Playing online ... I guess for me if I want to play online with people I'll just fire up Guild Wars and head over to Fort Aspenwood. There a PvP round takes maybe ten to twenty minutes and during prime time, you can get into a group in a minute or two. Sure I might play for half an hour to 45 minutes, but then I might quit after the first round, nobody cares.

Then too, Sins to me just feels like a single player game. No offense to the online Pros intended. 

1) Winning IS fun

2) Playing a challenging game that you lose is ALSO fun!!!

No, I am not the kind of people that play online. and I don't consider my self as a good player

Fear of assholes more than anything else.  The first 100 times I tried to get an online game ended in a completely non-fun experience.  Every single time.

The typical situation is that some kid create some huge map with 10 players, and wants 5vs5.  You join coz its your only shot at a game (I know - ridiculous from the outset.  How long will the game last with 10 players?  10 hours?), then 5 minutes into it one of the players bails, causing much consternation from his teammates (now its 5vs4).  This then causes a stream of bails, until everybody bails.

Another situation is the free for all, but not locked teams.  Thus 3,4,5,6 people gang up on 1.  Those games don't last long - if you are on the receiving end of such treatment, you will bail.  If you are on the giving end of it, your opponent or opponents will bail.

Lastly, the asshole clans.  My first experience with them was a 4vs.4.  I join a game, chit-chatting while waiting for the game to fill up.  Then 4 dudes join with [LoS] at the beginning of their names.  I asked myself "I wonder what that's all about?" (I know - stupid - but I had ZERO experience with clans, and so did my teammates, whom I didn't know and had never played with).  The game starts, and me and my teammates are still trying to do introductions, figure out where each of us are located, yadda yadda.  While this is happenening, no more than 2 minutes into the game I receive a coordinated attack at my home planet from all 4 [LoS] assholes at the exact same time, all arriving at the exact same time with their starting capital ships and a few frigs, screaming "Newb!" and other offenses which I will not quote.  I just chuckled, messaged my teammates to "Get a load of this!  Look at my home planet!"  My teammates look, we all figure out that this is some sort of clan that plays and practices together (Ah!  Now I know why they all have [LoS] at the front of their names!  Duh!), and we all just bail.  I'm sure the [LoS] assholes got major jollies from that one.  I bet they were jacking their collective clan dicks for days (We crushed some "newbs!" Ha ha!  Wish we could have seen the looks on their faces!).  I kept thinking "Why don't these clan assholes go and pick on some other clan?  Don't they want a challenge?  What else do they get their jollies doing... beating up cripples?"  Yes, I am naming names.  [LoS] is the clan (or was, anyway).

Dude, that's *EXACTLY* the way it is with this game online.  All settings are set to uber-fast (uber-fast research, uber-fast money flow, uber-fast ship movement, etc).  One minute into the game you realize that it makes no sense to go out and colonize - your cash flow is already fast enough to build whatever you want to build.  Ha, that's not even enough for these people.  They'll even make maps where everybody has a separate star system that you are "not allowed" to attack.  The idea is to build up an uber-fleet and meet in the middle (neutral) star system and duke it out with another uber-fleet.  It's for people who don't want any strategy in their real-time strategy game.  Unfortunately, that seems to be most people.

I tried for hours and hours, night after night, but could never find a game that wasn't set to "uber-fast" in all settings.  If I asked the game host to change the settings, the response was "get lost, newb."  If I made my own game with my own settings, people would join and ask ME to change the settings to fast.  When I said no, they would leave.  I would even have "normal settings" in the game title, but people can't read, ha ha.  Yeah, finally after enough beating of one's head into a wall, one wants to just quit playing online.

i got it to work. i just added my name to the player list in ironclaid, then clicked on my name.

i dont know if anyone mentioned this already, i didnt read much between the 2nd and 5th pages. But as for fear of online players and "pros". 1.12/1.13 so far as been a great equalizer. in 1.05 i would casually beat 3 players by myself. Raknor, Tyr, Berz, and i with others coming in and out went on a 3 month wrecking spree of 3v6-7's jus to find a challenge. Now that illums FINALLY got nerfed, and carriers are now the major factor of the game, and that going eco early game is a must in all but 4 jump or less rushes, the game has been incredibly equalized.

Gone are the days of 3v7's, 2v5's, 1v3's. Im not sure if the calibre of players is going up or the "pro" level is going down, but the best of us can no longer count on consistantly handling even the weakest 3v7's. I have seen 2 very new players handle a pro with a little direction from their teams best players. and when i mean handled i mean that skilled player had a feed and still was completely bumped out of the game. And now that lrf rushes can be repulsed with small feeds and a carrier spam, rolling over and forcing people to surrender in under 14 mins of gameplay is very difficult. At the very least you can expect to take losses now, as opposed to sins 1.05 when i would lose 1 out of 15 kanraks killing someone and have moved on to kill the next guy in the line by the 20th minute.

Bottom line, if you are new dont join games that say skilled only, ask people in lobby or after game for advice none of us typically keep secrets and are more than willing to give tips, and do NOT quit/surrender when your hw gets rushed and your cap dies, you essentially cost your team the game if you leave and there is no limit to what you can learn by watching.

I use Duke Greg, Greyfox, Mindseye, Aggroed, Harla, etc. as examples in this, they were as horrible as anyone when they started but they stuck with it, took their licks, asked questions to those with more experience. Now im fairly confident all these guys are on track to be as good as any of us. Ask any of them and they will tell you that you learn more from your first 20 losses than you ever do from your first 100 wins.

my 2 cents

-bronze

It was a real clan alright -  "lords of sin."  They had a website and everything (I checked it out).  A couple of their members have posted here before - I've seen their names.

I have no idea if they still exist - this was quite a while back.

Yeah, there are a lot of toxic players online, and even some of the decent players can be pretty harsh with their comments towards new players, which I agree is bad.  On the flip side, I wish the newer players would create and join games labelled for beginners.  That way they get a chance to play other new players.  Sure, some jerks may sneak in, but a lot of the experienced players will leave you alone.  We are more interested in fighting each other.

You should also avoid FFA.  I don't find them rewarding in the least either.  I find they are either 2 hours of buildup, and then the host bails because he realizes he can't win, or as you noticed, everyone gangs up on you.

You should also avoid most of the larger multistar maps...they can get pretty drawn out.  As was pointed out, 8 and 10 player single star 40-60 planet maps normally take a couple hours.

Well, Sins plays kind of slow in general, so most people set it on fast.  With Alloy, there is kind of an early game turbo which I really dislike, I think it makes things TOO fast, but most players like the speed.  I am just old and slow, I guess, but I hang in there.

I still prefer multiplayer for how dynamic the game experience is....people do things the AI would never do.  The best way to prepare for Multiplayer is to play small 1v1 games agains a Hard AI and don't build any defenses, just offense, and dominate the AI that way.  Single player is about building up and slowly gaining ground, while multiplay tends to be much faster paced.  Try it without using the pause button.  When you feel comfortable, give online another shot.

I've singled out these two posts because they both echo the same mentality, a mentality that is fundamentally flawed and completely missing the point. We can all agree that the subsect of gamers who play RTS games is smaller compared to those who play FPS games, MMOs, etc. Within that group, the number who play online is frighteningly small. In fact the only game I can think of that has maintained a large multiplayer community is Starcraft, but SC is popular for many reasons (balance and gameplay are actually only small parts of it). Suffice it to say, SC was a fluke and will likely never be repeated.

Both of the above posters seem to think that the reason for the small RTS online communities is because of an inherent flaw within the players; meaning the reason for people avoiding multiplayer is because they are stupid, noobs, scrubs, whatever. They're both seeking to 'fix' these problems by 'fixing' the players. Time for me to point out the facts.

First of all, you're wasting your time trying to get people like me to play online, be it via 'training', 'easing into it', or a higher 'clan community'. The fact is the clan community doesn't matter for shit. Nobody cares about clans except the people in them and for good reasons - clans are from my infinite experience and wisdom some of the worst things to ever happen to gaming. I've seen mods crumble to dust and obscurity because the developers felt some pressure from the loudmouthed and worthless clan community who demanded that the game be 'skilled' via a laundry list of stupid features. In the end, the clans left anyway, leaving a broken, sad game behind full of shitty gameplay nobody wants to pick up again. With clans come nerds with huge egos, who chase away players and can't learn to shut their yap. I'm sure people are just DYING to play a game full of people who gang up against one guy and call him a 'fag noob' because he can't bunnyhop properly before they ban him.

Anyway, I digress - how do you figure a leaderboard and stat tracking is going to matter in any way, shape, or form to someone like me who actually has BRAINS and knows that none of that shit matters? Why do I give a fuck that team |DIK| is going to play against team [BWB]? You're going to attract new players by implementing features new players have never given a flying crap about?

Second - you're missing the point. The players aren't broken, the game is. No, not the game, the GENRE is broken. RTS has been a genre utterly opposed to any innovation whatsoever. People complain about FPS games feeling 'samey' but never say that about RTS games? The fact is RTS games are generally some of the most uninspired heaps of crap ever made. Build your barracks-like building, build your ranged attack unit, upgrade him with bigger arrows, or bullets, or whatever, and fight the obligatory weak-yet-fast race. It's the same shit, over and over. While Sins did a decent job detaching itself from about 70-80% of what makes the RTS genre suck, that 20-30% is what makes RTS games truely the crappiest PC gaming has to offer, and that's the multiplayer component.

The nice thing about an FPS game is that once you're good at one, you tend to be good at them all. Your precise aim, your framework of thinking all tends to translate over just the same - if I can snap headshots in CS, I can do it in UT, COD, or whatever it is the kids play these days. With RTS games, you have to start all over, and it's also a different kind of learning. In FPS games your 'skill' is inate. You don't think about aiming at the guy before you do it. You don't think about pressing the keys to move. You don't have to. Learning an RTS to play online is like learning how to build different car engine from scratch. You have all these tiny bits and pieces that are unique to each one, and you need to rote-memorize every single dimension and aspect of them, for each engine you build.

The single, most inane 'feature' of RTS multiplayer, that keeps me and everyone with an ounce of brains from wasting any time with it, is the mentality of how an RTS should be. We don't want to have to mathematically calculate out the best build order. I'm tired of STRATEGY games that rely on little more than building a billion of unit X because unit Y is 2.45% worse, or whatever. I'm tired of how the very beginning of a game usually decides the outcome, how comebacks almost never happen, and how pretty much the tiniest group of gamers ever (online RTS players) thinks this is how every RTS game should be, for all time, always. And I'm tired of the fact that they refuse to innovate or change whatsoever.

Finally it comes down to time. Why am I going to waste hours of time learning to be only somewhat-okayish at this game? Even FPS games with a brutal learning curve like Tribes didn't take me 20-30 rounds of tedium, of getting steamrolled by one guy, enduring an inevitable, inexorable crushing defeat, to ascend to a level of 'I almost know what I'm doing'. I'd rather pound a railroad spike through my penis with the time I could have wasted inflating some tag-wearing asshole's ego who thinks his ability to humiliate me is somehow helping the life of this game.

Nothing is going to 'revive' RTS online because the very nature of what RTS online is is not something we're interested in whatsoever.

the idea of playing is to ENJOY the game, NOT defeat other players

harpo

I agree that ICO is polluted with assholes who play 24/7 and will laugh their asses of the moment they bust you screaming..."MARZA MASH...can't stop me now f... face" and other not so injoyable words but its all about playing with the right people.

Personnaly, I played with all regardless of reputation and even when they go ahead screaming you off, you kindly answer them, etc. Call me excessive gentleman all you want...IT DOES WORK! they will eventually stop bragging just to say "GG man" and that for them..I guess is a major leap

For those of you looking for a faster way of gaming and more friendly group of players (9 as of yet...but hoping to grow more). Check out thedomesoasemod.freefoums.org   Its "duel mode" maps where strategy primes and where EACH player starts ON EQUAL GROUND!! So veterans and new players (I hate the term NOOB as I find is soooo disrespectful) alike can quickly find their mark! If interested come check us out where also trying to revive multi a bit with it! I guess 9 players out of 200 online is a good start

-ShadowMastiff2468-

Forum with all info: thedomesoasemod.freeforums.org

I must dissagree. I enjoy RTS games and find that if you have played 1 RTS you can, in fact, play them all. Point and click. I hardly ever read manuals anymore. Anyway I don't play online so mabey my point is moot but I still disagree with your statement that RTS's are the worst games ever. I don't want to argue with you, just state my annoyance. Good day.

Samurye.