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Honestly, if a game doesn't make it to 60 minutes then how can we *honestly* say it was balanced?

phoenix1 wrote:QUOTE (phoenix1 @ Mar 30 2018, 06:46 PM) 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. [url="https://www.leagueofgraphs.com/rankings/game-durations"]
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.

Considering the way you described your idea(and making adv tech having really an edge over enh tech), you could remove hvy bbrs all the way, and leave aleph res for capships only, or the other way around. But I believe SY would need a total rework (and work in a similar way as the regular techpaths), to stay viable, and not just something funny with special flavour that you throw in (like most peenix pieces of tech).

This would also making the offensive/defensive part of allegiance income more important, since whover reaches adv tech first would have the upper hand, and a clearer opportunity to win the game.

IMO the hardest part would be achieve an "imbalance" to equalize all factions perks/nerfs.

Yeah, I never stop hearing newbs saying "Man, that epic 50min game sure was too long, I'm gonna go quite alleg now."

phoenix1 wrote:QUOTE (phoenix1 @ Mar 30 2018, 05:46 PM) <snip>

Its not only about timing. Its about game stagnation and the rate at which events happen. The lack of power of "game ending tech" against gat3/mini3 is part of it, but not entirely. Dota (as Metz said) until a few years ago regularly had long average games. You'd be in for 45-60min, often more, but usually not more than 70-80.

Allegiance is missing a few key elements compared to other, newer, more popular competitive team games. There is some emphasis on defensive play - you earn money by defending your miners, as opposed to earning money by killing @#(!. Defending to endgame tech is a viable strategy in some cases. The game can easily stagnate if players don't have some idea of what to do/attack. There are elements that stick around which are distinctly "anti-fun" - nobody likes dropping probes or deprobing, but we accept it as necessary to win. Killing miners/bases slows the other team down, it does not speed your team up (aside from giving you space to mine). The game has a lack of targets to attack at any given time.

Get rid of probing, give comms surveillance drones instead. Cheap cost, low signature, easy to blow up, limited number available on the field at any time. Use more miners, at cheaper cost, with proportionally lower capacity. Gives you more stuff to kill/defend.

"nobody likes dropping probes or deprobing"

Bull@#(!, some pilots live for it. Getting hvy scouts with a $#@! ton of probes is a lort of fun imo.

Shizoku wrote:QUOTE (Shizoku @ Mar 30 2018, 10:59 PM) Yeah, I never stop hearing newbs saying "Man, that epic 50min game sure was too long, I'm gonna go quite alleg now."

No, but I never hear newbies really say that a long game was epic. And a lot of the time the game goes long because they're trying to do things like probe, but the enemy team is down to one sector so they're just dying to the camp over and over again.

phoenix1 wrote:QUOTE (phoenix1 @ Mar 31 2018, 06:49 PM) No, but I never hear newbies really say that a long game was epic.

I never hear newbies.

Do we even have newbies?

We had a handful at Steam launch (that are all gone now) that were making an effort but beyond that I don't think we've had one that's logged in more than once.

i have been noticing at least 2 or 3 newbies sticking around and playing more than one game lately