Free Allegiance Forums

NightRychune wrote:QUOTE (NightRychune @ Feb 4 2013, 04:59 PM) esports don't work with teams of 15-20 people that need to be present to play a game

esports also need to be watchable

allegiance is not really watchable unless you intimately know the game, and even then it's not that interesting to watch

People watch starcraft 2 matches, they will watch anything.

Spectator mode with dynamic camera angles and faster paced cores anyone?

Spunkmeyer wrote:QUOTE (Spunkmeyer @ Feb 5 2013, 12:53 AM) 5-Stacking is not a design problem. It's a coding problem. It's easily, easily solvable given enough development effort.

lol what?

Edit not to sound like a jackass
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Adding incentives to make people want to play for the weaker team is how you solve the stacking problem. The only incentives that people care about (other than the implicit one of getting a rewarding game) is certain stats (kills, drone kills, wins) on the leaderboard. I'm not making a very bold statement when I say most people give jack @#(! about an arbitrary "stack rating". If you mean you can solve the stack problem by coding a "better" autobalance; it won't work. If you force poeple to play for teams they don't want to play for it will only drive people away from the game.

Now, I'm not a game designer, but I think there are two viable ways of naturally encouraging evenly matched teams:
a) Reward players for playing for the weaker side. The question is how to measure the players' contribution, you would want to show a leaderboard number that increases every time you are a "game turning player". The datasomething dude that popped in here a while back and added a bunch of metrics to the client was on the right track, maybe some of the stats he gathered could be used to create a player stat that would *feel* rewarding. Hit % could be fun. Kills/ejects split per ship category would be great - you'll $#@! up your stats if you don't fly a hvy int all the time. There are a lots of exciting things to measure for each individual player which would add a reason for keeping on playing, and if done correctly, encourage even teams.

b) Add something meaningful to do when the team is doomed or make games end quicker. If commanders are uneven or the teams have been uneven for the first 15 minutes of the game, there's really nothing you can do to turn it around. The stacked team will have hvy ints and map control and your enh figs and 2 sectors will only be a killing ground until you convince your team to resign and start a new game. If there was something to do during this march of doom, it would be a different matter. You can already see vets joining and staying in games where their team is down to one sector THAT HAS AN ADVANCED EXPANSION AND HVY INTS. It's pretty fun to try to get as many kills until the enemy inevitably finishes you off. It's not fun at all if you're cannon fodder while you wait for them to finish. Going in this direction can be done with core design.

SgtMajor wrote:QUOTE (SgtMajor @ Feb 5 2013, 03:04 AM) People watch starcraft 2 matches, they will watch anything.

Spectator mode with dynamic camera angles and faster paced cores anyone?

that's because starcraft 2 is much more interesting to watch

People don't watch Call of Duty or Battlefield, why would they want to watch Allegiance.

Counter-Strike would be the only one which is similar that people watch and even that is declining.

There are too many players and things happening (in an ideal Alleg match) to spectate.

HSharp wrote:QUOTE (HSharp @ Feb 5 2013, 11:37 AM) People don't watch Call of Duty or Battlefield, why would they want to watch Allegiance.

Counter-Strike would be the only one which is similar that people watch and even that is declining.

There are too many players and things happening (in an ideal Alleg match) to spectate.

Also, allegiance is slow. It only feels action packed when you are playing, but if you look at a complete replay of a game you'll notice not much is going on between teams scrambling for the next miner rush.

One-Man-Bucket wrote:QUOTE (One-Man-Bucket @ Feb 5 2013, 04:13 AM) lol what?

I don't know what you originally said, but you probably took my quote out of context. Bacon was claiming stacking is built into the basic game design and therefore cannot be fixed.

Spunkmeyer wrote:QUOTE (Spunkmeyer @ Feb 5 2013, 10:58 AM) I don't know what you originally said, but you probably took my quote out of context. Bacon was claiming stacking is built into the basic game design and therefore cannot be fixed.

Problem is we have a mu, we have a sigma, and we have a stack rating. But people only "care" about rank, and rank is only affected by mu and sigma. I know that stacking will always make mu go up slower, but it will go up just the same as long as you win, so it is better investment to stack and win.

Be sure that if the stack rating was compounded into the final rank calculation, people would start caring about stack.

Spunkmeyer wrote:QUOTE (Spunkmeyer @ Feb 5 2013, 02:58 PM) I don't know what you originally said, but you probably took my quote out of context. Bacon was claiming stacking is built into the basic game design and therefore cannot be fixed.

I only added the stuff after the ------ in my edit. I agree with bacon and was hoping that you would clarify why you are not.

Hey I proposed a points based system so that even losing means you can increase in rank (or at the very least lose less rank)
To stop people farming for points you could make actions take diminishing returns for point values so it's not worth it to stand by a Bios tele and just pick up pods.
OMB is right that adding in more metrics might be interesting like DataMine did so you can get hit %'s and crap, even providing interesting stats could be useful for ranks.

Elo/Trueskill is not a good system to determine how good a player is on large numbers of people.

You can't accurately rate players in team sports like Football and Rugby with Elo/Trueskill.

Almost 2 years ago I also asked for a sample database of TAG games to be given so people can test their own ranking systems and put their money where their mouth is instead of just talking, got a response from TE saying he could send some CSV files for me to sort through which I accept and then request thread locked and nothing since.

NightRychune wrote:QUOTE (NightRychune @ Feb 5 2013, 01:59 AM) allegiance is not really watchable unless you intimately know the game, and even then it's not that interesting to watch

The videos AEM shot from the 5 vs. 5 dogfights were pretty sweet. An observer mode where you can freely pick targets to follow, POV cams and F3 sector overview cameras would make it possible to spectate and comment.