Writting the obituary for GSF

[philwil]

As we speak..bomber spam after bomber spam.....serious IMP domination over Pubs on Harbinger is going to kill it.

 

Keep it up fuzz balls.

 

You wanted more people to play. They are for CSX. For a time or two...

 

Many of the same comments come out of people playing it for the first time..or again for quite some time.

 

They are not impressed.

 

So..keep it up.

 

I dont give a rats patootie if you are doing it for CSX, you are flying 'with friends', what ever it may be.

 

It may be funny to you...but you drive people away.

 

3 things piss me off, and I always comment on it. Even in GSF chat.

 

1. Spawn camping noobs in TDM, by supposedly 'ace' pilots.

 

2. 3 capping noobs with bomber spam..by supposedly 'ace' pilots.

 

3. Multiple aces (friends) teaming up on one side for hours, not a care in the world about switching sides to 'share the wealth'. While th opposing sides loses match after match. Generally..with the team of aces..other aces show up..so..near a full 12 man ace team against constant noobs or near noobs.

 

I am not angry for me. I am angry..because of the mixed messages you send by doing this bull.

 

'We want new pilots!'

 

at the same time

 

F you noobs. Sorry. We are all powerful.

 

Have a good time. Your days are numbered.

[zaskar]

I fly T0 and/or 100% stock ships 95% of the time. We've all tried to educate, myself and many others have spent 100s of hours building resources that not a soul used or cared about. This is all on bioware for abandoning the minigame.

 

So, totally wasted effort, man. Bigly wasted effort. It was the best effort in the world but totally wasted.

[Toraak]

I know for myself at least, I haven't been flying at all tonight, and when I did log on read your post, and went to do Ground PvP for CXP instead. No clue what aces you've been flying against tonight. When I do fly against noobs (unless the bomber spam me) I try to fly non meta to help out the noobs.

[Lendul]

I fly T0 and/or 100% stock ships 95% of the time. We've all tried to educate, myself and many others have spent 100s of hours building resources that not a soul used or cared about. This is all on bioware for abandoning the minigame.

 

So, totally wasted effort, man. Bigly wasted effort. It was the best effort in the world but totally wasted.

 

You are missing the point. This is not about education or what ship is being flown or it's upgrades. It is about making people's experience so miserable they choose not to play anymore. The problem is not what they are flying. It is how they are flying. Bioware abandoned the minigame after we the players ran too many people off. They promoted GSF more than they did either of the Eternal expansions.

[DakhathKilrathi]

You are missing the point. This is not about education or what ship is being flown or it's upgrades. It is about making people's experience so miserable they choose not to play anymore. The problem is not what they are flying. It is how they are flying. Bioware abandoned the minigame after we the players ran too many people off. They promoted GSF more than they did either of the Eternal expansions.

 

This is what happened after the top tier aces quit playing. Wasn't it supposed to turn into sunshine and rainbows after that "swarm of locusts" quit playing there?

[philwil]

You are missing the point. This is not about education or what ship is being flown or it's upgrades. It is about making people's experience so miserable they choose not to play anymore. The problem is not what they are flying. It is how they are flying. Bioware abandoned the minigame after we the players ran too many people off. They promoted GSF more than they did either of the Eternal expansions.

 

Thank you for understanding. I feel like I am flapping in the wind out here. I am glad I am not the only one.

 

I love, Love, LOVE GSF.

 

The only time I say ANYTHING in chat for the most part is when these instances occur.

 

I dont complain about GS walls, losing, etc. In fact, when I last spouted off about this stuff..I had lost most of the day on pub side. Until..we were almost winning and the imps bomber spammed to win the match.

 

I am jolly as one can get, but my buns get burnin when this goes down.

 

I have been told 'Everyone knows you are a basket case!'

 

I have even went so far as to leave matches where my team was bomber spamming and the like.

 

But, I never realized til the other day. I was imp side..pubs bomber spammed us. I was getting ready to cross sides, but I stayed imp because i hate bomber spam.

 

After another couple matches, I go over and asked why. They said, several of them, what else do we have to lose? A game? Like we have for quite some time?

 

So, there is despair...and people arent picking up on it.

 

A couple of new people said, this was our first experience. (doing the intro quest) .and frankly they were not impressed with GSF. of course, they were just bomber spammed to death.

 

This isn't just some thing to tell them to 'get over'. Because they wont, because they wont be back.

 

We have a golden opportunity to grow the community with this CSX deal. If we do it right.

 

Some guy was actually saying 'win or lose..i still get good CSX', lol. So..there is that......

[caederon]

Bioware abandoned the minigame after we the players ran too many people off..

They abandoned GSF at the height of its popularity! Nobody was being run off. There were matches three deep concurrently even on backwaters like BC. People were happily theorizing on what stealth ships would be like for months after they had internally pulled the plug (which was just after the release of the T3 ships). Their decision to ditch funding a dev team had nothing to do with anyone being 'run off.' What kind of idiotic company would decide whether to continue developing a game based on player behavior when they have in their power an endless amount of tools to regulate that behavior? Please employ reality-based arguments.

 

- Despon

[DakhathKilrathi]

3. Multiple aces (friends) teaming up on one side for hours, not a care in the world about switching sides to 'share the wealth'. While th opposing sides loses match after match. Generally..with the team of aces..other aces show up..so..near a full 12 man ace team against constant noobs or near noobs.

 

There aren't 12 aces playing on Harbinger anymore. Not regularly. Certainly not all at the same time.

 

People will probably get upset with me for saying so, but none of the people who I'd consider aces still play there, and those who do are primarily solo/small group players anyway. What's happening is that a group of solid players is coordinating and the randoms can't handle it. I'm not going to hold that against people who want to play with friends, and you shouldn't either.

[Lavaar]

There aren't 12 aces playing on Harbinger anymore. Not regularly. Certainly not all at the same time.

 

People will probably get upset with me for saying so, but none of the people who I'd consider aces still play there, and those who do are primarily solo/small group players anyway. What's happening is that a group of solid players is coordinating and the randoms can't handle it. I'm not going to hold that against people who want to play with friends, and you shouldn't either.

 

Seconded.

 

Harbinger is a wasteland of abusive behavior which has actually driven the players who are ace pilots away, leaving players who are veterans at best to run amok without any checks and balances to stop them from rigging the game in their favor.

 

Apparently we were the big bad wolf ruining the game when we flew there and I heard plenty of whining about it. It warms my heart to see the same complaints after we left you guys to your own devices.

 

Let it burn as far as I'm concerned. Not my problem. The Shadowlands is better than ever.

[zaskar]

So, what you're saying is, if you have any skill at all, don't play because it's not fair to new players. OK. gottcha. Will make sure that happens, stat.

[philwil]

So, what you're saying is, if you have any skill at all, don't play because it's not fair to new players. OK. gottcha. Will make sure that happens, stat.

 

 

Wrong...go to next station please...

[philwil]

There aren't 12 aces playing on Harbinger anymore. Not regularly. Certainly not all at the same time.

 

People will probably get upset with me for saying so, but none of the people who I'd consider aces still play there, and those who do are primarily solo/small group players anyway. What's happening is that a group of solid players is coordinating and the randoms can't handle it. I'm not going to hold that against people who want to play with friends, and you shouldn't either.

 

No...there arent. I didnt say anything of the sort against those flying with friends, etc.

 

Camping on one side for 6 hours racking up the wins, kills is another thing. Switch it up.

 

Those that dont switch fairly often dont give a hoot about gsf health at all.

 

Heck..there was a day I switch after every daily. And I won nearly every time I switched after one game.

 

I am no ace..and neither are the noobs parading out for target practice for the jack lugs to just slaughter, and then never to return.

 

Its not funny bomber spamming those who cant defend against it.

 

Even getting in your 'worst ship' is better than a noobs best ship.

 

We had the opportunity to learn when nobody knew what the heck was going on in gsf.

 

The noobs today step right into the grinder..and we spit them back out.

 

All I am saying is, give them a chance. Don't ion spam them at their spawn point and then slug them all.

 

Over all, it is poor sportsmanship.

 

Let them fly a little..get out..shoot at you.

 

Like i said in a previous post..get out and into a new toon..and go pub side harbinger for a day.

 

You have the skill to know whats going on already. The noob doesnt. You might top the charts for them.

[Maulkat]

I myself have taken a slight sit back and not flying as much as I used to. Last week, I did conquest on two toons, some of which was ground pvp and crafting, the rest was gsf. I flew two or three evenings out of seven and that's been about as much as I usually do anymore. Also, I both solo queue and fly as a group. As always, I reach out to new people, try to avoid bomber spamming and fly on a "noob" friendly when I see noobs on the other side.

[wvwraith]

Here's a little story. I started playing gsf when it came out. Like many people I was excited about it. You know, I was the most terrible pilot out there. I got my rear kicked day in and day out. It took me at least over 30 matches before I got my first kill. There was this pilot called Knickers. He killed me...lots. I'd be around a sat, here comes Knickers. Dead. I'd be after someone, here comes Knickers. Dead. Did I quit? No. Its because of pilots like him that I strived to be a better player. I finally got Knickers one day....and it felt good. I've been spawn camped, focused, kicked around in matches, tons of losses, and frustrated sometimes with teammates in matches, matches where I couldn't hit a broad side of a barn, lag so bad I felt like a standing target, but I hung around. Point being, if someone gives up after a couple of matches, they wasn't that interested in gsf to begin with. I'm no ace and I don't consider myself good either.

[Eli_Porter]

As someone who recently figured out bomber defending in cap point maps, it does feel way too easy. Is there a simple counter new players are missing or is it just hard to counter?

[Greezt]

As someone who recently figured out bomber defending in cap point maps, it does feel way too easy. Is there a simple counter new players are missing or is it just hard to counter?

 

There is a counter to bombers, but generally speaking they're easy to use and hard to counter. Especially when stacked. New players lack both the experience to deal with them, and in many cases the actualy tools (armor pen, ion AoE). It can be tough for experienced players when facing a lot of them too.

 

That being said, bomber who do know know how to do their job (i.e they either circle the node or "tick" in one corner) are easy kills to anyone who understands how to deal with them. It's a mistake to think bombers are the key to easy wins.

[philwil]

There is a counter to bombers, but generally speaking they're easy to use and hard to counter. Especially when stacked. New players lack both the experience to deal with them, and in many cases the actualy tools (armor pen, ion AoE). It can be tough for experienced players when facing a lot of them too.

 

That being said, bomber who do know know how to do their job (i.e they either circle the node or "tick" in one corner) are easy kills to anyone who understands how to deal with them. It's a mistake to think bombers are the key to easy wins.

 

But..they ARE easy wins against said inexperienced players with barely, or no upgrades at all.

 

This is what I speak of. Not against a mass armada of vets. I have seen vets use the easy way by bombing. 'when no one is looking' because all my toons are not known.

 

 

I have moved my known/maxed toons off server to start anew. I do this every so often to remind of the grind it is to level these monsters.

 

Bomber spam has been so prevalent on harbinger..that my new toons..i paid to convert ship req to fleet req and used that to max out my gs's ion to max.

[philwil]

Here's a little story. I started playing gsf when it came out. Like many people I was excited about it. You know, I was the most terrible pilot out there. I got my rear kicked day in and day out. It took me at least over 30 matches before I got my first kill. There was this pilot called Knickers. He killed me...lots. I'd be around a sat, here comes Knickers. Dead. I'd be after someone, here comes Knickers. Dead. Did I quit? No. Its because of pilots like him that I strived to be a better player. I finally got Knickers one day....and it felt good. I've been spawn camped, focused, kicked around in matches, tons of losses, and frustrated sometimes with teammates in matches, matches where I couldn't hit a broad side of a barn, lag so bad I felt like a standing target, but I hung around. Point being, if someone gives up after a couple of matches, they wasn't that interested in gsf to begin with. I'm no ace and I don't consider myself good either.

 

So have I. I have played from the beginning. I have about 50 flyers..most maxed out. I am currently flying 14 new ones on harbinger. And this is the toughest crop I had to raise so far.

 

There was a GS..so happy to see me coming to the sat..because i headed straight for him..and got shot down 10 times. I was bound and determined to try and get the sat. So, yeah....that and bomber spammed, spawn camped, targeted. I have all that and a T-shirt too.

 

It is true..that if they dont have the fortitude to keep playing, maybe they shouldnt. But..say your very first day...wasnt everyone first day. They had the knowledge, the experience and the equipment to make your life a hell in matches. It takes a very long time, losing to max anything out.

 

If I find someone is new to gsf, I group with them, or point them towards someone flying. Best way to bring along someone is to talk shop in group chat with experienced veteran pilots.

[Eli_Porter]

I think it also has to do with the amount of CXP you get as a bomber, since you get medals just for staying on the cap point. And if it's a heavily contested cap point, you can get a lot of kill+assist medals as well.

 

I find myself playing bomber for CXP rather than fun.

Edited December 28, 2016 by Eli_Porter

[Lavaar]

The underlying message of this post:

 

"Bombers are OP and you guys are all jerks for grouping up with them"

 

Nothing wrong with that, but I've heard the exact same thing about gunships, and about scouts as well. I've even heard (a very, very small number of times, by exceptionally delusional individuals) that strike fighters were too powerful.

 

The kicker here is that the strongest team you're ever going to see is a balanced mixture (sans strikes of course). Bombers can be extremely frustrating to deal with, and ticks can indeed be incredibly tough, even for aces, when they are trying to fend off several people at once while trying to get in the right angle to smack the tick properly. Ticking and bomber stacking works against uneven teams quite well, and on Harbinger, uneven teams seem to be the rule, rather than the exception.

 

You have said that switching sides constantly is a a way for the vets to fix things, but I feel from experience that the constant switching is the biggest issue with harbinger and why it has turned into the farming server and a shadow of it's former self. I haven't been there for awhile, but IMO harbinger would do well to have more static players on either faction to retain some semblance of balance, rather than pilots hopping around willy nilly to "get their dailies" or to "balance the que" when 90% of the time they seem to be "coincidentally" matched up with a strong group of players, or manage to gang up on somebody they dislike.

 

I was in voice chat one time with a prominent harbinger group. Someone logged into voice chat, and, without looking at who was in the channel, gleefully reported "Vexx is on pub side alone, should we get him or join him?". This kind of insidious culture is what we are dealing with and it drives both aces as well as new players away. I cannot for the life of me get a good match there.

[Lendul]

They abandoned GSF at the height of its popularity! Nobody was being run off. There were matches three deep concurrently even on backwaters like BC. People were happily theorizing on what stealth ships would be like for months after they had internally pulled the plug (which was just after the release of the T3 ships). Their decision to ditch funding a dev team had nothing to do with anyone being 'run off.' What kind of idiotic company would decide whether to continue developing a game based on player behavior when they have in their power an endless amount of tools to regulate that behavior? Please employ reality-based arguments.

 

- Despon

Bioware abandoned GSF because of what their metrics showed them. Maybe they forgot to look at anecdotal evidence. Which you seem to think is superior. Edited December 28, 2016 by Lendul

[caederon]

Bioware abandoned GSF because of what their metrics showed them. Maybe they forgot to look at anecdotal evidence. Which you seem to think is superior.

No, what I think is superior is 'not making things up.'

 

You claimed:

Bioware abandoned the minigame after we the players ran too many people off.

This is an unambiguous claim, you say 'we the players' were 'running people off' before Bioware abandoned the minigame. Where are your metrics to prove this? Do you have figures relating to player retention? Do you have population tracking data? Have you conducted exit interviews with a wide array of players who have confided in you that they were 'run off?' Please, share this treasure trove of information with us! Drown us in your assiduously collected data.

 

The last significant development to GSF came in SWTOR patch 2.8: Spoils of War on 6/10/2014, where if you care to look at the patch notes, the T3 gunship and T3 bomber were introduced. The T3 strike and scout came in patch 2.7, roughly two months earlier. After that, there was no new content added to GSF.

 

It is now nearly 2017, so roughly two-and-a-half years have elapsed with ZERO new content from Bioware, and only one single foray by their developers into the GSF forum for the ill-fated behemoth strike-fighter recommendations thread, which came roughly one year after the cessation of GSF development. In that post, we learned:

 

We have some ideas of what we want to do with them but because this community is always very impressive with communication and feedback we want to get your thoughts on what you think is the best course of action.

...

Looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts!

 

Note that he did not say "you all have been running players off, and do not deserve our time. If only you had been more virtuous, we would have addressed this long ago..." or anything of the sort. Note the 1009 replies to that thread and the ~53k views. This is not indicative of a population that had been 'run off,' even a year after the final new content to hit GSF was deployed.

 

In 2014, again I remind you two-and-a-half YEARS ago, the GSF population was at its peak. If you want to dismiss that as 'anecdotal' fine, but I am certain many more people would corroborate my anecdotes, since there is really no grounds to claim that there was some mass running-off of players at that point which made Bioware decide to abandon development.

 

Also again, I'll point out that a company developing a game responsibly and intelligently doesn't look at imbalance issues, sternly cross their arms, and say 'our players are abusing the game by playing it within the rules we have given them, and with the tools we have given them. Their insolence must be punished. Time to pull the plug.' If a company acts like that, they are not going to make money. If there is imbalance, they address it with patches, which they had to that point, and make the game better to retain their players.

 

For a game whose obituary has been written and death proclaimed many a time... people are still around playing it. The lights are still on. Despite having no new development for two-and-a-half years, there are still pilots flying around.

 

If anything, GSF is -easier- to learn now because it is static, the successful techniques and strategies are known and catalogued, and all people have to do is seek out the knowledge and practice the skills to succeed.

 

And to the point of this thread, such as there is one, yes... bomber-spamming sucks. Teach people to deal with it. It's a PvP game, and you can't always expect sportsmanship from the participants (and can't even get a consensus of what constitutes good sportsmanship when that is being argued).

 

You might also find that new pilots aren't necessarily facing the same people you are, at least not regularly. I conducted an experiment recently which I'm assembling into a new video series that looks at the new player experience. You might be surprised by the results.

 

- Despon

[Toraak]

Bioware abandoned GSF because of what their metrics showed them. Maybe they forgot to look at anecdotal evidence. Which you seem to think is superior.

 

Oh please, BW doesn't know how to read metrics.

[Greezt]

Oh please, BW doesn't know how to read metrics.

 

They probably do, the question is what are they measuring? GSF was never properly monetized, so that could very well be it.

[Maulkat]

I was recently chatting with a veteran pilot and was given permission by this person to use one of his replies to me. No names are going to be mentioned.

 

"I recently conducted a little experiment on Harb. I made a fresh character named XX, and flew only stock ships for fifty matches. I wanted to see what I could accomplish personally, given the limitations, and also what sort of opposition I would be slotted in against. I was somewhat surprised to find that only one game out of the fifty was a 3-cap Veteran Premade Vs. Nothin But Noobs mess. Coincidentally it was the very first game on that character. Of the other 49, I rarely saw more than one or two vets combined from both sides. XX was in 2 of them on largely unskilled teams, XX was in a number of them, XX once or twice. Otherwise it was consistently people who looked like they were still figuring things out, and not the 'usual suspects' I'd expect to encounter when playing as XX."

 

That's not to say this is what happens to all pilots all the time, but something to think about.

Edited December 28, 2016 by Maulkat
Forgot to include stuff