Topics

1

Feedback and Suggestions / Duplicate map previews for different game types

« on: June 22, 2014, 08:51:11 pm »

I feel that map preview images should be distinctive between capture point and deathmatch games, even when the base map is the same; the reason this is important is that it's often unclear that, e.g. paritan has switched to labyrinth, which has grave consequences on early-game strategy. The duplicate images I can think of off hand are:

- Paritan and Labyrinth
- Sepulcher and Flayed
- Anglean and Firnfield

2

Feedback and Suggestions / Underdog honor

« on: March 24, 2013, 05:10:14 pm »

Regularly I see fights where a group of 3 friends, often with crews in the 6-8 range, play against a team composed of level 1-3 members. Certainly experience levels don't confer additional abilities, but regardless of a general gamer's skill, I find experience levels are a reliable indicator of... experience.

I propose some metric or series of achievements that rewards players for fighting on the low-experience side of an greatly imbalanced fight (they'd have to be present both when the match starts and ends). If it were an achievement, it should involve enough matches (maybe 100+) to prolong the amount of time players would be willing to make the conscientious decision of turning a, usually guaranteed, win into a fighting chance.

I'd still favor an "honor" metric better, though -- experienced players who regularly choose the experienced side (with increased weight on captains) would have this slide towards zero (or into the negative, depending on implementation), while those who choose to even things out would rise in prestige. All of this would be relative to the amount of imbalance, with imbalance below a certain threshold having no effect (so a 8-8-6 vs an 8-8-8 match would not affect this metric for any of the captains).

To allow players to still play in clan or pre-determined team configurations without a large risk of penalty, when setting up a game, a minimum or maximum captain level could be specified to, for example, to enforce "noobs only" games or to prevent a trio of new captains from jumping into a game they couldn't reasonably win against a coordinated high level team.

3

Feedback and Suggestions / Commander auto-promotion

« on: March 24, 2013, 04:49:35 pm »

When the existing commander leaves (and their auto-reconnect option times out), I propose that the first person on helm gets auto-promoted to commander (and the commander slot would be once again filled when viewed from the lobby). I've had a few annoying cases where players jump into the commander slot, and steal the helm -- most recently it was a powdermonkey, who clearly had not picked up any skill yet, stole the helm in the middle of a tied-score fight against a then-disadvantaged enemy, and logged out as soon as our team lost the battle.

4

Feedback and Suggestions / Add initial CP activation delay to CP maps (particularly Crazy King)

« on: March 22, 2013, 12:27:20 am »

Since different machines load the maps at different speeds, I find it's not uncommon for one team's ships to be on a points or points (especially Crazy King) before the other ships can be half way there -- in an otherwise fair match, this gives the quicker-loading team a "free" lead. This, coupled with what seems like the possibility for a Crazy King point to start nearer to the first point can give a significant advantage. To diminish both effects, I propose at least a 30 second delay past when the server starts the round before the points are activated (and in the case of Crazy Kings, before the first point is even indicated), diminishing the negative effect of loading delays and allowing ships to disperse past their spawn location enough that spawn-distance bias is also somewhat nullified (since the good preparatory strategy for capturing an as yet unknown point is to position yourself within reach of at least several of them).

5

Feedback and Suggestions / Make it easier to lose a spotted ship

« on: March 22, 2013, 12:16:22 am »

I propose that if nobody on any allied ship has looked in the direction of a spotted ship in a certain amount of time, even if the spotted ship hasn't disappeared behind clouds or obstacles, and the spotted ship through its own action causes its angular position relative to the spotting ships to change enough since the last time anyone looked at it ("it's not where we expected it to be"), the spot will get lost. By "own action", I mean that if allied ships move considerably but the spotted ship is stationary, the spot won't get lost.

The intent is to increase the need for managing the situational awareness of a crew: if an enemy ship is behind you, but all engineers are looking at components and all gunners and the pilot are focusing solely on blasting the ship in front of them, then it seems reasonable that the approaching ship shouldn't have to take extraordinary measures to lose their spot. To make this work really well, the spot reticule would have to be simulated along the movement vector from the time it was last observed, so if you last saw a ship approaching you directly from behind, but nobody looks at it for a while, the indicators will still indicate it's facing you and presumably getting closer along the same movement vector; when you do finally look back towards it, if it's in the same direction as it had been  (maybe within a 30 degree arc), the spot will be freshly updated without any action, but if it's not in that same direction when you look, the spot will be lost immediately. To display the staleness of a spot, all indicators could slowly gray out of existence.

In terms of time expiration, if it is feasible to involve line-of-sight calculations (you can't freshen a spot by looking in its direction when it's visually obstructed by your hull, even if it is following the predictable path), then it might be reasonable to expire a spot in ~30 seconds. Otherwise, if those calculations are not feasible, ~15-20 seconds seems fair.

As a side-proposal, it'd be useful for a flaming ship to be more easily spotted through clouds (similar to the flare effect).

6

Feedback and Suggestions / Obstacles on map edges

« on: March 21, 2013, 11:53:17 pm »

It's probably been mentioned before (but a forum search of "map edge" brought nothing pertinent up): edge of map behavior combined with obstacles on the edges of map (such as the towering wreckage on the edge of Duel at Dawn or Canyon Ambush) can be jarring, particularly for new players in those areas, since without knowing the particular edge of map behavior (it's not necessarily obvious without large points of reference), it's rather easy to be forced into ramming an obstacle, even without enemy assistance.

Unless this is an intentional effect, it'd be ideal for maps to not have free-standing edge-of-map obstacles (ridges and other smooth terrain that don't intersect a map border wouldn't be such a big deal, since any collision with it would have been a result of the "natural" physics). Perhaps this could be achieved by shrinking or extending map borders so that any ship could slide past these obstacles if the edge-of-map effect comes into play.