Chef Kerensky, on 20 March 2016 - 10:46 PM, said:
I like your enthusiasm but in all seriousness CW populations are low enough as it is, and I firmly believe that even scrubs and cowards can be made into men of action, given the right prodding. There are a bunch of ways to simplify the idea, like so: you get half of your faction's contract bonus at the end of a round if you exit your spawn and participate in the match (i.e. moving through the gates as attackers) with every mech you have. If you fail to meet these conditions and you lose, you receive nothing, just like you do now.
Scrubs and cowards don't get turned into men of action by doing what they've always done though. The behavioral decision tree that leads to a change away from justification of failure/under-performance and toward self-improvement is either fight-or-flight (threat of being fired, thread to survival, other significant fear-based event), bottom-out (fail so completely that you have no viable excuses. Think of getting broken in boot camp), peer-driven (I Wanna Be Like Mike), or leadership driven (willing acceptance of a mentor).
So either a QQ ragequit experience where they decide to stop sucking or they get friends who are successful and, ideally, get someone to show them.
All those things more or less *require* the elimination of excuses for failure though. There's no peer pressure for success if you have a constant, steady supply of changes to 'make it easier' to justify why you fail. 'I would have won if only X, this is correct because PGI is coding in something to protect me from X'.
You split out solo/coop play and let it be scrubtown and you make it EASIER for people to accept that PvP is harder and requires that they apply themselves. You give them a point of reference between 'this is how I play when I'm alone' and 'this is how I compare directly with other people' and you make it easier for them to adapt to the idea that they have to be better to play PvP.
When the environment is only PvP the frame of reference instead becomes how the developer treats things. Is this an expectation or an exception? Is this particular excuse validated or denied? We have an environment of validation for failure in a team only PvP only game. We have whole processes in place to literally nerf teamwork in QP and PGI literally saying that 'big groups are the problem' for FW. This *creates* the behavior that drives players being failures at the game and still thinking they're doing it right.
A big chunk of the population only changes and adapts when they have no other choice. A classic example is the quote 'You can always count on America to do the right thing - after they have exhausted every alternative'. That's a broad stroke at the behaviors around procrastination and fear of failure.
You could cut the population of FW in half and still find just as many matches as you do now - just need to narrow the fronts and combine attack/defend queues and a tiny amount of coordination between units and groups of players. I've been on games with a population of ~50 online at any given time who easily kept up 10v10 conflicts pretty much around the clock in a big open world environment. You'd post up 'Hey, we're going to X and we'll be there pretty consistently for a few weeks, especially around Y times'. That's it. You wouldn't have MS going to Steiner/FRR/wherever at the same time as everyone else because then they wouldn't get nearly as many matches.
Same thing as above. People adapt pretty quickly. The idea of 'everyone would just leave' has never held true - CW went through huge gaps of players and it's actually got *more* content now than it did before.
You don't cater to new players by making execution simpler. You do it by making it seamless to integrate them with more experienced players. A lobby for a start. Second you have new players in a different lobby for their first 50 matches and only volunteer experienced players can go into the lobby who want to show them how to play. That's just one example.
There's a lot of them. There have been successful mechanics for onboarding new players for decades. The idea that you'll get and retain more players by just making the whole game so simple that a scrubtard can show up, be terrible and still get by has never worked. Even scrubtards don't want to play with other scrubtards. You give someone something to progress toward and they'll stay longer and be more invested in what they get.
Crockdaddy, on 20 March 2016 - 11:24 PM, said:
Reporting for sounding utterly un NKVA like. I think you are intentionally trolling sounding reasonable and stuff. Don't worry though, I merely took a screen shot I never in fact hit the report button.
I'm noticing a theme here.
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