Vitriol towards Newbies

Hi all,

I've just noticed in a few topics that people are a bit harsh on those who don't play well. Can I make an honest suggestion? Teach 'em. If you see a Support not hacking friendly turrets or healing or something, ask him to? Same thing with sins, if you see a sin with a 3-50 k/d ratio, remember they're probably learning and trying to get into it. Give em a few pointers or point 'em towards this forum! We were all n00bs once, don't forget. And I know being on a team which doesn't work together well hurts your teeth, but not everyone can be as good as you right away. If it gets too much, jump onto another server.

Thats all Not a rant or a self righteous sermon or anything, just a bit of a concerned grandad gamer reminding us all to go easy on the n00bs.

It might be true and all, but I have a few problems with this:

Gamers who don't know what english is. Communication at this point is too hard.
Silent gamers.
Jerk gamers.
Lazy gamers. I'm one of these.

Those three groups just don't make it easy communicating with people. I can try, But I'm too lazy to give out pointers and rather focus on the game itself. The other thing I have is that I just don't notice how others play. Situational awareness is a key thing I should improve on, though.

It doesn't help that the chat window is too short to type a complete sentence and hitting Esc to cancel the chat dialog require you to hammer the button three times to close out of it. Uber should really just steal the TF2 chat window in its entirety: scrollable history, huge chat field length, easy to close, it gets everything right that MNC's chat window gets wrong.

Then there's the voicechat, which isn't loud enough no matter what I do to adjust volume, doesn't provide an onscreen indicator as to who's talking (no, the tiny indicator above the avatar of a player who happens to be onscreen doesn't count), and doesn't dampen other sounds when you talk. Of course, if all that were fixed it would just make it easier to be an *** over voicechat because people could hear you better, which is why we need easy to use player muting in-game as well.

I think a good deal of the rage misdirected towards newbies (not to be confused with n00bies, i.e. poor players who refuse to learn) is the incredible difficulty of communicating with other players in this game. You simply can't effectively communicate tips in-game in anything but terse typed commands that never effectively convey your message, and that gets quite maddening very quickly.

All of you said in here may bear certain points but never forget that you can't fix people and I cannot be bothered trying to help people that cannot be helped, it's not my job to find out who is worth the time and who isn't.

I'd rather just kill people and win the game.

I just posted something to this effect. I fully agree with the undue difficulty in communicating with teammates and the server in general in MNC. As this isn't Source engine I don't know if they could really copy TF2's chat window, but I do know the Killing Floor is on the Unreal just like MNC and their in-game communication is much better, and that leads to there being a LOT of team-building (as well as pleasant conversation) in that game. Uber could really learn something from that game I think.

Your average gamer who is already showing signs that go beyond "being new" and into the realm of "just doesn't get it" and "possibly retarded" aren't even worth trying to talk to. Sadly, most people who can't manage to pick up a pretty straight forward game in a day or two probably never will, or need to work at their own pacing. Special pacing for special people.

Voice and text chat both being hands down terrible doesn't help. Along with having barely any indication of the speaker, oftentimes I can barely hear them or they break up very badly. Chat has improved a bit with the patch it got, but it still feels underdone and clunky. I think both of these are a pretty big factor in most games being a silence fest except for the occasional whine.

I doubt you have any clue about programming or IT-stuff anywhere. You can't copy/paste out of compilied binaries :?.
Would be a coypright infringement and very expensive for the developers ...

Oh, and I do. Small, yet effective hints, like "<insertSupportNameHere>, can you please hack our turrets?", "Don't build LongShots on Steel Peel, they only hit the walls", "<insertGunnerNameHere>, can you please mortar the enemy turrets" and the like.

Some players will actually try said hint, and I'll usually help them out along the way, such as escorting a Gunner to the enemy base.

However, most players who make these mistakes blantantly refuse to play better, claiming they paid the money, they want to play the way they want. Or, more often, they go on failing at thier class without reponse. I like to believe they didn't even know chat existed.

I too play to win, and it really hurts your team when you have 3 supports and no firebases/hacked turrets. You can't fix people, but you can help a new player learn.

Is there a console command to bind messages to a certain key ala the good ol days of quake?

I've tried. If we have two assassins and they're being outscored in bot kills by the entire team, I'll politely ask them "Assassins, can you please kill the bots?"

And then they don't.

And then our moneyball goes down.

And then they end up on the bottom of the scoreboard.

Hatred like this isn't born out of nothing. It's when people actively ignore requests from their own teammates to do their jobs correctly that people start getting bitter.

Every bad player I see I tell to come here for advice.

I either get in return:
1. Mind your own business, ******.
2. stfu

Yeah I once had a Support healing me while I was a Tank. An Assault and an Assassin come around the corner. He runs away I kill the Assault but the Assassin was able to finish me off with a slash or two then she grapple kills the Support. I casually say into the mic "Aww man. You should have kept healing me we could have killed them both." He responds "Don't tell me how to play the ******* game."
:?

Ah well, at least you guys have tried. If they don't wanna listen, it ain't your fault. It was just a suggestion on my part

My breaking point came when I asked the 3 assassins with a kd ratio of less than 0.1 (I'm dead serious) to go for bots and turrets from time to time.

Their response: "haha noob dont tell me how to play"

/gg.

I meant to get ideas from how they conduct their communication in-game. Not to actually straight copy-paste, I'd be surprised if that's even possible, as you are correct in thinking I don't know anything about programming. I meant to look at that game as a case-study in good in-game communication options leading to a well-informed playerbase.

Their voicecoms are robust and each one is useful as well as entertaining (due to the hilarious British accents). The mic not only shows the playername of who's talking but also their character's face, which is useful because it shows you who's speaking without even needing to put the voicechat window in your eyesight's focus (say, when you're busy not getting eaten). In MNC that would show you at a glance who is speaking and what class they are. The textchat is not only responsive even in low-FPS conditions but also shows up sharp and clear on low graphics settings. Not to mention it's in two colors that are far outside the actual game's color range.

I can't count how many times this has happened to me. I've even tried to give assassins with high K/D ratios and no bot kills that same advice. They just laugh and lose saying how much of a noob I am. I've only had one win that way but only because the rest of his team was bot managing. He even had the nerve to scream how much of a noob I was and left before he could claim his money and win. :roll:

I see then. So the newbies in this game might not be getting the treatment necessary to not become noobs. Once they have gone noob (assassin not killing bots or taking advice) there is no going back.

I wish there was some way to get to them earlier and keep them from becoming noobs. 2 bad assassins on a team make the first person to go assassin (me) look bad.

I think of that situation as camouflage. If there are 3 assassins but only one is worth worrying about, I can't distinguish which is which until the kill (or death) so I'm left with two options: raise the bar for all assassins or lower it below what I would give the good assassin on his own. Either I'm paying too much attention to assassins and more vulnerable to other sources of danger, or I'm more vulnerable to the GOOD assassin.

I'd have to agree with pretty much everything said here so far.

Helping people who need it is good, but the odds of your communication actually having an effect are quite low, I've found.

Generally, communication ends as follows...

1) I sit in spawn and slowly type out a message that is segmented and generally not particularly detailed, but gets the point across, and then...
a) The person replies and follows my advice (yay!)
b) The person replies with "lol l2p noob" or "Don't tell me how to play"
c) I get no response, and unless I specifically follow them, I have no way of telling if
they heeded my advice or not

2) I call out advice with my microphone, both quickly and with detail (generally proceeded by me saying "Can anyone hear me?" 3 or 4 times without response), and then...
a) Nothing happens. I am left unsure if I am ignored or unheard
b) I get the reply "I can't understand you".
c) Honestly. That's all. I have never had a useful interaction over my mic.

I would agree about KF's communication. Mics especially are great in that game because I can know my voice is going through thanks to the bar at the bottom.

Some people might disagree but I think the classes have pretty definite roles, and one of the things that makes it pretty hard to understand the game for newbies is that there's nothing guiding into making balanced teams, most servers have no class limits so you end with retarded team compositions all the time, even when each class is limited to 2 like it is on most servers with class limits, kinda hard to learn how the game works and how to play classes properly in thoses conditions. The fact people on the forums say "assassin is the best lane pusher and turrets killer" while she's so squishy and outclassed in thoses two tasks by tanks and gunners looks like a consequence of most pub matchs being full of assassins and snipers to me.

The lobby also plays a great role in turning a lot of matchs into crap: it is just too basic, teams and class selection should be made before the game starts, right now it's so fast that people who want to write a few lines before logging off are thrown into a team before they have the time to log off, then comes the class selection and attempts at creating a balanced team often go to waste because of autobalance, when it doesn't even completely messes up with the class limits, creating some situations where one team has more of a class then they're supposed to while the other team can't select this class at all (which can also prevent a 6th player from selecting a class and entering the match).

So in the end some newbies never learn the game, while people who learned a bit more get frustrated by retarded team compositions, rage, and look for another server (or another game).