At the moment if you're looking to find a multiplayer game of OTC you're faced with this:
How many players are online? How long am I going to be waiting for the lobby to fill? It feels pretty lonely in there. There's no way to know how many people are playing, how long until the next lobby will come up. If it weren't for Pipples there could even be 20 of us staring at the same blank lobby screen without knowing it.
I would propose that for the multiplayer lobby browser you move to something like this:
It has a chatroom area where people can discuss making lobbies and use as a post-match chat. But the main thing is: It doesn't feel lonely. You can tell other people are playing or looking to play the game. It feels more 'alive' - you can host a game with the confidence that at least a few people will see it. If you're looking for a game to play, you can be confident that someone else might see you and the others online and put up a lobby. As it is now, people are discouraged from sticking around waiting for a new lobby to come up.
Something I'd add on top of that would be the ability to also see public games in progress. When there's a critically low number of people online, knowing that there's an 8 player game which is 20min in can make the difference between waiting the 10 minutes for it to end and spill players out, and closing the game to find something else to do.
In short, I recommend adding:
1) List of other players online (in same screen as lobby browser)2) Chat rooms (in same screen as lobby browser)3) Ability to see games in progress (in same screen as lobby browser)
Also want to thank the devs for making this awesome game!
Excellent suggestions, I concur!
I think this would make a huge difference in finding people, especially for getting larger games together. So far I've only managed to play 1v1 against other people, I would love it if 4-way games were easier to arrange.
I strongly agree with this. We really need a chat lobby.
Good suggestion, but it will be a very short list. I only worry that having the player numbers in black and white would be more off putting to the casual gamer, right now there are 38 ppl online, how many of those are mutliplayer, not many I'd suggest.
You bring up a good point Kingmorgan but hopefully that part will be solved when the game gets out of beta and we have people lining up to buy it. If they're in the chat room they already own the game so it shouldn't be an issue.
I'd love to see this happen. I use an app to see how many people are playing at any given time but have no idea how many are multiplayer. It would help the decision as to whether to launch with 4 players or wait for a full 8.
Hook it into IRC, allow people to join the chat without being in the game, I've seen this work reasonably well in other games.
OTC seems to have a pretty good community (not the sort of game that attracts the DOTA crowd) so I'd expect a chat to be really good at building up new players faster
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