Topics

1

Website and Forum Issues / Remove clan name in forum profile?

« on: January 29, 2017, 05:21:30 pm »

Hadn't posted here in a long time and I see that there's a clan tag associated with my profile ([SG-1]) but I can't find any relevant options in my profile configuration...

2

Feedback and Suggestions / Fanciful ship preset / lobby ideas

« on: January 29, 2017, 03:10:47 pm »

Since this appears to be a pretty actively used sub-forum I'll just post these together in one thread.

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1. Make Ship Presets Great Again

• Increase the number of presets from 3 to... something bigger.
• Have custom ship names be saved per-preset and not per-ship type. This will help identify the presets so that players wouldn't have to visually parse the guns and their placement.
• Add a button allowing the player to copy the currently selected preset to another slot.
• Include a dedicated "temporary" preset slot, much like the recommended loadout slot "R". When combined with the copy functionality in the previous point, players would be able to easily clone an existing preset and then make one or two changes appropriate for the particular match about to take place, without having to then go back and undo the changes later. This would be especially important for copying the dossier (see next point).

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2. Ship Dossier

Add a text field to ship preset customization allowing captains to describe the ship's usual engagement strategy and lay out the roles for each crew member. This will allow potential crew members to review the captain's plan while in the lobby. This will make time spent in Lobbies of Icarus somewhat more useful. (Even moreso if players have the ability to browse the captain's entire collection of presets and dossiers for edification purposes.) Being able to review this information via text is a nice alternative to voice chat, especially when some of the more talkative players are socializing and stepping all over what your captain is trying to tell you. The captain could instead just write in crew chat "Please review the ship dossier."

Extra credit: Include an "OK" button in the dossier review screen and when crew members click it there is some indication in the lobby (at least for the captain) that the player has read / acknowledged the dossier. Maybe a star next to their name or something.

Insane bonus credit: When the "OK" button is clicked, the dossier disappears and the player is presented with a multiple choice question written by the captain and saved as part of the preset. (This could be simple bbcode style markdown that captains enter at the end of the dossier text.) A wrong answer wouldn't necessarily have any adverse effect other than alerting the captain that the player answered incorrectly (and so didn't read or didn't understand the dossier).

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3. Mandatory Loadouts

(I know this is a hot topic, this is just my thinking for a possible approach.)

If a non-novice captain joins a lobby in an empty ship (or gets the consent of everyone already on the ship) they can enable mandatory loadouts, such that the current crew and anyone who joins the ship in the future will be assigned a loadout by the captain and will be unable to change it (other than re-ordering the tools for those silly captains who put spanner before mallet). This could be filtered based on player level, so if a captain wants to always allow other players with a certain amount of experience the flexibility to bring chem spray instead of an extinguisher, that would be possible. So there would be a field labelled "Mandatory loadouts below level [__]" and the captain could put whatever number they wanted to in there.

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4. Pop Quiz

If GoIO is more knowledge based than skill based, how about a tool that allows captains to do a quick knowledge check?

When a captain joins a lobby they can enable a quiz of one or two true / false questions, such that anyone who joins their ship beneath a certain level of experience must answer them and their incorrect answers are reported to the captain in the chat console. Example questions:

Mortars and flak guns are most effective at stripping a target's armor. True or false?
Fire on a burning component can be extinguished while the component is on repair cooldown. True or false?
The "standard engineer loadout" does not include a buff hammer. True or false?
"Port" means "left" and "starboard" means "right". True or false?

Sure, this would add an extra 10 seconds to the process of joining a game and starting a match, but since the average time spent in lobbies is about the same as the average time spent in game, an extra 10 seconds shouldn't be the deal-breaker here.

3

Feedback and Suggestions / Suggestion / Discussion: Only allow intra-ship commendations when losing

« on: November 18, 2014, 11:34:14 am »

When everything goes smoothly and your team handily wins a match, only trolls or the truly maladjusted behave badly on the winning team.

So I would assert that the true test of "good sportsmanship", which is ostensibly what commendations are about, happens only when your team loses.

Did the main engineer ignore the armor?

Did the captain fail to indicate when he was using moonshine?

Was the noob gunner dumping mortars onto a target with full armor?

Did the captain pilot the ship into the firing arc of multiple opponents, smash into the landscape, then shriek blame at the engineer for ignoring the armor, apparently oblivious to the concept of repair cooldowns and the non-existence of a +10 Enchanted Mallet of Divine Protection?

In my opinion it's only when your side struggles and fails that you can possibly know whether your crewmates are actually quality teammates. As such, I would suggest that commendations between crew members only be made possible when your crew is on the losing team.

(Alternately if it was possible to revoke a commendation, that would work too.)

4

Q&A / What's the deal with fire? (Burn vs. repair vs. extinguish)

« on: November 04, 2014, 03:05:48 pm »

Hello. I checked the wiki, which has pages on the extinguisher and chem spray, and I read the chem spray guide over on the Classroom board, but I'm still foggy on exactly how fire works.

Here's a comment someone wrote in the chem spray Q & A thread:

Also, the most important things to spray are balloon -> hull -> guns. Engines even with 20 stacks can be kept up indefinitely with mallet. Balloon is pretty much lost with even 2 stacks of fire, and hull around 5 stacks. Guns can take a bit more but remember 8 stacks and the gun is unusable.

I did learn from the Weapons wiki article that the effectiveness of various types of damage depend upon the ship component being damaged. But I still have a few questions...

If a component on fire is destroyed, all fire stacks are removed. If an un-sprayed component on fire is subjected to additional attacks from fire-damage weapons, more fire stacks will be added (up to the cap of 20). If a component on fire is treated with chem spray or an extinguisher, the number of fire stacks will be reduced by 3 or eliminated completely, respectively.

1) Apart from these influences, does the number of fire stacks on a component remain constant?

2) If a component is chem sprayed, it won't CATCH FIRE for 25 seconds, but does it still take direct fire damage? Or does spray convey complete immunity to all fire damage (apart from any stacks the component might still be carrying if the spray couldn't remove them all)?

3) As a new and uninformed player, my instinct upon seeing fire is to put it out - however if fire does not "spread" on its own (see question 1) and the component in question is near destruction and is not particularly susceptible to fire damage (engines, guns), and only has a very small number of stacks, then based on the quoted comment from the chem spray thread, it's better to simply mallet it and move on if other components require attention. I guess this one isn't a question, but I'd like to hear more about the factors that figure into the decision to either let a component burn until it's destroyed, repair the component and ignore the fire, or to put the fire out.

Thanks in advance!

5

Feedback and Suggestions / Showing newbies how a proper crew operates

« on: November 03, 2014, 02:05:00 pm »

Hello - I just picked up GoIO yesterday (having never heard of it before) and although just engineering on a ship with equally inexperienced randoms for the first hour or two was entertaining in its own way, playing with an experienced captain who knew how to fly and how to communicate clearly was a completely different experience.

If a new player joins during a surge of new players and doesn't play long enough to wind up on a ship with a GoIO regular, I can imagine they would never see just how fun the game can be.

In the interest of retaining more new players, if something could be done to show them the potential of teamwork as soon as they get into the game then more might stay.

Two ideas come to mind. The first should be easy and quick to implement, though at the expense of interactivity: just record some staged footage from the perspective of an engineer/gungineer where the captain gives orders (with light explanations). The clip could begin with no enemies in sight, so the captain tells the crew over voice comms to search the skies for ships. The recording player would pull up their spyglass and after a few seconds they'd spot a ship and then verbally report it to the crew. (Maybe it would be some distance away and the captain could tell the player to buff the main engine to close the gap faster.) Then some more instructive orders like "Man the gatling to take down their armor. When the hit markers turn red the gunner will take out their hull with the mortar."

I'm sure you get the idea - just have a concise video that shows how a proper crew operates and gives some flavor of the game's mechanics without drowning them in details about ship builds and tactics (or other captain concerns), and then have that video playback the first time a new player clicks on the Tutorials button. Really I think videos for each role might be nice since you can rewind a video and watch it very easily, whereas the tutorials have text which a player can accidentally skip and then only see again by running through the tutorial all over.

The other idea would be to have a more elaborate interactive tutorial which basically runs the player through a scenario like the video I described, complete with canned audio orders from the AI captain. However this would be much more time intensive to implement, and really the goal isn't to teach the player how to perform a particular task, it's to show what it's like to be part of a well-oiled flying death machine - so I think a well made video would serve nicely.

As it is the only video I bothered to look up before playing was the Total Biscuit video, which did more to illustrate the complexity of the game than the fun of the game.

Cheers