I used to love empires because of the great games you'd get out of it, but recently I've just found it no fun, despite the many good improvements, here are the problems I think are ruining the game. Stacking: Whether intentional or unintentional I find that more than 50% of the games I play are badly stacked. Often at the beginning which causes one team to have the obvious advantage. And then no one likes to play on the losing team so they all join the winning team and the game goes to shit, it seems that auto-assign now means "Rape me please." which shouldn't be the case at all. Also good players often like to join the team which they think has the best players on which can ruin the map too, cause let's face it no one wants to be on the loosing team. Commanding: No one ever wants to be commander, it's just not fun and so the game is often dictated by whether either side has a commander who even wants to do it or can be arsed. Everyone skips the comm vote and on some occasions people who are voted and don't want to be try to mess around with the comm vehicle and end up ruining the map for everyone. Lack of ways to recover: Basically there are very few ways a team can recover from being in the losing position. There's ninja'ing or waiting for the other team to do something stupid like run out of tickets or spend all their money on vehicles which doesn't often happen. This means that after the first 5 minutes where the outcome is decided, the game is only fun for the winning team and the losing team all quit to make the battle even less fun. Another thing is the people who just wait in spec for a good game to come along, which really is silly. If you want a good game then you have to work towards it by joining the losing team and helping to balance the game out, waiting for a good game is just stupid and as others have complained it can block the servers up when the game is full. I don't know how to fix these as a lot of them could be fixed if people changed their attitudes, but I'm not expecting that anytime soon. And I would say that a lot of players have very good attitudes but it doesn't take much to turn an empires game sour and it seems that recently very few games are going well for anyone. This is just my view, I accept that some people might/will disagree which is fine, just lets be polite about it please.
right after you suicided our comm on money i ninjad there cv and won it.. too bad you left rite before that
They're not new problems at all, and to be honest it's not as bad as it used to be (stacking and lameing). Skill stacking isn't easily solved and one can only hope that teams are fairly balanced. There's not much the dev team can do about that as we cannot calculate individual player skill. One thing that does work though is that a lot of crappy players with the proper attitude and guidance can tremendously help any team. It's just rare that anyone steps up to take their hand. Also, with the closed RC tests everybody kinda knows who's a good player and who isn't so it's easier to predict what team will win. Once 1.08/2.0 goes public with (hopefully) a broader range of unknown players this should solve itself. Good commanders are few and far between. I know I'd rather not try my hand at it because I don't have the organizational mindset for it. Most people don't. The only thing the dev team can do is implement an "opt-out" feature to exclude people from the vote. This won't guarantee you'll get a commander, but will keep people from being voted in against their will. Late game recovery is a hot issue and there's no clear option on how to change it. It mostly depends on the commander and the teams combined motivation to reclaim territory and push back the enemy. Part of the problem in my opinion is the relatively small size of the map. The enemy base is located relatively close and choke points/resource points are easily accessed. This never happened in the BF42 version as the map sizes were much bigger and it was very easy to relocate to different spots and try to regroup from there. This is however not an option with the current maps as there are few spots to actually relocate to and the enemy will find you almost right away. I hope with the x16 maps there will be more of a variety in battles as assaults will take longer to execute (travel time) and refineries are in more remote locations and money will be scarcer. Not really a problem when the server is not full. However, I'll try to make sure there are no specs when the server happens to be full. Now that Krenzo has gotten SourceTV to work, you should be able to spec from there (though it kinda sucks). To be honest, the only games I have fun on classic maps are the pick-up games, as they are what Empires is supposed to be. Lots of players and lots of action. There's just too much work to be done with a low amount of players for classic maps to be fun and it's easier for others to pull of lame stunts like asshatjeeps or ninjas. Conquest maps like district, glycen and urbanchaos can be quite fun with small numbers though and are designed to be server fillers fro the classic games. i just wish people stuck around and actually played them.
It seems to me that a number of your concerns would be addressed with public release, when there will be more players, servers, commanders, etc. to choose from.
we skip the comm vote? I didn't know that. I think Falcon is right, these concerns should disappear as the RC goes public. But suiciding the comm? If you commed and lost, and don't wanna see it out, then go spectator. Don't suicide. You'll piss people off, and incur a ban.
to be honest (usually this precedes a really opinionated and biggoted post so be warned), i think there are quite a few ways for a losing team to recover. if you're losing because they had a better comm than you, then it's going to be hard. here's my guide to recovering from a losing position. 1) evict the current commander and get the best commander in the CV that you can afford not to be playing on the ground. there's a good chance you're losing because of your commander 2) expand expand expand. the number one reason for losing teams eventually losing is that as soon as they are pushed back to their base, they hedgehog, putting up pleanty of defence, and all going grenadier or rifleman. this totally cripples your chances of getting back in the game. as soon as you lose your forward positions, you need engineers (with grenadiers if neccessary) to get out into the field and put up forward barracks. if that means the barracks are within 30 seconds of walking distance, so be it. you NEED more barracks to push out and expand. 3) Walls are your friends! their team is going to be a lot more spaced out than yours is, so wall fighting, that slows the combat down is great because it means you can easily flank or gang up on spotted enemies, you can use your locally placed camras to spot them behind the wall and you will be able to survive long enough to get to an engineer, while the rest of your enemys team messes around and doesn't help the people you're trying to kill. whats more, tanks hate walls (and grenadiers love them), and the one thing you're going to be fighting lots of is tanks. [It's spelled lose, as in one 'o'.]
I think you're right about the official release sorting out a lot of the player oriented issues, especially when there are more full servers up. Actually I didn't suicide the comm, so please don't post without checking, you'll find that someone else got in the comm vehicle towards the end of the game because I was repairing a building and a tank started attacking the comm. I don't know who did that but I left just as some guy drove our comm into the water and said something about converting it into a submarine. Yes I did post after that but only because I have recently been finding that most games seem to be being ruined or just plain rubbish recently more than they used to. Retrospectively I think that the official release will fix up a few of these issues because there will be admins on more often and better defined rules. I guess I was just getting a bit too annoyed and forgetting that the servers real issue is that its a test not a gameplay server, still it would be nice to see more effort (by players) going towards making a fair game. Sandbag those are some good ideas, maybe they should make it onto the hints on the loading pages.
well i just figured since you were our comm(must of been that CW guy then).. but these things you are talking about are usally fixed with admins.. but the admins on the offical server are rarely present and dont use rules like no stacking.. so atleast on our server this wont be a problem with release
As said before, this will all blow over after public release. I don't play Empires too often anymore because it has become more of a routine than a game for me. I can easily see which team has the most potential, and more often than not I prefer not to play (I don't spectate either, though, I just don't join :p). Only on emp_escort have I had truly fun and epic games lately. It's the cradle of awesomeness when it comes to maps. If you ever want to get friends into Empires, let them play emp_escort with a whole other bunch of newbies on a maxed out server. They'll have the time of their lives :D
... As long as those newbs know what the hell NF should be doing... like... you know... defending. I played 1.07 recently and when it came to escort, everyone mapvoted to something else because "NF couldn't win cuz they didnt have enough people to cap the flags"
*shudders* Just the thought of playing on the 1.07 server sent shivers up my spine... The thought of playing not only that version but with nothing but german pubbers is almost scarier than the thought of everyone votemapping out of escort.. I mean COME ON it's Escort! but oh the zoom feature on that BEAR... There is no way around skill stacking, I mean what I am finding fun with escort now is that the good players are starting to go automatically to NF because they are finally looking for a challenge(as apposed to just the easy win). I know that is where I go everytime I hit escort, not saying I am good or anything, because I know it will be a hell of a lot more rewarding to win as NF than BE. Especially when JCW is on NF cause then it's even harder as you are usually spending the last portion of the game crawling ever so slowly to the BE base to 9 mine their VF while the rest of us are defending the last flag, even if it takes you 30 minutes... haha, remember the last one we won. NF had like 80 tickets left, game crashes and u come on and say 'Come on! I just about had the VF mined!!' and then I realized where you had been for the past 20 minutes
