Title, not much more to add. Introduce matchmaker based on character winrate and separate groups from solo players. Right now GSF is nearly unplayable as a solo player and thanks to numerous flaws, non-existent balance and general obscurity of this mode finding a group to play is comparable in difficulty to finding team ranked group in PvP.

Until devs decide to devote attention to GSF, here's what you can do:

[1] Find a good player

[2] Slide into their DMs

 

How else do people find a team ranked groups for ground PvP?

 

If you insist on flying solo, talking to other players to figure out what they're doing can dramatically improve your own play. You can reach out to others on /gsf in-game, and on two Discords.

 

It also pays to bite the bullet and try things that you're not good at, but are proven to be meta.

Title, not much more to add. Introduce matchmaker based on character winrate and separate groups from solo players. Right now GSF is nearly unplayable as a solo player and thanks to numerous flaws, non-existent balance and general obscurity of this mode finding a group to play is comparable in difficulty to finding team ranked group in PvP.

 

Get ready for a flood of defensive panicked responses from the premades.

 

These premades exist to create lopsided matches. That's it. Any claim they actually want competition is revealed to be at best self-delusion, and most likely a plain lie.

 

Premades are not the only problem with GSF, but they are horrible for it.

 

What they should do is make two queues you can be in simultaneously. One solo queue, one premade only. If you can be in both at the same time, it won't slow pops at all.

What you wold be looking at is, no pops.

 

There is a reason they went to cross faction.

 

And it isn't because of premades or side stacking.

 

Premades make it tough yeah.

 

But, you also have to look at, teams get crushed, regardless of a premade or not.

 

There is no replacement for veteran ability/skill, other than time and training on your own part.

 

You cant just show up and expect to rek, or be carried.

 

If that is your implication here.

Here you go...a perfect example of no premade participation.

 

You can skip to the end if you want.

 

But it doesnt take a premade of aces (four people, by the way, not an entire team), to knock the enemy into submission.

 

Title, not much more to add. Introduce matchmaker based on character winrate and separate groups from solo players. Right now GSF is nearly unplayable as a solo player and thanks to numerous flaws, non-existent balance and general obscurity of this mode finding a group to play is comparable in difficulty to finding team ranked group in PvP.

 

I absolutely agree that we need a matchmaker based on character or legacy win rate, the matchmaker that we have now that is purely based on games played doesn't seem to be able to recognize the difference between a very skilled player and one that has simply played many games.

 

But your solution to seperate players that solo queue and group queue would simply not work at this point, there wouldn't be enough players to make a premade only queue pop frequently enough so all you'd up doing is eliminating that part of the game. I also believe you'd be surprised at how many premades you are fighting regularly, many simply duo queue ing.

 

 

I'm not sure what you mean by flaws or non-existant balance, the game is far better then it ever has been in this aspect, are there weapons/ships that are a little more powerful then others, yes of course there are. Some could use some minor changes but nothing is REALLY over tuned at the moment, not like Ion Railgun or Distortion Field used to be.

 

As for your comment about GSF having a general obscurity problem, yes for sure, that's why we're constantly trying to make guides and videos to educate as many as possible, because this games tutorial doesn't teach anywhere near enough. This game is so in depth it's hard to even scratch the surface even with a 2 hour coaching session, and then it's so much information to retain I usually have to go over half of it again in the next session.

 

 

In regards to your comment about the difficulty of finding a group to play with, we've been hard at work to try to make that easier too! While the /gsf channel in game can be one great way to find some teammates, we have a Discord specifically dedicated to helping players find/form groups for GSF. Link to it here https://discord.gg/W9MaNbK

 

 

Get ready for a flood of defensive panicked responses from the premades.

 

These premades exist to create lopsided matches. That's it. Any claim they actually want competition is revealed to be at best self-delusion, and most likely a plain lie.

 

Premades are not the only problem with GSF, but they are horrible for it.

 

What they should do is make two queues you can be in simultaneously. One solo queue, one premade only. If you can be in both at the same time, it won't slow pops at all.

 

I wouldn't say he's going to get a flood of responses, but yes if a player is suggesting that someone delete the part of a game one loves the most, then yes I'd say that deserves a response from the players he's suggesting that of.

 

Playing as a team is the way the game is meant to be played, it's a team based pvp game. I play to win games, it's as simply as that, however the fun part comes when you're trying as hard as you can to win a game and your opponents can actually push back. I'm talking when my full team is pushed to the brink in both playing ability, coordination and communication. You can't get these games by playing solo, and contrary to what many think these games happen, sure we have to play many lopsided games to get there, but if after 1 or 2 lopsided games we didn't keep trying we'd never get them. It's usually after a few games that other players recognize there's another team on and group up to counter it.

 

 

Hopefully that gives you guys a little more insight and help in playing GSF, I myself have queue'd solo many times into enemy premades only to lose, sometimes dramatically, I usually just use them as practice games to shore up my mecanics. After that game though, I form a team to fight them!

nothing is REALLY over tuned at the moment, not like Ion Railgun or Distortion Field used to be.

 

I shudder to think what Ion Railgun used to be, because it it currently insanely powerful.

I shudder to think what Ion Railgun used to be, because it it currently insanely powerful.

 

Flat power drain with any% charge fire. No cool down. You could spam that bad boi like rapids if you were fast enough.

Yep, if someone is pissed at you, they could hit you when you were low on engine, and instantly drain your engine pool.

 

You couldnt move, then they would hit you again with ion, and you would be paralyzed for about 6 seconds, in the mean time the ion stopped any power regeneration.

 

The could kill you slowly or quickly.

 

Ianir (*** too) used to kill me slowly, like 10 or 15 ion bursts and you couldnt do anything about it.

 

Its why people used power dive, not only because it was insanely quick refresh missile break, but also can be activated with zero engine power.

 

Thats how it used to be.

Edited April 7, 2020 by philwil

I shudder to think what Ion Railgun used to be, because it it currently insanely powerful.

 

The full history of Ion Railgun is as follows.

 

At launch all Railguns didn't have a minimum charge, meaning you could fire a 5% charged Railgun.

Now while the damage still scaled with the charge the amount of Engine and Weapon power it drained did not, meaning a quick 5% charge snap shot would drain the ship of the full amount.

 

Soon after launch a patch was introduced so that Railguns had a minimum charge of 25% and that the Engine and Weapon power drain on Ion Railgun scaled with the amount charged.

 

Now since launch the tooltip on Ion Railgun had been bugged for one of it's final upgrades, it read that it would put a debuff on the target to slow regeneration by 65%, but in fact it would slow regeneration by 100%. This meant that if you got drained to 0 Engine or Weapon power, you'd be stuck there for 6 seconds, giving the same Gunship plenty of time to simply hit you with another 25% charge Ion Railgun to refresh that devastating debuff.

 

Since launch all Railguns had a cooldown of 1 second you had to wait after firing a shot before you could begin charging another. We would always get around this cooldown by simply swapping to a different Railgun though if faster damage required it.

 

 

Now we enter the world of the big 5.5 patch.

 

We saw Ion Railgun get 2 big nerfs, first the cooldown on it because 2 seconds instead of 1, meaning hitting the same target with 2 consecutive Ion's became much more difficult to do. These days most good players will very rarely fire 2 Ion's in a row because of that cooldown, you almost always want to fire the Ion and then swap to Slug railgun to start charging immediately.

 

The second nerf, which didn't really seem like a big deal but really really help was that last upgrade. It no longer completely stops regeneration but instead slows it by 65% for 6 seconds. This really helps since without players being able to double Ion as much, this debuff is what would have kept the players from regenerating in between the long Ion cooldowns. It means you can save up enough engine power to get to a position where the Gunship can't see you anymore.

 

 

While Ion Railgun is still a powerful tool in the Type 1 Gunships arsenal it isn't a meta defining tool anymore, almost every ship in the meta was chosen before 5.5 because it had to be able to deal with Ion Railgun. Now that ships like the Strike fighters have much larger engine pools, it's much harder to completely drain them to be dead in the water, and with the longer cooldown and less debuff magnitude they have a much better chance of getting away when hit by an Ion shot.

 

 

I hope someone found this informative.

Thank you all for taking the time to share a bit of GSF history with me. I'm not going to lie, that sounds like a pretty horrible mechanic. Glad I wasn't around to experience it, I might have given up on GSF for good and might have missed out on hours of fun.

Thank you all for taking the time to share a bit of GSF history with me. I'm not going to lie, that sounds like a pretty horrible mechanic. Glad I wasn't around to experience it, I might have given up on GSF for good and might have missed out on hours of fun.

 

Well the meta was very much built around how good it was. For example the meta was only 3 ships for each mode.

 

Team Deathmatch was T2 Scout, T1 Gunship and T2 Bombers.

 

Domination was T2 Scout, T1 Gunship and T1 Bombers.

 

That was it, those were the only ships played at the top of the meta.

 

As you'll notice both the T2 Scout and T1 Gunship have access to Distortion field, it was pretty much mandatory to deal with Railguns. The Bombers would closely hug things to Line of Sight and since only Scouts were out their ordanance was far more effective then it is now.

 

 

I mean if you for example really like Strikes now yes, you'd have hated that meta. But it was still a fun game, just not as fun as it is now.

Hey,

sorry to hear that your GSF matches recently have been difficult. Just out of curiosity I would like to ask though where in the scorebored you usually are placed.

Since the scoreboard can be roughly translated to your experience in GSF I would have several tips for you.

 

If you are in the bottom third...

 

 

 

If you are in the middle third...

 

 

 

If you are in the top third...

 

 

 

I hope these tips will help you to get over some of the flaws in GSF that you have pointed out ;D

 

But generally speaking a good matchmaker would be difficult to make for GSF. The reason is simply that it is severly pilot and ship dependend. Sure you could rank the pilots by a certain category and try to have equally strong groups overall, but you never know for sure which ship the aces and veterans will fly. You can never expect a pilot getting the same amount of kills no matter whether he flies gunship or bomber. This and also the strategy or even just if the pilot has a good or bad day can heavily impact how good they are playing and how good they can carry. This is one problem that the MM has to face.

 

The other problem is the amount of people. Same times there aren't enough people available that can outbalance aces, veterans or even groups of them. Sure the difference between the groups can always be reduced, but a perfect balance will always be impossible and is heavily dependend on the available weights.

 

4v4 or 2v2 ranked would be a nice addition though. maybe a smaller map and less satelites. And I would never say no to the devs uphgrading the matchmaker. Heck even a GSF ground PVP comby might be fun xD (like 2 linked matches where capping sth affects the other match).

 

Seriously though the Devs don't seem to be too interested in GSF so updates will be rare like usual. So I guess finding your way to survive is the way you have to go.