Casual players like me

Winning 50% of your games sounds good to me.
If you want to win more you would have to play versus people that are worse then you are, but they do not like to get crushed by you so ... 50-50 is ok.

The problem with the Sera bomber rush was not that you *had* to scout it, but that it was *impossible* to scout it. It became a guessing game and that is bad, and so it was changed (I'm not sure exactly what was changed but now bomber first is still viable, it's just not so devastating - I'm not high-level enough to use it myself and I've only had it properly done to me once, but it became the dominant strategy amongst the top players).

In the sense that it unscoutable it is very similar to what I've heard of the Zerg Rush, but like I say I can't comment on that as StarCraft was a couple of years out of date when it was released so I ignored it.

However, if something is potentially scoutable, and it kills you, then it was your fault that you lost. No ifs, no buts, if you were distracted by another attack, if your eco got raided and you were too busy rebuilding to scout, if you forgot to scout, if you couldn't be bothered to scout: the other player played better and you deserve to lose.

Game design wise, I hope that PA will give players the time and resources they need to set up so they can then react before the fighting really starts.

This may have been a fault of the small maps of FA and TA, because often players were pressured far to early to be able to react.

That's how I feel about it anyway, the small maps seemed like a good starting point for players, when that wasn't true.

Just remember that there's a big difference between "you lost and it was your fault" and "a fun way to play the game".

When people just start disconnecting from games because they see their opponent is doing strategy X, just like in the last 10 games, and it's boring as hell, there might be a problem with that strategy, even if it's perfectly stoppable.

This whole discussion of scouting brings up another point: support strategies and tactics are not intuitive to new players.

Think about it from a rookie's perspective. Since both cost resources, given the option to make a tank or a radar... why not make a tank? You win the game with more tanks.

In SupCom2, I had to be extensively coached to build more radar, but once I did, my play improved substantially. But I still have to remind my friends to build radars.

One of the problems is that the list of things you can build can be overwhelming. There's a huge list of buildings in the construction menu, so new players are typically going to find the few that can directly benefit their strategy and stick with those. Because of the information overload, they'll ignore the rest.

So I think the change that can be made is in the construction menu itself. What if buildings and units were categorized? (And not the "Main"/"Advanced" tabs you see in Supcom2 and Starcraft - these categories should be all onscreen at once if possible, but visually distinct) Categories for buildings could be "Economy", "Military", "Intel", etc. For units, you could have "Direct Fire", "Construction", "Specialized", etc. That would save players the cognitive load of filtering out what they actually want to build, which has the indirect effect of encouraging them to build more obscure things.

From there, the strategy implications are intuitive: "Hey, I can have a radar and a scout now. I guess I should figure out what my opponent is up to!"

I see your point, but I think it is exaggerated, perhaps even to the point of being a straw man. I can't think of any real game scenarios where you would be able to scout something being built, and rather than it enabling you to adjust your play to counter it, it would dishearten you so much that you just plain gave up.

If such a thing existed especially if it happened ten games in a row, then you have a game mechanic that is seriously broken.

The whole point of scouting is so that you can avoid being caught off guard, in general a counter should be designed to be easier to perform than the attacking move.

Well, as far as anecdotal evidence goes, the above is the reason I quit playing Starcraft. Every match was exactly the same, and you knew pretty much how it would play out 2 minutes in. There was for the longest time only 1 (maybe 2 if you were lucky) strategy per match-up, so often you'd know exactly how the game would go from the moment you saw what your opponent was playing.

The only reason it was semi-bearable for a while was because I played random which meant I had 9 matchups instead of 3, and my opponents couldn't run their default script.

It's a major problem with powerful opening strategies, they really guide how the entire game plays out more often than not, especially once you get to the somewhat higher tier.

I would say that Forged Alliance doesn't have that problem. 1v1 it is always T1 spam to start, and if you get out-eco’d then it's GG, but assuming evenly matched players it's really just a stepping stone to a multitude of different tactics and potential manoeuvres.

I assume PA will have the same basic mechanics, but most likely a bit slower-paced (which is arguably a good thing as there would be less of a brickwall learning curve before you can feel like you're doing something productive).

T1 spam is actually a really good place for newbies. It's simple enough that newbies can use that time to learn the basic mechanics of the game, and because it's so early in the game, losses happen quickly and give a tight feedback loop. It is a bit boring to get stuck there match after match, though, especially if the T1 phase can last a half hour like it does in SupCom. (At least, that's how I remember FA)

You should come and have a go on Forged Alliance Forever, it's a lobby, client, matchmaker and all that gubbins that beats the pants off GPGNet and is going very strong indeed.

All +1 i have.

The best answer to this problem is creating a casual league, which has the complex and brutal parts of the game handled by AI (or not present at all)

Yea this is what I would prefer as well, a way casual gamers would be able to enjoy multiplayer without getting demolished within 5 seconds.

I much more like to watch and commentate other's battles than play against people myself simply cause I can't play sweating my *** off to beat someone, I just wanna sit, build and destroy others.

(I very much prefer turtling, fort based gameplay and slow, huge maps)

I hope this could be done, also I would love to see a very functional good replay system, gonna check the forum to see if that has been talked about.

That's called either hosting your own game or Custom/non-ranked Servers. Where you can use whatever mods/built-in exclusions you want.

Mike

This I feel is the wrong way, it creates a wall that will be hard to cross, as the players will be missing important things when attempting to move to the competitive league.

I'm not opposed to a casual league, I just think handing weaker/new/casual players crutches that are not normally present is going to hurt them in the long run.

Just watched it! This should be, like, mandatory for game devs to watch. And scrubs. Heck, anyone playing a multiplayer game should watch this.

FAForever is beast (as in, yes, it's awesome).

So would I be correct in saying that at one point the bomber rush strategy was at one point a FOOS strategy?

My view of this is.. well, I'm planning on heading off to college soon. I have other games I play, including a few long running RPG games, of which I am DMing some.

I'm just not going to have time to go do long term deep forum strategy dives, reading every post on the latest top tier tactics and strategies, and given that PA is not going to be a short game, maybe I'll have time for, at most, one multiplayer game a day. And then I need to go do homework or study or it's Session time for D&D. And same for replays. If you want to get worth out of a replay, you have to study them, and that means they can take, specially when you are new and learning, almost as long as a real game.

I'm not asking to be able to casually murder top tier players in my first verses match, but when I can reasonably get in maybe one good Multiplayer game every other day, and I loose my first five games.. well, that's about a week to two weeks down the drain without a single victory.

And that's pretty damn discouraging. That's why I stopped playing starcraft 1 battlenet, back in the days of grade school. You were a competitive pro, or you were dogmeat, and if you don't have the time or interest to get to competitive pro, that means you get sick of being dogmeat and stop doing multiplayer.

I still play starcraft today, but I only play it when the family gets together and we have fun murdering each other. Are we pros? No. Are we close enough in skill to each other that we have fun and aren't sure who is going to win? Yes.

It's completely understandable that people with more time to learn and practice win more often.

But if you aren't one of those people with more time, and you keep getting sent up against them by a ladder system that isn't getting the hint from your horrible murders that you aren't one of those people. Well. That's when I stop bothering because it's stopped being fun to try to learn how to get better.

Ten sessions is a lot. I'd have probably given up five or seven in, and gone to do something that I could actually see myself improving at or otherwise actually having fun doing.

I don't demand a 100% success rate. But if I don't have better then a 0% rate, I'm going to go do something else.

Not really, because only very skilled players could do it properly. However in the hands of somebody who could do it properly it was literally unstoppable and thus game-breaking.

As well as knowing the right build order (which is presumably all you need for a Zerg rush), you also need to be very good at bomber micro. Bomber micro in FA is arguably an abuse of the physics of the game in order to make bombers behave in an unintended way.

The worst of it was patched out in FAF (it used to be possible to drop bombs constantly with the correct timing, but a delay was added to stop this), but especially with the Sera bomber which has concentrated damage and can seemingly throw bombs sideways, it is very powerful in the hands of a competent player. But as it is now, it's considered a feature and not a bug, and I think that's correct.

Sorry for double post, but in response to the video posted above, where it says that new players should be able to feel that they can do something useful, such as E Honda's hundred-hand-slap or the “noobtube” in Call Of Duty, I think that this may be an inherent problem with RTS games.

The bits that typically appeal to noobs are the massive robots, nukes and the like, yet these don't come into play until the game has gone on for a long time, which is probably the explanation for the appeal of 20NR or restricted games.

Unfortunately unlike Street Fighter, playing with these noob-appeal settings does not act as a stepping stone to general improvement at the game as a whole, so I think the question is are there any mechanics that could be implemented in this direction?

Unlike an FPS game where even a new player will accidentally get the occasional lucky kill, RTS is a zero-sum affair where games can last from ten minutes to two hours. If after that time investment a player feels they have had no reward then it can be very off-putting.

I can't think of any way to change this without fundamentally changing what the game is about. You can't have perpetual stat increases, you can't have unlockable weapons. You can't really give out any meaningful reward avatars, although you could have “achievements”, but these have been discussed at length elsewhere and general consensus is that they have the potential to do more harm than good.

So I'm at a bit of a loss, anyone else?