The game play experience is volatile. It means that as an individual it's hard to have a stable and predictably good experience each time I play. As a new player, I'm by myself and have no established relationships with other GoIO players to form my own sense of community. So I roam from game to game and what I've learned is that my patience has grown short.
GoIO is the kind of game that works best when everything comes together as it was envisioned and designed too. The players are knowledgeable; the players are willing to participate, interact and communicate with each other; the teams are balanced and not stacked; the teams are setup with ships and crew that well configured for the type of strategy to be employed.
Most important is that all the players are reserved to playing together, as a group, which means making concessions in the interest of everyone having a good game. That means playing certain ships, certain roles and on certain teams that may not be a players primary choice.
In an open and public environment where strangers come and go, each with their own motivations for playing, having all of the above elements come together in an optimal way is rather unlikely. That goes for any publicly played multiplayer game, not just GoIO.
When it does happen, it's marvelous. In any game.
What I have found in the few games that I've been playing is that the favorable conditions are less likely to appear and instead I've been subjected to repeated games of failure. The majority of games ending in Blow-Outs 5-0, 7-1, 600-0 and so on. To me, that's not fun... not fun to be on the losing end and certainly not very interesting to be on the winning team either. It's not as exciting when there is no sense of a competitive contest. I've been on frustrating crews of disjointed players. Pilots, a very crucial role, who can't fly their own ship, steer into dust storms, crash it into terrain obstacles and just drive straight into overwhelming numbers. Gunners who are never on a gun, never on the right gun, or are spending more time fixing the balloon then shooting the enemy killing it. Engineers who haven't figured out that repeatedly hitting the hull with a spanner doesn't fix it faster, it only disrupts the guy with the mallet trying to save the ship.
I've played several games where the ship dies quickly several times in a row and then the pilot quits the game, followed by another player until it's just me and the AI.
I've sat in the lobby waiting to start a game only to see the teams become stacked, Captains who refuse to ready up forcing everyone to wait for minutes on end, captains ready up and then ready down to reset the clock. Meanwhile I'm sitting at my desk drumming my fingers waiting to play and listening to some guy drone on like the voice coms are amateur night at the improv. Ironically that same guy then speaks not a word while actually playing the game, except to complain about how much player "X" sucks at doing job "Y".
There is only so much a player will tolerate before rendering judgment on the game as a waste of time and souring their impression of it. We then quit and go play other games that provide a more consistent play experience.... and yes, sometimes that means playing another game of Call of Duty, because as tired and played out as it is, at least it's consistent.
If I didn't really want to play GoIO and make it fun, I think I too would be gone already, having played less then 40 games. I'd be back playing World of Tanks, WarThunder, Planetside 2, or one of the dozens of games I bought on Steam Sale and have yet to play.
And I think many players are in the same "boat" as me, feeling the same way... except not nearly as tolerant and motivated to hang in there to make it work for them.
