Author Topic: Ship swapping in Lobby before competitive matches  (Read 65089 times)

Offline redria

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Re: Ship swapping in Lobby before competitive matches
« Reply #75 on: June 27, 2014, 03:02:08 pm »
The challenge here is choosing/making rules that people like, that work, and that don't stifle creativity.

Using MOBA's as an example. You don't know what your opponent is going to take. You take a character and build set you feel comfortable with or that you think will work well in certain ways with other members of your team. However, if your opponent counters this, you can alter your build order to buy into abilities that combat your specific opponents to allow a suboptimal character to win out. In this way, MOBAs only feature soft counters instead of so-called hard counters. Taking an interesting character is perfectly fine since you can alter your build order to handle and counter your opponents.

In GoIO, there is no mid-match control. The only thing you can do is alter tactics to try to defeat a counter. Sometimes that just doesn't work.

Using Hephaestus Challenge as an example, I believe administration touched on this subject while ironing out rules. Some of the things in play with HC are experimental to see if the rules are clearly defined enough or if further measures are needed. Without a distinctly better solution, we left just a time limit to see if it would be sufficient, knowing that if/when season 2 happens adjustments can be made to account for problems.

Analyzing the problem, there are 3 possible ways to organize selections: timer/unorganized, simultaneous, or ordered.
Timer/unorganized is primarily what we have seen to this point. It relies on good faith and confidence to work. While it hasn't seen major problems, it is also asking for trouble sooner rather than later.

Simultaneous and ordered are the other 2 options. Ordered allows teams some form of reaction to their opponent. This means someone has to choose first, and someone gets to choose last. Major problems with this is that early ships are likely to be generic, which isn't necessarily bad, but somewhat stifles creativity. More unique ships tend to have more distinct weaknesses that can be taken advantage of.

Simultaneous has the same problem in a different way. Simultaneous selection, or blind, pushes teams to take more generic builds capable of fighting any style of enemy. Again, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it still stifles creativity.

Probably the best solution will come from a combination of the 3 options.

The key here is that no, to date it has not been a glaring problem, but it has the potential for abuse. Everything should be thought of in terms of scalability. If a serious event could be run for a much larger, not necessarily as friendly community, it should be able to run just as smooth as events in a smaller community. In that line of thought, this is a problem, and this is a good thread to put forward ideas to solve it.



A potential solution: Captains must submit the specific ships their team will be using say 20 minutes prior to match start. After all ships have been submitted, then captains will be informed of all ship choices and will have until 10 minutes prior to match start to submit their ship loadouts. When loadouts have been submitted, all captains will be informed, and all players will be invited to join the lobby with said ships and loadouts. Players may then adjust their personal loadouts until the timer ends to allow for soft countering of certain aspects.

The limited time for decisions is my least favorite part, and could probably be taken out in favor of a 3 day lead time for ship decision, plus 24 hours to choose ship loadout, allowing each team time to toy with how their ships will play against their opponent's ships.

So for example, Team A submits 2 Pyramidions and Team B submits a Goldfish and a Galleon. Both teams are informed of this. Team A then submits a gat-mortar loadout and a carrot loadout, hoping for quick kills and lots of disable on the heavy weapons, while Team B submits a lumberfish loadout and an asymmetric killing galleon loadout hoping to go for quick ranged kills by keeping the pyramidions locked down with lumberjacks. The teams then have time to practice against these specific builds playing for flaws, giving them time to find ways to avoid a "hard" counter. They join the lobby and are free to engage in a cat-and-mouse game of swapping ammo and tool personal loadouts prior to the match until the timer runs out and the game starts.

This allows teams to take interesting ship combinations knowing that if their ships are not favored the way they wanted to fly, then can pick weapons that help them combat their opponent's ship.

Offline Queso

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Re: Ship swapping in Lobby before competitive matches
« Reply #76 on: June 27, 2014, 03:24:19 pm »
Hmm. That seems interesting, although the blind ship picks still seems like it will force out more of safer ship picks. If you pick something like a squid or spire, you can't do much situational picking in the weapon loudout.

Offline redria

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Re: Ship swapping in Lobby before competitive matches
« Reply #77 on: June 27, 2014, 04:05:25 pm »
Hmm. That seems interesting, although the blind ship picks still seems like it will force out more of safer ship picks. If you pick something like a squid or spire, you can't do much situational picking in the weapon loudout.
Squid is somewhat more limited. You sort of end up going attack squid or disable squid. However a merc squid to support a sniping ship might be a nice surprise if the enemy focuses on countering a close range squid.
Spire can do a sniping build or take a close range build the GwTh have done.

But yeah, certain ships will always be more all-around capable, which is part of why Pyra builds are so popular. It is very good in a lot of different scenarios.

I think this set-up would really benefit most from significant gaps between ship announcement and weapon selection, and between weapon selection and match. This would give teams time to find weird weapon combos that work well, and try to find the perfect way to fight that ship combo, then time again to learn and practice for the weapon combo.

Anyway, that is ~an~ option that allows both teams an opportunity to counter the other without giving one team a last say in the matter. An addendum might be that a team would be allowed say 1 mulligan for the season, and get to request a re-selection of ships from both teams if they backed themselves into a corner and just couldn't find a way out.

Offline Dementio

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Re: Ship swapping in Lobby before competitive matches
« Reply #78 on: June 30, 2014, 08:53:42 pm »
Hypothetical scenario:

Team A wants to fly something they have been practising with and are comfortable with. In the lobby though, it appears that Team B seems to counter them.
Team A decides to change one of their ships loadout to decieve their enemy. The enemy does indeed respond by changing one of their ship's loadout to counter the ship that has just changed on Team A.
When they both ready up Team A then changes their ship back immediately and the game starts, before Team B had time to react.


Team A wanted to fly a combination of ship they have practised hard with and were so sure to take.
Team B was comfortable by countering Team A ships with ships they were comfortable with.


Is countering allowed? If yes, to what extent?
If it is allowed we have endless ship swapping in lobbies or one team just gets the bonus of, well, the "superior" ship choice by countering the enemy ships.
And what right does one team have to simply counter something that the other team has practised long and hard for and nullify all its effort?


If we go off with a blind pick for each team then Team A wouldn't have had the need to swap at last second to fly something it is comfortable with, but Team B would have been forced to make a "safer" choice. This safer choice is hugely map depended too and what Team B expects from Team A. On Dunes it could have ended with very long range ships and on dawn with double metamidion...
To note is that this is rather disadvantageous for a team that always seems to use the same ships.

If it would have been a 1-2-1 kind of choice then Team A could have been semi-comfortable and Team B just as semi-comfortable.
However if Team B gets the first pick then Team A could have been countered just as much, because in the above mentioned scenario only 1 ship was changed per team, which means 1 ship per team could have been a permanent decision, which again means the second ship of Team B was a specific counter to a specific ship which would have been "locked". Only that Team A couldn't do a last second swap.


Personally, I am barely bothered at all to sit in the lobby for a little while longer to have my team as well as the enemy team perfectly comfortable with our choices. Well, "perfectly comfortable" is a bit of a stretch...
And I feel like it should really come down to the captains of each team. Does Team X want the right to counter the enemy ship, but give the enemy team the same right by possesing this right? Or does Team X NOT want to be countered and thus either request a blind pick or something 1-2-1 like, in which case the disagreement of the enemy team could lead to a problem that the tournament rules need to cover.


Why do people have to be so complicated...

Offline CitizenFry

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Re: Ship swapping in Lobby before competitive matches
« Reply #79 on: July 09, 2014, 01:55:29 pm »
I'd like to see "blind setup" as a toggle for public matches. I have been in a few lobbies where enemy captains will go back and forth counterpicking, and it's very frustrating. Red captain takes galleon, Blue captain takes flamer squid, Red captain switches to gatmortar pyra, Blue switches to galleon, repeat. Ugh, it took five minutes just to get 16 players in the lobby, now you guys are doing this switching thing and PEOPLE ARE LEAVING :(

Blind pick adds a little bit of interest in that just because you can tell what ship class you're facing, you don't necessarily know what all the hardpoints are on it until you get a good look at it - does that Galleon have a carronade, a flamer, or a mine launcher on the back? What does that Pyramidion have as its side guns? Etc.

I'd also like to see an option to change my personal equipment loadout during respawns (swap my firefighting item, for instance). Maybe this option already exists but I haven't noticed it. There's already the option to have three preset loadouts...

Offline Spud Nick

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Re: Ship swapping in Lobby before competitive matches
« Reply #80 on: July 10, 2014, 05:14:00 am »
I'd like to see "blind setup" as a toggle for public matches. .

That would be madness! It would change the game so much I don't know how it would be played after that.

Offline CitizenFry

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Re: Ship swapping in Lobby before competitive matches
« Reply #81 on: July 10, 2014, 12:19:19 pm »
I'd like to see "blind setup" as a toggle for public matches. .

That would be madness! It would change the game so much I don't know how it would be played after that.
Exaggeration. There are plenty of people who don't look that closely at how the opponent is setting up during public games. Just set up your ships the way you want them. The one challenge would be preventing people from hopping over to opposing ships to scout their loadout, but that's not an issue when all of the ships are full (and besides, it would be pretty obvious when someone was doing it).

Offline RomanKar

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Re: Ship swapping in Lobby before competitive matches
« Reply #82 on: July 12, 2014, 05:15:46 am »
I'd like to see "blind setup" as a toggle for public matches. .

That would be madness! It would change the game so much I don't know how it would be played after that.

I bet you'd figure it out.