous lag as well!

I have a High end PC( which I recently upgraded for Star Citizen which is supposed to be the new benchmark for pc gaming ) ...so wanted a very good PC and I got a uncapped High end broadband line as well!

So the lag in raids is horrendous and not my machine and can only think its the game itself....they seem to be milking the players and thats all they seem to think about ££$$$$$ - I blame EA- they notorious for doing this to gamers!

 

If you have anything other that an i5 the game can run badly. I upgraded my processor and found a huge difference. Went from an AMD Athlon fx to a i5. Never had a problem with any lag, and dodnt touch anything else.

 

A solid state disk helps with the load times too if they bug you.

Edited March 7, 2014 by Yndras

[QuinMantha]

Something needs to be done to give new players an opportunity to learn, right now they join, get shot down 20 times and never come back.

 

Well, as a player, I try to do my part and not shoot someone I see with two ships trying to shoot at me from six klicks off a whole twenty times.

 

Maybe five.

 

Then again, Ebon Hawk is a different kind of server. Our vets treat our newbies, for the most part, with kid gloves and something vaguely approaching respect (but resembling pity). I don't know how it is on whatever server you're flying on, but on Ebon Hawk, I like to think we old hands are trying to get it right.

[Verain]

This is a pretty wild thread already. I think if a dev started to read the thread, they are done with it by now.

 

 

But OP has a VERY good point- we need cross server GSF pretty damned bad. Without the ability to do this, we have 10 to 30 minute queues much of the time. We also run into a thing where you see the same people again and again. For instance, if I queue with my group, we'll get a bunch of nubs, nom them up, and then... queue into the same nubs. What are the nubs supposed to do? They shouldn't see the exact same premade every game, just because we are playing at the same time. A lot of threads have terrible ideas about this, but the root of the cause is the lack of cross server GSF.

 

It's a hard sell, of course- they obviously don't have the capability, or they'd have cross server arenas and cross server warzones. But for GSF it is very very important.

[Armonddd]

Then again, Ebon Hawk is a different kind of server. Our vets treat our newbies, for the most part, with kid gloves and something vaguely approaching respect (but resembling pity). I don't know how it is on whatever server you're flying on, but on Ebon Hawk, I like to think we old hands are trying to get it right.

 

Shuffles feet

 

Kicks dirt

 

I... help people if they ask after my 20+ kills games. That's what you're talking about, right?

Edited March 7, 2014 by Armonddd

[Mallorik]

Cross server ques are a very good idea but it wont save GSF. People aren't playing and ques are getting longer for a few reasons, fix them and gsf will be saved.

 

Who would have thought that a flight game tailor made for people who don't play flight games wouldn't be a smash hit?

[DanNV]

They need to fix the gear issues. As it stands, new players don't stand a chance. I have one character with pretty well modded ships and playing him is fun. Playing new ones is terrible. Against modded ships unmodded ones don't do well at all. I'v ebeen saying this would be and then is an issue since PTS testing and BW doesn't seem to get it. However, I expect that's a lot of the problem with queue times. People try it, get plastered a few times and quit like any sane person.

[zaskar]

... Stuff that has nothing to do with population / queues ...

 

There are plenty of other threads for all of that, go post in them. This is specific to not having enough players to play.

 

The sole reason why I made this thread, is to address a very important problem without tackling other issues that seem to be easy fixes but we guess, are not. Like a good tutorial or a way to practice without dragging down teams in "live" games.

 

... Stuff about what this thread is about ...

 

Anyone that says their queue lengths are fine must only play during prime time. I have played on five of eight servers in North America and saw the same players over and over. This is antidotal, yes, however I did collect data over a couple of weeks not just a cursory look and see.

 

A regional queue would give BioWare the time to continue to add needed features and content making this, a very good start, into something spectacular.

[Danylia]

I 100% agree with the OP that regional cross-server is the single best thing that could happen to GSF. Because

if I queue with my group, we'll get a bunch of nubs, nom them up, and then... queue into the same nubs. What are the nubs supposed to do? They shouldn't see the exact same premade every game, just because we are playing at the same time.

 

All the tweaks and adjustments the developers make for ships and components are fine and appreciated, but ultimately only aimed at the veteran core. The newbie or casual does not care that Barrel Roll cooldown is 10 seconds longer or that Tier 2 Strike Fighter got an anti-bomber missile, they just want to play (and learn). When facing opposition which three caps in the first 30 seconds of Domination, or creates an impenetrable cluster of Bombers, Gunships and Tier 2 Scouts near their spawnpoint in Deathmatch, they get neither. Matchmaking really is the biggest problem (and for the record 4 veterans and 4 newbies on one side versus the same on the other side is not a solution; such match probably won't be a faceroll, but the newbies won't get much play, either).

[Verain]

I don't even care if noobs get faced a lot. My problem is when they know they are gonna get faced when they press that button. Because... why press it? Matchmaking cross server would kind of solve it, but all I really care about is the cross server part. You'd just see so much more diversity.

[Toraak]

They need to fix the gear issues. As it stands, new players don't stand a chance. I have one character with pretty well modded ships and playing him is fun. Playing new ones is terrible. Against modded ships unmodded ones don't do well at all. I'v ebeen saying this would be and then is an issue since PTS testing and BW doesn't seem to get it. However, I expect that's a lot of the problem with queue times. People try it, get plastered a few times and quit like any sane person.

 

I honestly think your completely wrong. you can do just as well in a totally unupgraded ship as you can in one that is fully upgraded. I can consistently get 8-10 kills 20-30k damage in a bran new ship. The big difference for new players is they haven't had time to learn how to play yet. GSF has a fairly large learning curve that those of us that have played for awhile picked up on.

[MystbladeWA]

While everything most people have said about x-server queues is correct, why do we keep discussing it as a concept with any hope?

 

I mean its self defeating.

 

It. Is. Never. Going. To. Happen.

 

Even before the game nearly went **** up, and they decided to go F2P they said to us that it wasnt possible to implement with the game structure.

 

They are hardly about to make massive structural changes to a game which is already making them squillions for them by simply selling lottery boxes to the crackheads who spend their entire weeks wage on them everytime a new pack comes out.

[TheOldDruid]

I honestly think your completely wrong. you can do just as well in a totally unupgraded ship as you can in one that is fully upgraded. I can consistently get 8-10 kills 20-30k damage in a bran new ship. The big difference for new players is they haven't had time to learn how to play yet. GSF has a fairly large learning curve that those of us that have played for awhile picked up on.

Dude, you may believe the BS that you wrote. But face me in an new ship and see what happens.. The new players are deff under the gun, and the match making dose not help them one bit. don't believe me.. come to pot5, challenge bwulf/octi ill show you how good you are in a new ship, and post it to utube..

[mattycutts]

i hear alot of these cry outs on forums about gsf dieing, long queue times etc.

 

BUT

 

as far as some EU servers go there doesnt seem to any problems, signs of it dieing.

 

Ive always been a keen supporter of pvp ground and now space pvp. GSF pop times on red eclipse are far faster than ground pvp pops ever was. ive played in off peak times as well as peak times and queue times majority of time i struggle getting one lap on fleet done b4 another pop.

 

And its not the same 16 or 24 queuing. majority of games u may see 1 or 2 names that are familar but more often than not its names ive either never seen or not seen for a while.

 

Ive heard on the other english server PVP queue times are fast also.

 

If it was already dieing i dont think bioware would throw money into it, more maps, more ships, more classes etc and fairly consistant, why is this? because its a good money maker and if it was dieing they would just cut there losses and barely add anything just let it sink.

 

It wont flop, it wont die for a long long time. yes many dont like GSF, and theres many that love it just like ground pvp or raiding or hm's etc.

[Brewski]

As a long time supporter and defender of GSF, I have to add that I am getting concerned as well. The biggest problem we have is matchmaking. Every match I've played in the last week has been a complete faceroll one way or the other. Either I'm teamed up with one or two vets and the rest new pilots against an enemy team of all vets and we get destroyed, or it's the other way around and I'm on the team that wins 1000-1 or 50-2. Neither situation is at all fun, and I've actually found myself playing less and less.

 

There's a lot of whinging on the forums here about balance issues, but I think that's less of a problem. The problem is not Gunsihps/Bombers/Type 2 Scouts. It's pitting a team of players who have those ships and know how to fly them against mostly noobs who can barely avoid crashing into the capital ship at spawn.

 

Maybe cross server would help by increasing the population, but long term the real problem is ensuring you put mostly equal teams against each other. If they solve that, everything else is in reach.

 

And it would be nice if we could hear from someone on the Bioware side that they know and acknowledge the issue. Just knowing it's being worked on would be a strong motivator for a lot of us.

[Itkovian]

Well, as a player, I try to do my part and not shoot someone I see with two ships trying to shoot at me from six klicks off a whole twenty times.

 

Maybe five.

 

Then again, Ebon Hawk is a different kind of server. Our vets treat our newbies, for the most part, with kid gloves and something vaguely approaching respect (but resembling pity). I don't know how it is on whatever server you're flying on, but on Ebon Hawk, I like to think we old hands are trying to get it right.

 

::Stops painting himself with the blood of his enemies. Coughs.::

 

We certainly do have a rather good community, though I will say that newbie massacres still happen, from both sides.

 

That said, I think the very premise of this thread is very flawed. That sort of alarmism is entirely baseless. People have been saying "do X before Y happens" forever on these forums, and ultimately nobody has any data that Y is going to happen, or that X would help.

 

God knows I'm seeing a very healthy player base on Ebon Hawk, with better queue times on average than I've seen for level 55 PvP at comparable times.

 

In any case, to be raising alarms and warnings of impending doom - however popular it is to do so on gaming forums - is entirely premature.

[Armonddd]

Dude, you may believe the BS that you wrote. But face me in an new ship and see what happens.. The new players are deff under the gun, and the match making dose not help them one bit. don't believe me.. come to pot5, challenge bwulf/octi ill show you how good you are in a new ship, and post it to utube..

 

Stock ships do well with good pilots.

 

Notice I dinged level 2 in that match. You can't play a GSF match without gaining enough exp to get to level 2, it's simply impossible. Thus, I had zero shp req and zero fleet req before entering that match. And 46% accuracy doesn't come from gear, anyway.

[Itkovian]

Stock ships do well with good pilots.

 

Notice I dinged level 2 in that match. You can't play a GSF match without gaining enough exp to get to level 2, it's simply impossible. Thus, I had zero shp req and zero fleet req before entering that match. And 46% accuracy doesn't come from gear, anyway.

 

Yeah well, you were clearly abusing the shield to engine component. Bloody min-maxer.

[Armonddd]

Yeah well, you were clearly abusing the shield to engine component. Bloody min-maxer.

 

Clearly I am the most gimmicky.

[RatPoison]

Well I think the best solution would be to take the "bolstered" mechanic from the Tactical Flashpoints and apply it to players that only have the stock striker and scout.

 

This suggestion and any similar over trying to somehow give fresh players better ships/advantages/pseudo-upgrades, etc is a fool's ploy. When a fresh player blasts out 500+ shots and connects only 5 times in a domination match for a whopping 1% accuracy... giving them a better ship isn't going to improve their situation.

 

As simple as GSF is, it is simply a game of skill. Those that play it, learn it, practice it... will tend to be superior regardless. This has been uttered time and time again.

 

The only thing you can do to spare fresh players from getting hammered is to give them a safe haven and unfortunately the byproduct of splitting the potential players up is longer que times for all. Whether you try to install some form of match making based on total requisition earned for said character or splitting the population into different groupings for ques... the wait will be longer.

 

...

 

Besides, people who give up after getting their butt kicked likely won't have stuck around regardless. If I get my butt handed to me, I tend to research, question my actions, rethink a strategy and find ways to control the situation to give myself the opportunity to adjust and learn. I find the newbies that get farmed haven't put any thought into what they are doing and are simply riding off into a swarm of enemies to get pummeled. There's no helping that. If a person can't come to terms that flying alone into a cluster of enemies is stupid (as a newbie) then oh well.

 

My one and only suggestion for GSF is to improve and expand upon its tutorial. To give or even force a new player to learn how to target, to provide an explanation of the controls, and to point out some of the beneficial keys already bound. I would like said tutorials to feature moving targets that move on a set pattern so that players can experiment with passing shots, getting in behind their target, and see how the firing arc and accuracy penalty works in tandem with flying in a manner that centers your enemy on your screen.

 

...

 

Additionally, in comment to decreased que pops... I've noticed a fair number of veteran pilots from JC at least have been missing. The issue isn't always one of new players, but is also of older players losing interest due to any number of reasons. While I won't clamor and demand more GSF as this is just a side game within SWTOR... it is a point worth noting that short of a new game mode people are bound to lose interest as the matches become homogenized.