Messages

1

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Fanciful ship preset / lobby ideas

« on: January 31, 2017, 06:00:24 pm »

It would definitely be unusual. It's pretty common for games with as many facts as GOIO to have some sort of "Tip of the day" appear somewhere (loading screens), but I can't think of any that actually test the player's knowledge directly. We wouldn't want people calling the game "Quizzes of Icarus"... Cheers.

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Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Fanciful ship preset / lobby ideas

« on: January 31, 2017, 02:12:10 pm »

GOIO has a hard enough time retaining new players.  Grilling new players before each match could be rather............detering.

After a little more reflection... While you're certainly right that SOME new players would be annoyed by the quiz to the point of writing off the game after just a few matches, I think there's a case to be made that for OTHER players doing a knowledge check and giving them feedback in a less distracting environment than the tutorial might help that knowledge stick and would prevent THOSE players from going into a match without understanding the most basic mechanics of the game, getting the captain angry and getting yelled at, and THAT experience would be more of a deterrent to playing again than the quiz would be.

Like, the quiz doesn't just make the captain's life easier, it makes life easier for the new players too (at the slight cost of the annoyance of having to respond to the quiz a dozen times).

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Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Fanciful ship preset / lobby ideas

« on: January 31, 2017, 01:59:36 pm »

2. I like it aside from the quiz bit.  Not sure how many new players would like that.

Yeah, it would be entirely up to the captain as to whether the crew member gets quizzed about the dossier. It just seems like it would be nice to give the captain some fully automated tool for actually verifying their plan was read and understood. (Setting aside lucky guesses by people just clicking a random answer.)

3. Maybe restrict that to novices? Again, not sure it would be well received.

I definitely know what you mean, and it would just be a tool available for captains who want to use it. Maybe making it only apply to novices would be good.

4. Maybe only do that in the tutorial, and make the tutorial required.

GOIO has a hard enough time retaining new players.  Grilling new players before each match could be rather............detering.

Certainly making some demonstration of the most basic knowledge required (and not brute-forceable by simply trying all possible answers) before playing online would be a good step.

Maybe one way to improve my pop quiz suggestion so that new players can bypass it would be to give them a button to do just that ("Stop giving me these quizzes") but then they'd have a little pile of poo icon next to their name in the lobby unless / until they opted back into the quizzes. The quizzes would stop naturally once they've retired all the questions. If there were only, say, 8 questions available, and they answered 2 of them per quiz, and a question is retired after having been answered correctly the last 3 times it was asked (3 times to help protect against lucky guessers), then a player who knows the correct answers would only have to play 12 matches to retire all of the questions.

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Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Fanciful ship preset / lobby ideas

« on: January 31, 2017, 01:43:14 am »

2 - I would use this feature pretty fully, I've thought of various complicated ways for showing crew roles in lobby and somehow never considered just having a text box. Getting the length of text allowed right would be the challenge, no one wants to be pushed into reading a 2000 word essay on the metamidion, but it still needs enough space to explain 3 crew roles and a general strategy. Some way to link and display the loadouts referred to would also be a good feature of it.

This started me thinking about actually being able to name to loadouts / roles, and having separate text boxes for each of the roles.

With these, the act of recommending a loadout could be a much richer process. In addition to seeing the loadout contents the player would see the name of the loadout ("Main engie") and the description of the role the captain entered as part of the dossier process. ("Focus on keeping the hull armor and engines in good repair. I'll call out Artemis or flare targets.")

Some crappy mockups:

Ship preset editing


Ship dossier editing


Recommended loadout screen

4 - I'm not sure about this one

Yeah, maybe once novices get a particular question right three times in a row that question is "retired", and once they retire all of the questions they don't have to take the quiz anymore. There's just so many who either manage to skip the tutorial or at least plow through it without paying attention... Sad to see them keep hitting a component that's on cooldown when there's other repairs to be done. Also another question to include would be something like "If a ship already has a gunner, you should probably join as an engineer. True or false?"

Actually... shouldn't the game ask for confirmation when attempting to join mid-match as a second gunner? "It looks like this ship already has a gunner. Are you SURE you want to join as a second gunner?"

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

« on: January 29, 2017, 06:10:54 pm »

dont have pride for your clan?

I should have mentioned that the clan ceased to exist a long time ago, so I'm just curious as to whether this forum is frozen in time or if there's some way to get it to correctly reflect my current clanless state.

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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...

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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.

----------------------------------------------

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).

======================

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).

======================

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.

======================

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.

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Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Reputation system?

« on: November 18, 2014, 01:48:21 pm »

I see - well maybe there would be a way to have an effective karma rating without involving negative points, and even without something like "revocable" commendations...

Here are some ideas for a commendation-driven visible karma system...

1) When a player receives a commendation, this fact should NOT be announced to them. Players shouldn't feel pressured to give a commendation to a player simply because they received one from them. Likewise, a player shouldn't be made aware that they did NOT receive a commendation from a crewmate since that could potentially be a source of ill will. In order to fully obscure whether or not a particular player awarded you a commendation, your karma value should only update at fixed time intervals, for instance, at midnight or 3 AM, so that you will only see the effects of ALL of the matches played that day and not the effect any single match had on your karma.

2) Instead of player A commending player B being a one-time event, player A can commend player B once each day. (Keep reading.)

3) The karma from a commendation is not permanent and gradually erodes as a function of matches played. (Eroding as a function of time could be unfair to high-quality players who do not play often.) As an example if Alice commends Bob, Bob's karma would increase by 100 points at midnight (per number 1 above), but the value of that commendation would decrease by 1 for each match that Bob plays, until after 100 matches at which point that commendation no longer carries any weight at all. However if Alice and Bob play another match the next day and Alice commends Bob again the karmic value of Alice's commendation of Bob would be restored to the full 100 point value and would proceed to erode as before.

4) Instead of seeing a raw karma score, karma scores would fall into a handful of "buckets", with the topmost bucket being open-ended. For instance the buckets could be something like "Swabbie" (0-999), "Deckhand" (1,000-4,999), "Officer" (5,000-9,999), "Captain" (10,000+). These numbers are PDOMA, the idea is that even though karma gradually evaporates, as long as you continue to receive commendations at a reasonable rate, you should stay in the best bucket.

A system like this appeals to me since if I give a commendation to someone I later discover is a jerk, I'd know that any benefit their karma score gets from that commendation will eventually vanish. On the other hand if there is a player I like playing with, I can commend them each day that we play together so my commendation will have an ongoing positive impact on their karma.

The most obvious flaw (I'm sure there are more) is that if you have 3 friends and you only ever play with them, your karma would max out at 300 and you'd always be a Swabbie, so if you went to play with randoms they might think you weren't a good team player.

So perhaps instead of the karma value of commendations eroding by one with each match played, they would only erode in matches where you're on a crew with someone who hasn't commended you that day (or maybe it would still erode when playing with your clan, just at a greatly reduced rate). That way someone who plays with the same 3 clan members 99% of the time would be able to retain any karma they earn playing with other people for longer (possibly indefinitely), so they could build it up to the "Captain" bucket and keep it there.

Anyway, just some ideas.

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Feedback and Suggestions / Reputation system?

« on: November 18, 2014, 12:27:05 pm »

I guess the problem is I'm expecting commendations to serve a purpose which they do not serve.

Is it fair to say that there is no machinery in place which attempts to answer the question "Do people like playing with this player"?

If someone works hard and contributes to a win, that's great - and if they work hard but lose anyway and exhibit good sportsmanship, that's great too - but if they work hard, lose anyway, but turn into a screaming, insane idiot in the process, that's not someone I would choose to play with again.

Since commendations (or lack thereof) seem to have no visible effects, I suppose the only use they have is serving as a mild positive-reinforcement mechanism. (Though I understand that in the not too distant past level increases were achievement-based so being held to a low level due to not receiving commendations might be a more weighty mechanic.)

I wonder if GoIO could benefit from a more overt reputation system. This wouldn't necessarily need to rise to the level of visible endorsements of fellow players (like a publicly viewable "is friends with" relation), but some sort of system where commendations or discommendations from players who have put in hundreds of hours and have a high reputation have more weight than commendations or discommendations from people with less than 10 hours and low reputation scores.

In order to prevent a new player from being sandbagged by a veteran having a bad day, reputation could be accrued or lost at a reduced rate until a player graduates from being a novice so that they have an opportunity to screw up but then learn from their mistakes.

I'm probably overlooking problems a reputation system would cause, but I can say that the current level scheme only gives you an idea of how many matches someone has played, not whether anyone likes playing with them. (You can get to level 45 and still be a jerk.)

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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.)

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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!

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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

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The Lounge / Re: Introductions!

« on: November 03, 2014, 11:50:50 am »

Ahoy - looks like I'm the first person to post here since the start of the current Steam sale.

It kind of bothers me that I hadn't heard of GoIO (or as I like to spell it, "goyo") until it popped up in my Steam discovery queue yesterday morning. Or equally disturbing is the idea that I had seen it earlier and dismissed it. I have to admit that I have a bias against the steampunk aesthetic and I haven't had much experience with team-based ship-to-ship combat, so I can imagine that I might have seen the description for this game and ignored it based on the metacritic score (which I've since learned to ignore). I almost skipped it yesterday as well, except that I always drill down on user reviews for any game which has an "Overwhelmingly Positive" reception.

And I'm glad I did. Although crewing with equally inexperienced randoms was somewhat entertaining (mostly scrambling to keep the ship in one piece), once I started playing with captains who knew how to play and communicate the game made a quantum leap from somewhat entertaining to incredibly awesome. Probably my favorite part is the tension when your ship is healthy and no enemies have been spotted - everyone is scanning the sky, watching and waiting.

I liked it so much, I bought the 4 pack, then I went to the in game store and bought some duds. (And I imagine I'll be sending some more doubloons to Muse to support the adventure game.)