Allowable Game Options / Modifications

I wanted to start a discussion on this rather unfortunate topic.

Basically, I myself have a divided opinion on this, but I'm leaning towards making an "official/ranked" mode or something and even deprecating mod/options support.

There's kind of an issue in Supcom2 currently (which I mostly play), which will probably be far worse in PA. The issue is players who can't handle the complexity or difficulty of the game and artificially reduce it by playing with exclusions, messing with game speed etc. etc.

It's gotten to the point where 80% of the games played are "land only, no arty no nukes, fast speed." That's not necessarily because air or arty or nukes aren't well-balanced - it's because everyone wants to mindlessly spam land units and not think about air, naval, arty, or nukes. I play no exclusions games when available, and you really have to work to successfully win with any strategy, be it land, air, naval, arty, nukes, or ACU rushing when good players play on both sides.

Basically what I'm trying to say is, make it difficult or maybe not even an option to change core game mechanics such as excluding units or changing game speed - make something like a "ranked mode" which is THE definitive mode to play which doesn't allow any modifications to the core game. In my opinion, a community which plays different mods, different speeds, different exclusions, etc. etc. would be EXTREMELY undesirable.

I'd personally rather have a game where there's few people playing than a lot of people playing with "No Orbital Bombardment, No Asteroid Bombardment, No Arty, No Air, No Naval, Infinite Income" 1 month into game release. Arguably that happens when a game's not well-balanced, but it also happens when options are easily exposed to the players such as in Supcom 2 where I don't think the case is that it's not well-balanced, necessarily.

Really this just comes down to personal choice. Or "If you don't want to play a land units only game, then don't join them and host your own game."

Yes there will probably be quite a few people who insist on playing the game in default mode only and I am sure they will have servers up hosting games. And I'd rather have the choice available to allow anyone play the game in any manner that they choose.

If they just want to play mindlessly, I don't think you would enjoy playing against them will all the units even if they had to. They would probably be really bad at the game, complain a lot, and then leave the game for good. The problem is more in the fact that a lot of people aren't really hardcore gamers, then there being too much separation. Those casual players will likely stop playing very quickly if this isn't in the game, so instead of seeing 80 games with exclusion, and 20 without, you might see something like 25 games with everyone forced to use all units. Not exactly a good thing.

Sure, it's always an option to make my "elitist" game.

The problem is it becomes a trend. One game appears, people (new and older) play it, get used to it, want to play it more because it's simple and that's what they know to do and do well, start avoiding proper games and avoid learning new things, etc.

It tends to reduce the complexity of a game to a really low level. Sure, there might be "hardcore" players playing without mods or options but a lot of the general population is swayed by trends imo.

I think investing some time to make an active ranked mode will solve that problem to an extent. The ranked mode in supcom2 was arguably pretty horrible, being limited to random map 1v1 only, so maybe that contributed to the demise of proper games being played.

I just think that the funniest thing in this game would be playing "planetary annihilation" without planetary bombardment. Mark my words, it will happen. People will get pwned by falling asteroids and will start disabling them, given an easily accessible option.

Perhaps, as a compromise, create an effective ranked mode (perhaps with rewards for certain milestones, like portraits, additional design considerations, titles, etc. I know that Star Craft 2 does this fairly effectively), with the skirmish option available to players who want it. I realize that it degraded SupCom2's ranked to do it this way, but I think if you add rewards for ranked play, it might make it a little more effective.

I don't know.... I love the modding community, but I personally never like using mods/exclusions (TA has these too). They kill the fun for me. I'm sure most people who want to truly enjoy the game will agree with me, and they won't use them. Simple as that. The people that don't enjoy the game in it's full won't like it at all if there are no exclusions. From my experience, I haven't seen anybody who truly likes the game using these things all the time (maybe occasionally, to goof off). More often than not, if they ban something, it's because they don't like it and it might not be balanced well.

I don't know about planes/ships, but I've heard that SupCom players usually spammed nukes/artillery, which would make it understandable why people would grow to dislike it. As for speed, I play TA and never had a problem with it, SupCom always felt slow for me (yet not epic). I can see why people would play it faster too.

If people are playing the game a certain way instead of how it was designed, obviously there is a problem with how it was designed.

I can understand why people wouldn't play mods as much in TA, because of the hassle of installing/removing them, but if the options are so easily exposed and changed as they are in supcom2 (a simple click of the mouse when you are in a lobby), I would imagine there are going to be a lot of games excluding substantial parts of the gameplay as early as week 1, because people won't be able or are not going to be willing to handle the complexity of the game.

I guess I'm mostly hoping for a quality, popular ranked mode (including ranked team modes not just 1v1) where you can't touch or alter anything from the core gameplay (speed, exclusions, win condition, resource income, etc. etc.) which is probably what I'd end up playing.

Also, looking into the future further, paid DLC and segmenting the game is always a bad idea - another area where supcom2 failed miserably.

I already started a similar thread and got bashed, cause my huge ego wants to "force" people to play the game my way.

Someone else mentioned that he is a good SC2 player but simply gets tired when every 10 sec a nuke get launched against him...I did not even comment on that... I think you get my drift.

I totally understand what you mean, FA has exclusions too, but in SC2 it became ridiculous...and most new players don't even bother to play the game right...
Oh I have no clue how to handle air, ahh right, turn it off.... and so on and on and on.

Exclusions were in the beginning implemented so bad that they had to patch it...
For example, no air allowed, but the ACU was still able to pop his head off and fly around...so...after killing everyone in the game, there was one player with his ACU head flying around, not willing to give into his defeat...just an example.

To all the nay sayers towards this idea, in FPS games, there is no exclusion to turn off bullets, is there? I don't mind certain exclusions, like no nukes, if they really don't like it...or different game modes via mods...but the main game should be pure, the same goes of course with the game speed...fast games only hide your bad skills, especially if you only use a single unit, the ACU... so much for micro...

I do though have high hopes for the PA playerbase, since it will be a game known for being a hardcore RTS...so certain people would maybe not even bother to play it...which would be also sad though...

I lold.

I guess he does have to be THAT good to last long enough so someone can spam so many nukes... :mrgreen:

Meanwhile, what did he do with his time? Make point defenses maybe? Or a pretty box of pgens (without shields because you know, no arty)...

It's just sad. I'd hate to see this game in that state.

Perhaps the issues with SC2 came about because they so fundamentally alter who their target demographic was?
For me it's no great surprised they moulded it to something even more like the traditional RTS's they were more used to?

TA had a completely granular exclusion list and I don't remember it being a big issue.

From what I can tell PA is being made with money primarily from fans of TA and SC, and we will dominate the community in the early days, so in all likelihood that demographic will want all the bells and whistles turned on unless something is clearly broken (until it gets fixed).

Have a little faith in your fellow enthusiasts!

TA has an awesome exclusion list allowing you to ban units, or limit how many you can have, but it's still rarely used. So difficulty of access is not the problem.

Also, I didn't say people don't want to play mods as much on TA. In fact, plenty of people on play mods of the game now, and it makes sense. With TA patched to support more units than it did before, the balance severely changed, making some units far more powerful then they should be.

Flashes where always useful, but it used to be they would fall off by endgame due to the unit cap, which you could replace with less efficient for the cost, but more powerful units. Now you can spam flashes without worrying about a cap, thus making many other units unused.

Mods allow players to fix this up (though I still play OTA [original TA]). If the developers are still making patches, they can see the problems and make them official patches themselves, but games won't always be supported, so they should be made in a way they can continue to live on by themselves.