61 replies to this topic

[Roadbeer]

Shumabot, on 02 April 2013 - 05:46 AM, said:

Get rid of the games two worst maps, River City Night and Alpine and suddenly people aren't forcing disconnects to avoid playing on them. Both are abysmal, unbalanced, and fail completely to interact with the games objectives. Night has an excuse that it's just really dark, but honestly, Alpine is beyond saving. It is the worst map I have ever seen, it's designed terribly for gameplay, for interaction with objectives, and it just looks awful.

OPINION: YMMV

[Mancu]

jay35, on 02 April 2013 - 05:42 AM, said:

But that's just it: I've never quit due to a lack of "favorable terrain", only due to the game repetitively placing me on the largest map match after match after match, which is a problem that can be easily solved. I'm not the target case here and if you are addressing me in such a manner, you're missing the point of the post.

Perhaps that's my fault for not making the proposed solution clear enough. What I think would help immensely in all cases, would be to balance the rewards by the average length of time the map takes to play across the community. We know Alpine tends to take roughly 25% longer and Tourmaline takes roughly 50% longer, than the rest of the maps. Thus, starting with the current rewards level, increase those two maps accordingly, so the extra time invested in playing matches on those maps is not wasted. Incentivize people to play the maps. That makes the grind more acceptable and should alleviate a significant portion of the disconnecting disaffected players. Just a guess, but one that would be fairly easy to implement to test with no real downside.

The incentive should be to play, period. It doesn't matter if one map takes 30 seconds longer than another. This isn't spreadsheet warrior online. You play to play, not to make the highest income in the shortest amount of time.

Finally, quitting for any reason is unacceptable. Quitters are being selfish when they disconnect and screw the remaining players on their team. Every disconnect is a giant middle finger to the guys that dropped on the same team.

[Nonsense]

Mercules, on 02 April 2013 - 04:50 AM, said:

You are never going to make someone like that "have a better experience" on Alpine. So maybe we make it so they never have to drop on Alpine, but now they have a super focused mech with no downfalls on the maps they play because they have taken out any map that might make them engage at 500+ meters. Maybe that is exactly what the player wants(and I've seen it suggested) but it is not the vision for the game.

Exactly...it's really not any kind of huge mystery as to why players are avoiding maps. I don't avoid maps, but I do avoid conquest because my average cbills per time spent on conquest maps is about half of what it is for assault. Between that and the fact that I'm tired of people failing to understand conquest, I simply avoid the game type with the provided option.

in general, I agree with the OP's thinking, but in this case it's mostly just players who want to play certain mech types that are terrible on certain maps. Are there more legit reasons for avoiding maps? Sure, maybe certain computer configs have a crashing problem with Alpine, so these people hack the game files to avoid Alpine. While this case is less underhanded than the "brawler avoiding big maps" thing, it's still not really a design problem.

[Shumabot]

Roadbeer, on 02 April 2013 - 05:47 AM, said:

OPINION: YMMV

Don't contribute much, do you?

[jay35]

Mancu, on 02 April 2013 - 05:49 AM, said:

The incentive should be to play, period.

And that's precisely what the recommendation provides. Good, glad we could agree on that. Make the maps worth playing.

Quote

It doesn't matter if one map takes 30 seconds longer than another. This isn't spreadsheet warrior online. You play to play, not to make the highest income in the shortest amount of time.

Not so fast. That's a red herring. It's not about making the highest income in the shortest amount of time. It's about making the same average income regardless of which maps you end up on. Meaning, if you invest one hour of your time into the game, assuming the same number of wins and losses during that time, your income over that period of time should be the same regardless of which maps you played on. What is being proposed is increasing BALANCE in an aspect of the game that is not currently balanced. What you're arguing against is a strawman of imbalance that is not what is being proposed.

Quote

Finally, quitting for any reason is unacceptable. Quitters are being selfish when they disconnect and screw the remaining players on their team. Every disconnect is a giant middle finger to the guys that dropped on the same team.

Precisely how I feel. I've suffered through enough imbalanced matches due to quitters, hence why I'm proposing something I think might alleviate that without ANY downside to trying it out. There is NO downside to balancing map payout by average match time. If it has the impact of reducing disconnects, it is a success.

Edited by jay35, 02 April 2013 - 05:58 AM.

[Nonsense]

Shumabot, on 02 April 2013 - 05:55 AM, said:

Don't contribute much, do you?

You saying "get rid of the worst maps" when it's simply your opinion doesn't contribute much either.

[Shumabot]

Nonsense, on 02 April 2013 - 05:57 AM, said:

You saying "get rid of the worst maps" when it's simply your opinion doesn't contribute much either.

Sure, but I expressed what is by in large a broad community opinion. I have never heard anyone praise River City Night, and Alpine quickly fell out of favor. It's purely dysfunctional in conquest, where more often then not the victory is decided by whatever team had 2 lights running in a giant circle while it's pure chance if the teams run into eachother at all. In assault the map devolves into two teams poptarting behind two hills to the northeast of the central giant mountain that makes scouting worthless because you can see all relevant places on the map from the top of it. It also has terrain that continuously and pointlessly deforms like the ground is made of jello and a significant portions of the rocks and buildings in the map aren't even touching the ground.

Insofar as everything is an opinion, sure, it's my opinion. But alpine is bad by almost every objective measurement of game design.

Edited by Shumabot, 02 April 2013 - 06:13 AM.

[FrDrake]

I'm sure someone has made the comment but I didn't read the whole thread so I'll just throw it back in here. OP your post makes the base assumption that every player's whine deserves credit. 95% of the whines I see here on this forums are what I would consider creditless whines that the dev shouldn't have to entertain or do "anything" to fix.

You also don't address the fact that player's whines are sometimes in direct opposition to each other (LRMs are weak on the same front page as LRM are OP threads).

People who whine about playing a particular map are a creditless whine. Yes the maps take longer to get through, my own stats page confirms it, I'd like to see the conquest timer doubled on the larger maps, but I have a 3.0 win rate in Alpine right now, because at the start of every match I organize the pugs I'm with, and we make a plan. If that is too far out of the reach of the average gamer then no amount of coddling will help them.

[Sifright]

FrDrake, on 02 April 2013 - 06:23 AM, said:

I'm sure someone has made the comment but I didn't read the whole thread so I'll just throw it back in here. OP your post makes the base assumption that every player's whine deserves credit. 95% of the whines I see here on this forums are what I would consider creditless whines that the dev shouldn't have to entertain or do "anything" to fix.

You also don't address the fact that player's whines are sometimes in direct opposition to each other (LRMs are weak on the same front page as LRM are OP threads).

People who whine about playing a particular map are a creditless whine. Yes the maps take longer to get through, my own stats page confirms it, I'd like to see the conquest timer doubled on the larger maps, but I have a 3.0 win rate in Alpine right now, because at the start of every match I organize the pugs I'm with, and we make a plan. If that is too far out of the reach of the average gamer then no amount of coddling will help them.

Why does your post not address a single thing the OP mentions and instead brings up a bunch of straw mans so you can show much better you are as a gamer/person.

Seriously, this is complicated. Remove choice that players are forcing the game to give them due to 'REASONS' and if the players dont find another work around they quit the game in frustration.

Any one suggesting the players be punished or that they are just bad players doesn't get game design or that games are supposed to be fun. Yes fun for every one involved.

not just you.

[Belorion]

Didn't they say something about being able to downvote/upvote maps which will slightly effect the drop rate?

[Alois Hammer]

OP = longest rationalization I've yet seen for "allow us to totally break the game by min-maxing for one and only one map." From an admitted "I don't like [map] so I DC and give my entire team the finger 'cause it's all about me" player no less.

Epic Fail™

[jay35]

FrDrake, on 02 April 2013 - 06:23 AM, said:

You also don't address the fact that player's whines are sometimes in direct opposition to each other (LRMs are weak on the same front page as LRM are OP threads).

Because I'm not sure the truism applies to matters of opinion or posts on forums. This is about actual user behavior with the product, not merely voices on a forum. Where it might apply on the topic you mentioned, is if we found that in the game, most players stopped taking LRMs at all on their mechs. The tracking data is in place for the devs to notice that, and if that was the case, then the truism would apply: It would be worth understanding why people stopped using the weapon before attempting changes to influence players to use it again. Rather than force usage by imbalancing things in the other direction, study and address the root of the problem, whatever it turns out to be, instead masking symptoms while the problem continued to fester. Just to be clear, that's all a hypothetical to show how the truism would apply to the topic you described and why it wouldn't really matter what people say so much as what they actually do. The devs may in fact be applying such a practice to things like weapon balance. But one area they do not yet appear to have demonstrated it, is in understanding and addressing the map hacking and disconnects symptom.

Alois Hammer, on 02 April 2013 - 07:08 AM, said:

OP = longest rationalization I've yet seen for "allow us to totally break the game by min-maxing for one and only one map." From an admitted "I don't like [map] so I DC and give my entire team the finger 'cause it's all about me" player no less.

Epic Fail™

Congratulations on completely missing the point. That is not even close to what is proposed in the topic post.

Edited by jay35, 02 April 2013 - 07:19 AM.

[Shumabot]

Alois Hammer, on 02 April 2013 - 07:08 AM, said:

OP = longest rationalization I've yet seen for "allow us to totally break the game by min-maxing for one and only one map." From an admitted "I don't like [map] so I DC and give my entire team the finger 'cause it's all about me" player no less.

Epic Fail™

Another wonderfully useless response from an elite founder. Truly, this is a group of people to whom reasonable criticism is the greatest crime of all. The crime of thought.

Edited by Shumabot, 02 April 2013 - 07:14 AM.

[Mercules]

Shumabot, on 02 April 2013 - 06:11 AM, said:

I have never heard anyone praise River City Night, and Alpine quickly fell out of favor.

I love how quickly the "Community" went from, "Give us an actual night map!" to "I hate this actual night map!" and the same thing happened with large open maps, aka Alpine. A lot of people don't hate Alpine and I don't hate River City Night. I don't like it as much as others, but much of that is because of how idiotic some people play on it. Once the vision modes change a bit we will see how RCN feels and plays and that is right around the bend here.

[Shumabot]

Mercules, on 02 April 2013 - 07:14 AM, said:

I love how quickly the "Community" went from, "Give us an actual night map!" to "I hate this actual night map!" and the same thing happened with large open maps, aka Alpine. A lot of people don't hate Alpine and I don't hate River City Night. I don't like it as much as others, but much of that is because of how idiotic some people play on it. Once the vision modes change a bit we will see how RCN feels and plays and that is right around the bend here.

You blame your dislike of the map on other people. What exactly are other people doing to ruin alpine for you that they don't do to ruin any other map?

[Dudeman3k]

This guy is right. The OP that is.

some of you are still not getting the point of the post. You all should be ashamed, and go back to English class and properly learn how to read.

Why do people DC on certain maps? It's bad, yes. So whats the solution? taking it out isn't a very good one, and turning this game into a Dust / Dust_2 CS 24/7 isn't viable either.

The OP is stating how the problem can be fixed with a simple map redesign, so no need to implement a "what map to chose". The problem isn't not having the freedom to chose, but the horrible design of some of these maps. In fact, PGI really needs to look into letting go of some of their "employees" and just opt to use the Forum community for free labor. And chances are, it will be a lot better, the end product that is.

[Shumabot]

Dudeman3k, on 02 April 2013 - 07:23 AM, said:

This guy is right. The OP that is.

some of you are still not getting the point of the post. You all should be ashamed, and go back to English class and properly learn how to read.

Why do people DC on certain maps? It's bad, yes. So whats the solution? taking it out isn't a very good one, and turning this game into a Dust / Dust_2 CS 24/7 isn't viable either.

The OP is stating how the problem can be fixed with a simple map redesign, so no need to implement a "what map to chose". The problem isn't not having the freedom to chose, but the horrible design of some of these maps. In fact, PGI really needs to look into letting go of some of their "employees" and just opt to use the Forum community for free labor. And chances are, it will be a lot better, the end product that is.

Considering it takes "7 people four months and 250 grand" to make a map, there is no such thing as a "simple map redesign" with PGI.

Edited by Shumabot, 02 April 2013 - 07:28 AM.

[jay35]

The only "redesign" I was talking about is adjusting the payouts. Doubt it requires any actual changes to the map to adjust the payouts to be more appropriately balanced.

[Shumabot]

jay35, on 02 April 2013 - 07:57 AM, said:

The only "redesign" I was talking about is adjusting the payouts. Doubt it requires any actual changes to the map to adjust the payouts to be more appropriately balanced.

They've been considering doing it for months and haven't yet, so apparently it's "harder" than it appears.

[MaddMaxx]

Unless something has changed, every Map has a 15 minute timer. I am unsure how to incentivize Maps based on average timed a Match is played? If you get more for a shorter Match, then how does that help the Atlas on your Team? He is still attempting to assist but you "time mongers" ran off without him/her.

Then what happens is those players who actually enjoy their Mechs, on whatever Map comes up, get chastised by those same "time mongers" for being the cause of their Losses.

This idea does not want Map selection per say, just the ability to run what Mechs they see as the best, on a Map that they get to decide on which to play. While chastising those who would go against "the plan" and bring "their" Mech to "our" Map

So much for the whole "Team" dynamic under that kind of Tyranny...

Edited by MaddMaxx, 02 April 2013 - 08:19 AM.