Experience Gains - Post MM.

[Kamoba]

Hello ladies and gentlemen!
I'd like to address a small piece of feedback regarding the Experience gains of Guns of Icarus.

As wonderfully happy as I am that I now have my Elite pilot costume (Which is amazingly awesome!) I do feel that having only joined Guns of Icarus in October that the experience gain is a little bit too fast as I've near the pilot level cap with 660 matches.

The speed of which experience is gained makes being a "novice" almost pointless as you'll have hit level 7 within as many matches making the learning curve harder as the novice is so short lived (for the ones who stay in novice) that they're unaware they even finished Novice..
They then get pitted against vets, and start leaving after losses....

Increasing the level required to finish novice would not be a great help, but maybe scaling the experience rate would...

Just my two cents...

[Hillerton [PC]]

I very much agree! I have seen so many level 20 something with less than 100 games played. This I feel somewhat makes the levels just an number as 40-45 will be gained very fast and as such won't carry much weight in showing who is good and not.

Simply put your level should be more representative of the time in game as that will translate somewhat to skill allowing people on a ship to get an approximate idea of what everyone will be able to do. Also I hate explaining how chemspray works to people between 20-30, they should have found it out long ago when they are on that level

 

[David Dire]

Becoming not-novice actually used to take level 3, if I remember correctly.
When was that? I believe that was back with lobbies of Icarus: The Classic edition *Free Broken Server list included*

[Ightrril]

The old novice system had novice levels at 1-3, so 4 was when you were kicked out. However, the time it takes now to finish novice (I believe the achievement is actually rewarded at lvl4 instead of lvl8, hasn't been updated) is considerably less than it generally used to be. As a whole I've noticed level progression being a lot faster, around double that of what it was before for later levels, and even faster still for lower levels which is part of the issue occurring here.

I feel it may be more beneficial to set the novice system up not with levels but with match count. With that players with below, say, 100 (or certainly at least 50) matches could still play in novice games, regardless of level. This also helps players who choose to focus on one class instead of playing a mix of them. At the moment if I were to estimate it could take between 30 and 100 matches for a player to graduate novice (depending on the balance between classes played) with players focusing on one class at the lower end of that scale, rather an unfair way to do it.

An in-game tutorial for Chemspray could help a lot for some newer engineers too.

Levels have never been a good way to guess experience, I always find match count more useful but it's not something that it's easy to put a number on.

[TeddyBearMafia]

Part of the problem may be the bonus experience from achievements - I have ~ 400 more games than Kamoba, for example, but he has higher rank than me in pilot. A lot of that may be due to the fact that I completed a lot of the easy achievements pre-MM without achieving level 15. Still, though, I'm not sure this is actually a problem. Constant leveling up is good for morale on the part of new players, so I don't see much of a problem with it.

Keep in mind that I've put close to 350 hours into GoIO, and 200+ hours into piloting alone, which is more than I've played Skyrim, GuildWars 2 and Borderlands 2 combined. Yet, I have multiple max level characters in GW2, have finished Skyrim's main quest a number of times, and so on. There are certainly those who have played more, but I'm not yet max level and I can't help but feel that asking players to devote entire weeks worth of time to reach max level is a bit elitist at best - ergo, I think the current leveling speed is probably fine.

And for those who say levels don't matter, they underestimate the influence large numbers have over player's egos. Certainly mine is affected the closer I see my rank creep to 45.

[Kamoba]

The biggest problem with the fast level gain, is the novice players who have only experienced the game on one or two ships doing either only engineering or only gunning and finishing their "novice" status before they've even realised they were novice and the game play changes drastically from people mucking about on air ships to people blasting air ships out of the sky.
The jump between the novice and non-novice is huge, yet the level gap/time spent learning the game is near to nothing.
Level 12 gunners using only default ammo is a common thing.. Engineers with hydrogen extinguisher buff hammer and heavy at level 10 is also common...
People are not learning the game in the short time given to them before they wind up on the loosing end of a match and more often than any of us would like to see, rage quitting the game...

Remember novice matches mostly include two engineers running around like headless chickens trying to repair everything while a gunner shoots default ammo at any ship infront of him, the crew win and think they're doing well, so they stick together till they finish novice quickly, they end up one match against a random group of pub match players who know the basics and have one main engineer a gunner and gungineer... Suddenly the ship firing one gun is out gunned in a matter of seconds, that is no morale boost in the early game play...
Or they take a Galleon because "Big Guns!!!" Then the pilot fails to give any arcs... They get obliterated slowly...

The fast level increase is good for morale at higher levels yes (though still fast imo) at lower levels its for new players, who we want to learn and stay and make a legacy for themselves) something there needs to change.

[TeddyBearMafia]

I mean, in that case the problem is the parameters of novice matchmaking, which could be tied to matches played rather than level. The actual speed of leveling would have no real negative impact in that scenario. Still, forcing new players to play novice matches is still something that I think is rather poor design with a small community like ours, however that ends up impacting pub lobby playing at higher levels.

[Indreams]

It took me several days, tens of matches, for me to graduate novice back when it was 1-3. I didn't know I had to hunt achieves to graduate.

It's taking many people 6 to 8 matches to graduate novice.

Just yesterday, I captain a crew of lvl 8s, who had one-digit matches.


I piloted a Galleon. They had never seen a Galleon before, didn't know how heavy rounds worked on Hwacha, and panicked at 1 stack flames.
We battled against two pyramidions, with a mid-range mobula on our side. It should have been a very easy match (Galleon-disable tank, Mobula-damage) because Hwacha is super-effective against pyras, but it ended up being one of the hardest matches I've won.

We need better tutorial. I want a Leaguish tutorial where the player is put into an easy, "scripted" bot match that teaches players as they play.

[Ightrril]

I mean, in that case the problem is the parameters of novice matchmaking, which could be tied to matches played rather than level. The actual speed of leveling would have no real negative impact in that scenario. Still, forcing new players to play novice matches is still something that I think is rather poor design with a small community like ours, however that ends up impacting pub lobby playing at higher levels.

The novice match option can be turned off (which should probably be made more clear). If matchmaking can't put a player with novice matches enabled into a lobby then they get the option to join non-novice matches instead. There should definitely always be an option to not be in novice matches, but the option to be able to play in them should last for longer.

Without there simply being more players for the matchmaking system to work with there isn't much that could be done, except perhaps expand on the idea of novice games and split lobbies (optionally) further into different levels of play, but I can't see that working well due to similar issues and I don't think is a very good idea overall.

Slight correction to my earlier post, the "30-100" matches should be "10-40", or there about.

[HamsterIV]

Novices aren't forced into novice matches, Non novices are disallowed from joining them. It is supposed to create a safe space from the novices to experiment without getting killed 10 seconds into an encounter by a seasoned crew.

In spite of levels having no gameplay advantage they do effect how other people react to you. I will fly more conservatively if the highest level on my crew is less than 20, and I will micromanage anyone under level 10. If I am crewing I will not fly in a galleon or a squid with a pilot under 15.

The Match Making update that changed the levels forced me to reconfigure my expectations of players based on their level. If it were changed again I and I am guessing most players would change how they react to strangers based on their level.

[Dementio]

Novices aren't forced into novice matches, Non novices are disallowed from joining them. It is supposed to create a safe space from the novices to experiment without getting killed 10 seconds into an encounter by a seasoned crew.

That is the thing with novice players. In novice matches they are stuck with three ships (Pyramidion, Junker, Goldfish) with three predefinted and questionable loadouts while playing only one and the same gamemode (Deathmatch) on a maximum of two maps (Battle on the Dunes and Northern Fjords).
This doesn't allow for experimentation, exploration or any real excitement. I highly doubt that there is any excitement from people that just joined the game and play Battle on the Dunes, especially not when they can't do any of this "experimentation" during 10 games that doesn't allow any before not being able to join novice matches again.
So they join normal matches that have more game modes, more maps, allows for more ships and loadout variation and then they get "killed 10 seconds into an encounter by a seasoned crew".

Muse argued that novice matches have these restrictions to avoid silly builds like a four hwacha Galleon, which can be actually pretty deadly nowadays, but whatever, and to counter that novice players join normal matches to make these builds instead.

The problem isn't really how quickly they level up.

[Dutch Vanya]

I'm pretty sure new players love Battle on the Dunes, that's why it gets voted for so much.

[michael.hauda]

I wouldn't mind novice matches to be all they get until they have x number of achievements but that's just me, I acknowledge the player count is low so it might not work but I like the idea.

These achievements would cover the basics of the game and require things like; destroy 20 components with heavy clip, extinguish 5 components with chem spray, spend 30 seconds using moonshine, the idea being they'll get the achievements hopefully by using tools smart (probably not, its trial and error) the main idea being force them to get a few easy but fundamental achievements without any of the somewhat silly or difficult ones.

Also, why not have each gun tell you good ammos for them? if I remember correctly they each tell you about themselves already, is it too much to add in a blurb about greased rounds to the mortar?

Also, less creative solution but hear me out, increase the XP required to level at low levels? like, have each level require as much XP as getting to 8th itself does or something, if you get to 8th in 10 games now the number goes up to 80 which is much better I think

I would like to see the leveling at least for non-novices stay the same just because I level comparably slow (at 1100 matches) and I like the added pat on the back once in awhile, I wouldn't mind more goodies when I level though I mean you don't get anything at level 30? that was upsetting..

[GeoRmr]

All those level 4's with 0 games played, xp from tutorial achievements is OP.

[Kamoba]

All those level 4's with 0 games played, xp from tutorial achievements is OP.

Yes, that's a problem, half of novice is finished before even a single game is played