An idea to help encourage newcomers
Posted: Sat Mar 22, 2014 2:23 pm
Alright after not playing the game at all for like a year I opened up the new OpenSpades and started playing, at first I was like "OMG GRAFIX :D" and then I was like "OMG HOW R THESE HAXOR NUBS TRICKSHOTTING ME FROM ACROSS THE MAP?"
You see one of the big issues with this game is that the inherent skill level is really high, the only people left playing are the ones who've played for a long time which means newcomers who may not have much experience with FPS games at all are just gonna get destroyed, not have any fun at all and leave.
How do I propose to fix this? Matchmaking. Yes that horrible M word. This is how MOBA's solve the problem, you see MOBA's require a great deal of time to learn to any form of mastery and if you kept getting stuck with people who have been playing the game since beta and you only just started, you'll get destroyed, have no fun and quit. Ace of Spades is nowhere near as complex as a MOBA like Dota 2 or League of Legends but it still has a fairly high learning curve as your mechanical skill determines everything and it handles quite differently from most other FPS games I've played.
Now how the system would actually work is whenever you played a game, you would gain points based on whether you win or lose. The longer you are on a winning streak, the more points you gain. The longer you are on a losing streak, the more points you lose. The closer you are to a 50% winrate the more matched up your point gains and losses are. This would place greater value on actually playing games through to the end instead of quitting halfway through because you are raging. Servers would place a value between 100 of how many points they want players to have before playing on the server (like 1000-1100) and you would have to have a point value greater than 1000 and less than 1100. The points would be connected to your build and shoot account, so whenever you went to the play page it would automatically filter out the servers you can play on and the servers you can't.
One proposed change I have though is that EVERY server that wants to be part of this system has to have a hard limit of 16 players (maximum of 8v8). The reason is it will increase each individual players impact on the team so that it's harder for a player to get "carried" to a high point level without actually deserving it.
Also this could also lead to the creation of a ranking system and a leaderboard.
Also this system would lead to a decrease of hackers, why? Because it would be easier to catch them. They would rapidly increase to high point levels which would obviously have them play against people who have been around the community for a while and know how to get hackers banned.
This would be very hard to implement I imagine and get servers to come around to the idea but all in all, I feel it would very much benefit the game and would help draw in new players.
You see one of the big issues with this game is that the inherent skill level is really high, the only people left playing are the ones who've played for a long time which means newcomers who may not have much experience with FPS games at all are just gonna get destroyed, not have any fun at all and leave.
How do I propose to fix this? Matchmaking. Yes that horrible M word. This is how MOBA's solve the problem, you see MOBA's require a great deal of time to learn to any form of mastery and if you kept getting stuck with people who have been playing the game since beta and you only just started, you'll get destroyed, have no fun and quit. Ace of Spades is nowhere near as complex as a MOBA like Dota 2 or League of Legends but it still has a fairly high learning curve as your mechanical skill determines everything and it handles quite differently from most other FPS games I've played.
Now how the system would actually work is whenever you played a game, you would gain points based on whether you win or lose. The longer you are on a winning streak, the more points you gain. The longer you are on a losing streak, the more points you lose. The closer you are to a 50% winrate the more matched up your point gains and losses are. This would place greater value on actually playing games through to the end instead of quitting halfway through because you are raging. Servers would place a value between 100 of how many points they want players to have before playing on the server (like 1000-1100) and you would have to have a point value greater than 1000 and less than 1100. The points would be connected to your build and shoot account, so whenever you went to the play page it would automatically filter out the servers you can play on and the servers you can't.
One proposed change I have though is that EVERY server that wants to be part of this system has to have a hard limit of 16 players (maximum of 8v8). The reason is it will increase each individual players impact on the team so that it's harder for a player to get "carried" to a high point level without actually deserving it.
Also this could also lead to the creation of a ranking system and a leaderboard.
Also this system would lead to a decrease of hackers, why? Because it would be easier to catch them. They would rapidly increase to high point levels which would obviously have them play against people who have been around the community for a while and know how to get hackers banned.
This would be very hard to implement I imagine and get servers to come around to the idea but all in all, I feel it would very much benefit the game and would help draw in new players.