Time to stop complaining and start fixing, pilots.

[Sidenti]

I'm sick to death of hearing what everyone DOESN'T want. That doesn't tell anyone anything.

 

Do you think GSF is "broken" somehow? Awesome! What's your beef and - most importantly - what the hell is your solution to it? (Read: REAL solutions, people.)

 

Don't get me wrong. I think the random butthurt is fantastically entertaining. But it's also getting stale. I think I'm just gonna start making fun of random complainers who offer no solutions along with their whine.

 

Did this offend you? Not my problem. Tell me how you plan to solve your problem. Or don't. Whatever. I'm not here to tell ya what to do.

 

Just react to it. -bp

[Kuciwalker]

I have like 15 posts describing exactly how to fix the armor/pen meta, and several on how to fix the bomber/strike meta. There's not much left to do except complain. Edited May 9, 2014 by Kuciwalker

[mr_sim]

I have like 15 posts describing exactly how to fix the armor/pen meta, and several on how to fix the bomber/strike meta. There's not much left to do except complain.

 

Which bomber/strike meta?

[Slivovidze]

You are probably reading different forums than me. Most people complaining here actually provide their view and solutions. The ones who don't are one-time psoters and they probably don't even read their own post ever again, not to mention other threads.

[General_Brass]

I'm sick to death of hearing what everyone DOESN'T want. That doesn't tell anyone anything.

 

Do you think GSF is "broken" somehow? Awesome! What's your beef and - most importantly - what the hell is your solution to it? (Read: REAL solutions, people.)

 

Don't get me wrong. I think the random butthurt is fantastically entertaining. But it's also getting stale. I think I'm just gonna start making fun of random complainers who offer no solutions along with their whine.

 

Did this offend you? Not my problem. Tell me how you plan to solve your problem. Or don't. Whatever. I'm not here to tell ya what to do.

 

Just react to it. -bp

 

 

Oh I know we can put on a show

 

We can use Armonds barn, and Verrain can sew the curtains, and if we all think real happy thoughts a magical unicorn will appear and shoot rainbows out it's backside.

 

P.S. You are correct, people being offended by you probably isn't your problem.

Edited May 9, 2014 by General_Brass

[Sidenti]

I have like 15 posts describing exactly how to fix the armor/pen meta, and several on how to fix the bomber/strike meta. There's not much left to do except complain.

 

All right! Let's start there. If there's 22 posts, though, could you pick out a few of the best ones and show 'em here? I'm game. -bp

[TrinityLyre]

We can use Armonds barn, and Verrain can sew the curtains, and if we all think real happy thoughts a magical unicorn will appear and shoot rainbows out it's backside.

 

This sounds awesome!

 

All right! Let's start there. If there's 22 posts, though, could you pick out a few of the best ones and show 'em here? I'm game. -bp

So am I. I'd rather read solutions (no matter how stupid/silly/thought-out) over "wahh bombers wahhhhhhhh omg premades wahhh." It's more constructive and useful to the developers, I'm sure. So let's start by getting the obvious one in: cross-server.

[Nomaad]

I would love to strap in more often, but most times I'm still sitting in the queue, like right now, still in queue for an hour, which is my only complaint, the wait times are way too long.

[Sidenti]

This sounds awesome!

 

 

So am I. I'd rather read solutions (no matter how stupid/silly/thought-out) over "wahh bombers wahhhhhhhh omg premades wahhh." It's more constructive and useful to the developers, I'm sure. So let's start by getting the obvious one in: cross-server.

 

I don't think we'll get full-on cross-server - certainly not in the short term. For one, I don't think Bioware has the resources to make an acceptably smooth cross-server PvP experience for a global community.

 

What about regional cross-server? Or, barring that, promotions to raise individual servers' GSF participant pools?

[Sidenti]

I would love to strap in more often, but most times I'm still sitting in the queue, like right now, still in queue for an hour, which is my only complaint, the wait times are way too long.

 

Try queuing on an alt and see what happens. For some odd reason, I can't get the pops on Sid that I get on Nîne.

[Nemarus]

Between myself, Anastsie, Verain, Kuciwalker and others, there have been a variety of suggestions--all with pros and cons that have been exhaustively discussed here.

 

And that exhaustive discussion has left me exhausted.

 

At this point, the devs have read it all multiple times now, and they are the only ones that matter. They either agree with one or more of us and have committed internally to making fixes and changes (in 2.8 or beyond), or they indeed think no changes need to be made.

 

My guess is they are going to wait and see how the new 2.8 ships affect the various metas and then see if we re-complain. But until we've played on the new bits, I doubt they are going to make any significant changes.

 

As for ship balance, I think there are several related issues that could all use tweaking, either directly or indirectly through other changes:

* Weak-in-slot components (Rapids, Plasma Railgun , Ion Missile, Ion Mine, Concussion Mine, EMP Missile, etc.)

* Best-in-slot ("choose these or you're dumb") components (BLC's, Seismic Mines, Interdiction Mines, Distortion Field)

* Limited justification to fly certain variants in competitive play (T2 Gunship, T3 Scout, T1 and T2 Strikes)

 

That being said, the above issues are rarely so prominent as to override the biggest issue: matchmaking. The biggest problem threatening the game is not one of ship balance, but skill balance (which many often misinterpret as ship imbalance). The vast majority of matches are determined the moment the teams are created. The only viable solution to this is cross-server queuing. The devs have stated many times they are aware of how badly this is wanted, but maintain it is not something they can do. I hope they are still investigating and trying to find a way to do it, because it would save many aspects of this game beyond just GSF.

[Mathemagica]

What about regional cross-server? Or, barring that, promotions to raise individual servers' GSF participant pools?

 

I had some thoughts about this in the last few months. I don't see them introducing any form of cross-server anytime soon. They will certainly observe the effects of the double req phase and the other GSF promotions on the GSF-population. I doubt that they will take any action before that and even if they decide to do cross-server after that, it would take a while to make it reality.

 

Given the things that are on the roadmap linked above, it seems that they want to increase the GSF-population with 2.8 and we have to wait for it. This is kind of a non-suggestion, but given the solid GSF-population on my server, that's exactly what I'm going to do.

 

Sideremark: I don't really see any significant issues in GSF, so I can't really contribute to this discussion any more. (I might find some, once I finally decide to play my Strike more often)

Edited May 9, 2014 by Mathemagica

[Altheran]

Now that you mention ideas, I'm working on a proposition about Cannons rework.

 

However, to make things easier at displaying and so that devs can play a bit with numbers internally (and because writing it on forum format would be a real pain), I'd like to publish it in excel format.

 

So I'm looking for a platform that would allow me to publish a public viewable version but unmodifiable (so that random A-holes don't ruin it) and at the same time, a download link of the original file.

I've thought of Google docs but I'm not sure it would allow both "read-only" preview and a restriction-free downloadable file... I am under the impression it's a pure cloud work platform, unallowing the kind of protection I'm looking for. But that's just a first look impression, I've never used it, so I may be wrong.

So, can anyone give me advice about where you'd publish such a file ?

Edited May 9, 2014 by Altheran

[BattleDress]

No idea if this has been suggested but here is my 2-cents:

 

Why can't matchmaking identify mastered ships in your personal line-up? And match it with other mastered ships? It would make q's that much longer, but at least it would put vets with vets and new pilots with new pilots. Even if you are a vet on a new toon with new ships or a vet with your un-mastered ships in your line-up it would still give the new pilots a chance.

 

When i fly on my shadow tank (Båttledress), i have 4x mastered ships in my line-up. When i see the other team's line-up and all i see is 2-ship line-ups i die a bit inside cause i know its gonna be a "turkey-shoot". Not much of a challenge in those situations and i cannot become a better pilot that way, it's just too easy.

 

edit: As you can read, my beef is with match-making. Everything else is fine in my opinion.

Edited May 9, 2014 by BattleDress

[Verain]

No idea if this has been suggested but here is my 2-cents:

 

Why can't matchmaking identify mastered ships in your personal line-up? And match it with other mastered ships? It would make q's that much longer, but at least it would put vets with vets and new pilots with new pilots.

 

This has been suggested ad nauseam, and sure enough, the game DOES try to matchmake- but it probably values speed over the other things.

 

The problem here is that you are suggesting a trap.

 

'People who play this game shouldn't be allowed to play this game. They should sit in queue while foodships bump uglies, wallowing on fleet, or not be able to put their good ships on their bar. Ha! That'll show those guys with full mastered ships that they have to reroll if they ever want pops!'

 

 

That's crap.

[Gavin_Kelvar]

No idea if this has been suggested but here is my 2-cents:

 

Why can't matchmaking identify mastered ships in your personal line-up? And match it with other mastered ships? It would make q's that much longer, but at least it would put vets with vets and new pilots with new pilots. Even if you are a vet on a new toon with new ships or a vet with your un-mastered ships in your line-up it would still give the new pilots a chance.

 

When i fly on my shadow tank (Båttledress), i have 4x mastered ships in my line-up. When i see the other team's line-up and all i see is 2-ship line-ups i die a bit inside cause i know its gonna be a "turkey-shoot". Not much of a challenge in those situations and i cannot become a better pilot that way, it's just too easy.

 

edit: As you can read, my beef is with match-making. Everything else is fine in my opinion.

 

I'd just like it if it would properly balance so it stops stacking 2 shippers against a team of vets. I get that in faction vs. faction that's a little harder to do but there's really no excuse for wargames to have a team of vets pitted against a team of newbies.

 

I dunno how it weighs groups vs solo ques but maybe giving them equal priority would help? Its my understanding that groups get faster ques so maybe that screws with the equation so that it checks "quing as group? Y/N" before checking ship mastery level? (I've never asked the two shippers whether they solo qued or qued as a group of newbie friends wanting to try GSF out). At least in theory if matchmaking was only concerned with checking ship mastery level it might lead to more balanced matches rather than being concerned with giving groups the shortest que time with the potential cost being that assembling the most balanced teams gets lower priority.

[Verain]

Well, it should definitely give group queues priority- otherwise it would probably have a harder time letting friends play together.

 

The issue is this: the queues prioritize speed just a bit much, such that matchmaking when there's plenty of people on still mostly doesn't work. If 8 food pubs are getting eaten by 4 imp aces, you can simultaneously have 8 food imps getting eaten by 4 pub aces, and getting those two to get matched up is super hard- sometimes it will fail even if you simulqueue.

 

 

 

The real problem with this thread is that it is "suggest a bunch of contradictory and condescending stuff to the devs". It kind of insults their intelligence- I'd suspect that the devs have gone through and not chosen several ideas. Some of the ideas is blatant crap- like "vets should never get pops" or "bombers should have no role" or "anything that hurts my battlescout is bad design".

 

Is it bad that bombers are so strong on Domination? I'm not even sure about that. Some of these guys are probably on chess forums complaining that the queen needs to be nerfed, and that the knight is only helpful to master level players, and it needs to be more noob friendly. I do think that they should have a bit more stuff to help peel them off the node, and I think that the design decision they made about charged plating is damned strange.

 

 

But a lot of the posts are like "ok, lemme redesign the game totally here, and here's why..." and then carries on like that's the only possible way to do things.

 

 

The players don't agree, and when they do, the devs may not.

 

 

 

Note that we are getting a pretty big change to mines- the EMP field is going up from 3k range to 4.5k range. This sounds minor, but it's HUGE- it's like 3.4 times the area, and more importantly, if you target a low mine and get within 3.5 of it and trigger, you'll probably pop it, the high mine, hit the bomber, and not have to worry about being in explosion range. EMP is almost worthless against mines now, but it was meant to be good. Now it actually might be. This alone might change some things.

 

Meanwhile, I think charged plating should be less binary in general, as do many around here- but it's a pretty clear design decision by Bioware, and not inherently bad or anything.

Edited May 9, 2014 by Verain

[Gavin_Kelvar]

Well, it should definitely give group queues priority- otherwise it would probably have a harder time letting friends play together.

 

The issue is this: the queues prioritize speed just a bit much, such that matchmaking when there's plenty of people on still mostly doesn't work. If 8 food pubs are getting eaten by 4 imp aces, you can simultaneously have 8 food imps getting eaten by 4 pub aces, and getting those two to get matched up is super hard- sometimes it will fail even if you simulqueue.

 

This second bit was largely what I was thinking about in suggesting giving solos and groups equal que priority. You might end up with slightly longer que times than we used to but I think it'd overall be healthier (since really a team of vets steamrolling newbies just increases the odds of the newbies never quing again and thus creating longer que times due to diminished player pool).

 

I'm not really sure that giving solos equal que priority to groups would mean friends would have a harder time playing together. I can see though that in extreme cases where a group of vets might be the only vets in the que could lead to their que taking forever. So perhaps the solution would be to make group que priority weighed according to the mastery level of the overall que population (for example during peak when presumably you'd have vets both group and solo queing group que is equal or near equal to solo que but during off hours when the majority of people queing may be newbies groups get a bump in priority)

[General_Brass]

"Friends playing together" = codespeak for "we gather above average pilots together in a group and let the laws of probability take care of the rest"

[Verain]

"Friends playing together" = codespeak for "we gather above average pilots together in a group and let the laws of probability take care of the rest"

 

Whoa, you mean good players might try to win?

 

I am aghast sir.

 

Aghast!

[Sidenti]

I had some thoughts about this in the last few months. I don't see them introducing any form of cross-server anytime soon. They will certainly observe the effects of the double req phase and the other GSF promotions on the GSF-population. I doubt that they will take any action before that and even if they decide to do cross-server after that, it would take a while to make it reality.

 

Given the things that are on the roadmap linked above, it seems that they want to increase the GSF-population with 2.8 and we have to wait for it. This is kind of a non-suggestion, but given the solid GSF-population on my server, that's exactly what I'm going to do.

 

Sideremark: I don't really see any significant issues in GSF, so I can't really contribute to this discussion any more. (I might find some, once I finally decide to play my Strike more often)

 

The waiting is always the hardest part, but it's a solid point. Solid points all around, actually.

 

Guess we'll wait and see.

[Pilgrim_Grey]

"Friends playing together" = codespeak for "we gather above average pilots together in a group and let the laws of probability take care of the rest"

 

Darn them MMO players trying to group up! How dare they! This is a singleplayer game only!

[Sidenti]

Darn them MMO players trying to group up! How dare they! This is a singleplayer game only!

 

What?! Multiplayer on a multiplayer game?!?