Gapshots/Longshots don't work on Steel Peel?

Man, I love Steel Peel. It's the one map that's so open, no one is really paying attention to anything too close to themselves (unlike other maps that frequently support corner camping). I just run right up to people and lay into them with whatever the hell I'm holding.

Personally, I enjoy long shots not working, it's a nice reprieve from most other games where I build a turret; watch it get destroyed right after I finish an upgrade; run over to the enemy base; destroy all their long shots; rebuild my turret; skip back to step two.

Or just say, screw it and save my money for juice in overtime. That'll teach 'em.

I hate to wade in on this discussion (ok, I don't hate it. I love it ) but as someone who's actually had a great deal of experience putting text into an action game I can quite happily tell you that trying to teach players things with text is surprisingly ineffective. Simply put, most players don't read.

They might read the tooltips on the loading screen but when is something you can't be sure of. Will they read it first time or eighth time? You can't really predict it. They definitely won't read any text once the match starts (This is one of the major reasons why almost all of Valve and Rockstar's recent games are predominantly voice acted, among others ).

The pit girl suggestion is a good one, though perhaps you could go one step further and maybe even have the announcer have a line about it in the intro speech for the level: e.g. "Be careful with your turret choice here folks! We're still hammering the dents out of the dome from the last team that tried to use long shots; I've not seen damage like that since the last time my ex took her driving test! Oh boy!"

So you expect players to build a LS and then stand there and watch its fire trajectory in order to learn that it doesn't work? That strikes me as a very poor/lazy way to try and educate a player for two reasons:

1. Players don't need to watch the LS turrets fire on any other map in the game to see if they are working correctly. They actually don't need to watch any of the turrets to see if they are functioning. The game teaches you that turrets are 'build it and move on'.

2. MNC is a very fast-paced action game where standing in one place too long can be deadly so to think that I need to stand and watch my turret after I build it to see if it's working correctly is not intuitive or good design. On top of that you can't remove turrets so even if you did see that a turret wasn't working correctly you can't do anything about it.

Yes this is a fun game, but only having 16 employees is not a valid excuse for problems with a consumer product. No one wants a tutorial for this issue as it's not practical. I'm also not hopeful for any kind of fix, honestly. Rather I'm providing this constructive criticism in order to try and let them know that, as a player, I have a real problem with a core gameplay mechanic on the map, and hopefully they will not make this design decision on any future maps that they release.

I actually block out the announcer and Pit Girl when talking to my friends on the headset. Anyway, I guess I am from the last generation that was actually taught to read and use proper grammar. I am not suggesting that my idea is perfect, but it would provide a quick method of instructing players in such a fast-paced game. If they want to ignore the tips they could even remove them entirely by using the options menu. The problem with voice acting is that it is not cost-effective for a budget game. Valve and Rockstar are some of the largest developers in the industry so if they want to use full voice acting then I'm sure they can simply use their private sound studios to do so.

Again, these are just tips and nothing more; the good players will learn from them and the rest will continue to build Long Shot turrets on Steel Peel. Heck, in a game yesterday my team decided to build three Long Shot turrets on Steel Peel and they had them fully upgraded to level 3 so players are not learning from their actions and something else needs to be done.

On LazorRazor there is a node that has a wall right next to it, I noticed sometimes the LS would just hit the top of this wall. Now on Steel Peel I just looked at the wall and knew that a LS wouldn't even aim that high. Sure players don't NEED to watch their turrets but they should be well aware of their surroundings. Also wouldn't you notice you LS not making any income.

I think the easiest way to teach players it just talking to other players. Just like any strategy game it's all about trail and error to see what works best on each map. I'm one of those people that likes to learn the basics then figure the rest out on my own.

As for a fix I say keep it as is but add the ability to buy back a node from players. Paying the last person to build/upgrade for the node.

...and I lost track of what i was thinking. It getting rowdy in my place atm...lol

Actually, on several occasions I have noticed long shot turrets in my base that were simply firing into the walls without ever getting shots clear of that obstacle. Besides Steel Peel, I've seen it happen on LazeRazor and Grenade III. It seems like the turret just picks a target with the perfect angle to hit the wall, and because the target is never destroyed it keeps shooting (unless the target moves or is otherwise destroyed, but if it targets an enemy turret you'll be waiting for a while).

Of course, now I actually pause and watch the first few shots of my turret before I go ahead and invest more money upgrading it.

Oh, most players don't find actual text annoying. The problem is that text is essentially a very single-player experience. Everyone reads at different speeds, the act of reading actually takes a sizeable chunk of your concentration and everyone has their own interpretations of what they read on top of that. This isn't a big deal in a single player game, or in sections of the game where you don't interact with others (again, loading screens) but when you stick it in a multiplayer environment then people feel naturally inclined to do everything quickly to keep up with their companions and not give their enemies a headstart, then people start skimming or outright blanking text out. Net result is that most players aren't actually aware the text even exists; they're not choosing to ignore it at all, and this even happens in prolific readers. It's not a reflection of their grammar or reading abilities whatsoever.
This form of 'banner blindness' can lead to some bizarre situations; in one case a user complained about the big blue boxes popping up in our game and then in the same sentence pointed out that we didn't tell him how to play the game and that we needed to add more tutorial messages. Take a guess what the blue boxes were? XD

It just means that text ultimately fails to educate in fast action games in the vast majority of cases. As I mentioned it has to be relegated to loading screens and the like and not all players hang around for loading... some of them will go get a drink or chat to friends or the like

Obviously some people ignore audio too but the number is considerably lower. The great thing about voice is that it goes at the same speed for all listeners and requires less concentration to take in than text; if the GTA games required you to read the mission details while driving rather than listening to an NPC rabbit on about it you'd probably find the players having more traffic-related accidents =D

I can't guess what it costs to do voicework for uber specificallyy but in my experience if you already have voicework in your game to begin with, it's not always that hard to get extra lines done as most voice actors are hired for set periods of time rather than by dialogue. The project I worked on had enough time on top of the required voice over work to record some fictional radio station stuff without paying any extra =D
I'd imagine they'd probably need to get some new lines added eventually

Either way, I'm just throwing my own experience out here. If it isn't right for Uber then C'est la vie. But I'm not sure it'd be worth going through the localisation costs and time to get the text done for tips based on what I've seen; after all that doesn't come for free
either in most cases so it's good to make sure the cost is justified :3

A simple alternative could be to replace the leaderboard ticker with tips while waiting for games. It would need to be limited to general and map specific info though. It would still be better than letting the masses remain ignorant.

Hiero Glyph I was just going to suggest something alone those lines. Using the News Ticker at the bottom and ProTips during loading screens. Something like "Make sure there is nothing obstructing the arc path of a long shot turret."

Maybe we should try something like many fighting games have. They give us enough information to get started, but to really learn you have to do your own work, whether that means to find information on the internet or your own experiments. Just give us enough info to start us out. I think the way it is works fine though. It seemed like there was already enough information to realize that long shots didn't work.

Another round of Steel Peel saw 4 of my 6 turret nodes with Long Shots built upon them. Seriously, the players are just not getting the 'strategy' of this map so either change the strategy or educate the masses. I tried but of course they did not have mics.

See that's why I think there should be a way to buy back an occupied node. I can see a problem with that might be players just doing it to annoy people.

the tip ticker sounds a lot more user friendly. It's out of way but the fact it's moving draws your attention and the user's probably not got much else to keep themselves entertained unless they're messing about in the locker. Nice idea! :3

As far as fighting games go it depends on what fighting game you're talking about Leonyx. Fighting games are pretty niche and even the biggest recent name; "street fighter IV" was outsold by the more intuitive and friendly smash bros in their first week of sales at a rate of 8 to 1

Quite frankly I think fighting games have atrocious player teaching tools. I base this off how few players seem to know what they're doing in them and the fact that interest in the SF games has pretty much died off already among most of the gamers I know except the fairly hardcore fighting fans (I'm pretty into my fighting games but I'm not an SF fan myself ironically ) I think that MNC's current tutorial snippet is already better than most of the fighting game's introductory experiences, with maybe the exception of the new Blazblue Continuum Shift and ye olde Virtua Fighter 4 (which people claim has a great tutorial system. Sadly I've not seen either's yet, though, I plan to remedy that in Blazblue's case real soon :3 )