Rizartha Posted January 5, 2017 Share Posted January 5, 2017 First off, let me say that I am aware that NOTHING I suggest here is going to be easy to do, in fact I would not be surprised if the current GSF system would need to be scrapped and something new built in its place in order to do anything I suggest here. I have also divided things up into sections in hopes that I keep things concise and people can follow along easier. There are three problems I see coming up over and over again on the forums and in chat Steep learning curve Vet players steamrolling less experienced players Matchmaking, or lack thereof While the ideas I have worked out are not perfect, they may help address a good part of these three issues, with that my initial ideas are as follows: Three Tier System - PvP More than just the unranked and ranked leagues in regular pvp these match types will help strain out players into pools that will help encourage them to play more often because they should be able to get enough play in to actually learn how to play. -Bush League This would be like a live fire tutorial system, matches would be limited to 4v4 and restricted to scout and strike fighters that have had less than a certain amount of requisition earned on them. This tier would likely need its own maps designed that are smaller and less cluttered so that players don’t get lost and mission goals that keep matches from turning into hide and go seek games. By making the limit an amount of Requisition earned on a fighter you limit the window that someone could sit back and grief newer, less experienced players. Sure, they could keep rolling up more and more alts but after a while they will run out of character slots or get to a point where rerolling character after character just isn’t worth it to harass people that will eventually move on. -Rookie League For unranked the programing is probably going to be hairpulling for the Devs. Fighters in Unranked would need to have their components capped, likely at the rank just below the rank where you have two options you can choose between. It would be enough for people to get a decent taste of what each component can do while also encouraging them to try out other components without feeling like they are going to be utterly destroyed while they upgrade them and learn what they can do. Limiting the match sizes to 8v8 might be a good idea as well as not allowing ops groups from queuing up to steamroll matches. By capping component upgrade levels on fighters it would level the playing field a bit and if need be you and nerf the lower ranked upgrades and compensate by buffing the higher ranked upgrades so that a fully upgraded fighter would still be as powerful as it currently is. There should be no minimum level for entering this level. -Ace League This is probably going to be a pain to program as well, but ships entering Ranked should have most, if not all, of their components ranked up to just before they start giving you two options at each rank that you have to choose between. All ships would be allowed in Ranked and match sizes can be of any size. This is it, the tier in which everyone should know what they are doing. High skilled players fighting high skilled players with potent fighters. Once they have a fighter fully upgraded they can use fleet requisition to bump another fighter in the same class up to being able to compete in this league. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lendul Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 (edited) This is both insightful and inciteful, good post. Edited January 6, 2017 by Lendul Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
caederon Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 First off, let me say that I am aware that NOTHING I suggest here is going to be easy to do, GSF has not seen any development, at all, in over two years. Even things that are easy to do have not been done. Your ideas are fine, and they are similar to many ideas that have been proposed in the past when it was at least reasonable to hope a dev might look upon the forum. As with the other thread about adding a sandbox practice mode, this stuff is unlikely enough to happen that finding a way to better direct your energy is advisable. There are three problems I see coming up over and over again on the forums and in chat Steep learning curve Yep, the learning curve is steep for most players. There are lots of guides and even a YouTube channel dedicated to helping people overcome that. This sort of material is the best bet for players to become acquainted with the techniques needed to compete in GSF. It would be outstanding to have a training mode/sandbox for people to practice in. The best bet for achieving something like that is assembling a development team and making a non-commercial clone of GSF for people to play in. You'd even find people here willing to donate assets to make such a thing happen. Sure, it's not easy or fast to try something like that, but it's also far from impossible, and has a better chance of manifesting in reality than anything from the erstwhile GSF dev team. Vet players steamrolling less experienced players Matchmaking, or lack thereof A recent experiment I did suggests this is not quite an accurate depiction of the situation. On a populated server like Harb, there are enough people queuing, generally, to have matchmaking work reasonably well. The problem, from a new player's perspective, is that everyone looks like a veteran no matter how good they actually are. Yes, there are times new and low-geared players will get thrown in against tough teams of veterans. More likely, though, is that they are playing against inexperienced players who happen to have progressed their ships a bit farther than they have. On servers that have less population, matchmaking will choose whoever queues up regardless of experience or upgrades, because it wants to at least get a match started. This is a population-size issue and not a game design one. When given enough players, the matchmaker usually (not always) does pretty well. That said... By capping component upgrade levels on fighters it would level the playing field a bit ... Once they have a fighter fully upgraded they can use fleet requisition to bump another fighter in the same class up to being able to compete in this league. Gear gap is a lot less of an issue than it is often made out to be. If you know what is important to upgrade, you can get a ship to a highly competitive state relatively quickly. Mastering a ship is not necessary for it to be competitive. Knowing which upgrades are essential and which can wait makes the path a far faster one to traverse. Experienced pilots can take a pure stock ship and still help their team, because knowledge is the most important weapon you have in GSF. Yes, it is hard to be at a disadvantage. Yes, it requires patience and perseverance to gain the skills you need... but it is entirely possible to compete and excel in GSF if you approach the game the right way. - Despon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eagling Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 There are many reasons for new players to GSF to be discontented, but most Veteran players do their best to be welcoming in an environment that has received no help from Bioware for years. I have yet to see anyone put in a bigger effort to provide a more comprehensive and easily accessible series of guides and examples for new players than Despon and his cohorts are doing now. I haven't been flying for as long as some; I have been flying for longer than others, and I still have a lot I can learn from the videos he puts out. This is not to say Despon is the only player that attempts to help the community; a lot of people do so, both ingame and over various online forums. The only thing that Despon lacks is the viewpoint of a completely new player. As he has stated, experience is far more important than gear, and from what I've seen from his first Stock Ship video, his statistics would probably be better than mine when I'm using fully upgraded ships. Because of his skill and experience, he can do a lot more than a completely new player. But Despon can't do anything about that, what he can do - and is doing, is try to educate players about how to succeed in GSF, and to dispel misconceptions about how much gearing helps. --- I don't agree with the suggestions posted by the OP. Though they have merit, the most important thing in GSF is skill, and unless you're a prodigy right of the bat (even if you are), you get that skill through practice. This suggestion is to divide players by gear, which will lead to bigger problems down the track, because instead of being 'new' to GSF once, there will eventually be multiple tiers where players have to readjust to a new set of circumstances and situations. Disregarding the possibility of vets rolling new toons to troll new players, what the OP's suggestion would do is segregate GSF into tiers that would exacerbate the skill difference that is already a problem. As sad at is to say, we are not likely to get any support from Bioware, and the best thing that new players can do is persevere. New players will die a lot. New players will feel useless at times. New players will, at times, run into opposition that completely roflstomps them. New players will have to deal with their own teammates lambasting them for losing the match, and sometimes those teammates will be right. But this baptism of fire will weed out the weak and forge those that than endure into a good pilot. I know all this to be true because I went through it, I still go through it, and I will doubtlessly continue to go through this as long as I fly. I don't think that artificially separating an already small portion of the game will do anything but harm in the long run. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rizartha Posted January 6, 2017 Author Share Posted January 6, 2017 I want to clear up a few things that seem like misconceptions that I have spotted a few times so far. First off, I'm not new to GSF. I didn't want to add my personal experience to this thread because it always seems that threads that do either come across as whining or bragging. ("Oh I can top score with a stock fighter because I've got thousands of matches under my belt. GitGud, L2P, scrub noobs! Ban whiners Bioware" or "People keep blowing me up and won't let me play, nerf and ban them Bioware!" for extream examples) When it first came out I was playing several matches a day and was becoming the person that the members of my guild would ask for tips and advice on playing until my health went to pot and I stopped playing because of it. It has only been recently, maybe 6 months, that I have been well enough to try playing GSF again. Second gear does matter because it is indicative to experience with both GSF in general and a particular fighter specifically. If you have a maxed out fighter or more, it means you have played possibly hundreds of matches getting the requisition needed to do so. That means you are familiar with the mechanics of the game and what you need to do to be competitive in a match. Someone who has never played, or has not played in a long period of time is not going to be able to match that kind of up to date experience and wind up being killed quickly and repetitively. Third, it seems that because you know that there are guides out there that everyone knows that there are guides out there or, more importantly, where to find them. On top of that when I looked at the channel that has these videos I saw that there were a *LOT* of videos to watch. Say what you will but a lot of people are not going to want to watch what seems like hours and hours of video in order to play a game. Watching someone play an MMO is one of the most boring things in the world. Don't get me wrong, it is great that the community has done this however it kinda misses the point of my thread. This is stuff that BIOWARE could do, not the community, to help with GSF Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
caederon Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 This suggestion is to divide players by gear, which will lead to bigger problems down the track, because instead of being 'new' to GSF once, there will eventually be multiple tiers where players have to readjust to a new set of circumstances and situations. As a point of comparison, Star Conflict is a game that is very similar to GSF in quite a lot of ways. They approach their player sorting in almost precisely the way you just described. I thought it worked pretty well, with some problems. *Note that I haven't played SC in a few months, and they're very active with their dev team changing things up, but looking at the system they had in place while I was playing is still useful. SC divides players strictly by gear. You don't just upgrade a single ship with better components... you buy new ships constantly, each of which is successively more powerful than the last (and comes with its own set of more powerful upgradable components) . The ship classes are all distinct, so you end up with something like twelve ship classes and three factions, making this giant tech tree you're grinding your way through. The ships are sorted into tiers, and you have a hangar that initially allows you to have three ships available for combat. What you put in your hangar also determines what level of opposition you will face. For the first three or four ranks of ships, you will be put on human teams vs. AI bots. These ships have fewer abilities, and they are simpler than the later ships. You're also limited to playing on only a few maps, and only two game modes (one like Domination, one like TDM). Even if you buy ships that are progressed down the tech tree, you can load up low-level ships in your hangar and be sorted into these sort of matches. If you constantly load your hangar with the best, highest rank ships you have, you are presented with more complex abilities and stronger (human) opposition. You also have many more maps and game modes open up when you start reaching the middle tiers of the tech tree, and another set as you break into the upper tiers. The whole thing kind of eases people into the more complex ideas and scenarios if they progress along the tiers naturally. People also have the option of buying their way out of the grind and just flat out purchasing higher rank ships immediately, but as with anything, if a beginner does that they are missing a lot of the learning experience. SC's system is not a bad one. It has issues, and also could not be directly applied to GSF for a number of reasons. In SC, a 'stock ship' (one of rank 1-3, let's say) does not have weapons powerful enough to hurt a ship even three levels up the tree. They would simply do so little damage that it is negligible (think Rapid Fire Lasers vs. a bomber with Charged Plating active 100% of the time). In GSF, while the unupgraded weapons are less effective, they can still blow up mastered ships. A stock Burst Laser Cannon is still very dangerous. What SC's system does well, and what the OP appears to be aiming for, is getting people into situations where they are not overwhelmed by the stuff the game is throwing at them. And that is a goal I agree with even if the methods by which it is done are arguable. In GSF, you can contribute to your team's success in stock ships, and your ships don't have to stay stock very long at all if you get the Daily and Weekly quests and play a few matches a night. The difference between a maxed ship and a stock one is significant, but only in a few narrow circumstances is a stock ship unable to damage another ship. The 'gear gap' is narrower than it feels to a newcomer, and a ship halfway to mastery with well-chosen upgrades can be nearly as dangerous as a mastered ship. If enough people are playing, the matchmaking works pretty well. I was actually surprised at that, and other people's experiences may vary by server or time of day... but for those fifty matches I flew stock, I was expecting more than one lopsided blowout at the hands of a 'stacked' team. That didn't materialize. If GSF had an active dev team, these things would be a lot more useful to discuss. I maintain that you'd have better luck designing your own game than waiting for Bioware to resume GSF development. With a company as directionless as they are, yeah the chance exists that they will do something unexpected, but they don't come here looking for ideas and even in the one instance that they did exactly that, it was a false alarm and nothing came of it. GSF is a good game in its current state. It has flaws, but they aren't fatal. - Despon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
caederon Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 (edited) Say what you will but a lot of people are not going to want to watch what seems like hours and hours of video in order to play a game. I agree with that, which is why I purposefully made the Basic Training videos very short and to-the-point, focusing on one topic at a time so people can pick something, learn about it, and proceed or not at their own pace. Don't get me wrong, it is great that the community has done this however it kinda misses the point of my thread. This is stuff that BIOWARE could do, not the community, to help with GSF Right, there is an endless list of things Bioware should be doing, should have done, and has not done. Like, for example, fixing longstanding known well-documented bugs. Or following through on their own stated intention to improve Strike Fighters. Or engaging with their paying players on this forum on more than a biennial basis. The precedent they have set is pretty clear. - Despon Edited January 6, 2017 by caederon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eagling Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 I'm all for the idea to simplify things, make it easier for new players to have fun or contribute in GSF - I genuinely don't think segregation is the way to go about that. From what you've said, it seems like not only is there active development in Star Conflict, but game has been structured to allow this progression system. I would not mind the Op's suggestion if along with it Bioware made additional changes in order to accommodate this, and continued to develop the game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Krixarcs Posted January 7, 2017 Share Posted January 7, 2017 2 million? they only need $2 just fix a bug, give strikes more DPS and make denon TDM easy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rizartha Posted January 8, 2017 Author Share Posted January 8, 2017 Yeah, it's never that easy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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