I see, well it still won't fix the fundamental problem of not having a reward loop to keep newbies. I mean, its something new and exciting, but again it won't fix the reward loop. It might excite and bring back some really old players who are like "Wait, new content? Empires? Really?" but the noobs won't see it as new and think it's been part of the game for a while. It'll, I predict, revive our numbers for a brief period based on vets coming back to try it out, but noobs will still be coming and going.
I know... But by then I'll have a good idea how difficult it would be to add the features we desperately need... EDIT: then I can focus my efforts on adding these features... I've got to finish my current stuff first
Ah I see. That sounds good. I know Smithy talked about this, perhaps if Solokiller gets accepted on we could see some work on this? Perhaps more inter-dev communication and promoting people helping out would be good as well. This is a game for all of us, every contribution helps.
If you're interesting in implementing an elo/rank system, I'd suggest taking a look at how they do it in NS2 for inspiration. Here is the overall 'leaderboard': http://hive.naturalselection2.com/ Although I think its been tweaked since then, here's a description of how it's calculated: https://moultano.wordpress.com/2014/08/04/a-skill-ranking-system-for-natural-selection-2/ The biggest drawback, which you might want to fix if you implement it in Empires, is that it doesn't have a separate elo for comming vs playing as a regular soldier. If its not separated, it can cause a big issue of good players not wanted to comm so that they don't mess up their elo.
That is why "win/lose" is a simple but effective way to judge someone's contribution. I am not saying it gives 100% accuracy but it's easy enough and accurate enough. Who gives a shit about 150 kills? If you lost you fucking lost. You encouraged your team? Well git gud, there are a lot of ways to win the fucking game without you running your mouth. What about stack? We can set it so that you get almost zero point for playing on a stacked team, but you lose a fuck ton of points if you lose. The only problem is that people would join at the last minute to get full points, and that's why you consider the time they actually spent on the team. Not really, any sane player who actually gives a fuck to his own e-penis would get a tank and go for more kills. Even if he's trying to roadkill with jeeps, that's probably because he feels like it. Now stats are gone and some vets would still get jeeps and go for roadkills because they feel like it. Also, I'd like to point out that VIPER stats wasn't removed, it's just gone with VIPER. I don't think the stats impacted the games negatively. Now it would be a great way for me to track down weapon usage...etc @TheCreeper Can we bring it back? I think Vicki said that the related services are gone.
That is why "win/lose" is a simple but effective way to judge someone's contribution. The percentage could be the same for a noob and a vet, what's the point in that? You can literally keep losing every match because of reasons. I estimate I have more defeats that wins. It's not reflective at all. It's something worth to keep track of but doesn't work on its own for Empires. It works for L4D2 versus and csgo. hl2 stats were better to get an overall opinion. we dont need 100% accuracy but win/lose is probably less than 50% accuracy
if you make it win/lose there will be more stacking, more cursing new and inexperienced players, more switching to the winning side, more early quitting and less incentive to join a game which became imbalanced due to leavers.
I doubt hats will ever keep players around much longer then now to be honest. I have to ask who exactly are you trying to keep? From my perspective if it's getting completely new players every person I tried getting into empires said something along the lines of "it's too much", or "it's rather complicated". These players will never stick around just because of a hat, the game is too much for them to even deal with. Smoothing all the rough edges is what you need to do to keep them.(This can actually be done, a more friendly UI is amazing to have here). If it's the players who play for more then a couple of hours, the ones that say " yeah it's fun", again I don't really see hats helping here because I would suspect they are playing because they enjoy the game, what a concept. If these players stop playing it's mostly because there's no one playing when they want to play, so they end up forgetting about it. I'd imagine these players are the reason we have a spike in pop after updates, because they suddenly remember that fun game they played that had no players around. Just as a personal thing, I would never design a game around the idea of simply raising a bar or to unlock pointless things, I would encourage players to play just because it's fun. No one likes another chore. About stats in general, zoom outlined it nice enough I think, it can encourage the wrong type of thing. I don't think vipers was too bad because it had a simple point system of just k/d and who you killed just like you find in counter strike, so players didn't spend endless amounts of time doing something dumb. Like everyone said in the thread though just being a good shot doesn't really mean you helped the team win meaningfully. W/L that security suggested is about the only thing I might be ok with, if only because I would assume it's used as a team balancer. I would add on that to get the most out of it, it would have to kinda force players into teams just so people couldn't selectively stack. I would probably disable being able to switch teams too, again to prevent people wanting to stack. The downside obviously being you couldn't choose playing with the players you want, but I would take that downside in an instant if meant better games in general.
The parts that i dislike the most about Empires are having to run all over the map and having to balance the stamina so you don' t get out of breath (which is really just a stupid mechanic), followed by getting one shot killed from halfway across the map and then not hitting the enemy because you missed them by a single pixel. It's too black and white, one second you're sprinting, the next you're walking even more slowly. One second you have full health, the next you're dead.
No, in the long run that percentage won't be the same for nub and vets. Unless you are one of those "I deserve 3000 ELO but I am just unlucky so I am stuck at 1200 ELO, those 3000 ELO guys are just lucky." I didn't actually count them but my personal winrate should be around 60%. Your skill decides at least 70% of your points, 30% goes to luck. Allow me to be straight here, nub-vets in Empires don't really have much impact on the game, their long-term winrate should be 50%. If you are unlucky, you go lower, simple. Read carefully. 1: We can make it so that if you are on a stacked team, you gain almost zero point if you win, but you lose a fuck ton if you lose. Like actual ELO. 2: Switching team costs you points, regardless of your intention, switching team is dumb.
I didnt read all the comments since shit blew up overnight. But heres my 50 cents on all these bad arguments. " you cant mathematically decide whos better or who added most to the victory" You cant exactly but what u are doing is guestimating and most of the time its correct. Ive never looked at a scoreboard and thought ow that guy on the top of the leaderboard is such a shit player. No the guy has done a lot being kills being revives being relairing buildings he has contributed more than most of the team. And if you wanna go on about those few exceptions that lead the team to victoey with 0 points well then you are an idiot i havent seen one of those players since trickster last played ( fn actuallt does both get points and lead ). Points are a good metric to see whos playing good and contributing there are exceptions but we not a single system will guestimate better and most important of all requires no extra codwwork to see who helped the team win. "more time could be spend fixing bugs" Who cares ahout fixing bugs for the people that are here to stay. New people will barely notice these bugs, and we need new people to stay, we dojt need to appease to people like me who are going to play either way If this xp system gets players to stay 20 percent mpre its probably going to be the best update since steam release. I would play more just to level up. We dont need everyone to play more. If only a small part plays more its enough. Tldr u guys are all so very pessimistic when this system brings nothibg but advantages to our game. Who cares if the math doesnt pinpoint who the best player is , who cares if we could fix more bugs. If we can get more players to play more and longer its worth it. You old farts who barely play shouldnt get a say
Dt theres a good idea I have. Could we add a cumulative team score based on the levels of both teams etc. Then make objectives that require you to win 10 games against a team that has x more points blablbla, this can incentivize people to finish objectives and counterstack -> incoorporate objectives into leveling up. You have to finish 5 objectives every 10th level or something
I agree with team balancing. I failed to point that out in my previous comment so I'm adding that imo, win/lose ranking will not effectively balance teams. How is that fair? I'm so against it for so many reasons I'm pushing myself to discuss this further. So only those who are able to change games should have stats reflective of their skill? A noob vet like what? Teams win most of the games not single vets. And teams are always random so to the point again, how does a defeat reflect YOUR quality. This is not chess; chess is 1v1; there's so much more in Empires. Like, I accept any ranking system but win/defeat rating. GTFO gaming community had a nice ranking community before it was shut down, idk if anybody knows, I think it was hl2 stats, no idea tbh
Yes I know. My point again. Super soldiers clearly have an advantage in getting ranks faster. Also, how is it fair to get a rank point when only one person won the game for your team? Top players can be on top without messing with other's people statistics. Viper stats were fine I think with some tweaking.
I don't like any of those ideas and I didn't stay on Empires because of its community or because of e-penis. I stayed because it's the game with the greatest potential for teamplay and the only one that allows me to command 25+ players.
Well, while I agree that hats will probably not "keep" people more, it's the loop of "do this task, get kills, get reward, repeat" that keeps people. When there is a level system, this is what promotes you to stay, it's something ingrained in the human mind which is what made MMO's popular and what makes kids level up on COD or Battlefield so quickly. because they NEED THAT NEXT reward. I think a more in depth tutorial would be best, going over EACH feature rather than "Here's a sandbox, explore", then this system. The tutorial though, most people wouldn't even play UNLESS there was a "reward" for it such as a "skin" to promote people playing it. This XP system would be the best bet at retaining people and promoting them to do something. Make the top 5 players get a special skin for being in the top 5 so it is a never ending loop. People keep having to work to stay there or someone might come along and unseat them. This is to keep people playing. There are plenty of people who play 3-4 hours and then just stop. Yea they had fun, but they aren't going to come back. To them, it's just a continuous grind of getting yelled at and bitched at by vets because they simply don't have the skills. However, with a reward system it promotes them to stay through all of it because... they just want that next reward. Yea just a simple stats page. I'm not advocating for stats of "Most people killed with jeep", just a simple K/D, Buildings built, Rounds as Commander won, Rounds lost, Rounds won, Tanks destroyed, tanks lost, buildings built. This allows people to see how they are doing while not promoting doing 1 stupid action. W/L won't work. In fact, I think it makes stacks worse. If we could remove mid round team switching, that'd be great, however, I don't think that will happen. Couple this with the fact that then Vets will simply stack not to mess up their ELO and we've just ruined the game. ELO would be more for a competitive community, for like, PUGS, I don't see it working for general all purpose play. Edit: Unless you are talking about assigning to teams based on ELO, which I still think would be a let down when there is 1 high ELO player and like 10 noobs playing. ELO might work if our community was 10X larger and we were able to retain noobs, but again, that isn't the case and what this is suppose to fix. You and I both. I stayed because it was fun. However, we are now faced with a situation that if Empires doesn't adapt, you might be looking at the last time you will see 25+vs 25+. I know you said to me once that you loved the big matches, well, hopefully this would ensure bigger matches. We can no longer sit back and say "This is fine" as the house burns down around us, we have to face the fact that Empires is lacking significantly on some aspects, and some of those are extremely important in retention of newbies.
You might believe that, either because you've been formatted by so many "AAA" games or because you're one of those people. But I don't, we were doing just fine 10 years ago without all the bullshit there is in nowadays games. Furthermore, like flasche said, if you think the yelling at newbies is bad now, wait 'til you see what's it like after you implement those "improvements". It's bad enough to have to command newbies, but if it impacts the perception that others are given of yourself, I will never command in public games ever again. And to conclude, statistics are the way to stereotypical judgement and will further divide experience players from newbies. Everyone will be pre-judged without even having a chance to defend themselves or to explain anything. Smurf accounts will be created to erase their past. I refuse to be defined by my past actions based on a few mathematical formulas. We are the present, not the past.
The whole point of this is to evolve with modern day games. "We were doing fine 10 years ago" well look at the game now. Dying. You can't keep saying "This is fine" as the playerbase continually drops. Vets are leaving and not coming back, but noobs are finding this game but there is no reason for them to stay. If you want this game to survive any longer, we must realize that some things from modern games MUST be adopted and this is the best thing to adopt as it doesn't mess with gameplay in any way. This is simply using the formula to addict new players to the game, it hooks into the constant need to be working towards something, similar to Runescape or any other MMO where you strive to be #1. It addicts you, and we need it to keep noobies. Also, I don't think I've been "formatted", I have identified something that works for other games and thought it would be good to bring it here. I don't understand what the negativity for this is? Please, describe to me how this hurts your gameplay, and I don't mean it in an assholish way, because I just see this as a positive. This, in no way, adversely effects you and I think that it is worth the implementation since it has relatively no down side. 10 years ago, games were all the same and didn't have this "leveling system" or a lot of things, but look at them now. They have improved their games and I think Empires should be improved. It works in other games, we should bring it here and evolve empires to the modern age as they have been working on new ways to hook players for years while Empires has remained relatively the same. We must evolve or die out. I'm going to make a rather bold claim. I believe it was Thexa who told me 3500 people look at this game each month on the Steam Store page with around 100 some downloading the game. I believe a trailer that demonstrates gameplay will put it up above 200, and I think an XP system will fix our retention problem, if implemented correctly, and keep around 20% of the noobies who download it. However, if you make an XP system, you need to make it known. In the post round, it would have to show you get some XP, and on the main screen there needs to be a big ole fat "Customization" button to make new players work towards something. This is realistic I think, Empires is unique but it just lacks any progression system and/or no real goal after you play 1-2 rounds. Yea some people like it cause each round is unique, but it still has no reward loop to retain people.
