minigun wrote:QUOTE (minigun @ Mar 29 2018, 04:25 PM) I always wondered what wrecked allegiance. Ps and Xbox? R8 or r9? Call of duty and wot? Everyone grew up and had kids? Balanced the game so much it stripped the fun away? The massive in fighting? Metz? <-----lol I always liked that one.
Shizoku wrote:QUOTE (Shizoku @ Mar 29 2018, 10:35 PM) Maybe nothing really wrecked it, maybe it's just an old game that was never that popular. I think the better question is what could have we done or can do to make it more popular?
Probably taking 18 years to change the default controls to wasd, or maybe not banning metz enough. More bans for metz!
I think the main problem lies in how long individual games last. If you look at the popular games, you'll notice that their average games are typically shorter than 30 minutes. Here's some data for League, which whether or not you like it is one of the, if not the, most popular multiplayer games on the market.
The main trend you want to notice here is that
even competitive LCS games which always end in one side blowing up the nexus, they last an average of 32 minutes. Hour long games are incredibly rare. At all other levels, the average game length is far shorter than that. Starcraft lasts about 20 minutes. Overwatch is at about 15 minutes which is where I suspect most FPS are.
Now, this isn't to say that Allegiance can (or should) have its gametime compressed down to 15-20 minutes. I think a good time frame for us to shoot for with Allegiance is 30-45 minutes. 15 minutes of basic tech, 10 minutes of enh tech, 5 minutes of adv tech, with a little more time thrown on at various levels for some of the games. But we do have a problem with Allegiance which is that basically all squadgames take 1 hour plus, baring some ridiculously lopsided shennanigans. Aarmstrong has his videos from the 2008-2009 heydey of PK, when PK was top dog and into the beginning of the SysX era, and almost all of those games are >45 minutes long with more than half of them sitting in the 60-90 minute range.
Fixing this is an open-ended question, really. I think the solution lies in nerfing the weapon damage of most ships at the enh/adv levels of tech. In my mind this accomplishes two things: first, it makes end-game runs like bomb runs more likely to succeed as nans last longer and no one can spike the HTT out from under the nans. Second, it helps prevent that awful tech stall when both sides kill each other's miners and are now forced to try to payday their way into something besides nan2 bomb runs against mini2 hvies since it's harder to kill miners with weaker guns.
Despite being accused of "not thinking" (lol! If there's something I never stop doing it's think... and eat...) I've been tossing this idea around for a while. I have to fix the figs from PCore15 first, but PCore17 is going to start having the tiers of tech rebalanced, generally making basic bomb runs less effective while rendering the game enders more effective.
The only thing I'm not sure about is what I want to do with sup. Figbees are popular (and fun to fly, leading to exciting gameplay moments), but it's kind of odd to me that sup is sort of torn between that and hvy bbrs. Do hvy bbrs go away? Do I leave hvy bbrs as an "everyone can go this route"? Should it ever be correct to go hvy bbrs over HTTs as exp? I'm just not sure.
