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Add GSF to PvP season reward track!


Stradlin

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 Starfighter is an awesome way to enjoy some PvP in TOR. So strange it isn't included in PvP reward track.  Either give it a reward track of its own, or morph it as part of PvP track with some GSF themed rewards to match.

 

Other GSF related things:

 

 

* Add Sith Empire Starfighters as deco. Models are already present in game and everything(void star roof for example, or docking bays of fleet)  In general there's hardly any starfighter deco available on either side, its just weird. All these docking bays, landing platforms  and hangars, and no starfighters to fill them with!  Such deco items would make lots of sense as Seasonal rewards too, ofc. 

* If you ever going to add new maps for GSF, why not revisit the several "legendary" battles in TOR storyline, that have space battle happening.Like Revan Flashpoints of vanilla game all have big space battles going in the bacground. There'd be some cool VA stuff one could easily recycle for this too. 

* As it stands, ship customizations, cartel  market ships and other GSF things with cartel price tag   on are of really low value.  Value as in bang for the buck. You can't unlock things so they'd  become  account wide via collections.  Nobody considers them appealing enough to unlock for each of their alts.  It'd be a good cc sink to offer a possibility to turn custom ships and other ship cosmetics into account wide unlocks, just like you can do with armor, weapons,. It'd increase their value as unlocks to a place where people might wanna spend money for it. Ship cosmetics would be another easy, low effort reward option for GSF seasonal reward track.

* Having an actual in-game hangar with your own customized ships present that your character could visit would increase value of ship customizations and make more people want to buy them for cc. Even slightly cooler "hangar" screen for GSF would go some ways towards achieving this.

*Hangar Screen  of GSF is very bad. I mean, look at these 3 examples:

Squadrons: https://i.imgur.com/0uEw8yA.jpeg

World of Tanks: https://i.imgur.com/zB4tUa3.jpeg

GSF: https://i.imgur.com/02O5Tzd.jpeg

Each of these three screens provides the same function. All are just fairly static menu screens for customizing your warmachines. Just that two of these are very  atmospheric and make you "care" of your ship/tank and its customization..and one doesn't.  More this screen makes what you see there feel like " this is my ship, my property my snowflake!" more likely you are to spend money to customize it.

 

 

 

Edited by Stradlin
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  • 2 weeks later...

In perfect world, it'd have track of its own though!

 

Ig it is somewhat conceivable to have a shared reward track for GSF and railshooter. Activities have little in common besides rewards from one are automatically very suitable rewards for the other,(=navy and starfighter themed things.)   This would be little bit like Arenas and WZs share a reward track.  In this setup, BW could for example lock  3  weeklies behind GSF, 2 behind railshooter heroics and one for doing few non heroic railshooters.

 

You could have entire season themed around empire and republic navy. hand out two companions, pilots of each navy. Let people pick pilot of one faction at level 1 and pilot of the other faction at lvl 100. I assume there is no specific reason why seasons should always be about the underworld.

 

 

Edited by Stradlin
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This is a very very good idéa to make especialy reward for this game mode. And add in season Galactic Starfighter this k-52 impossible to have now! Add in Cartel coin if you want but add this please!
And i think for the Galactic Starfighter need new map and game mode are a good idea too.

Edited by Zrafin
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So many cool reward possibilities too. There's the pure cloudcastle tier of suggestions, such as having actual unlockable personal  in-game hangars and so on. It'd be awesome,. it won't happen.

When it comes to more attainable things?  Military ranks for pilots!

This has never really been a thing and should be established imo. All military ranks and hierarchies present in TOR pull their inspiration and flavor either from land armies or from   RL Navies. These ranks are used for ground troops and various bridge officers and so on. There is nothing present that'd  draw inspiration from RL Air Force, which is what pilots deserve! These ranks could easily be turned into seasonal  rewards.  At its simplest, this stuff could simply be just  half a dozen legacy titles you can unlock. And/or flairs. Add in Flight suits and uniforms. Republic side in particular is missing a defined and established navy uniform for pilots.

 

 

Edited by Stradlin
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Just thought about it but having GSF in PVP Season would also be soo helpful to grinding achievements. There's some I want but I don't feel like grinding them because it will take so long if you don't have a bunch of people doing lots of GSF at the same time, and with PVP season you can be sure that people would queue on a lot larger time frame than usual so no problem for those that can only log on when fewer people are online.

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^

Yeah it is disappointing. Though I suppose such plans would have been spoken a bit months back if any plans to include GSF had been there. Maybe for S3...

 

It is the best and most unique way to do PvP in TOR, pushing it to sidelines on something like this is misguided.

 

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When it comes to objectives of this as of yet imaginary GSF season..Stuff like "3 wins while in solo q" could be cool. 

Should premades be banned y/n? <  -  This is some sort of an eternal debate in GSF and pvp community in general.  On the other hand. everybody wants to fly with their friends and guildies. Aprox the most natural thing to do in an MMO. It makes sense to group up in a  multiplayer game. Then again, single good premade team  in a match makes the match uneven and boring for everybody, almost always. That good premade won't fly one match btw. They'll keep at it, making every single match that pops uneven. GSF Season objectives could offer a small compromise to this, by encouraging solo-q. 

 

 

Beyond that, I think pvp season did the objectives quite  well. Reward people from medals and wins, not from participation and afking.

 

 

 

Edited by Stradlin
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You could go the other way on groups.  3/3 Fly a GSF match while in a group.

 

Then folks like us might post things like, "Experienced GSF pilot LFG for GSF group weekly," a bit more often.  On average, given how I fly alts, I'd be trying to group for 15 more matches per week than I currently do if that were the incentive.  Just a thought.

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If starfighter was to have its own seasons thing, like warzone regs does now, then don't have it running during the same time as the other wz pvp season (it's hard enough finishing that one with 20 tokens & all cheevos). 

 

I do like the idea of more Sith starfighter decorations, as we definitely could use more fighter size decorations for SH's; hopefully a KoToR star forge Sith fighter deco down the road (as those look amazing):

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/5/5c/Sith_fighter_concept_art.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20200419205713

Edited by Willjb
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4 hours ago, Ramalina said:

You could go the other way on groups.  3/3 Fly a GSF match while in a group.

 

Then folks like us might post things like, "Experienced GSF pilot LFG for GSF group weekly," a bit more often.  On average, given how I fly alts, I'd be trying to group for 15 more matches per week than I currently do if that were the incentive.  Just a thought.

You could.  Just..how likely is it,that any notable minority of people arrange themselves into any remotely even premade groups, that then face one another?  I dunno...  It is easy and simple to soloq, it is difficult for a random player to end up in  group, even harder to have a situation where groups are evenly matched. People who know people group up even more, while majority of folks would face great premades even more often than they do now. Or maybe it'd work great? I rly don't know where I stand with this tbh.

 

When it comes to evenly made matches with premade  groups facing one another, imo we pretty quickly approaching scheduled nights, tourneys and such. GSF and WZs both provide seperate challenge mode that works great for these.

Edited by Stradlin
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3 hours ago, Willjb said:

If starfighter was to have its own seasons thing, like warzone regs does now, then don't have it running during the same time as the other wz pvp season (it's hard enough finishing that one with 20 tokens & all cheevos). 

 

I do like the idea of more Sith starfighter decorations, as we definitely could use more fighter size decorations for SH's; hopefully a KoToR star forge Sith fighter deco down the road (as those look amazing):

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/5/5c/Sith_fighter_concept_art.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20200419205713

 

Yeah absolutely. Idea of 3 different seasons arranged so that all three of them never fully overlap sounds pretty fun to me. They could schedule things so we never have all  3 seasons running at once...or have a situation where none would be active at all.

 

Edited by Stradlin
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47 minutes ago, Stradlin said:

You could.  Just..how likely is it,that any notable minority of people arrange themselves into any remotely even premade groups, that then face one another?  I dunno...  It is easy and simple to soloq, it is difficult for a random player to end up in  group, even harder to have a situation where groups are evenly matched. People who know people group up even more, while majority of folks would face great premades even more often than they do now. Or maybe it'd work great? I rly don't know where I stand with this tbh.

 

When it comes to evenly made matches with premade  groups facing one another, imo we pretty quickly approaching scheduled nights, tourneys and such. GSF and WZs both provide seperate challenge mode that works great for these.

Well if you look at activities that are designed as team activities, the ones where failure to use teamwork is a near 100% failure rate  MM FPs, Vet Ops, NiM Ops, there's little complaint about grouping and teamwork being needed.   The ones where success is possible without groups or teamwork are WZs and Arenas, and people sure do complain about the benefits of teamwork in them.   One difference though, is that the incentives for the PvE have a stronger link between reward and being a team.   Their groupfinders imply at least, that teamwork is needed.  No tank?  No Healer?  Back into the queue you go if they didn't accept the pop from groupfinder.   It subtly says to the player, "you must be part of a team and work as a team to do this activity."   PvP incentive structures don't really have the game sending you that message in that way.   Sure, damage, kills, heals, etc. but that's all stuff you can do solo, and is sometimes easier to cheese solo.    If the game directly says, "Yo, dude, I have a bribe for you if you make a team for this team activity," you might see some traction with a playerbase that's notorious for chasing rewards to the point that they complain about being "forced" to do optional activities for optional loot, that's inherently worthless digital ones and zeros.   Worth a try anyway.   There's a lack of positive reinforcement from the game design for cooperative play in SWTOR's PvP activities.

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2 hours ago, Ramalina said:

Well if you look at activities that are designed as team activities, the ones where failure to use teamwork is a near 100% failure rate  MM FPs, Vet Ops, NiM Ops, there's little complaint about grouping and teamwork being needed.   The ones where success is possible without groups or teamwork are WZs and Arenas, and people sure do complain about the benefits of teamwork in them.   One difference though, is that the incentives for the PvE have a stronger link between reward and being a team.   Their groupfinders imply at least, that teamwork is needed.  No tank?  No Healer?  Back into the queue you go if they didn't accept the pop from groupfinder.   It subtly says to the player, "you must be part of a team and work as a team to do this activity."   PvP incentive structures don't really have the game sending you that message in that way.   Sure, damage, kills, heals, etc. but that's all stuff you can do solo, and is sometimes easier to cheese solo.    If the game directly says, "Yo, dude, I have a bribe for you if you make a team for this team activity," you might see some traction with a playerbase that's notorious for chasing rewards to the point that they complain about being "forced" to do optional activities for optional loot, that's inherently worthless digital ones and zeros.   Worth a try anyway.   There's a lack of positive reinforcement from the game design for cooperative play in SWTOR's PvP activities.

Then again, you work against the "E" bit in PvE, not so much against the players. In PvE, there is some fairly  defined and static requirement of collective knowhow and gear the group must have to succeed. Some NiM Ops boss on Thursday isn't much different in terms of required difficulty  from what he was like last Sunday. Besides that, everybody in Ops team is quite literally in the same team. in PvP, half of the people you need to be there to make a match happen want to kill you once it does happen.

"Difficulty" or "skill requirement" of PvP is much wilder in this regard.  When it comes to very dififcult NiM content, better your team is, more rewarding and enjoyable it  usually is.  In PvP it isn't so clear. A total cluster..hump that objectively speaking is a very low quality match from pov of anyone can be a great fun even for ace level pilots present. Both teams being equally bad leads to fun matches almost as easily as both teams being equally good. "Equally "being the important  word there, not so much the "bad" or "good".  Some literal GSF god watching it all from Olympos might deem that the  low quality match displeases Him, but mere mortals killing, dying and derping around have good fun in it regardless.  On the other hand, if 4 ace level pilots have teamed up, they automatically make their entire team very good. it is questionable how many of the 16 or 24 people are having fun, once it is time for 6th 12-50 DM in a row. Match might have like 4 of the top-10 GSF players of the world present, but if they all are in  the same team, it can't be a good match.

 

I often wonder how matchmaker would perform, if it'd never have to worry about a single group. Goes for  warzones  and GSF both. 

 

 

Edited by Stradlin
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Agreed. Add a GSF Season. Rewards could also be flight suits that look like the Flight suits in the Star Wars movies, for example baggy X-Wing Flightsuits. Also, you could posisbly add starfighter skins, like a Clarion with S-Foils in Attack position (too look more like an X-Wing!).

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3 hours ago, Stradlin said:

I often wonder how matchmaker would perform, if it'd never have to worry about a single group. Goes for  warzones  and GSF both.

About as badly as it does with groups.   I've been queued plenty of times at slow hours where there's only one match worth of people in the queue and it's not uncommon for one team to end up with zero good players and the other to end up with 3-5 skilled solo queued pilots.   Aggravates the heck out of me, because the matchmaker is failing by it's own metrics.   If it looked at the people that end up in the match the "balance score" would be bad according to the matchmaker.   The problem is that it seems to pick one "group" at a time, and considers a solo player to be a group of one, and once it has made a choice, it goes on picking and never double checks the final team composition.   I think it's a combination of using less complicated code and of prioritizing minimum queue times above all else.    Basically, they do a sorting step at each pick from a fluctuating queue, but once they have a match worth of players, it never goes back and checks, "given this finalized pool of players pulled from the queue, is this sorting of player into teams the most balanced sorting according to the metrics being used."   The answer is almost always no, what varies is how badly.   Sort speed good, sort quality poor.  Team compositions definitely not double checked for correctness before start of match.

 

I'd like a better sorting method implemented, but maybe not until the code they're releasing gets on average more like previous expansions and less like 7.x in term of how buggy it is.  The way things have been going, a 7.3 matchmaker revamp would probably either fail to pick players from the queue at all and hang in some sort of infinite loop, or sort everyone onto one team and then auto-terminate the match due to the mismatch in number of players on the two teams.   Though . . . if they managed to break the the auto-terminate too, then everyone would always win their 12 vs. 0 matches, and people might finally stop complaining about premades and how long Win x/x matches dailies and weeklies take to complete.   So maybe they should go for it, and achieve the unattainable goal of making everyone in a MMO PvP mode happy with their win rates?

 

April first is coming soon . . .

Edited by Ramalina
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On 3/29/2023 at 2:18 AM, Ramalina said:

 

April first is coming soon . . .

 

Today is the day! Meaty  GSF content patches for everybody!!  Pilot storylines and starfighter expansions.  Epic  200 million dollar 80 minute lasting  starfighter cgi to launch it with....

I was gonna mention deselect bug getting fixed too,but let's not get obscene here, april 1st or otherwise.

 

Premade vs solo could be tested on live server just fine.. One month where grouping up is heavily encouraged and rewarded through seasonal objectives. Followed by o e month where solo queue is encouraged and rewarded.  Then ask people how they found it.  There might not be much of  a difference either way though, unless you get very heavy handed. (Some seasonal objective prolly doesn't break many  groups at all)  Meanwhile, getting heavy handed (disabling grouping entirely for a month) would result in some angry people.  I'd still like to see what it is like though. : p

 

 

 

Edited by Stradlin
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  • 1 month later...

Since we last spoke, BW actually considered this idea. For two days, they held feedback for the idea open on Test Center forums. Then they thanked for the feedback and called it a day. 

 

Has anyone here ever experienced a situation, in any game,  where game dev asks feedback from  community and then closes the shop TWO DAYS later?

 

Reasons devs gave for exclusion of GSF are listed below..

 

 

Quote

 

Hey everyone, thanks for your feedback regarding the addition of Galactic Starfighter to the PvP Season track! The team has taken a look at the issues you’ve raised surrounding the current state of Galactic Starfighter such as the medals, objectives, skill gap, and bugs. After evaluating this feedback we’ve come to the conclusion that GSF is not in a good position to be added to the PvP Seasons track at this time.

Thank you again for your constructive feedback regarding this change! We will continue to monitor PvP Seasons and your feedback to improve PvP Seasons going forward.

 

 

 

I'm sorry but this is infuriating. Firstly, they speak of feedback and issues raised during this feedback. TWO DAYS. This  collection of feedback phase took ALL OF TWO DAYS. If their idea of current status of GSF is based on community feedback, does it make any sense to give community TWO DAYS to give that feedback?

When it comes to current status of GSF, the big picture and so on:

GSF has been in an excellent state ever since the patch they released  somewhere around KOTET. Ship balance is as close to perfect as one can realistically hope for imo.  I'd say anyone familiar with GSF usually agrees with this. This should be what counts. 

 

Reasons  and issues devs  discovered and outlined during this intense two day intel gathering period:

* Medals

????? Medals work just as they do in ground pvp. It is possible to try and  evaluate player's performance and activity  judging by amount of medals they've earned, just like in arenas/warzones. 

 

*  Objectives

??????? Capture a  satelite, defend a satelite, destroy turrets, earn kills, earn assists, collect powerups. Win a match, lose a match. That prolly sums it up. Is there any issue with any of these objectives that ground pvp doesn't have? This is la larger offering of different objectives than what arenas offer. Warzones have more different maps and different objectives. However, the  only "objectives" PvP season recognizes for Warzones  are win a match, play a match and earn medals. All of these can be done in GSF just as easily.

* Skill gap

????? There is a skill gap in pvp. ..and in literally every single thing in life, come to think of it.  What does this mean? Things with skillgap should not be things?  GSF has had an incredibly devoted community build around it for 10 years now. Pilots have written an endless amount of excellent guides, created tutorial videos. Players have thrown tutorial  events and held literal GSF lectures to new pilots.  Yeah, in game tutorial is terrible. Community has more than picked up the reins in this. Anyone wanting to learn GSF will get tons of help for it.

 

* Bugs

????? Yeah, your game has bugs. I'm not gonna even assume GSF related ones are going to get fixed, it hasn't happened by now, so. Luckily for GSF, only major bug it has is extremely rare. Sometimes when zoning in to a match, sound disappears. Usually it returns at some point during that same match. Sometimes it doesn't. This would be a severe bug if it weren't so extremely rare. Before 64 bit client, I'd guesstimate people suffer from this like 1 match out of..15-30 or something. I've not personally encountered the bug since 64 bit client, so maybe that fixed it? This was always so rare that it is hard to say for sure.

Component deselect bug is far more common but extremely simple for players to undo.(check your components once you log in. Done, bug fixed) Medals no longer being displayed is third thing, but I'm not sure anyone cares of this, as long as they are counted correctly for season objectives, conquest and achis. (which they are)

 

 

Core parts of GSF are in great balance. If GSF is not in "good position" to be added for pvp seasons,  then literally nothing is.   Only aspect of TOR made purely for PVP is not part of the pvp season.  This is obscene.

 

Edited by Stradlin
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2 hours ago, Stradlin said:

Since we last spoke, BW actually considered this idea. For two days, they held feedback for the idea open on Test Center forums.

Here's the actual thread:  https://forums.swtor.com/topic/929314-pts-gsf-added-to-pvp-season-3-track/  ...for reference.

As a former 'Dev' myself on another SW mmo , that thread ^ is a perfect example of how to attract then immediately alienate a section of your playerbase by not only perpetuating an unfortunate pattern ( of literally ignoring SPACE for years in a game called STAR Wars ) but also creating a new even worse perception of indifference & insensitivity toward possibly the nicest most skilled/helpful  group of $ubscribers left in this game. ( Pilots  :sy_starship: )

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