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Add Starfighter Mode Without Gunships And Bombers,so it would be Gsf "Dog fight".


REVAN_cz

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I don't think this would work, there are people who only have those on their ship lists. How about a new primary blasters only map mode. Like you emerge from hyperspace into an energy field disabling rails, missiles, and mines etc.

 

People have 5 slots. - whether they choose to participate is another matter.

 

But since strikes really need work, it'd probably come down to which team fields the most battle-scouts. - Making it mainly a scout vs scout match. - And since not everyone flies scouts, you'd rarely see it on less populous servers.

 

- There are a few problems with this mode. - Not the idea per-se but the way it'd end up.

 

Sometimes it's the rock-paper-scissors-lizard mix that makes GSF such great fun.

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If we're actually discussing this, let me say this: it would be pretty bad.

 

You'd need a second bar of ships. You couldn't do it without that at all- it would not be ok to assume anyone without a strike or scout would simply get skipped in queues. You'd need to have it be part of the random queue- no one could be permitted to queue "Strikes and Scouts Only" as a separate queue button, while smirking about how thuper-duper great his battlescout is.

 

So now you have a situation where people can't opt into just one game mode (just as you can't queue "only domination" now), and you've made a second bar of ships that only allows strikes and scouts for when those games pop.

 

Is the resulting game good?

 

Nope.

 

The only ship that matters in this mode is the battlescout. If you were to go through the development effort to make a ship build that could feast on battlescouts but lost to some other ship type that in turn lost to battlescouts, you'd have at most three viable builds, and you'd need to bring that design into the rest of it, which could work, but might be poop. Strikes will always lose to scouts, and a map without mines is a map where scouts can be anywhere at any time.

 

The only mode that would be even playable would be TDM. Or rather, BDM, as it would be Battlescout Death Match. You could maybe justify someone playing an ammo/heal ship. Maybe. Everything else would be garbage. Domination without gunships or bombers would become ring-around-the-rosie, because a scout on the node can basically live forever if there's no gunship to deny a side of the node, or no bomber to deny areas. With all areas open to the circling scout, he can't be meaningfully engaged by strikes or scouts. We actually saw this at launch, when few pilots had access to gunships, and bombers did not exist, and TDM did not exist.

 

If there were several modes like this- a gunship-only mode, a bomber-only mode, a strike-only mode, in addition to OP's proposed scout-only mode (he includes strikes, but that's just so his battlescout can feast harder), each with their own bar, and each accessed only through the main queue button, it would be a fun distraction sometimes. But it wouldn't be something you would want to pop too often.

Edited by Verain
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Verian summed it up pretty comprehensively. - Better off to organise a strike + scout night on your server OP, get some friends to queue and see how it goes..... But I fear that even if you got everyone to queue those two ship types, the greater number of scouts would win TDM or DOM. - for the reasons above.
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Minor correction of fact:

 

At GSF's launch everyone playing had a gunship.

 

Degenerate forms of play involving battlescouts happened despite this.

 

If you can stack evasion over 100% on a scout then you can also get pretty cheeky about venturing into a railgun's line of fire. Plus Barrel Roll was practically always off of cooldown, so getting out of range wasn't very hard either.

 

Battlescout swarms and 15 minutes of playing ring-around-the-satellite without actually capturing a single sat, may be slightly more amusing than gunship walls and bomber stacks, but from those of us that were there to see it, believe us when we tell you that the "better" is like a 50 cm tall ladder being "better" than a 40 cm tall ladder when you need to get onto the roof of a 10 meter tall building. As long as it doesn't work, "better" really won't make you happy.

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Minor correction of fact:

 

At GSF's launch everyone playing had a gunship.

 

Nope.

 

If you were subscribed before November 1st, you had gunship access. Many people subscribed AFTER to get access to GSF. Tons of players in the games I was in had no gunship during that time- they had subscribed after the game was launched.

 

Here's a thread complaining about it:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=695687

 

Degenerate forms of play involving battlescouts happened despite this.

 

This is correct. A gunship plus a scout can usually get a scout off a node, but in practice it was way harder than that. A common scenario was a good scout chased by literally five other ships. It was a serious issue, and everyone was like "soon we'll all have gunships, and it seems like bombers might help". And that worked.

 

If you can stack evasion over 100% on a scout then you can also get pretty cheeky about venturing into a railgun's line of fire. Plus Barrel Roll was practically always off of cooldown, so getting out of range wasn't very hard either.

 

Well, the fact that BR was almost free and 10 seconds and evasion was wildly OP definitely didn't help things, but this is about just getting the scout to stop being on the objective, which was possible, if not as common as it should have been.

 

Battlescout swarms and 15 minutes of playing ring-around-the-satellite without actually capturing a single sat, may be slightly more amusing than gunship walls and bomber stacks

 

I mean, it was really very silly. Bombers helped fix this a great deal. The fact that the bomber has to actually commit to the node and doesn't get there for free is a big deal.

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I mean, it was really very silly. Bombers helped fix this a great deal. The fact that the bomber has to actually commit to the node and doesn't get there for free is a big deal.

 

Bombers can be on a node quick if you full burn then deploy your Hyperspace beacon and use it to slingshot a 2nd bomber to their destination - to deploy another beacon which the 1st respawns at. - This used to be a thing back in the day, but seems to have fallen out of favour recently.

 

Nowadays, most bomber pilots trundle to a sat and then tick in a crevice and spew ordinance until dislodged. - Which would be easily solved if the sats turned on their axis, sc****** them off or at least making them re-position.

 

But yeah, the early days when GS were few and far between was better than this Ion everything and blast it with the second or third or fourth GS while it's engines are disabled, with a follow-up slug, Tap /splat/ respawn/

 

It's not so bad when your team can co-ordinate its attack runs, but in solo-queue you can forget it.

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Bombers can be on a node quick if you full burn then deploy your Hyperspace beacon and use it to slingshot a 2nd bomber to their destination - to deploy another beacon which the 1st respawns at. - This used to be a thing back in the day, but seems to have fallen out of favour recently.

 

That's not for free. That costs you at least one meaningfully placed beacon.

 

Much more common is, one player tensors everyone and SDs, bomber B drops a beacon, tensor guy respawns as bomber A and spawns at that beacon. A won't hit the node meaningfully faster than B.

 

The point is that bombers and gunships have massively improved play at nodes.

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Based on the mode's popularity, one could say gsf was just as poorly thought out ;)

;) ;) Based on your reply, one could say your criticism is poorly thought out ;) ;)

 

The underlying structure of GSF is well thought out. It seems unambiguous that the devs ability to follow through on their original intent (the balance of which was based on including the unreleased Infiltrator class) was compromised by financial forces. We never got to see the game in the state they intended it to exist.

 

- Despon

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The WoW equivalent of this game is friggin pet battles, and we get a fully 3D flight game with many viable and fun ships and strategies. The game is always going to be beholden to the greater audience of SWTOR, and other flight game fans outside of the game are reluctant to grab an entire MMO to play the part that interests them. GSF is more popular than I would expect a sub game that doesn't bend over backwards for casual players to be, and a big part of that is because it is so unique.
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Depth is a relative term. I mean as a new player the "lack" of dogfighting is what deters so many players in the first place. It's simply not particularly enjoyable to be a starting player trying to figure out the mode and getting shot multiple times and never knowing where the attack came from. Then of course, trying to clear sats where the turrets alone can destroy a new player, let alone protected by bombers.

 

When gunship walls and bomber spam are fairly common terms, matches are far more likely to be dictated by simple basic strats. Often the best strat is simply stacking the deck by flying together with veteran or skilled pilots and letting the skill gap take care of it.

 

I get that the potential for strategy is there, but the reality is that skill gaps are so frequent that strategy is not even a factor. One has to consider the proficiency of the team as a whole, not just from an individual level.

 

Having been gone for so long allowed me to be more objective than I would have in 4.0, and it was pretty clear to me the mode would have far more successful if things were far more intuitive and starting players had reasonable effectiveness. There are so many intricacies and minor nuances to learn that make it virtually impossible for starting players to have positive experiences in the beginning - so it often results in the end of them participating in the mode as well.

 

If the mode ended up being popular, a lot of issues would be a lot easier to forgive. But waiting over 15 minutes to potentially hours for a pop only for it to be an unpleasant experience means its only harder to retain new pilots.

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It's simply not particularly enjoyable to be a starting player trying to figure out the mode and getting shot multiple times and never knowing where the attack came from.

Is it particularly better to get blown up right in your face? Do new players innately recognize when Heavy Laser Cannons are chewing them up from 6k behind them or under them? In a great many cases, new players have no tactical awareness at all. It is their job in a competitive game to develop that awareness and associated skills so they can understand their failures and know how to prevent them.

 

Then of course, trying to clear sats where the turrets alone can destroy a new player, let alone protected by bombers.

Fortunately for them, they are part of a team of other players who (sometimes) know how to help. While I do agree that the Damage Reduction on turrets makes them overly punishing on new players, those same players can acquire the means to expediently blow turrets up fairly rapidly... if they learn a bit about the game.

 

I get that the potential for strategy is there, but the reality is that skill gaps are so frequent that strategy is not even a factor. One has to consider the proficiency of the team as a whole, not just from an individual level.

And yet it is on the individual level that participants in a competitive game have a responsibility to learn how to play.

 

Having been gone for so long allowed me to be more objective than I would have in 4.0, and it was pretty clear to me the mode would have far more successful if things were far more intuitive and starting players had reasonable effectiveness.

Even the most intuitive of things (like 'shoot when your weapons are in range' or 'go to the objectives marked A B C') often fail to connect with those new to GSF. Whether something is intuitive or not is a very subjective determination to make. Intuition absent any prior experience is probably not going to solve people's issues when faced with the complexities of moving in 3D space and trying to hit other targets that are also doing so.

 

If new players were more effective, it would absolutely make matches better. For them to be more effective they have to first care about the game, and second learn how to play it. The in-game resources for learning how to play GSF are inadequate, which is why I made all the videos on GSF School. Only Bioware can fix the former problem, supplying people with reasons to care about improving their performance.

 

But waiting over 15 minutes to potentially hours for a pop only for it to be an unpleasant experience means its only harder to retain new pilots.

There are so many layers to this cake that it is hard to know where to start slicing it.

 

As a game-within-a-game, GSF is first beholden to the overall population size of SWTOR. Once you move past that and filter out the sizable portion of MMORPG players who have no desire to play a free-movement, 3D-space, tactically complex arcade space shooter game, you get to the potential GSF population.

 

Without a large enough population, you can't do something sensible like 'making tiers or some other dividing mechanism that keeps new players from ever fighting veterans.' The best you can do is to set up a matchmaker, which they have, that in the presence of sufficient players queuing will keep the new players out of the deep end of the pool. When there aren't enough players around, the mix becomes a lot less friendly... but when there are, the matchmaker does actually work. Nearly all the complaints about it are null and void because with enough of a population, it functions properly.

 

The solution, for the game that exists in the state that it exists, is to get new people the information they need so they can understand what they're doing. That alone will help elevate the quality of play in the absence of any large-scale, systemic changes.

 

- Despon

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As a game-within-a-game, GSF is first beholden to the overall population size of SWTOR. Once you move past that and filter out the sizable portion of MMORPG players who have no desire to play a free-movement, 3D-space, tactically complex arcade space shooter game, you get to the potential GSF population.

 

- Despon

 

Aw c'mon Des, there's no need for the fancy sales pitch. The only mode less popular in Swtor are the space battle missions. By disregarding the essence of the title you're missing what killed GSF in the first place, as the appeal of flying a ship chasing and getting chased in space is not what the new pilot experiences. Sure you can say that it's the player's responsibility to learn, but if it's not very fun to begin with you also can't expect them to make the effort. After all, that's the bottom line of why pilot retention is so poor.

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Sure you can say that it's the player's responsibility to learn, but if it's not very fun to begin with you also can't expect them to make the effort. After all, that's the bottom line of why pilot retention is so poor.

As I 'passionately' pointed out in the other thread, fun is subjective. I do not believe that 'fun' is at the root of pilot retention problems. I believe that GSF being stuck inside another game that has nothing to do with piloting is the root of the pilot retention problems. I would advise against people participating in games they do not find fun to play.

 

I also firmly believe people would tire very quickly of GSF minus gunships and bombers, because that variant of GSF existed and involved mainly a bunch of scouts zooming in circles around satellites while nobody could hit them. TDM matches with nothing but scouts and strikes generally are very low-scoring matches where people are just zooming around with few shots landing. That's what happens when every ship is largely Evasion based. My opinion of such matches is that they are terrible, and new players would fare no better in them.

 

Battlefront's Fighter Squadron mode is nearly all 'dogfighting' and I found it shallow and dull as dirt (though graphically it was very well rendered and presented in a cinematic manner that I found pleasing).

 

"GSF is not the game I'm looking for" is a perfectly understandable viewpoint. "I demand you change GSF into a game of a different type which I will theoretically enjoy" is not. I'll point out, though, that for many years I have called for a custom match lobby where people could post matches others could join and restrict them in whatever way they liked. I don't feel like digging up the threads to link them but they're here on the forum if you care to search.

 

- Despon

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I think where you see "DEMAND" I see a new player suggestion based on their previous experience thus far.

 

We'll definitely have to agree to disagree on the fun factor affecting player retention - I mean 5.0 is a shining example with the DvL event recycling old game content and then GC recycling it even further.

 

Where you don't enjoy much the game outside of GSF, I've completed all of the class stories at least once and was raiding regularly. After being gone a year, I found myself outperforming active players despite not having touched the game for ages. There are far fewer pugs and the ones that exist often fail horribly at stuff that used to be basic knowledge.

 

What that tells me is that there indeed was a bit of an exodus and people left for the same or similar reasons that I did. It's not fun to grind for gear doing the same stuff you've already been doing with nothing to look forward to.

 

I totally agree that having matches with lots of scouts can make for uninteresting combat, but I would also say the same for gunship chess and bomber spam. However, I was simply reading between the lines as I can still relate to what it's like to be in the OP's shoes.

 

Requesting a mode that limited ships is not a new idea, and its been suggested time and again in various forms. It exists in other games, particularly of a shooter type nature.

Edited by SeCKSEgai
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Where you don't enjoy much the game outside of GSF, I've completed all of the class stories at least once and was raiding regularly.

Not that it is necessarily relevant to anything but I used to enjoy the non-GSF game, at least as far as the story content went. I've run half of the class stories in full, and most of the way through the rest. At a point, somewhere towards the end of the KotFE story, I found the 'grindy parts in between story segments' sufficiently boring to stop bothering with the ground stuff entirely. Whatever, I won't waste time lamenting it. On the whole, I'd rather have a single-player KOTOR3 and standalone GSF. I'm not going to demand that they turn their game into some other kind of game.

 

There are far fewer pugs and the ones that exist often fail horribly at stuff that used to be basic knowledge.

This wasn't a GSF-related comment, but may as well be.

 

It's not fun to grind for gear doing the same stuff you've already been doing with nothing to look forward to.

It's even less 'fun' to be railroaded into participating in part of the game you don't enjoy in order to most efficiently ameliorate the grind, and that's essentially what tacking on great CXP gains for GSF did. People will always seek to take the quick, easy road to bypassing an obstacle. It hasn't led to better GSF. Maybe it introduced a few people to it that wouldn't have otherwise bothered, but it also dumped a lot of non-contributors into the pool.

 

I totally agree that having matches with lots of scouts can make for uninteresting combat, but I would also say the same for gunship chess and bomber spam.

So would I! Diverse ship comps and correctly altering your approach on the fly are two of the best parts of GSF that people often totally ignore.

 

Requesting a mode that limited ships is not a new idea, and its been suggested time and again in various forms. It exists in other games, particularly of a shooter type nature.

As long as those modes are strictly optional, as in the case of a custom match lobby, I'd be all for it.

 

My experience tells me that a 'dogfighting' mode with GSF as it is presently constituted would not please the people asking for it. Whatever flavor of dogfighting they might expect of such a mode isn't what they'd see in it, unless it involves 'almost never hitting what you're shooting at' and 'getting blown up repeatedly by someone who's better in a T2S than you are.' GSF's mechanics are currently not set up to permit the sort of 'outmaneuvering people one on one' experience that dogfighting implies.

 

If there were more matches that featured teams of relatively even strength and diverse ship comps, people would complain a lot less. There will always be the 'gunship haters' but... if you are one, go learn to kill them. Do it often. The more people there are that know how to play and react to situations, the less you'll see unbalanced stomps.

 

- Despon

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I mentioned my interest in the regular game not to disregard yours but to represent experiencing a broader sense of the general population as a whole - it's not particularly healthy which only means GSF suffers for it indirectly.

 

My main view of GSF is that they excessively monetized it without thinking of the consequences, primarily the impact it would have on gameplay. When it failed to become a popular mode, it simply fell by the wayside like space missions.

 

I think most people could agree that a match making lobby would be nice. I think most of the regulars would reluctantly agree that major improvements are extremely unlikely given the state of both GSF and the game as a whole.

Edited by SeCKSEgai
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My main view of GSF is that they excessively monetized it without thinking of the consequences, primarily the impact it would have on gameplay. When it failed to become a popular mode, it simply fell by the wayside like space missions.

If anything, they did not monetize it enough and what little they did (and it was quite little) was enacted in a haphazard and slapdash way that didn't make a lot of sense then and doesn't now. They have rectified that somewhat with the changes to how cosmetics are purchased, but failing to offer Cartel versions of all the ships has always been in my view a huge mistake... in fact had I been in charge of it, I'd have offered multiple designs for each ship that had some visually analogous SW counterpart.

 

In what way do you think they 'excessively monetized' GSF?

 

- Despon

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