Fanciful ship preset / lobby ideas

[Electric Donkey]

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.

[Daft Loon]

1 - Yes

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.

3 - I'd like to see this tied into the ready button, essentially "I'm ready to start like this, no-one gets to screw it up and delay the match further"

4 - I'm not sure about this one

[Electric Donkey]

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?"

[Carn]

1. I definitely agree with

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

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

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.

[Electric Donkey]

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.

[Electric Donkey]

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).

[Carn]

I certainly understand that, I'm just envisioning the initial thoughts of a new player upon seeing the quizzes.  Thank you for the feedback btw.

[Electric Donkey]

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.