Just some advice from a gamming veteran that has seen games come and go

[Jimen]

It's not really about relative skill but about knowing whether you should do X or XX or XXX in situation Y or XY.

[Bard]

QUOTE (Jimen @ Apr 18 2010, 12:32 AM) It's not really about relative skill but about knowing whether you should do X or XX or XXX in situation Y or XY.

QFT

Situational Awareness and timely response are supremely important.

[Cadillac]

QFT wtf?

All I see are axises, sex chromosomes and porn.

[badpazzword]

Allegiance games are simply too long. A single mistake can vanish an hour-long effort from the game changers who too often complain about being alone. Hence why mistakes are a big deal.

Rank has nothing to do with this, I believe. The community is small enough that you know people by their handles, rather than by a generic number attached to them.

QUOTE (Dracus_Prime @ Apr 13 2010, 12:58 AM) Also, with this ranking system that pits wins vs. losses, it is essentially the case that for a new player to rank up, a veteran has to be demoted

No. Newbies also gain rank from losing -- just, not as much.

QUOTE (Dracus_Prime @ Apr 13 2010, 12:58 AM) as there are a fixed number of rank points in the community

No. The "fixed number of rank points" is ingame-only as a legacy way to plug Allegskill into a non-Allegskill aware game. Allegskill uses floating point ranks.

QUOTE (Dracus_Prime @ Apr 13 2010, 12:58 AM) unless there is some other way to get experience points or w/e you may call it, I believe this would have to be the case.

When you are a new player, you gain rank just by playing (you gain more if you win, tho; it takes spectacuarly unpredictable losses to send you into negative ranks.). The more you play, the less rank you gain by "just playing". It's not exactly "experience", but it definitely tries to account for that as well.

[ogorass]

QUOTE (LANS @ Apr 16 2010, 03:33 PM) Personally, I believe that much of alleg's "6 months" learning curve comes more from have vets that have played for years compared to a relative lack of new players who suck. But the help/training system here is incredible compared to any other complex games I've seen. Any good game will take time to learn, and lots of new players will drop before they learn how to play well. The difference is with alleg compared to "popular" games such as Edmond's list, is that alleg has a low influx of new players, so every player who does drop out is noticed.

A lot of people try out the game, about 4% of those play more than 10 (or was that 15?) games. Also, compared to back when I joined, the playerbase is pretty huge right now and the newbie influx is ginormous. All thanks to the Dev team and marketing efforts.
What haven't changed much, is the retention rate. This game is complex enough, that the average player won't have the will/time/ability to learn it enough to become decent.
QUOTE I've seen this with another small game I used to play, Redline. There's an incredible amount of player-made content, all made in people's free time, and everyone who plays is usually friendly and helps new players. It was a lot of fun (I don't play it anymore), but a few things have hapenned since its release:

1. The good players have gotten better. Nobody (especially nobody new) has much of a chance of winning against the core group of players who have been with it from the start (tends to be the same players who make all the custom content).[/quote]
Hmmm, I'd say that it is possible to learn this game and become pretty good, even if one is not a member of the Beta Club. It takes a quite a long time though, so that filters out all the people who are looking for instant gratification provided by your average FPS. There just aren't any games out there similar enough, for us to expect people with some kind of background in the area of gaming represented by Allegiance...
Skill in FPS type games is represented by knowledge of the maps and ability to point and click a moving target, skill in MMORPG type games is usually represented by the number of hours you spend on buffing up your character...
In Allegiance, you won't be able to hit anything smaller than a cruiser for a while in the beginning, you can't rely on superior abilities of your character to own someone, as every game starts with basic tech for all sides. Oh, and Alleg requires something, that most action-based games do not require: thinking, a lot of it
QUOTE 2. There's sooo much custom content that the learning curve grows steeper continually. The core group keeps making new content for themselves (new cars and tracks), but learning new tracks and the characteristics of new cars takes time, and in that time you won't win, which isn't fun. I'm not saying that this new content is bad, its still important to keeping the game alive.[/quote]
The "contents" can only relate to Allegiance cores... and those don't change rapidly enough to influence the new players. Hell, most changes made to the CC aren't even noticable to the newbies, so I don't think I can get your point...
QUOTE Its even gotten to the point now where there's a player-run committee that classifies cars into competitive classes and publishes a handy spreadsheet for reference, so that races can be declared as "class B-2" and everyone will be able to pick a different, but comparatively competitive car. Its used mainly for the yearly championship tournament.[/quote]
Interesting, but still I don't know how it would relate to Alleg
QUOTE Now this isn't a problem with alleg,[/quote]
Ah, ok
QUOTE but alleg does suffer from problem 1. And the only solution is a huge influx of newbs[/quote]
Ironically enough, we are having that as we speak.
QUOTE who are willing to ##### around on the newb servers with other sucky newbs who are just as bad.[/quote]
We've had that a while back. Even a small sub-community of utterly sucky players, who stuck to silly side games and tried to reduce the game to Quake in Space. Most of them are gone by now. Newbie servers should really serve only the purpose of a try-out area: allow the new player to figure out controls, remap them to his/hers liking and get a general "feel" of the game's environment. Then off to the main games they should go.
QUOTE Or even on the main servers, having someone comparable to dogfight with 1v1 just makes it more fun.[/quote]
You learn nothing by doing anything against someone who is at your level or below. I've learned how to fly by watching the best own me. Again and again and again. Having a hug-fest with other newbies accomplishes nothing, besides creating bad habits.
QUOTE Yes, diluting the player pool sucks for those who want to play serious games without organizing a squad game, but some of those new players will stay.[/quote]
This game is only fun, when competitive teams face each other, competitive teams come from players with a clue, who come from newbies who yearn to learn this game. As I've said above, that is below 5% of people who install this game and play it for a couple of hours. Dumbing down the games, so that it's easier on the newbies will only serve the purpose of driving the veteran players away... From who will the newbies learn then?
QUOTE Now the question becomes: how do we get more players?[/quote]
Hmmm, try and think about what is being done to improve player influx and newbie retention... it's all on those boards. Trust me, there are quite a lot of people working on both.
Also, goddamit, I guess that this counts as 2nd win to TE, as this post has 'Something needs to be done or this game is dead!' vibe very clear in the background

QUOTE (badp @ Apr 18 2010, 12:17 PM) No. Newbies also gain rank from losing -- just, not as much.

Nope. That has been changed - the (0)-(4) ranks do not differ in AS calculations from the ones above them now. You can drop from (4) to (2) in a couple of games. Another difference is, that it is now possible to drop back below (5).
QUOTE No. The "fixed number of rank points" is ingame-only as a legacy way to plug Allegskill into a non-Allegskill aware game. Allegskill uses floating point ranks.When you are a new player, you gain rank just by playing (you gain more if you win, tho; it takes spectacuarly unpredictable losses to send you into negative ranks.). The more you play, the less rank you gain by "just playing". It's not exactly "experience", but it definitely tries to account for that as well.[/quote]
All ranks are variable and depend on your win/loss ratio and relative skill AS-based skill levels of teams in each game. The newbies' ranks change quite rapidly, as they have huge uncertainty - the more games you play, the more accurate your rank becomes, and the harder it gets for it to change. I've been stuck at (13) since forever (i.e. introduction of AllegSkill) for once, it's not like my rank wouldn't go up if I started madly stacking for a couple of months

[badpazzword]

I was about to comeback by saying that for new players, the sigma gain tripled should be greater than the mu loss. Then I loaded the leaderboard and sorted by wins. Nobody with 0 wins has a 0.1 or better rank. Without further data, I stand corrected

[Weedman]

you must have been one of the primes that got his @#(! pushed in

my money is on optimus

[Hellsyng]

Holy @#(! my eyes are bleeding for reading all the stupidity in this thread.

Thank god for the ability to not be a $#@!ing pussy.

[LANS]

QUOTE (ogorass @ Apr 18 2010, 08:07 AM) <cut to save space, read above>

Hmm, I didn't know that 5% statistic, or the new-players/time statistic when I posted that. And I don't believe that "something must be done!" as alleg seems pretty lively to me. But I wonder what the new-players-who-stick-with-it statistic is for other complex strategy games such as chess/go/etc. I used to play lots of chess, but not anymore. I remember that when I was learning though, I lost every game quickly for months straight before I got some basic strategy down (and I'm still not very good, and haven't played in a few years now). Speaking of which, I wonder how many alleg players play (or used to) play chess/go/etc regularly? It would be an interesting statistic, even if this entire post is meaningless. Maybe I'll start a poll.