Messages

1

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Improvements for this game

« on: December 20, 2014, 11:43:25 pm »

I also completely disagree with what you're saying about being able to see your opponents in the lobby. The game can still focus on a community without being able to see your opponent, it's not like one thing exclude the other. Team balancing should be based on ELO / MMR and not switching teams manually. You say that you want to say hello but what I mainlyhear is people making racist and sexist jokes and abusing their microphone because they're in the spotlight. You have teammates, tutorials, videos, in-game information and the forums to learn things. I don't see why we need to have the opponent teach you stuff if there are already so many sources.



...With Guns of Icarus the lobby occupies almost and in some situations more time than the game itself.

OK, this all loops back to the Lobby.  Think of The Lobby as a Gentleman's Club with a horrible Bouncer; Classy, but with a few unsavory characters.  Mute the assholes, and have a grand old time talking to everyone who's NOT being a dick.

Talking to the other team is amazing, you can get great banter GoIng, and seeing them lets you counter them; they counter, you counter again...  Once again, learn2lobby.

Countering pre-game based on reaction time, oke. Reminds me of playing Generals Zero hour where people would switch army the last moment in order to counter the other, requires much skill and it so much fun indeed. Nah, I rather not have that. Banter and countering, the two things that are both negative in my opinion which are your two arguments. I guess we can agree to disagree on this. The developers can choose whatever they like it's there game obviously. I've just mentioned all the things that I think would dramatically increase the population.

2

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Improvements for this game

« on: December 20, 2014, 12:36:46 pm »

I understand your intent but I feel you missed some of the point of the given features and the structure of the UI.

For example the class icons. Most people already know their builds and presets and in this game you can be asked to change class in an instant and when a lobby is counting down. You really really need a means to make changes fast.

Most importantly is class. Why lengthen the process if you can just quickly change class with an icon click? There will be times when you have literally until the drums finish, upon match start. You won't make it in time with the UI you suggested.

as for the whole chats and buttons thing? You know this game has rebinds. Don't like it, just rebind to your liking. There are far too many chats to dumb down to your structure. The keyboard controls are what they are because this game has many many functions and commands.

If you took the time to understand them all, you'll get why they are placed exactly where they are.








As for your lobbies comment. Oh dear god... this game is heavy on information gathering. You damn straight you see your opponents. You want to know who you're facing. Say hello. Talk about stuff. Mess around have fun. Teach players on opposing sides. Possibly switch people about to balance things out.

This game EMPHASISES COMMUNITY. To ask to make the game more impersonal is asinine.



As for ragequitters and afkers. The game auto kicks people who are truly afk during a match for a full 30 seconds.

ragequitters, can actually just be people have connection issues. To create a punishment system for one will punish the innocent other. Hence te safest option as is. Is to let the community handle it.

Winning and losing holds no real consequence. Both give exp and are both learning experiences. The game isn't about winning the game, its about getting better at it.

If people care about their win/lose ratio. They are gonna quickly realise that news about their bad habits spreads quickly and the community will act accordingly.

What I'm suggesting doesn't lengthen the process at all, if you just add the icons in the lobby itself the only difference is the location of it. It both requires one click to switch to another class. You completely ignored the point of having a global chat on the first page and not being able to close it. Also, I still don't see a reason to why this game should use key-bindings that are non- standard. There are games out there with twice as much key-bindings yet they use standard chat key-bindings. Sure you can change your key-bindings around which is a good thing but that doesn't mean they should add non-standard key-bindings.

I also completely disagree with what you're saying about being able to see your opponents in the lobby. The game can still focus on a community without being able to see your opponent, it's not like one thing exclude the other. Team balancing should be based on ELO / MMR and not switching teams manually. You say that you want to say hello but what I mainlyhear is people making racist and sexist jokes and abusing their microphone because they're in the spotlight. You have teammates, tutorials, videos, in-game information and the forums to learn things. I don't see why we need to have the opponent teach you stuff if there are already so many sources.


In order to punish ragequiters / afk-ers / leavers you need to implement a system that prevents a person from rejoining the queue / matchmaking system for a certain period of time after they left. You can start out with 5 minutes and increase it every time they leave. This period of time will automatically be reduced again if they don't leave for most of the matches. Leaving a match gives you -5 waiting time and not leaving a match gives you +0.5 waiting time where the maximum is 0 to give a random example.

I doubt we'll agree on things but all I can say is that I think it's necessary for this game to adapt and follow popular examples on the market. There's a reason why millions of players play certain games on a daily base. Sure you can hang on to the same thing but it will never achieve it's full potential in my opinion. I'm not stating that this is the only reason why certain games are so popular but convenient and fast ways to play definitely has a lot of influence. Whenever I want to play a MMORPG I just log-in and be in the world right away, if I want to play a FPS game I browse through the server list, join a server and at the most I need to wait for the round to start. If I want to play a MOBA game I go into the matchmaking queue, pick my champion and start the game. With Guns of Icarus the lobby occupies almost and in some situations more time than the game itself.

3

Feedback and Suggestions / Improvements for this game

« on: December 19, 2014, 08:22:19 pm »

Hello everyone,

I'm an old player that comes back every now and then to check out the progression of this game.
I've always thought that this game has great potential but I find it difficult to play this game for a longer period of time.
A lot of things have been improved since the last time I've played so I'm really happy to see that.
I do however think that there's still room for a lot of improvement which is the reason why I've made this thread.
There's no reason to invent the wheel again so many of my suggestions are coming from other successful games.

1) Chat

One of the first things you'll see when you log-in to the game is the chat, in my case:

1) Sometimes I like to go to the park, bend over sideways and just stick things in my ass
2) Well fuck off then
3) I like to lick my girls butt
4) Shut up
5) "Insert random foreign language"
6) Penis
7) Stfu whore I just got the game

Etc.

This mainly has to do with the fact that the game is on sale right now and many new people are trying the game out.
It gives people a distorted view of the community right away because I've met many kind people on this game.
This is the reason why many popular games don't have a global chat on the main page of their lobby, have a look at all the popular MOBA games for example.
To make things worse you aren't able to close or minimize the chat so you're forced to switch to another tab.
I'm aware that there's a profanity filter in the options but it's not like people will look for it right away, they usually just ignore it.
Also, all games use similar key-bindings to chat and I think it's weird that this game uses non standard key-bindings.
T (team) and Y (all) or common in FPS games, Enter (team) and Shift-Enter (all) are common in MOBA games and
Enter with the usage of /s /p /g /c are common in MMORPG's and just Enter for a lot of general things.

2) The class icons in the upper right corner

These icons serve multiple purposes it seems like which is only confusing in my opinion.
If you're on the character page you can click on it to switch between the load-outs of the classes.
However, if you're on you a random page (let's say ship) you can still click on them even though you don't see any changes until you switch to the character page again.
The second function it has is the switching between classes for the matchmaking system.
The third function is that you can switch role with it in the lobby.

It would be better of these icons were removed there.

- If you want people to switch between class pages, put it on the character page (which it already is).
- If you want people to select their class for match-making, put it in the matchmaking section.
- If you want people to select their class in the lobby, put it in the lobby.

Alternatively you can keep the icons there and use them to switch between the character pages,
replace the big character icon on top (redundant) with something else such as a spectator icon for example.
Also, remove the < Gunner Loadout > on the character page (redundant).

3) The matchmaking system

In my opinion it feels unnatural to set the match options before you click on play instead of after.
In almost any game that I've played you have to click on play first and then you select the match options or choose what you'd like to do.
It would be better if you'd implement a more clear and familiar / popular menu like League of Legends for example.
I understand that you can't copy paste the exact menu obviously but just to go the idea across: http://i.imgur.com/RWA5YYF.png.

Due to population issues you can temporarily add continent flags right next to it.
Make it also possible for people to select multiple modes and amount of players for shorter waiting times.
This is something that eventually should be gone.

A few other things:

- When you click play you aren't able to cancel instantly
- Time in queue indication / optionally: average wait time
- You should not not see your opponent in the lobby
- Leavers and AFK'ers should be penalized

4) Miscellaneous things

- Add a ranked ladder / scoreboard
- You should be able to create your own team and be in multiple for ranked matches (optionally: you can merge this with clans)
- Display solo / clan ratings of all the modes on a player's profile (optionally: private/public toggle)
- When you press alt-tab in-game you'll see Team 1 and Team 2, change that into Red Team / Blue Team instead or make it show the clan name.

Some of these things are more important than others, I especially think that the matchmaking and ranked teams / ladders are the most important.
All of the other things are also important nonetheless. I think it's important to make the game convenient and more accessible to people.
There's no need to invent everything again, there's plenty of solid examples up for grabbing just like the League of Legends example I've shared.
I honestly believe that (most of) the things that I've mentioned are necessary to get this game to the next level.

After all of the interface, matchmaking and competitive features are fixed and implemented it's all about the game-play itself.
I haven't played actively for a long period of time so I cannot say anything about balancing
nor do I have the energy to suggest things how to make the game itself more interesting at the moment.
Perhaps I'll make another post about all game-play related things later on once (some of) these things have been addressed.

Thank you for reading and I hope it's helpful.