A serious question that has been bothering me.

I know of many MMORPGs with PvP minigames where they have done poorly, I can't think of any structured like GSF that have done well.

When I say like, I mean has the following characteristics.

1. Internal vertical progression. A mastered ship is worth at least double a base ship in gsf, simply in terms of hitpoints/fire power and enhanced cooldowns/buffs/debuffs

2. Heavy team orientation but pairs teams against randoms

3. No matchmaking to speak of.

4. No Equal footing/Bolster mechanic

5. New learning curve separate from main game and no tutorial, with thanks to Devirus for pointing this out.

I ask because GSF is beginning to remind me of other MMOs failed PvP mini games, and not at all of successful pvp games. Heck it doesn't even look like this games moderately successful ground pvp game.

this games moderately successful ground pvp game.

Once I read this sentence, I realised you can't possibly be serious -- or at least, taken seriously.

Since the stuff about mastered ships is simple gibberish (lots of players do extremely well for themselves in un-upgraded ships), it seems you're basically just complaining that Teamwork Is OP. To which the answer is: yes. Yes it is. So?

Next.

A serious question that has been bothering me.

 

I know of many MMORPGs with PvP minigames where they have done poorly, I can't think of any structured like GSF that have done well.

 

When I say like, I mean has the following characteristics.

 

1. Internal vertical progression. A mastered ship is worth at least double a base ship in gsf, simply in terms of hitpoints/fire power and enhanced cooldowns/buffs/debuffs

2. Heavy team orientation but pairs teams against randoms

3. No matchmaking to speak of.

4. No Equal footing/Bolster mechanic

 

I ask because GSF is beginning to remind me of other MMOs failed PvP mini games, and not at all of successful pvp games. Heck it doesn't even look like this games moderately successful ground pvp game.

Then design a good one and show us what you mean. -bp

2. Heavy team orientation but pairs teams against randoms

I think the game is actually solo oriented. The UI, the action, everything is restricting you to a basic self-consciousness and a simplistic surrounding awareness... Like if you were suddenly thrown in a bar brawl, or something like that.

But I don't know why, they allowed group queuing, which allowed the use of group strategies on vocal... and since the game isn't emphasizing on people acting together but on personal feats and decisions taken in the middle of action, groups ended being at a huge advantage over PuGs, much more than in Warzones for example.

I think the game is actually solo oriented. The UI, the action, everything is restricting you to a basic self-consciousness and a simplistic surrounding awareness... Like if you were suddenly thrown in a bar brawl, or something like that.

 

But I don't know why, they allowed group queuing, which allowed the use of group strategies on vocal... and since the game isn't emphasizing on people acting together but on personal feats and decisions taken in the middle of action, groups ended being at a huge advantage over PuGs, much more than in Warzones for example.

It's only solo-oriented if you fly a mastered BLC scout. The rest requires at least a little teamwork in an even match. -bp

It's only solo-oriented if you fly a mastered BLC scout. The rest requires at least a little teamwork in an even match. -bp

I have yet to see a ship that can't work as a solo tunnel-vision ship beside the Spearpoint (because it sucks)

Wow. That's a really elaborate lead in just to say you don't like getting beaten by better players that sometimes group up. Save the drama for your mama and just come out and say what you mean. Be a man!

I've had a good group I've been running with for a few months now and our VOIP usually consists on talking build strategies or what we had for dinner. The type of coordination some people think exists just isn't very common. I mean really, haven't you ever played any shooters with built in VOIP? What did you hear people talk about. People rarely talk about the game or actual strategy beyond the superficial stuff that any experienced player doesn't already know.

I also pug alot and never have trouble getting up high on the scoreboard or contribute to my team. It just takes time and experience. If you fly often enough you'll get to know the regulars on your server and won't have any problems grouping if you want to. Really the best reason for grouping is that you get much faster queues.

Besides the fact GSF is not newbie friendly and that we need a *real* tutorial I think it's doing well.

If it was more newbie friendly more players would try it out and stick around and problems like a single premade ruling the skies would be mitigated by not always flying against them or with them.

What this mini-game needs is what games like War Thunder and World of Warplanes has: a multi-part tutorial.

You learn to get from point A to point B, follow and shoot down a faster less armed opponent, follow and shoot down a slower armed opponent, destroy turrets, introduction to different game styles; like how railguns work and how to place mines and so on...

The fact a pilot on the forum made a 3 minutes video that is several times more informative then the in-game "tutorial" shows how badly we need a proper tutorial, because not everyone will go to the forums after getting demolished.

What this mini-game needs is what games like War Thunder and World of Warplanes has: a multi-part tutorial.

And you know you could keep the current tutorial. But have it continue in 2nd part in a simulated domination and tdm match just to go over the basics of what you may find.

Once I read this sentence, I realised you can't possibly be serious -- or at least, taken seriously.

 

Since the stuff about mastered ships is simple gibberish (lots of players do extremely well for themselves in un-upgraded ships), it seems you're basically just complaining that Teamwork Is OP. To which the answer is: yes. Yes it is. So?

 

Next.

I actually considered the idea that improved ships were relatively unimportant and have been tracking results with alts and overall matches.

So far the things that affect individual performance in order of impact.

1. Being on the winning side

2. Having very bad opposing pilots to target

3. Having the better ship.

4. Pilot skill

In matches like domination where the other team can consistently throw 2 or 3 ships at you to shut you down at an objective you aren't going to do much. In team death match the best way to rack up kills is to spot the noobs and farm them.

A really simple way to gain understand why having a fully upgraded ship is so important is to look at this thread on engineering passives. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=736226 What you are saying when you say upgrades don't matter is that you are fighting pilots who haven't figured out they need to run away.

Edit: This whole having better ships doesn't matter meme needs to die. It's really just a case of people with an advantage rationalizing it as rightfully theirs. It's a very common thing to do, but it really has no place in a sport.

You can see the study of the behavior here

http://blog.ted.com/2013/12/20/6-studies-of-money-and-the-mind/

Relevant quote

The study: In a UC Berkeley study, Piff had more than 100 pairs of strangers play Monopoly. A coin-flip randomly assigned one person in each pair to be the rich player: they got twice as much money to start with, collected twice the salary when they passed go, and rolled both dice instead of one, so they could move a lot farther. Piff used hidden cameras to watch the duos play for 15 minutes.

 

The results: The rich players moved their pieces more loudly, banging them around the board, and displayed the type of enthusiastic gestures you see from a football player who’s just scored a touchdown. They even ate more pretzels from a bowl sitting off to the side than the players who’d been assigned to the poor condition, and started to become ruder to their opponents. Moreover, the rich players’ understanding of the situation was completely warped: after the game, they talked about how they’d earned their success, even though the game was blatantly rigged, and their win should have been seen as inevitable. “That’s a really, really incredible insight into how the mind makes sense of advantage,” Piff says.

Besides the fact GSF is not newbie friendly and that we need a *real* tutorial I think it's doing well.

 

If it was more newbie friendly more players would try it out and stick around and problems like a single premade ruling the skies would be mitigated by not always flying against them or with them.

 

 

What this mini-game needs is what games like War Thunder and World of Warplanes has: a multi-part tutorial.

 

You learn to get from point A to point B, follow and shoot down a faster less armed opponent, follow and shoot down a slower armed opponent, destroy turrets, introduction to different game styles; like how railguns work and how to place mines and so on...

 

The fact a pilot on the forum made a 3 minutes video that is several times more informative then the in-game "tutorial" shows how badly we need a proper tutorial, because not everyone will go to the forums after getting demolished.

This is a very good point. I still remember when City of Heroes changed their PvP so it had different combat mechanics from the rest of the game. PvP there , prior to the change, had a small but active community (some estimated 5 to 10 percent of the players) afterwards PvP became a desert that never recovered.

The fact a pilot on the forum made a 3 minutes video that is several times more informative then the in-game "tutorial" shows how badly we need a proper tutorial, because not everyone will go to the forums after getting demolished.

Can you link the video? Im interested in showing it to some of my guildies who are interested in testing the waters of GSF.

Can you link the video? Im interested in showing it to some of my guildies who are interested in testing the waters of GSF.

Have them all read this:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=729222

The video is in there also.

Can I name a MMO minigame that has done well?

The biggest one that comes to mind is pet-battles in WoW. I know what you're thinking, and I laughed at first too...but damn that system is addictive. I choose you Mr. Bigglesworth! It's fairly popular and there are many websites dedicated just to pet battles.

Runescape also has a plethora of minigames that have a very large following -- the largest of which is probably Castle Wars.

There are plenty of minigames out there in MMOs.

I like GSF and all, but it's never going to become very popular without the existence of cross server queues.

Have them all read this:

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=729222

 

The video is in there also.

Agreed, Stasie's guide should be required reading upon getting in the cockpit of your first ship, it is more valuable in information then anything in-game.

I actually considered the idea that improved ships were relatively unimportant and have been tracking results with alts and overall matches.

 

So far the things that affect individual performance in order of impact.

1. Being on the winning side

2. Having very bad opposing pilots to target

3. Having the better ship.

4. Pilot skill

 

In matches like domination where the other team can consistently throw 2 or 3 ships at you to shut you down at an objective you aren't going to do much. In team death match the best way to rack up kills is to spot the noobs and farm them.

 

A really simple way to gain understand why having a fully upgraded ship is so important is to look at this thread on engineering passives. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=736226 What you are saying when you say upgrades don't matter is that you are fighting pilots who haven't figured out they need to run away.

 

Edit: This whole having better ships doesn't matter meme needs to die. It's really just a case of people with an advantage rationalizing it as rightfully theirs. It's a very common thing to do, but it really has no place in a sport.

 

You can see the study of the behavior here

 

http://blog.ted.com/2013/12/20/6-studies-of-money-and-the-mind/

 

Relevant quote

firstly suggest you do more research before coming out with so many inaccuracy.

firstly, skill matters first and foremost, mods on ships are a cherry on cake. I have a char with zero mods and still every game I will be in top 3 of that match even on loseing games.

The best pilots don't target the noobs, I myself always seek there toughest members where possible.

one person can alter the whole flow of a match.

Yes a better tutorial is really needed.

cant moan about people grouping up, no different to ground pvp do or don't its YOUR CHOICE.

Performance is not based on with you are on winning team, ive done many games against good teams and been top while we lost and at same time been on winning team where hardly anything happened.

GSF is not a hop in be the best, its try it, try it, and do more learn everything from ranges of each ships to attack patterns and even down to predictability of people u see regularly in gsf.

firstly suggest you do more research before coming out with so many inaccuracy.

 

.

I have tracked the results and analyzed them. Mostly because I was curious which mattered more, my improvement as a pilot or improving my ship. Suggest you do some number crunching before making your statements. When I see matches where pilots who regularly have kill counts in the teens are shut down to 1 or none just what do you think is the determining factor ?

I have tracked the results and analyzed them. Mostly because I was curious which mattered more, my improvement as a pilot or improving my ship. Suggest you do some number crunching before making your statements. When I see matches where pilots who regularly have kill counts in the teens are shut down to 1 or none just what do you think is the determining factor ?

Sorry buddy, you don't get off that easy, ever hear of peer review? You can't talk like a researcher and not provide, methodology, data and your results for review. Just like how the theory crafters here do. Publish or you're forever branded a fool.

Sorry buddy, you don't get off that easy, ever hear of peer review? You can't talk like a researcher and not provide, methodology, data and your results for review. Just like how the theory crafters here do. Publish or you're forever branded a fool.

I didn't realize there was a Republic Journal of Operations Research, Perhaps the Sith Industrial engineering society, Transactions of the association for stellar military science ?

Of course the force only knows what standards of proof I would have to meet to convince people that feel their great skill overwhelms material advantage otherwise.

The best pilots don't target the noobs, I myself always seek there toughest members where possible.

Depends what you mean by 'best'. I personally love my 80~85% win rate (need more than 100 games to actually have this be a worthwhile statistic), and so if I see that there are multiple 'good' pilots, I'd typically either a) focus them myself and have my teammates farm the newbs, or b) have my teammate focus the main adversaries and farm the newbs myself. More often than not, I'm getting my butt focused for the entire match by multiple enemies. This means that I'm already distracting the good pilots (and evading as much as I can for as long as possible), and if I'm going to be sacrificing my KD to ensure a victory, you better believe I'm telling my teammates to "go for their bads". This has been a common theme that I've personally seen - people focusing on one player SOOOOOOOO much longer than they should, that the opposition isn't paying attention to the score and my team will be gaining numbers while they're remaining the same / only getting one (I've also been on the opposite end where my teammates are the ones overexerting themselves).

Good players need to be shut down, true enough, but you need to find the balance between straight out shutting down the amazing players and actually winning your match. Winning = most important in my books.

I'm getting really tired of this whole "aces shouldn't target newbies" thing. Of course they're supposed to target newbies! You shouldn't aim to humiliate them, but one generally goes out there with the intent of winning a game - and usually you win games by either killing the people you can kill the quickest, or denying the other team numbers on the objective. Do that by slaughtering the weakest links in the other team, hopefully faster than the other teams' aces are doing to your team's weakest players.

Depends what you mean by 'best'. I personally love my 80~85% win rate (need more than 100 games to actually have this be a worthwhile statistic), and so if I see that there are multiple 'good' pilots, I'd typically either a) focus them myself and have my teammates farm the newbs, or b) have my teammate focus the main adversaries and farm the newbs myself. More often than not, I'm getting my butt focused for the entire match by multiple enemies. This means that I'm already distracting the good pilots (and evading as much as I can for as long as possible), and if I'm going to be sacrificing my KD to ensure a victory, you better believe I'm telling my teammates to "go for their bads". This has been a common theme that I've personally seen - people focusing on one player SOOOOOOOO much longer than they should, that the opposition isn't paying attention to the score and my team will be gaining numbers while they're remaining the same / only getting one (I've also been on the opposite end where my teammates are the ones overexerting themselves).

 

Good players need to be shut down, true enough, but you need to find the balance between straight out shutting down the amazing players and actually winning your match. Winning = most important in my books.

This.

You want to focus another ace? Sure. Can be fun, and depending on the ace, that can be a game winning strategy. But if your team can't take advantage of you taking yourself out of the general melee, then you might have cost your team the win you would've had by just eliminating the enemy's weaker pilots efficiently. Just don't complain if you lose, and don't be surprised your teammates might be annoyed to know that you could've helped to win the match, but you wanted to 1v1 someone across the map.

Also, if you wanted to focus a dangerous player, bet that half your team is thinking the same thing. It turns the named aces on a server into giant targets. I get focused every time I go out there with people who know what I can do. If I'm going to spend half the match dodging 3-4 rather than fighting, I will take every advantage I can. I'll drag people around rocks endlessly, through respawning allies, into friendly minefields, call for peels, and relentlessly snare and debuff everyone I can. And, when I do finally get a chance to contribute to the scoreboard by annihilating a red dot that strays into targeting range, I will take it, and I won't feel bad about it maybe being a newbie. You shouldn't either.

I'm getting really tired of this whole "aces shouldn't target newbies" thing. Of course they're supposed to target newbies! You shouldn't aim to humiliate them, but one generally goes out there with the intent of winning a game - and usually you win games by either killing the people you can kill the quickest, or denying the other team numbers on the objective. Do that by slaughtering the weakest links in the other team, hopefully faster than the other teams' aces are doing to your team's weakest players.

This highlights another problem with the game. It makes it far too easy for vet players to grief noobs. The enemy call signs should not be visible. It's bad enough that you can hack their targeting systems to see who they are targeting, but really you have exchanged IFF codes with them as well ?

This highlights another problem with the game. It makes it far too easy for vet players to grief noobs. The enemy call signs should not be visible. It's bad enough that you can hack their targeting systems to see who they are targeting, but really you have exchanged IFF codes with them as well ?

I would LOVE it if this were true. I wouldn't immediately draw 3 people on me every time I go out. Seriously, it'd be like when dampening worked again. Where do I sign the petition?

The necessary of drawback of that would be that you'd lose the community aspect, since you wouldn't be able to connect people to what you see in game.

That said, I don't think most people can say the person they're targeting is a noob or not before running them down and shooting at them. Veterans will recognize each other, but just because it's a name you don't know under your reticule doesn't mean they're new, or bad, or an easy kill. You shoot at them because they're there. Aces will die slower, but newbies will not, and get farmed whenever they are in range.

This highlights another problem with the game. It makes it far too easy for vet players to grief noobs. The enemy call signs should not be visible. It's bad enough that you can hack their targeting systems to see who they are targeting, but really you have exchanged IFF codes with them as well ?

You don't have to "hack" their targeting system, it always shows your targets target (once the information loads)

Do you really think that removing call signs would help new players? I personally would love it, people hunt me from the beginning of the match to the end, if left alone I could be truly dangerous. Dropping in on unsuspecting targets would be easy, and people would wait too long too react since they dont know its me back there.

A name is not the only giveaway for a new player, you only learn if they or good or not after the first encounter (then you remember the name). In that same vein of thought the way someone flies is a better indicator if they are new or not, I can pick them out from pretty far away now (name or no name)

This would just end up hurting new players, since they could never know who exactly was the threat and who wasn't. But sure go ahead with that and see how it works out, I would have a very good time (which is not your intention I think)

Oh and as far as vets preying on noobs, I think any good pilot will tell you that you kill from the top down. take out the biggest threat, then the next, then the next..... If you focus on new pilots your score may climb fast but you leave your *** hanging in the wind to get chewed on by good pilots.

The confusing thing is that if you make yourself a threat to an ace they will kill you, so even if you manage to do well as a new player, all they are going to do is pay more attention to you (which can be a bad thing). Its a learning experience though, and nothing can be traded in place of that experience. Getting good involves dying a lot (at least in the beginning)