After a long time i played a little bit sins (because i saw a new patch was out) and now i figured out a new expansion also is coming out. Very nice, maybe i will be getting into playing more often again.
Anyways, i did not find a lot of information though, is there any thread or summary here what is known up to now about this game? I would be thankful for any link i could get.
In addition, some thoughts on the future of this game.
I remember how SOSE was in the past and i saw a really great RTS Game that sadly did not have the (multiplayer) popularity it deserved. I can only remember times when there were just a handfull guys playing it online and the only way for me to get a decent game was to arrange myself with others and ask in forums for people who wanted to play it.
So what really determines if a RTS game would become a multiplayer success? (The sales were fine as i remember, the question is why this never hit the online gaming, although clearly a multiplayer oriented title)
It is hard to say, what was the reason for it, because it definetely was not a lack of quality of the game. I remember some incompatibilities between different addons - effectively reducing the amount of people able to play with each other. Really i think this game like all others stands and falls with its capabilities to motivate players. One factor for multiplayer success is easiness of use. Although quite hard to compare, Starcraft 2 manages this excellently. I know this game starts at a completely different point regarding the community but to me it shows the optimal way, a multiplayer RTS can work: Start it, press play a multiplayer game. Play it. Still, it remains flexible. You can do custom games if you want to. Normally i am not a "play now"-presser, but SC2 somehow does this damn right. It does not give yo the feeling "okay, why should i chose "play now", it just leaves me with less choice than normal".
Maybe it is a slight psychological thing but the fact that blizzard takes a dominant position by chosing your games for you is just exactly what is needed to get the feeling of competitiveness. You would never get there, if the ladder system would be totally open to customization.
I have to say: I am not a pro-gamer. Neither in SOSE nor in SC2. But, i understand, that this community is driving the whole Online Multiplayer. All that makes you want to play a game online and keep playing it is competition. Competition is the simple, logical reason for multiplayer if you break it down completely.
In summary: A successful multiplayer game depends mostly on the level of competitiveness it manages to transport. You have to convey, that this is something that is equal for everyone and that learned skills will make the difference between the games.
I see problems to this, the way it works right now. As i said, i am not good at it and i am sure you can be very pro at it. But thats not the point. Actually it is people like me, without the experience, who should be convinced, that this is very competitive and who should be motivated, to get better. I just tell what it feels like and it feels too much like "Lets play together and have a good time." Sometimes, too much choice is too much.
Maybe you think i am stupid by demanding less, but actually i think it is as i said before: Giving the players more choices will give them also the impression, there is more that decides the game than just their play. For example it will make them say: "No, i dont want to play with pirates, they do completely throw the game off" while others say: "Its part of the game, comeon". Both will have the feeling, the other one is not playing the same game as himself, therefore not establishing a real sense of competition between both. What i want to express here is, that to me SOSE feels like a great game to play with friends on a LAN. But still, it somehow misses the taste of real, competitive multiplayer. It is hard to grasp what causes this but i made some suggestions. Maybe someone reads this and thinks about it in a productive way. If not it was at least myself thinking about what actually creates motivation in a game.
And i think you have really good examples out there that work fine. Even if its like David and Goliath - just look at SC2. See what they do right and for gods sake just copy some of the things. I could imagine, monster company Blizzard even has people with degrees in psychology that are paid to discuss things like these.
You do not have to remove all options - just see how SC2 does it and give the game a decent ladder system. Which depends on automatism. You want success? You obey the rules set by Gamemaster Stardock. Plain and simple. People who play for fun can do so by making a custom game. This is just a small thing but it changes the way you perceive the game so much...
One other thing taken directly from SC2: How are you doing the balancing? I dont think a developer does have as much spare time to play the game as the average computer nerd out there. You just DO NOT HAVE A CHANCE to keep up with them. They are freaks - but they drive the success of your game. They will find the slightest error normal mortals wouldnt even recognize and rub it into your face! You can not win the game against the players in this area. You have to play with them. Balancing is the key to competitiveness - and therefore to success of the game.
Ask the players for dealing with it. But please, do not read and try to change what they say in the forums! If they have noone to interact with, it is just random ranting over their own loss and no real issues.
No, instead give the players the feeling that they participate in your work. Dont do that when the game already is played competitively - the feedback at that point will not be objective anymore because egos become involved. See what Blizzard does right again - give out beta-testing keys. Offer really good players the opportunity to co-develop the game with you! Blizz even payed the world top players to get the balancing right. Again, off the top in this case, but a great idea to get inspired from.
Maybe you just announce an official tournament in SOSE. You encourage the best players here to participate. The winners will get exclusive access to early game versions the development process. They will be invited to play and test the new game with you.
Another good thing i realized in starcraft: Units have to be of equal usefulness and too much units are useless when not each is used frequently in the game.
I asked myself why they had so much more units in the campaign than actually existed in the multiplayer. At first i thought it was to save money for balancing difficulties, but then read the actual thought behind it was what i described above. A smaller set of units that should be diverse, yet balanced and all used in similar proportions. If you think about it, it is a good idea. "Useless" units leave the impression of a fundamentally simple game artificially pimped with a big selection of units that are practically not used much in the multiplayer games.
Talking about Sins, as i said i do not have much experience and do not play well - but i repeat myself: I am the type of player you want to motivate getting deeper into the game. The core of success is numbers of players and this will be set by those new to the game and how a game wil be able to motivate them in the long term getting into the deeper strategies.
I am just telling you my completely subjective, personal impression of the game and i think that it will be shared by many that did not come to the point getting into the deeper strategies. I only realized there actually is more deepness to the game by talking to and playing with people that had played it a lot more than me.
What i want to convey here is my opinion, that the scope of the game is not as obvious to new players as it should be. It is hidden behind an impression, that the games combat principles seem simpler than they actually are. I cant give exact explanations why this is the case, just that it is perceived this way somehow. Advanced play concentrates very clearly on the capital abilities and as a beginner you lack an impression that emphasizes that. The automated use of the abilities is so ineffective that it makes you believe they are useless in the first place.
The combat pace is not fast enough that you really see that these make a huge impact. Instead of seeing your capitals mowing down the enemy lines, making you believe that this is the badass stuff you need, you see a long battle which you won at some point. Without any further knowledge it makes you believe, that just more units will be the critical factor determining the outcome.
Maybe i am just way too noobish and this problem is a general one with all games when you just dont know how to play.
The term "easy to begin with, hard to master" often is used in a way to positively describe a game like this. But i think it also can be negative in terms of motivation to master it at all. That is the case when coming into the game seems easy and works too nice and you would never see, what are the possibilities to master it because you have no streamlined learning curve motivating to get there.
In my opinion, in this game a one-dimensional fleet composition just works a little bit too good. It seems like you can spam LRM frigates all the time and it will do the job. If i am doing such a uniform style of play i want to feel that thats not it. I want to get crushed hard by a superior unit composition (of the AI, when beginning in the first place). I want to feel, that i need a strategy to beat this strategy game.
Maybe i just had this impression because i could gather the other macro fundamentals quickly (i could use my knowledge from Galactic Civilizations 2). I felt, the learning curve is very shallow a lot of the time and then suddenly very steep when you get into the deeper layers of the game. In terms of motivation for new players this is not a good thing: Many may not even realize the quality of the game fully, because they will never keep playing until they reach the steep part. It reduces the player community to some fanatics knowing it to the core and those never having played it a lot. To generate and maintain a bigger base of people constantly playing it, the learning cuve has to be more gradually increasing. As a player at all times, you want to have the impression that you do progress in your playstyle while you can see from the beginning where it can lead to, if you practize. It has to be challenging and very complex from the beginning, without demotivating you completely by making you believe it is much to complicated for being fun to you.
Another RTS example doing this the other way around and showing how complex a good RTS actually can be is the great Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. This almost is too complex. Its like a million different units at the same time and everything multiplied by three (land, air, water). I first saw it when friends were playing it on a LAN. Without any introduction the learning curve is just too steep. The game mechanics too unconventional. I just did not understand it when just thrown into a full game by myself. I forgot it for a long time and luckily got the spontaneous idea to play it by myself after some time. And here we have a game where the campaign is not only a set of scenarios underlined by some random story. No, here the campaign is more of a necessary, enjoyable and legthy tutorial to the game when you are new to it (at least the vanilla game campaign). It gradually, almost way too gradually, gets you into the concepts of the game step by step. When you finished the campaign you realize what a great RTS game you have there and cannot wait, until you play it in multiplayer.
My personal conclusion from these examples is, that Sins does suffer a little bit of a gap between complexity and the first game experiences. Although a really great game, it hides its qualities a little bit because of balancing between different units. Its not unfair, that is not the problem. It is just, that i miss the initial feeling of a challenging strategy game when starting to play it. I know that it really is, but it fails a bit to convey it from early on. With the new expansion you could do a lot. I do not exactly know how - as i said asking the pro players here would be the best idea. An emphasized role of ship abilities would do a great job i think. Not only of the capitals but micro options for the normal ship as well. Micro-management is the core of a RTS-title`s feel of "depth". Optimally you see instantly, you can do a lot of different stuff in the game if you just learn how to manage it. It feels to me, SOSE distributes this too strong between different ships. You see a bunch of offensive ships and a bunch of support ships.
Representing the average newbie you want to get into this game i can tell you how i perceived the way the game felt to me: A lot of macro intensive units working in a basically simple rock-paper-scissors type of play. Also a lot of micro intensive spezialized units i am too lazy to figure out in detail because i have to put a lot of ingame effort into getting them and a lot of personal effort for figuring out their individual value to the game. Using standard units alone just is satisfying enough not to get into deeper strategies. In result, this style of play risks getting boring. It creates the illusion of the game being simple, while it actually is not.
Again, i have to compare to other RTS titles. SC2 manages this ingeniously. Basically i had similar levels of experiences when beginning with SC2 and SOSE. In SC2, you never get tricked into believing the game could be simple at any time. The game mechanics, balancing, abilities and layers of complexity are evenly distributed over all types of units. Maybe, some of this impression is accountable to the faster pacing and more direct feedback you get from this game. But it also gives you the feeling, that each unit has an own purpose and the usefulness of each unit mostly depends on your personal skills to utilize them. It is this feeling, that motivates and captures: the belief, it was you, the player, who won the game, not the units you used to win it. And the standard units as well have upgrades that open new tactical options. The unit selection seems more fluent, the separation between different unit types feels very flexible. This adds more complexity but does never overburden you. While a clear logic behind unit types is key to an easy introduction to the game mechanics, giving options and flexibilty between these uses is the key for adding a feeling of depth to the game.
As i said, i missed the feeling of depth in SOSE for a long time and i account it mainly to an uneven distribution of depth between different units in this game. The game itself has a lot of depth, but it is hidden too much to figure it out early in the game. I believe, depth in a RTS should be visible from the start - and especially regarding the combat which is the base of the game. To get the motivation right, a game should force you to utilize the depth - without taking away the logic behind game mechanics due to chaotic complexity. I just feel the distance between the basic game mechanisms and depths as too big from a motivation standpoint. If you dont have a clue, it tricks you into thinking of a game with a simplistic game mechanic and a huge amount of artificial depth, which is useless (to you). I would have liked to get forced into the depth of the game more early by seeing it will not really work out well without using it. I would have liked more of the impression, that its not this unit good against that unit, but that it really is the composition and use of different units that have an effect. Strategic options should arise from different composition of units and uses (which is the case for capital ships and support ships - but should be distributed more evenly between standard units as well i think).
I just say - challenge the players. And challenge them early on. Give them flexibility from the start. Force them a bit to use this flexibility. Just as a simple idea - deactivate the automatic use of capital abilities completely for player controlled ships. Make the AI crush the player with their abilities when he is not using them. Show the players, that an ability has been used. A small text feedback could be done easily, i guess. Distribute flexibility more evenly between all units.
Give the players logic to understand what that flexibility is supposed to do. Give the feeling it is a necessary part of the game, not just fancy bonus stuff nobody really needs. Ask players which units and features they feel to be quite useless. Give them something that justifies their use more. Give other units what is needed to justify it. Make the game experience more streamlined, where every layer of the game adds directly on top of the one before without leaving gaps in between. This is just necessary to establish a multiplayer community. Complexity alone does not do the trick. Instead it is the way in which complexity stepwise adds on every layer of the game. Complexity is not important in numbers of different units and production options - but in numbers of different ways to use given units. Optimally, all players with different experiences have a feeling of a linear increase in their skills in the game all of the time. Otherwise it will create gaps in motivation. Man, that became long. Nobody ever will read to this point. Thanks to all who did nonetheless. I am sorry to be so critical. I am just a newbie. I do not know much of the game. But i know, what motivates me and makes me want to know much of a game. That is the whole point of this lengthy post. It should give you an impression of my personal perception of the game. First-Hand-customer feedback from the average guy looking into this game out of basic interest. People like me will be the main customership. People, that will have an average motivation to keep investing into playing this game over the long-term. If i give you my perception of it, it may be similar to the way other average customers will see it. SOSE is a great game. I really like it. It has so much potential. It has just very high demands to your patience if you want to play it in the long term. Many people will not have the patience to reach the deeper levels of the game and might run at risk of totally disregarding it - at least this is my impression. With the new addon a lot of options could be possible. The success will not be about the game quality (which already is great) - it will be about the presentation of it. Think about how it could be improved to show more of its qualities more easily.
I was quite happy to lurk and not login tonight, but then this came along... I read it in full and almost agree totally with the analysis. We differ perhaps because I have played this a fair bit and see some of the depth you mention having trouble seeing (but perhaps its because I did look further, as you said many might not), however, your analysis on competitiveness and what drives it in an RTS is top notch. Yes Sins needs that extra oomph... im not exactly sure how to put my finger on it either but I agree with the presence of the problem. The game IS top quality with great lore, graphics, a deeply immersive feel that will cause you to lose hours at a time and some great strategic depth... but it does lose out on a particular feeling. I think that feeling is, as you say, the player's responsibility over who actually won the battle (ie soldiers/player) and the lack of enough punishment/reward for a player for balanced fleets and/or wildly different compositions. Playing Advent is an exception as different units working together with that faction has greater weight but still doesnt carry the same feeling that other RTS games have in army composition. In Age of Empires 2, compositions were everything and different compositions had weaknesses and strengths against each other or in general (and indeed how you micro'd them). And indeed Sin's multiplayer pull has never actually been strong enough for me to boot up ICO and give it a shot (although I have been reading these forums and participating in the community for over a year). There is a player here notorious for promoting the multiplayer scene (DirtySanchezz, we all know im looking at you) who would probably agree with a lot here. I think I would be more likely to try ICO if there were more players like me and if many of this was looked at by the Devs.Yarlen, this is worth reading, despite its size.
I also agree in many ways. I see two big problems with Sins online.
1) For me, and I'd imagine a lot of more casual gamers, the idea of possibly going up against very experiened players is not appealing. I can beat unfair AIs on FFA, but I also know that it will take several MP games to learn what works against an intelligent opponent. Which leads to...
2) Sins games last a long time. When I play against 4 unfair AI, the game can last several hours. Sure, in MP most games will end once a player realizes they are beat and can't recover, but that can still last a couple of hours. The nice thing about SC2 is that a match lasts about 30 minutes, tops. That means I can hop on, play a match or two, and then get off before the wife gets too upset (some of you understand...) NOTE: I am not advocating simplifying SOSE down or changing it to shorten matches. I love the game the way it is. I'm just pointing out one of the difficulties for MP playing.
Anyway, just my thoughts. Love the game. Play a lot. But my playing tends to come in 1 to 3 hour bursts, which just doesn't seem like enough time to have a good MP match.
deathmatch mode really needed to start players 2 hours into the game research and income-wise, even fleet wise. I've figured out the fleet and metal/crystal part for 7DS Quickstart, but not credits or giving 2 full tiers of all research
Good read (skimmed over it towards the end, sorry)
I think Sins has a lot of potential, and the core game is rock solid. I have high hopes that Rebellion can polish it and turn it into a shining jewel of the genre. There are lots of ways your broad ideas could be applied to specific aspects of the game, but that's a topic for many, many threads.
The devs just plain aren't going to have time to read a 3,500 word post. You're going to need a good, thorough summary if you want them to see your ideas.
One of the biggest problems with Sins is the lack of players online. For something which sold hundreds of thousands of copies (over 500,000 by Fall 2008) and which won IGN's "Best PC Game of the Year", there's something seriously wrong if one can usually only find 20-50 people online, even during the peak hours in the evening. I can think of a few contributing factors to this:
There've been numerous serious bugs and compatibility issues, especially in the past, from what I've heard. For instance: the Mesh error is very common for newbies just starting to attempt to play online, which is relatively easy to fix if you know what you're doing, but can prevent newbies from ever being able to play online in the first place - this may well have prevented thousands of prospective players from checking out the multiplayer scene. Another serious bug is minidumps, which were apparently extremely common in the past while playing a game, but still appear frequently enough to be very discouraging. Also, quite a few players may have been interested in multiplayer and clicked the big "Multiplayer" button on the main menu, only to find that it does nothing unless you already know what you're doing and have a LAN game set up. I think the labeling of the "Multiplayer" button was a serious design flaw. The learning curve for multiplayer is also a huge problem: the game may seem deceptively simple at first (complicated but not overwhelming) when in reality there are hundreds of things to learn to become a good player, none of which are covered in the horrible tutorials. Odds are, someone coming online for the first time will be completely annihilated by the regulars in at least the first 30 or so games they play, before they learn the initial ropes. For many newbies, this may be discouraging enough for them to simply quit competitive ICO permanently and go back to killing AIs in single-player or comp stomps. This is a self-perpetuating system: low player counts populated mostly by experts makes it extremely difficult for a newbie to willfully trudge through the 50+ hours necessary of playtime (while being killed) to become halfway decent. There are too many experts and not enough noobs or semi-skilled players online for genuine newbies to have fun playing the game against other humans... which results in low player counts because 95% of the newbies aren't going to stay.
If most of the above issues aren't fixed in Rebellion, I fear we'll be seeing very low player counts there as well, once it's released. I hope that Ironclad fixes the bugs and then makes getting onto multiplayer in the first place much easier. For instance, perhaps occasionally have pop-ups on the main menu saying something like "Player X is looking for players for a 2v2 game online! Join now?" Or something like that. Getting newbies to at least experiment with multiplayer, hopefully against other not-so-skilled players, would be one of the greatest ways to improve the multiplayer scene for Sins, in my opinion. A matchmaking system of some sort would help this out a lot, but that's probably too much to expect. Lacking that, another idea is to allow newbies to have handicaps, like 2x income or something like that, to be decided by the game host - advantages like the harder AIs have. This would give even the better players on ICO a challenge against newbies (depending on the advantages), and both players would have a chance of winning. Still, hopefully Rebellion will do well enough for enough newbies to come online so they can play each other, instead of being annihilated by the experts and then discouraged from ever logging on again.
It's way too late for Diplomacy though.
I wouldn't go quite that far. There are many multiplayer games which are played just because they're fun, not because of the competition. Now, competition is certainly a very significant part of this game, especially given how the game is win-centric (you either win or you lose, and it's usually not fun to lose). But some people just like to watch ships blow each other up, or to try to see just how much trade income they can possibly get. I see competition as something useful which necessarily results from multiplayer gaming, and as one of the key driving components, but not as the overall driving component, although it's probably the biggest factor.
You're definitely right that there should be some sort of impression that the game is very deep and that learning more is essential to becoming a better player.
The biggest factor, I think, is the lack of organization for the multiplayer scene, which the developers could have done a much better job at. It's great that they've set it up so that we can play online and on LAN and such, and they have put a significant amount of effort into fixing the numerous bugs that come with setting up and maintaining a gaming network like ICO, but they haven't seemed all that interested in promoting multiplayer in the first place, or enabling the easy organization of games online. The players have to set up games completely by themselves, which can be extraordinarily difficult with the most popular games online (5v5). Two people have to volunteer to be captains, one of the non-captains has to send a secret number to another non-captain, the captains both guess, the nearest one "wins" and gets first pick, the player picked has to understand exactly what's going on and what team to switch to, repeat until all players have been picked and have manually switched their teams. If someone suddenly finds that they have to leave in the middle, the process often has to start all over again. And all of this has to be coordinated via only one thing: the chat box.It can be yet another intimidating factor for newbies, who probably don't understand a word other than "GO TO TEAM 10 NOOB" or something like that.If Ironclad creates a much better system for organizing team games online, the multiplayer community would benefit significantly. Issues related to competitiveness are not as important, I think.Getting newbies to better understand the competitive nature of multiplayer games isn't exactly the problem, in my opinion... I think they understand that most of the other players are much more skilled than them and that there are things to be learned to become a better player. A related issue to this is that it's very hard for players to understand how to get better: only after having gone to the forum on my own and having read it for weeks did I start to get a decent sense of understanding exactly where the problems were in my games online where I lost. Playing the game itself simply isn't enough to get better in a reasonable amount of time: understanding where improvements can be made is essential, but is very hard at first, especially if players don't know that they can go to the forum for strategic discussion etc.
Good idea.I'm not sure ICO has (or will have) the necessary organizational infrastructure to carry out something like that currently, but it it's possible, it's definitely something Ironclad should look into if they're interested in growing the multiplayer community.
While I'm sure that works well for Starcraft, I think the Sins units are (generally) fine the way they are. New players already have the impression that the game has much more depth than they are currently aware of, and know that there are many things to learn before they'll even have a chance against the regulars. Spamming one type of ship is often countered by the opponent hard spamming one or two types of ships in return. I'm fine with that. I don't think many newbies get a sense of artificial easyness, although they do have problems understanding what exactly they need to improve to get better.
Knowing how capital abilities work is definitely important, but I wouldn't call them all that key, except for a few specific instances: the Sova Embargo rush in 5v5 games, and the usefulness of the colonizer cap in 1v1. Knowing how capital abilities can be used most effectively is great to know but are probably much less than half of the strategy a good player uses.
It's true that the game is very heavily reliant on LRF frigates early in the game, if you aren't playing Advent. It is a balance flaw, I think: light frigates should be buffed so that they're viable early-game units with some purpose other than for being melted by enemy LRM.Still, the general rock-paper-scissors of the ship types is fine with me. Good players playing against other good players will create pretty diverse fleets.Your general argument here seems to be that people who have bought Sins need to realize that there's much more to do: you focus on the fact that they need to understand that the game is very deep and more complicated than they realize. I think that players will probably realize most of this after they've played a few games online and have been decimated. In my opinion, the problem is getting people online in the first place and then giving them the tools to become better, or to have fun playing and experimenting against other unskilled players.
Expert playing currently involves understanding the game and then following almost-rote strategies in response to what your opponent does. Now that I think about it, yes, Sins does seem to somewhat lack in "strategic" depth: once you've played a lot and have learned what exactly to do in response to whatever your opponent might do, most everything is automatic. However, it takes hundreds of hours of play to reach this point, without coaching, which is why I'm not so sure it's something to worry about. In competitive matches, micromanagement is still essential, even if what exactly the expert player is doing isn't readily apparent to the newbie. Were Sins to be made more like a chess game than a complicated rock-paper-scissors-in-space game, the difficulty would increase even more; there are already so many things to manage, and I think adding more dimensions to the game would completely overwhelm a lot of people, especially newbies, who would probably already be overwhelmed by the number of things in Rebellion (which includes everything from the past expansions).This said, you're right that the micromanagement necessary for the micro-oriented ships should ideally be made a little more apparent for newbies.
While not all ship types are created equal in Sins, I don't think anyone starting Sins by purchasing Rebellion and seeing all the features available could ever be "tricked into believing the game could be simple at any time" either.
Against halfway decent players, one can't simply spam units of one or two types and win. There are a whole lot of other things one needs to understand to be good. Granted, in the extremely cramped games of 5v5, fleet battles and ship spam is unfortunately 70% of the game, which is a problem. However, micromanagement and macro awareness is still important, and knowing ship counters is especially important.
Something which newbies might not be aware of is that all capital ship abilities have a sound which is played when their ability is activated, I think, which all players (friendly or hostile) zoomed in near the ship will be able to hear - just like how all players zoomed in on a battle hear the "Level Up" sound when any capital ship in the battle levels up.
Critical is good. I think any game-manager in charge of public relations or sales should pay good money to get a few reviews like yours while their game is still under development.(not that I agree with you on everything, but you make some fine points that the devs should surely listen to)
(also, uh, given the importance of this thread title, couldn't you have come up with anything more enticing than "Interesting"? )Unfortunately I feel this reply may be too long for anyone important to read it either... perhaps I'll repost a summary in a new thread later.
After 1000000 edits: Damn you, quoting. I know why i am no programmer. Quoting is challenge enough. edit #1000001: *YAY* Finally found the quoting error edit #1000002: no didnt ಠ_à²
My opinion on that: If nobody has the time to read, think about and discuss the honest thoughts of players on the game, i dont have enough spare time to spend with a bad game either.
You want to sell a product - you would do good to see and think about what the consumership expects from it. If you never thought and cared about what the people want who are buying it, you shouldnt be surprised at all if your lucky try becomes a miss.
It is not like we as the players are in the position to demand something from the devs of a game - it is the devs who demand from us players to buy their game. If a player spends some time to give a lengthy description of his opinions and thoughts on the game, i would see that as a gift of his time to the devs, not the other way around. Totally regardless of what the actual value of the players opinion might be - that is to be judged by them in the end.
I cannot force anybody to read my post who doesnt want to. They cannot force me to buy the game if i dont like it. Thats the deal. Its fair, i can live with that. I dont expect anything. Its my opinion, thats all. I do not expect it to contain unbelievably great wisdom which will be heard, change the world, or the game, or anything. As i said i do not expect. I will see what they will have for us. And the decide if its worth the buy or not to me.
I see that. But fun games are only fun as long as they are new. Or just occasionally. We are talking about Online Multiplayer, community size and long term motivation. I still believe that basically comes down to competition. To get long term motivation, you have to feel constantly that you get something rewarding from it. When you are over the experimental fun part of the game this can just be done by the feeling of progress, achieving something (Achievements work fine in this way) and at some point there is left only the option to progress in comparison to others, namely competition. In the long term, only competition lasts because player abilities will be the only part of the game that will be changing over longer timespans. No AI can do that, a community has to do that. The community will have to be motivated to stay in the game constantly to enlarge the pool of players available online. No feeling of - competition - no players online - no competition - sad, lonely games sitting on bookshelves and going to the recycle.bin graveyard of doom.
Fully agreed. The whole system is made to fit the image of a "fun game with friends" rather than an online Multiplayer title. Still i would point my finger on the competitiveness. Just a forced selection in ladder matches (optimally with a internal matchmaking, which might be too complicated as you said) would do so much for it. This just doesnt work. It will result in good players going to one team and bad players getting kicked into the other. Most players are not fair, they just want to win. Again the friends thing: Friends may be fair, but online strangers are smurfing you. Newer players will be scared away, just before they really started to play.
I have to point out again what decent matchmaking can do for the general quality of a multiplayer game. Not saying that you have to have it. Just saying a very good multiplayer game has to nowadays.
Yeah, i dont see the real issue in a non-existing complexity it actually does have. Id rather see it in they way the game gives you feedback of it. It may be difficulties directly related to the basic way this game is designed, pace for example. I really believe now while reading the opinions of others here and thinking about it a bit, that a lot of this motivational issues are in fact success feedback issues. It is a subconscious thing, but we humans get motivated in behavior by simplistic conditioning processes - behaviour and reward (or punishment). These thoughts may be a bit off the top, but basically i think it is hard to "feel" the effect of what you are doing there when being new to the game. You just still dont have an eye what is happening. It is sending your units, let them fight - and after some time see them lose or win by some game mechanic you still cannot grasp. I mean in the beginning i even had to read about it to even recognize that the Marza Missile Barrage is a total killer! In other games you will get immediate feedback, see enemies die like flies and think "yeah, NICE!! Hahaha!". Here at first i didnt even recognize at all, it was launching missiles automatically ^^
And it takes extraordinarily long times to get this kind of feeling with experience in SOSE i think. I mean, everybody knows that. It takes a lot of time in a strategy game to get a feeling for what is actually going on there. This is a skill, obtained with experience. Watch a progamers Starcraft game. I mean, these guys are so crazy turning it into a real reaction based play, 300+ actions per minute!!!. I heard one of the top Korean Starcraft players saying he is having a physiological disadvantage by being to old and having worse reaction times compared to the younger players. Just think about it! Where do YOU begin? Far, far, far, really far down from this, where you would click once, send in your army and see which army wins. You are not even close to this kind of direct feedback play - and it will get more and more addicting as you get this kind of feeling for it. So the general aim could be to shorten the time needed for getting the feeling that you are actually controlling something with an effect in the game.
In SOSE for a VERY long time you just dont know what you did but somehow it worked out in the end. Its fine, but not perfectly motivating from a standpoint in basic psychology if you understand what i mean. I may emphasize the completely different feeling in the Distant Stars mod, which is caused by only changing some visual and sound effects.
As lot of this is just accountable to the "realistic" space combat setting of the game, it is quite hard to give ideas for good improvements in this area. DS is just another taste, it feels more "trashy" if you know what i mean, but it shows best, what i am talking about here. I do not think such basic changes in the games feeling have to be done. As mentioned, i think more micro options would do a lot to give the player more of a motivating feeling that he is actually doing something that is haveing an immediate, concrete effect you can see. Behavior - reward.
Which is so true. It is unbelievable how much you can miss when new to a game. Did you ever had this point in some game where you thought: "Sh*t. Man, there is this huge flashing something important in the game directly in my face, telling me about X. How the hell did i NOT see that before??? " Yeah, SINS is quite subtle about these things sometimes. You cannot assume sounds will be understood initially. There are a lot of sounds all the time, how should i know at an instant what the difference between "phhheeeew", "shwoooomp" or "bwwwwwow" means?
\/ *click here for a laugh*
Umm, when I have a free day to read this, I will...
And that will be......
Never?
Honestly, dont feel obliged by me to do so. The topic headline was just a joke in response to others.
I totally can understand that, i am myself skipping lengthy posts all the time - and would do so even more if browsing a forum would be a part of my work ^^
Nonetheless, i have the opinion that i pointed my finger at some basic principles that are a lot more interesting than "balance unit X over unit Y and make A have 356000 instead of 35599HP". It would be nice if you read it, but i also wouldnt really care if you dont have the time.
I am already quite glad some people did read it at all and have appreciated some of its content, so thank you guys, i know its way too long. But i dont want to shorten it. Things just spontaneously splattering out of my head like this tend to be the best.
I really have to yak some more trash about my thoughts on this whole reward-punishment thing, i am sorry. ^^
Anyone with interest in psychology can read this, others should just skip it.
To me this really seems to be like THE part which creates fun and motivation in any type of computer game. This is so fundamental, basic psychology and is disregarded so much in the influence it can have.
For example just think a moment about this achievement stuff. I mean its so simple. Its some useless medals you get for some goals to achieve. You work hard for it - and all you can do with it is show it to yourself and others. Most of them do nothing except unlocking a small digital image and some line saying you got it. I have done a lot of stuff in Starcraft 2 i would have NEVER done if i wouldnt have received a small portrait for it others could see shortly when their game with me starts or in the official forums. This simple thing of objective unimportance is so damn rewarding and motivating if you really think of it. At least to me it is.
It seems so damn unimportant. No logic seems to be able to tell you what is worth the work to get it.
Except one: Behaviour and reward. Thats human motivational psychology. You have to work for a reward and will get the more excited the harder you work for it. The more you had to work for any type of reward, the higher will be your subjective value of it disregarding any objective criterion for value. The central point to motivational psychology is the balance between what the reward is and what amount of work you perceive as appropriate to achieve it. The more work you have to do without receiving any reward, the less the chance that you will not stop and change your current behavior - in this case playing the game. The secret behind creating, keeping and increasing motivation is the stepwise scheme in that work intensity, reward size and frequency vary. You can prove exactly that in experiments with animals - and honestly, we are nothing else. This is known for so long and 110% water-proof fact in common psychology.
That is why every modern multiplayer game nowadays uses achievements: It just works, especially when you can make others see that you received a reward. Simple idea, just stupid to begin so late to implement it into games in video game history. The psychology behind this idea to motivate for commitment to something is not that new in all other areas of life: Hunters gather trophies, soldiers gather ranks and medals and millions of similar examples.
No, wait. It is not new for video games at all. There had been times when content was restricted by technical reasons. Something called "High Score" was invented. Which is basically nothing else than a modern achievement. You go to the arcade. You show your friend that you are still the highest number on the top of the list. Worth absolutely nothing, but it was obviously motivating enough to keep people putting lots of money in the machine for repeating the same stubborn game over and over again at that time. Games progressed in technology. Other features of a game rewarding the player for the game became more prominent. Highscores faded in their importance over time. Who cared any more about scores when your victory over your friend instead could be crowned by a spectacularly awesome and bloody fatality super move and he is humiliated even more by the fact that only YOU know the great secret combination that lead to this? I played Mortal Kombat when the codes for the Nintendo where available in every magazine, but it must have been a great feeling to be one of the few knowing at all, that these existed in the first place. If you ever played both arcade and SNES Mortal Kombat you know that the moves were a lot harder to do, the timing needed a lot harsher than on the console. It squeezed the coins out of people`s pockets, thats why. You dont need that in a game you pay for only once. With paying for each game, each play gains subjective value to the player by making you work (in this case: invest) for it. Each victory has a higher subjective reward, because you have worked more. You already payed a lot, you saw people doing more fancy stuff than you can do, now you want to learn it too. In the same example on the SNES, you never paid for an individual game. The reward factor of each combat you fight is subjectively perceived as less rewarding because you worked less. The motivation to drive you to play again - the special feeling that you got from having to go to the arcade to play it at all, the money you put in - all that was gone on home entertainment systems. Behavioral psychology is able to break all that down very logically: new game and rare opportunity = high reward --> more prone to work for this reward --> do the way to the arcade --> put money in it --> play and win one game --> high reward. Rinse and repeat.
Home systems diminished the whole subjective perception of the reward obtained from a single game. You pay once, repeat it limitlessly without any effort by yourself and got bored more easily when the rewarding in terms of game successes did not come frequently enough. And that exactly is the reason why they had to tone down the difficulty of the fatality. The game otherwise would not have generated rewarding successes frequently enough to compensate for the loss in perceived reward quality when less effort is necessary and acceptable for the player.
Enough for practical examples of video game motivational psychology. With the gain in game complexity and length a new problem for game developers arose: The games previously just werent long enough and the expectations of gamers not as high as they are now. The basic psychological reward frequency that decides over loss or maintenance of motivation to keep playing a game began to play an increasingly significant role in this equation of commercial success.And still i cannot get rid of the feeling, that many developers dont have a consciousness for these principles which are deciding over the fun you have when playing a game. When i think about games in general and which parts of different games where entertaining to me, often it is the subtle things that make a huge difference. Most of these were made accidentally i believe. I previously talked about rewarding feedback and timing. I really think, the criterions deciding over the success of a game are very subtle.
Just take some classic examples:
What was good in Quake 3 when lookin at subtle things from this perspective? I remember it to be fun because it just gave you awesome little rewarding feedback things. Even if it sounds macabre - the way opponents exploded when hit by a rocket was just a great feeling. But even more subtle: The way it sounded when an enemy got hit by an extremely precise railgun shot. Just the sound effect it made, that you had this recharge time with the animation and sound effects that belonged to that process, the point precision of the ray (this is crucial, i never felt the Quake 2 railgun to be similarly satisfying) and this suddenly appearing achievement icon when you hit - all these small things added into being great fun. When you have understood my explanations above it may be clear, why: To gain the simple reward effect of a hit with all this stuff, the whole weapon design works perfectly to make you value the hit more because it is hard to achieve and the effects build up subtle anticipation of the reward.
I could go further with subtle examples in this game (different colors in kill count feedback texts, the voice feedback copied a lot in other games and so on). But again i got sucked into writing an overlength post about some random offtopic stuff. It has to do, to show you, why my opinion is, that completely other factors than the most beautiful graphics you ever have seen in your life will make you addited to a game. Some people STILL play the old Counter Strike, so that does not seem to be it (and they made the right decision not to change the new one much). Do you remember the way the headshot sounded, the way the big blood splatter looked like, and how the game physics reacted to a hit? Maybe you understand what i mean by important subtle things...
If you want the Dev's attention, you are doing it wrong...
Though I really appreciate all the time you put into this post
No, it is always more like i just have a spontaneous idea i wanted to state somewhere and i get so immersed in the process of writing down my thoughts that it gets much longer than i intended. And often longer than would be clever when you really want someone to read it and think about it. Thats my writing style, just that.
Well, I think everyone tends to forget that Sins is a hybrid between 4x and RTS. Most of the complaints I see come from people who want Sins to be more RTS-like. However, from the 4x perspective Sins is awesome, and adds the real-time battle from RTS. 4x games tend to be much more complex than an RTS, and nowhere near as fast. 4x games reward micromanagement, and allow for large complex strategies. For instance in Sins it is possible to win without ever attacking an enemy, it requires a lot of patience, excellent micromanagement, a massive economy, excellent defenses, and great tactics, but it can be done. Just try to overcome a player in SC2 with sheer economy, and almost no units, it can't be done. I've won games with max players simply by being the only one to survive the insane pirate raids. I've allied with much larger players, only to parasitically devour their empire as they lose planets to their enemies, because I had no way to effectively expand from where I started. I've countered Novalith cannons by paying pirates massive amounts of money to annihilate the systems the cannons reside in. I bribe other factions into going to war with one another just so I can park my capital ships at their battlefields to soak up some free XP. These are all tactics that I can never use online in an RTS, because everyone is obsessed with winning as quickly as possible. In my opinion competition ruins gameplay, by invalidating all tactics that don't involve blowing each other to pieces.
If anything, I would love to see an even greater level of customization in Sins, I'd love to see even more levels of research, and a optional ship design system as deep as MOO II's, but that won't happen. At the very least I would like Rebellion to maintain the balance of the current game between RTS and 4x. Well that, and higher memory limits, a multi-threaded engine, and a 64-bit client, but those are unlikely as well.
I can agree that the AI is a little weak, regardless of difficulty it has the same basic attack strategies, but still a game with 8-10 AI's on max difficulty with 200-250 planets is fun for me, it takes 1-3 weeks to finish, but I have a blast. And pacts are simply awesome in a long running game.
I guess that's all I have to say.
Well, this is a strategy game in which the primary objective is to kill your opponent. Of course good strategies will involve tactics which center around blowing your opponent's ships and planets to pieces. Great strategies will involve blowing opponents' ships and planets to pieces even faster. This in no way ruins the game - this is how the game is meant to be played!!! In my opinion, those who repetitively play against the AI and refuse to come online and face a decent challenge are what ruin the game. Those who play only against the AI experience only a small fraction of what a good Sins game should have, and also lower the player counts online, which is one of the reason ICO's community is so small nowadays.
Experienced players know that the AI is simply too incompetent to be much of a threat, who are ridiculously easily countered with starbases and static defenses. Those who play only against the AI are missing out of a huge chunk of strategy Sins has to offer: you aren't getting your money's worth if you intentionally play only against the stupid bots.
The game is already overwhelming enough for newbies. Adding additional dimensions to the game such as custom ship design would make things too complicated, IMO. It might work, but would significantly change the feel of Sins, and I like the general "feel" of it currently.
Consider coming online to face an actual challenge! ICO is really in need of fresh blood, and most games take less time than you'd expect. Annihilating the AI which falls to the same relatively basic tactics again and again must get boring eventually, right?
It's true that the learning curve is significant, but if you'd be new to multiplayer I'd be happy to teach you all that I can to help you out if you want. At least consider coming online, all right?
Really? Ok, I'll jump on this IED.
So, the smurf infested wasteland of ICO has nothing to do with issues in the game?
Guess we could ignore any topics where someone is crying about balance. Lord knows every patch there something else yall cry about.
Oh forget about having a FUN TIME on ICO if you not a regular, 5v5, Fastest settings, random map player.
The Troll factor is out the window if your new or you blamed for being a smurf.
NOT to mention the sheer amount of anger issues when lord forbid you dont do exactly what someone wants you to do. Forgive me master, I didnt mean to delay your feed. Please do whip me.
Oh cant forget lame tactics. Like Bomber spam. From a competitive side its all fine and dandy. But where is the fun in it? Where is the FUN in ignoring 50%+ of game content just to streamline chances to win. I could go on but you get the point.
I'll take the AI over 99% of you ICO players anyday. At least I can ENJOY my time no matter what type of player I am.
If you wanna fix the ICO population numbers then as the regulars...yall collectively need a change of mentality.
Guess we could ignore any topics where someone is crying about balance. Lord knows every patch there something else yall cry about.Oh forget about having a FUN TIME on ICO if you not a regular, 5v5, Fastest settings, random map player.The Troll factor is out the window if your new or you blamed for being a smurf.NOT to mention the sheer amount of anger issues when lord forbid you dont do exactly what someone wants you to do. Forgive me master, I didnt mean to delay your feed. Please do whip me.Oh cant forget lame tactics. Like Bomber spam. From a competitive side its all fine and dandy. But where is the fun in it? Where is the FUN in ignoring 50%+ of game content just to streamline chances to win. I could go on but you get the point.I'll take the AI over 99% of you ICO players anyday. At least I can ENJOY my time no matter what type of player I am.If you wanna fix the ICO population numbers then as the regulars...yall collectively need a change of mentality.
You're right that there are an annoyingly large number of regulars on ICO who seem to have an attitude problem and are unrepentant smurfs, but there are assholes in every community.
Balance is extremely important. I don't mind if people post threads recommending balance changes, even if I don't agree with them. There's nothing wrong with discussion.
Feel free to call it "lame tactics", but figuring out what exactly is the best way to do the most damage to your enemy is fun. At least, it's fun for me, and the unpredictable human element is an essential component of that.
If building lots of bombers is one way to accomplish that, fine with me. It's not like they're completely uncounterable.
Low player counts, a high learning curve, numerous unfixed bugs, and relatively difficult MP set-up are the prime culprits for why ICO is dying. It's quite competitive but it's also very interesting - more interesting than against the semi-retarded AI.
I have to agree, you are totally right.SOSE seems to be a bit of a completely overhauled version of the Galactic Civilizations II game - and this is necessary to get it anywhere near Multiplayer compatibility as it was often demanded by GCII players. If you just see it that way, you are completely right, SOSE is just an awesome conversion of the game principles basically derived from GCII into a multiplayer form. In fact, creating 4X in a way that can be played that comfortably in Multiplayer is really difficult to achieve. SOSE closes this genre gap in a great way. Actually it does this so well, that we players even forget where its roots are and compare them to games that were designed from a completely different basis. I think you are right when it comes to decide what the developers really tried to achieve here. While i can only imagine what the real intentions behind this game were, i think they did that ingeniously. Ingeniously enough, that the game not only creates a 4X enjoyable in multiplayer for 4X strategy fans, but also raising the imagination, what could be possible in terms of a long term enjoyable mainstream-RTS game with a main focus on Online Multiplayer.
Difficulties simply do arise by the fact that the 4X strategy genre never really was designed for the single purpose of being concentrated on multiplayer online gaming as set by other titles. Taken that way, it can be seen as a kind of compliment to the game, that people seem to perceive it as an online multiplayer focused RTS title rather than an excellent 4X to multiplayer conversion game and forget about these roots. Even if it never was the primary intention to design a fully competitive, specialiyed online multiplayer RTS game to meet expectations set by other games of this genre, the game still is good enough to be one. I was never one of the people demanding multiplayer in GCII. I thought, any changes necessary to make this possible would impact the game in everything that makes it great by its own. Changes to make it artificially fit into the demand for multiplayer compatibility would have resulted in a loss on both parts of the gameplay. Maybe because of the same reasoning Stardock decided to do what was absolutely the best decision in my opinion: Let it stay single player as it was meant to be and instead optimize what it is near to perfection. And the result as in Twilight of the Arnor was really great, one of the best if not THE best round based 4X game out there. To get a Multiplayer into GCII it would have to be changed into an entirely new game - and it seems as if that was exactly what Stardock thought as well when they created SOSE with the experience gained from GCII. If this is the case (and the parralels are indisputable if you have played both), then everything, they did to combine the GalCiv feeling with a good multiplayer compatibility was achieved unbelievabely well. SOSE is unique in this kind of game in the RTS genre and deserves more than acknowlegdement for that. Still, i never really had this feeling of going offroad with SOSE, it does feel right as a online multiplayer title rather than a fun X4 you can play with friends. It may suffer from difficulties a bit, that were set by the way the game is meant to be. But, still i believe that even if it does not have its roots in what is demanded by some players here, it is not impossible to achieve that. In fact i believe these issues to be minor enough that just small changes are necessary to completely close the gap between competitive online MP RTS and X4 that remains slightly visible. That is the reason why i wrote all this - i dont want it to be seen as a negative critique on the game itself, rather as some suggestions on how i think this genre gap could be closed completely. I can see so much potential in it for being more than just a fun game to play with friends sporadically. This could become an even bigger innovation to the whole multiplayer RTS genre as it currently already is - if it would be possible to polish the details just in the right way somehow.
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