We need more players! Especially for the 1v1 ladder. What can we do?

Your talking ****, whats more a fantasty, that they will put in your beloved experimentals or the community doing things like articles, organising community events/nights, things we can actually do.

Go play supcom 3

see this is great! More ideas like this!

You really should! Great idea! It's alot of fun and you learn as well while writing it.

I did a piece about the RTSSP's history and familly in this journal I made for school. it's all in french but you can still give it a look and try and translate with google. If I remember right @cdrkf was trying to read it in french, I dunno if he managed.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzN9wSaRvA86T0piWUJoOUwzTWM&authuser=0 file must be downloaded, too big for online reader.

I'm encouraged by the fact that even with my very limited French, I was able to understand the majority of that. I had to slap myself when I read "en croissance" as "un croissant" though.

EDIT: Also I did that labyrinth in like one take, wow.

Sure, a 'new player night' every everyone helps new players sounds good on a poster. But what does it actually mean? how does it actually happen? The simple answer is, it doesn't.

I learnt how to play SupCom2 because someone coached me. It really is the best way to learn. I picked this game up easily because it's essentially the same. I agree people need coaching, but having 5 guys (prove me wrong on this, find more than 5 people interested) hooking up with 5 newbies (3 of which will move on after a week, 1 of which will not accept advice, and 1 of which will stick around for a bit and then never be seen again) is not really going to solve any problems the game is facing.

I think the best suggestion so far is for Uber to develop a captivating single player campaign exactly like what TA had. Lets ask ourselves, how did we get into TA? Well I for one played the Arm and Core campaigns, which taught me nothing more than the basics I might add, and then I moved to skirmish and then onto online play.

I think this is a natural progression for people.

I've had a few friends start playing this game. They have no idea what they're doing, they struggle for a bit, die, and then never come back. I can't even recommend the game to them at the minute, only 1 in 10 games has any moments in it which you could describe as sustained enjoyment.

If I could get them started on a campaign, they would probably give it a good go. People like that kind of thing, seeing progression and moving onto the next step. People are less sure about just having random multiplayer battles which mean nothing ultimately. This could be covered off initially with a solid campaign to get people up to speed while also challenging them. And then some notion of rewarding them for spending time playing the game.

Look at COD. Everyone plays online, but pretty much all of my friends were more obsessed with their rank than they were with how much fun they were having. People are stupid, I say give them a bit of what they want. The Ladder is great for serious players (although, I'm sure several serious players are pissed off with it), but what your casual player wants is to go from level 5 to level 6 after LOSING a game because they killed a few units. They want an achievement popping up the first time they kill a commander. They want an award for building a power gen. This is what the idiot masses want! Give it to them.

The learning curve isn't really a problem. I've put 87 hours into the game and I understand how things work. I guess the reason I don't like it very much is because its maps.. They seem to be very bland. I remember in the SupCom/FA maps having strategic positions that involve mountains and oceans. That way if you build along the mountain side sometimes the arty couldn't hit you very well. Even if it could hit your base you could have shields protecting your stuff.

Another thing I'm not a fan of is there are no factions. Normally factions have different tech and strategies to use. I remember from SupCom that Cybran was my favorite faction to use because of the stealth capabilities.

I guess I didn't know what the end vision of the game was going to be like when I bought it..

I'll throw in here that I had almost no rts experience before playing PA. The reason I was able to conquer the learning curve* was between the time I got PA (in early open beta) and the time it could actually run on my computer (months after release) I watched almost every zaphod video and every available tournament I could find. My RTS experience has been fundamentally shaped by PA competitive play - before I could even participate in that competitive play.

edit * I of course still have a LOT to learn - but I knew enough when I started that I didn't have an imposing brick wall of game knowledge to break through.

I'd recommend trying out some of community made maps if you haven't yet. They make quite a difference.

this. Reports like this sorta scream: "Offer better standard maps" at uber

all the user-made maps that I've tried : I can think of the one with a bridge between two bases surrounded by mountains, another one, symmetrical in a desert with a lot of fissures and montains splitting it up, isis remake, and one which is almost entirely submerged except for the mountain peaks making walls around the two big starting points and all yielded an experience that was far below that of what SupCom did/does.

I haven't played since months before the unit cannon came out. I played a few games vs AI to check out the unit cannon and that was that. I never really play vs other players so people like me coming back won't matter to you guys.

Personally I think it's crazy to expect a campaign at this point in the game's lifecycle. More variations in maps definitely sounds easy enough and worth the effort.

If they had maps like the one pictured on the top right under Planetary Biome Concepts then I would love to play this game. But so far I haven't seen anything close to this in PA. That is what I miss the most from SupCom/FA.

I would post a link to it but I guess my account is to new.

As others have said, trying out community made maps might well be a good idea for you. As for expectations, I feel like I got exactly what I expected with PA. As soon as I saw that video, I knew what they were going for, and now I'm pretty much playing that game. Expectations can be tricksy things But the c ommunity has added a lot of content so yeah, try out some maps maybe? If you know the game well and you just feel that maps are "a bit bland", then it seems like a logical step.

I've played on a few custom maps and they've been great. Ultimately, with game design, designing any kind of 'map' can be a very involved process; balancing them out often takes a lot of time.

And @perfectdark, I think you're being a bit pessimistic, and I also think you're /dramatically/ underestimating the development costs associated with a single player campaign. Script dialogue, scripted events, implementing the new features into the engine, writing and engineering a story, balancing it to allow for progressive learning that is fun and not overwhelming. A single player campaign is a huge thing to try and achieve. There's a reason no mod has attempted it, and I for one new from the outset that it wasn't going to happen.

$3 million plus whatever Uber got in investment from other sources (their own money, investors, Idk...), is not that much money when you're talking about years of development, paying the salaries of very passionate, talented, hard working people, and critically, running your /business/ in such a way that it is profitable and allows you to keep your core staff employed. Valve have the luxury of having so much money that the games they make are really labours of love but even they have business constraints; other developers don't get to put in as much time as they would probably like on a game, at some point they have to look to the future and work on other things.

"but what your casual player wants is to go from level 5 to level 6 after LOSING a game because they killed a few units." - what? How do you think the world works? You want to engineer a game that somehow rewards you for losing? Wut?!

This is /not/ about giving 'the idiot masses what they want'. I started this thread so that the community can just discuss viable things that we can do to help out new players and, hopefully, get people to play the game who perhaps might have stopped playing it had the community not been doing things that they found to be helpful. I'm not talking about what Uber can do. I'm talking about we can do.

you know what word i like to throw out the window the most ? yes experimentals ... because they absolutly don't fit with the theme of the game .... how bout heavy assault or siege units which are more descriptive of the intend ... i still have no interest in having a full line of large units ... i don't think we need to ... i say just put in a ahwassa like and megalith/fatboy hybrid that are capable of spacetravel into the game and you are good ... i don't want the game to devolve into pure experimentalplay like supcom does ...

i generaly keep coming back every here and now
also play the occational ranked game ...
i don't think a campaign is realy the way to go to keep players in game ... they may play it once or twice and be done with it ...
what you want to keep are the players that like any kind of skirmish be it ai or players or both ...

so i say the game needs
tutorials
more variet stock maps or heck take community made maps into it for gods sake ...
better random planet generator
better multiplayer leagueplay and ranking both for single players as well as for teams ...

the matchmaking can be only so good as the playerbase it has access to ... have constandly a thausend ranked players playing the game and you may have more consistent matchmaking ..




sry for triplepost ... phone is a bitch today

Regarding experimentals...
MLRS, radar jammers, carriers, dropships, stealth units, fast amphibious vehicles etc. all things that could be put under experimental and aren´t just doombots. (not a single big unit in there)

I always liked experimentals more as higly specialized unit types that are mostly situational or even map dependant not as game enders or backbone of the army that being said hell even ww2 had experimentals ^^ Schwerer Gustav anyone ? Massive and huge still highly situational and a easy target for bombers.

I do agree that the focus should lie on the multiplayer /tutorial part though.

lol

Rewarding you for losing @zihuatanejo ? Yes. Most games do, haven't you noticed? Kill 20 people on COD but lose the game, do you get an achievement? Do you level up? Yes. Absolutely.

When you lose you often learn more than you win, no harm in having your level reflect that.

I'm not underestimating the manpower needed to develop a single player campaign at all. Did I ever provide an estimate? No.

This is about giving the idiot masses what they want. Appeal to more people, and we're sorted.