eSports?

It's pretty classic casual player hardly done by attitude, they perceive because they haven't put the time into the game to learn how to play it that the game is bad, not them.

I like your post, and I want to give examples of just this, using SupCom:FA as an example.

FA has an exponential economy, meaning that reclaiming small and big rocks have a HUGE impact. Developers need to ask themself. Does reclaiming rocks add anything meaningful to the game? Instead of forcing players to memorize what engineer E1-17 should do the first 10 minutes of the game, they should instead be met with options, so that decisions should be emphasized. F.ex, should I spend my engineers on upgrading this mex, or should I pump out more units to defend an important area? A constant decision making between tech/units or economy, as well as important basestructures (such as intel or defense).

I think that your point on making it very GUI friendly, with very good game mechanics, will make room in the players mind to focus on intel and strategy. The execution itself is not that hard, but having to decide will be.

This makes it so that good players will of course absolutely demolish a casual player, as they should. It will thus be easy for me and others, to present this game to their friends, and they can jump right into it, making decisions instead of trying to get the streaming economy to not show -15, or the power at 0% having everything stalled. Or even worse, wasting +10 mass..

I want to make a 3v3 with my friends, and I can tell them "build this and this", and they know how to do that. In a regular RTS, they are like
"Yeh an experimental, or those T2/T3/arty/shield/PDs would be awesome, but I just did not have the buildpower, or the power, or the mass. How do you get your economy that good?"

The conversation should be like this instead:
"I was too greedy"
"I didnt scout his moon base"
"I tried to overrun him in the beginning, but he defended/scouted my plan"
"Damn, that guy sneaked in an killed my eco"
"This guys economy was left alone for way too long, he will steamroll me now"

I hope you get the idea.

So, crippen, to sum up; you don't want noob traps or map specific things which people have to remember to be good?

Where is the difference between choosing which rock to reclaim or which mex to upgrade?
Those are both decisions.
In a game with a economy-system that has a certain level of complexity, you just NEED to either learn efficient builds by heart or you just have to have a godlike "feeling" for what is good. The second one is hard to get, so people usually go for the first one.
Sure you could break the complexity aways, but I dont think that is what PA is going for. At least I REALLY hope it.

I agree, thats what PA should go for, there are other good RTS that can be played for the "yeah I have more apm, I am sooo good"-effect.

Do you want to say that the economy should be simplified? Please not.
Do you want to say that it should be easier to control the economy? Err.. .wait thats the same thing.
I cant follow. Making decisions has nothing to do with how hard controlling the economy is. Your decisions ingame decide, if your economy will balance out or stall/waste.

That means you are basically asking for a VERY simple kind of RTS. You would need a simple "Build X with a perfect Build"-Button. Thats not exactly what most people have in mind for PA, I hope...

Either I dont get the idea (I hope thats it), or you dont understand what you are asking for.
I do have the feeling that you should reiterate over your idea of decisions: What is a decision?
Multiplchoice-stupidity: A multiplechoice-box that asks you at the beginning what you want the game to do for you?
FA-economy-type: The decision to send engie 5 at minute 2:37 to rock 3?
SC2-Micro: The decision to select a certain stalker, push y and click a position as far away from the enemy as possible as quick as possible?

Not at all. FA's economy is easier to control than TA's, and I certainly wouldn't call it simplified (as in less deep). Adding UI features is one way to do this, and that's what was done between Supcom and FA. The Gaz_UI went a few steps further, and it certainly didn't dumb the game down.
I'm sure there are those that consider buttons to autoselect idle engineers make the game less deep and challenging. After all, a good player should be able to do this on their own, right?

Also, something to consider with regard to engineers reclaiming natural resources early in the game is that since these maps are procedurally generated, those large rocks will always be in a different location, so some searching will be required. Then we have to manually click on each one, telling the engineer that they should get these first. I wonder if there isn't a more efficient way to do this . . .

Be better if we know what were dealing with matchmaking wise. It would be cool if it was.

It's not really the complexity that's the problem. Put two noobs together to fight it out, and they might screw their economy up completely, but have a great time. Put a noob and a person who knows the basics together, and suddenly the noob gets steamrolled.

Anyone who has played on any sort of ranking ladder has had the experience of getting steamrolled (and for most ladders it will happen several times). If that's your first experience to playing the game online, and its the primary option given to you in the online service, there's a good chance you're going to go looking elsewhere to have fun.

So the question is: How can we make it, that noobs go and learn the basics without having to endure one loss after another?

Slow the games tempo down?

IF SupCom1 was traditionally played at half the speed, then players would have the time to fix their problems and return to the battle before it is over.

That doesn't remotely address anything. The game has one speed that everyone shares. A faster, better player will ALWAYS have the advantage regardless of the game's pace.

The game certainly needs to have non competitive game types, and definitely will benefit from a tutorial. The TotalA economy does take some getting used to, and the interface should be very effective in managing it. There is no reason or benefit to neutering top level play, just because something "might be hard for new players, maybe, we don't know, but let's do it just in case".

If you are new to the game:
A) Practice.
B) Play against AI.
C) Play against friends (prereq: find friends) and **** around.

I don't see how it hurts top level players, the pros are masters of adaptation and are never hurt from changes like that.

What I am suggesting is that the speed you need to be going at to manage everything is not easy for most players to accomplish, and so we shouldn't be promoting it, especially in the way that starcraft does.

Most games are not designed for the pros, but they appear any way, why? Because people became good, not because the game was designed for it, People adapted and evolved how they played and become very good at the game, to the point where we refer to them as professionals.

People want people in PA to become pros? Then we ill adapt to the new environment.

I just want to express my happiness knowing that you are taking in account esports part of this game.

eSport (and a good multiplayers system) is what it can make PA a great game. (balance in 1v1 games, good maps, a good replays system like starcraft 2)

You can adapt to many things, but to a gamespeed so slow that it takes 1h to play a single game? Some people dont have that much time in real life and they cannot adapt their real life. You also have to consider that if the game is too slow, it will be quite boring to play.

Anyway a slower gamespeed would not change a thing. Good players would use the additional time to build even more stuff and control even larger areas. Areas so big, that it will require speed to control them all yet again.
Also: A good players uses his time more efficient than a bad player.
If you increase the amount of time available for each player by the same amount, the advantage of the good player will increase.

Considering that people sit down to watch 90min football games, I would think that an hour is more then fine.

Pros are always going to be better at managing their time, but newer players still require time to be able to react appropriately.

This wasn't a suggestion to some how weaken the better players, but they can adapt, this was a suggestion to give newer players the time they need to understand the game without having to lose 50 times.

By giving them more time to think and react.

FA ran at a fine speed. No need to slow things down, as the game was already slower than most. Besides, any new player that jumps in randomly and starts playing against skilled players should get their asses handed to them, no question about it. That's how every videogame ever is. (Except maybe stuff like CoD, where spray-n-pray may net you a few kills.)

Playing alone or against AI for a game or two is just fine to get accustomed to the game, and after that, a decent ladder system should be sufficient.

[EDIT]In Quake Live, player placement was handled through a series of obstacle courses and a bot match, which did fairly well to determine how good a player was and where they should be placed. To get the most granular placement, quick, short missions would be enough to determine their base skill. For example, have the player try to achieve a certain economic level and time how quick they do it. Have them attempt to reach a certain army size in a given time, etc. Of course, this depends on the game's support for scripting like this, but it's a great way to gauge new players.[/EDIT]

I am just saying, games these days play faster then they used to and not everyone is accustomed to the speed.

Ever tried playing TA at the normal speed after playing FA? Its a whole different game.......and ironically the game that PA is based on.

What ?
WarCraft 3 was an e-sport game of it's own. Yes Dota was a mod for WC3 that became an e-sport, but an entirely different game. People still played vanilla WC3 competitively.

I think neutrino means DOTA is much more successful than vanilla war3tft as a esport.
And it might be a philosophical problem if a modified game is still the same game or not.

How is this any different from the experience of any other game in the world?

Then I guess you're sh!t out of luck if you want a game where's it's possible to compete against one another. Let's just ban all winning and losing and the entire concept of competition.

Now I am certain you didn't read what I said.

I said you don't need to cater to the competitive scene because competitiveness breeds itself.

So you respond saying that I don't want people to actually win a game?

You are the most random person I have ever met. :lol: