So! That GSF game a lot of us have been playing since December. That's somethin', ain't it? We zoom around, blastin' the excrement outta one another, chasing a few titles and a few upgrades on a few ships populating a few maps?

Yeah, I'm bored too. :-p And the way I figure it, that's on EA/Bioware/Whoever's in charge of fun around here. They need to give us something more. And they could certainly do with giving those poor newbies a break. It ain't a learning curve. It's a learning CLIFF!

You're free to throw down a suggestion or whatever below, but my idea? Divide it up.

I know, I know. "BUT WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE YET DURRRRR ETC OTHER BUTTHURT NOISES". Well, guess what, pilots? It's not going to improve until the competition entry barrier is somehow lowered a bit. Kids try this crap, get farmed by some jacktard who insists on flying a mastered Flashfire during a roflstomp, and QUIT.

Permanently.

As in, they ain't comin' back, and they're likely to relay the bad experience to friends who might otherwise be interested.

I really do think it's at the point where division of the GSF population (and it has to be division because there simply won't be cross-server GSF - it's not happening, it's NEVER happening, get over it) *has* to be risked in order to bring in fresh pilots who want to actually stay. Splitting into 4 or 5 tiers is probably too much, though, so I'd recommend two:

ENTRY TIER: Cannot have an active loadout containing a ship with one or more Tier 4 upgrades. NOTE: this only effects weapons and systems. Everything else only has three tiers and would therefore be allowed.

ACES' TIER: Cannot have an active loadout LACKING a ship with one or more Tier 4 upgrades.

Why Tier 4? Simple. It's much easier to code for the developers (comparatively, anyway), it allows rookie and novice pilots time to get comfortable with upgrades (particularly in regard to mobility and missile lock breakage), and the weapons and systems are the only components that would be affected (positively for competition, might I add, as T4 and T5 are most often the ubertiers for weapon effects).

Why dependent on active loadout? Simple. Maybe someone masters a ship and wants to put it away to learn a new one. They shouldn't be automatically forced into the Aces' bracket to learn that ship just because they mastered a different one. As all true Aces can tell you, each ship handles VERY differently.

That's what I've got, and I always love hearing from fellow pilots in regard to GSFy things, but folks - we need a solution to this learning cliff phenomenon sooner rather than later or the pop's gonna stagnate. Soon, those opposing pilots will be all too familiar, tactics so ingrained that we stop flying so much as we just go through the motions and pretend it's another dogfighter that challenges us more.

Just a thought. Yours? -bp

Here is a simple thing you can do as a veteran pilot to help make matches more competitive: keep 1 ship in your loadout that doesn't have ANY upgrades (in my case its my rycer) if you're playing a bracket of total numbs, take your stock ship out and only play with that. It makes it more of a challenge for you and less of a drag for them.

Obviously this is a gentleman's agreement and i'm sure more than a few people are perfectly content to blast newbies in their maxed out offensive bombers and flashfires but if you really care about attracting more people in to the game give the new guys a break. Maybe practice weaving/avoiding them or refrain from using missiles.

Here is a simple thing you can do as a veteran pilot to help make matches more competitive: keep 1 ship in your loadout that doesn't have ANY upgrades (in my case its my rycer) if you're playing a bracket of total numbs, take your stock ship out and only play with that. It makes it more of a challenge for you and less of a drag for them.

 

Obviously this is a gentleman's agreement and i'm sure more than a few people are perfectly content to blast newbies in their maxed out offensive bombers and flashfires but if you really care about attracting more people in to the game give the new guys a break. Maybe practice weaving/avoiding them or refrain from using missiles.

Oh, I already do that on TEH. Some others do too. Unfortunately, it's not enough of a trend to be considered consistent or reliable for either veterans or newbie pilots. Too many seem to enjoy "easy button mode", and those pilots should be able to have fun too.

I just don't see how the two concepts can co-exist peacefully without there being a strong suppressive effect on new pilots becoming regulars, though. At some point, the uberbuilds are gonna need their own league. Who'd want to watch, say, the Pittsburgh Steelers playing, say, Tennessee Tech in football three or four times a season? Or, in the case of a whole gaggle of Imperial newbie pilots, a Pop Warner team?

Neither Tech nor the Pop Warner team in question would even consider the matchup. (Well, maybe the Pop Warner team, and they'd probably be allowed to win a few too, but only because the Steelers are a class act and those kids would be thrilled to meet real football players. Anyway. It wouldn't be truly competitive, is the bullet point here.)

Now, I don't do much ground PvP (mostly because I can't mentally reconcile tab-target in what should be an action setting - personal issue, I know), but to my understanding even THEY have two divisions - Ranked, and whatever they call the other one. I'm imagining that was done because of competitive balance issues, but that may have been an implementation that happened before I started playing (preordered RotHC).

If that is, in fact, the case - they went for two divisions of PvP because of competitive imbalance - then aren't we already heading down that road? Why not go ahead and implement the feature if, as I believe, we're headed that way organically?

Of course, if Ranked was implemented for another reason, this theory is largely protorped. -bp

Here is an experiment to try:

do a /who for all of the ground pvp maps: add up the players

now do a /who for all the GSF maps: add up the players

chances are are at least 5 ground pvp games going at any given time (more at peak times) and this is rather consistently high in my testing (usually more than this)

chances are for GSF at least that there are between 0-3 matches (3 being Bastions busiest time all day, lasts maybe 2-3 hours daily and varies) usually its 1 game.

Take also into account that "Ranked Ground PvP" is all arenas so 4 on 4 (8 players total) - they did this in order to make the queues pop faster, but as any long time pvper can tell you even with a larger player pool you can still wait sometimes hours for a ranked pvp pop.

What my testing tells me is that such a DISMALLY SMALL percentage of people even queue GSF at all. We can argue about why this is but suffice to say there are usually less than 50 people playing (both sides) GSF, out of that 50 people do you really think there is room for another queue?

There are at least twice the players queuing for ground pvp and they have issues filling their ranked queues (which are 1/3rd the size of the GSF game roster)

I want ranked queues, but something needs to be done to make GSF a more regular part of the game, people PvP because of the gear (which can be used in other aspects of the game) or at least thats why I play it. GSF however offers only twitch ship blasting as a reward, and while I love this most dont.

We need: Better tutorials, cross server battles, something to increase GSF player base, and at that point when there are lots of matches going at a time then im sure we can fit something like a ranked competetive queue. Otherwise it would just be a dusty old button few people ever press, and that yields little to no results for those that do press it.

I keep a couple leveling ships on my roster and use them in games with little to no competition, that and others on my server will switch sides if one doesnt have any groups. I think this more than anything in these "low queue" times are whats going to help players. We cant stop people from stomping new pilots into the floor, but we might be able to guilt trip them into a lesser ship giving the other team a bit of a chance.

Some teams though really are filled with trolls, and will bomberball / GS a new team to death. Never understood why people do this (max tactics for minimal team) theres nothing you can do about this because trolls think they are awesome and dont listen to anyone

Here is an experiment to try:

 

do a /who for all of the ground pvp maps: add up the players

 

now do a /who for all the GSF maps: add up the players

 

chances are are at least 5 ground pvp games going at any given time (more at peak times) and this is rather consistently high in my testing (usually more than this)

 

chances are for GSF at least that there are between 0-3 matches (3 being Bastions busiest time all day, lasts maybe 2-3 hours daily and varies) usually its 1 game.

 

Take also into account that "Ranked Ground PvP" is all arenas so 4 on 4 (8 players total) - they did this in order to make the queues pop faster, but as any long time pvper can tell you even with a larger player pool you can still wait sometimes hours for a ranked pvp pop.

 

What my testing tells me is that such a DISMALLY SMALL percentage of people even queue GSF at all. We can argue about why this is but suffice to say there are usually less than 50 people playing (both sides) GSF, out of that 50 people do you really think there is room for another queue?

 

There are at least twice the players queuing for ground pvp and they have issues filling their ranked queues (which are 1/3rd the size of the GSF game roster)

 

I want ranked queues, but something needs to be done to make GSF a more regular part of the game, people PvP because of the gear (which can be used in other aspects of the game) or at least thats why I play it. GSF however offers only twitch ship blasting as a reward, and while I love this most dont.

 

We need: Better tutorials, cross server battles, something to increase GSF player base, and at that point when there are lots of matches going at a time then im sure we can fit something like a ranked competetive queue. Otherwise it would just be a dusty old button few people ever press, and that yields little to no results for those that do press it.

 

I keep a couple leveling ships on my roster and use them in games with little to no competition, that and others on my server will switch sides if one doesnt have any groups. I think this more than anything in these "low queue" times are whats going to help players. We cant stop people from stomping new pilots into the floor, but we might be able to guilt trip them into a lesser ship giving the other team a bit of a chance.

 

Some teams though really are filled with trolls, and will bomberball / GS a new team to death. Never understood why people do this (max tactics for minimal team) theres nothing you can do about this because trolls think they are awesome and dont listen to anyone

As much as I'd love to share your view in regard to some of the more... distasteful, shall we say, among our GSF population, I don't see them giving up while there's a scoreboard to shoot for. That's all that type of pilot cares about - the numbers. They don't care HOW they get them, and many prefer to get them as easy as possible.

That's why newbies and casuals don't come back. It's probably the chief reason, though I have no polling to back this up. (Should probably do that sometime.) I imagine it's why Ranked arenas came into being, too. It doesn't make sense to split a population for the purpose of decreasing queue time. It DOES, however, make sense to split a population based on so-called "gear score" (I know we don't have that here, and I'm thankful, but I lacked a better term).

I believe we're at that point. Introducing new ships these days only seems to interest players who have been doing GSF for a while. That's not a good sign. -bp

Enable cross server for GSF, and enable matchmaking with the bigger population.

We can dally about on the forums with whatever suggestions we want, but the only way to address the fundamental problem of low GSF population involves doing those things.

Since X-server seems to be beyond the realm of possibility for at least a major patch cycle, tie GSF rewards with increased epeen titles/mounts/comms/credits/orange shells/reputation etc. That is probably the easiest to implement. People were queuing for ranked in **** gear just for the chance to get the rancor mount, after all.

OP, the problem is, at this point many of us who have been playing since December have mastered a heck of a lot of ships, so even if we don't fly our ship we enjoy the most (and effectively) we're still going to farm the new players on other mastered ships. the New ships in 2.7 don't impress me at all, so I honestly don't intend to use them just so the new players don't have me farming them.

Even if you've never played a ship, just from handing in dailies/weeklies most if not all of the ships should be mastered or close to it, with the exception of the 2.7 ships.