Great idea there! Got anything in mind for how the exact mechanics might work? I'd personally suggest the ideal "amount of work" be based on a mix of how many enemies you kill (rush phase), and how much ammo you expend (boss fight). This way, players are encouraged to figure out how to kill things themselves in the rush phase, instead of camping behind high levelled players and letting them do all the work. More importantly, however, if the work in the boss fight is based on how much ammo you expend, it will completely MURDER the ratings of freeloaders who don't want to use a shred of energy at all. In both cases, I would suggest having some sort of cap on the amount of work you can do, or it would be unfair for players who WANT to kill something, but can't, because they happen to have a trigger-happy lawnmower on their team (which may possibly be a dancing disco ball or a camping turtle). Similarly in the boss fight, what we're trying to do is encourage people to deal damage, not waste as much ammo as they can -- such a tactic might actually discourage the use of hyper clips, which would work against the notion of teamwork (might be possible to counter this if hyper clips count for double ammo expenditure, for the purpose of scoring). Either way, hoping Freyr read this! Superion, you can email them with any ideas you have as well, I think I've already bugged them enough myself
Looking for teammates, preferably CET timezone Hello there, I was wondering if anyone of the people who kept this thread so active are still playing? I picked up StarWarfare a week ago, and already get tired of what you call freeloaders on coop games. I am located in Europe and mostly play an hour or so in the evenings (~20:00h CET), but my schedule is somewhat erratic, due to reallife constraints. Currently rank 8, with decent equipment. Full Thunder Armor, MCP-76 on level 5, just got the STK-06-ZZ backpack to pack some more punch. I can carry 2 do-nothing players through the PoisonPit fight. But Siegfried - or tougher bosses - are still too much for me to handle alone. My Gamecenter username is dev\null , just in case you might see me around.
Hey Sheinfell, I'm still floating around on this game every so often, though I'm on considerably more rarely now because I've recently begun investing time in grinding at another game. Timezone wise, I think I'm about 9 hours ahead of you (GMC/UTC +10), so catching you online may be a little tricky for me if your evening playtimes are roughly 7-8am for me. My GC is "undead.exe", and I'll keep an eye out for "dev\null" if I'm running matches then Edit: Also, look for a player called "Asdeade97". He/she checks this thread every so often, and I believe he/she is in your same timezone, as per your preferred audience ---------- To everyone: Holy crap, Freyr really IS active with their feedback! I emailed them about 3 days ago, and got a confirmation within 7 hours that they'd look at the idea. They emailed again an hour ago with this response: "We have limited resources and are working on adding new game mode to the game. So friends list won't be considered in short term. But we will consider add a chat room in online mode lobby. Do you think that helps organize games and rooms?" I'd say that's a pretty good start, considering that they're adding something to their workload alongside what they're already working on. So speak up, guys! You'll get a response from them
Hi undead.exe, sounds like you are somewhere in the AsiaPac area, quite a bit off to make it work on a regular basis, unfortunately. Thanks for pointing out Asdeade97. I actually found her/his name on the thread before posting, and sent a PM. And that Freyr is still active sounds good, especially as this is the only shooter I play. Normally I avoid them, because my reflexes cannot keep up anymore, old age taking its toll I was a bit concerned that they abandoned support for this game, with their website unreachable for at least a week, and no replies in this thread for several weeks at least.
Sounds like they're trying but what if you're yelling to another player who you think is a free loader but he/she doesn't respond and continues free loading or worse yet you point out by mistake a very active player! It all sounds like a disaster waiting to happen!!! Very few of us like to be told to step up our gameplay!!!!
What I emailed them about was more with reference to implementing in-game communication, primarily more for organising matches and keeping track of people rather than addressing freeloading or laziness. While it's true that flame wars are always a possibility with in-game communication, it also gives us the opportunity to locate other cooperative players we'd actually like playing with. This way, we can at least take note of players that we'd like to play with or avoid on our own, although it would be made much easier if Freyr's able to implement some sort of friends list in a future update (too much on their plate right now to consider). Also, from what we've seen so far, freeloaders are generally...very easy to spot: they're the players with high levelled armours (most commonly Perseus or Andromedae) who run around with swords throughout the entire match. Newbies who are in a bit over their heads are generally quite obvious (low rank and low-level gear), and quite a few of us here actually take it as a challenge to carry them all the way through Mantis (and possibly Poison Pit too, but they're quite prone to dying there). Someone else want to email Freyr with ideas about mechanics which would encourage cooperation rather than freeloading? I think it'd be a good idea if a few of us emailed Freyr individually, to show that they've got more than one person interested in their app
Will mail them, too, when I find the time. What I'd like to see is some simple hardwired gestures you can use during a game, examples below: - Follow me: Wave an arm - Stay here/guard: Pointing to the ground - Look/Shoot/Guard this way: Point arm straight forward - Hide behind me: <no idea for a good gesture> - Cover my back: <also no idea> - Hand moving across throat in a slitting motion (the "you are dead" gesture): Do not use a sword, you buffoon! (Couldn't resist to throw that one in) Aside from that: Pregame text chat and friendlist (with person-to-person chat option; or, even better, with groupchat for friends only) definitely would be a good addition. Textchat during an actual realtime game I find very distracting, it gets overlooked easily, plus you need to find the time to actually type a message. Ingame voicechat support would be marvelous, but the professional VoIP solutions I know (e.g. Cisco, I3, Avaya) all need a huge amount of bandwidth, and also rely on QoS and getting traffic priority, where used. Which of course takes away from what is available for transferring actual gamedata. Oh, and a blacklist for people you really do no want to join your game.
Thanks undead.exe for clarifying Yes there are many excellent ideas that could be implemented!! Just hope Freyr with their smallish crew won't crumble under the pressure I wish them the best!!!
Yeah, email Freyr with those ideas and see what they think. For newer players, we DID have a makeshift system for getting them to follow us -- which primarily consisted of either shooting right at them, or running right up to their faces and slashing at them with a sword to get their attention, before backpedalling while facing them in an attempt to get them to follow us. Sadly, most people didn't really understand what we were doing until they got a written explanation on this thread -- and that tactic is really only needed once or twice, as most people who join this thread tend to learn quite quickly after being shown good camping spots once. In-game voicechat, I'm not sure if you saw, but Felder was trialling a separate app called Mumble to run alongside the game while we were playing. It seemed to work decently for people who didn't have choppy internet, but I don't think we'll be trying that again anytime soon until something happens to reinvigorate this thread.
OMG! I've seen you out there! You now have one more friendly on your team! Alright everyone, screw it, I'm not bailing on this game yet. After running random 9-10 Mantis runs yesterday for zero Mithril while carrying half my teammates, I was finally going to give up, but based on the communication I'm reading this morning, I think the players who genuinely love this game might actually be able to help Freyr save it. I've read so many good suggestions this morning, I'm not even going to bother going through them, but this one thing is very important: I am not asking for players who simply cannot kill as much as I can as fast as I can to be penalized. I personally take immense joy from helping Rank 1-3 players survive Mantis and PP. Nothing makes me feel as good about this game as going into a Mantis boss fight with two Rank 1s and seeing and hearing bullets raining down on Mantis, knowing how I felt as a beginner the first time I laid eyes on the beast. That $2000.00 (Hyperclip) is the absolute best money I can spend in the game, because it virtually guarantees the survival of my weaker compadres... What I will not do anymore is carry people too stingy to fire their weapons. Oh, and fix the Mithril drops. Sorry again to disabuse people of the notion that the current drop situation is "fair," but having played games other than this one, it simply isn't. 10 runs, zero Mithril. Not really all that complex an equation. DBC
Epic, Freyr responded! And Sheinfell I'll be out there too. undead.exe: the idea of Superion is an outline(a very good one) and your idea was more complex. But the thing with the actual boss ifght is this: lower level weapons have less ammo cost and fire slower, I think it should be the amount of shots made not ammo spent.
Hi DBC, nice to see you are still around. At what time did you see me? I played at some really odd times the last few days, like 3am CET when I woke up and went for a smoke... That you do not get Mithril on 10 runs seems very odd to me. Just to be sure: Did you do the 10 runs after you got your first Mithril for the day? With what I read here, that the chance to get anything goes down alot after you get Mithril from a boss once, I never bothered to try for a 2nd drop. I simply do not have enough time to do 10-20 boss runs in the hope of getting another Mithril drop. And yes, fully agree with you: The ideas people come up with on this thread are great. I am still reading up, at page 144 now And, same as you, I do not mind carrying lower level folks through a boss fight at all. But I am already quite annoyed by highrank folks not doing anything except running around and waving their swords a bit.
Great ideas you have there. Not sure if you covered this already: How about using rank as an (additional) modifier? I guess noone minds if someone of rank, say 1-4, does not do much during a boss fight, except being a decoy With rank 6+ things look different, though. You should be able to contribute significantly to a fight. So, if you just around like a headless chicken, or just don't anything worthwhile during a fight (sword folks, I am looking at YOU!), you should get less reward the higher your rank is. And nice to have another potential teammate, hope we manage to find time for a coop run or two. Does anyone of you use AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) ? If yes, We can use that to see if folks are around and setup a game. Or alternatively Skype, but I'd prefer AIM, simply because it is asynchronous and you can send messages to offline users as well.
Oh really? I thought you were quitting? 100% agree. I do not want to penalize weaker players who try, instead I do want to punish stronger players who clearly and knowingly do not try. While we're at it, if a player hogs all of the initial wave bonus and then leaves the boss fight immediately (Siegfried, Serpent, Rages), sticking two players with three players worth of boss health, the boss's health bar should reflect the absence of the third player, as opposed to only dropping when players leave or die before the boss fight... DBC
A potential drawback to basing workload on bullet count is that is that freeloaders may attempt to undermine the system by choosing a weapon with a high firing rate, but a very low energy cost. An example of that is the FR28a (the default assault rifle), which has a firing rate of 0.24 and an energy cost of 5. You'd have a firing rate of about 4.17 bullets per second against the M-27B1's rate of 5.88, while your cost per second is literally a tenth of what a chaingun user would spend (20.83eps against 235.29eps). Thaaaaaat being said...if we factored in Sheinfell's idea of modifying the criteria based on rank, I think we could probably make it work quite well both ways, whether it's based on number of shots or ammo spent. The only problem is the complexity of the programming -- Freyr would probably need quite some time to work it out as we've suggested so far. Best thing we can do is keep bouncing ideas off each other until we have a suggestion that Freyr can easily implement, so that we shorten the amount of time they need to work this sort of stuff out. Sheinfell, I have neither of those right now, I'm afraid. AOL/AIM isn't too popular a choice in Australia. We've been coordinating things using this thread so far, based on whether someone's icon is green on here -- things would be much easier if this forum came with some form of IRC =.="
I don't even get why they're quitting...The boss is usually the most profitable component of a three player match, so I'm more shaking my head at their complete lack of cost/benefit analytical skill =.=" ----------- Actually, I just thought of a rather ridiculous solution to the freeloader problem that would be HILARIOUSLY satisfying -- if a player runs around with a sword for more than 10 seconds, the boss immediately lunges towards said freeloader and EATS him, instantly killing him. Boss then gets a stomach ache from eating said freeloader, and instantly loses 1/3 of its HP. Delightful A more practical solution I just thought of while I was typing the above semi-joke response: make the boss focus its attacks more frequently on players who don't shoot at it, and as a special function, the waves from the Windblade do NOT count in this calculation. Freeloaders would pretty much end up running for their lives the whole match...how's that for punishment, DBC?
Nice idea, undead, with the boss munching up the freeloaders Jokes aside: If a boss goes for players who do not shoot at it, it might become difficult to carry lower rank players through a fight. How about adding a grace period, say for ranks 1-3, where the penalty does not apply? After all, it should still be easily possible to help out new players. Plus, even a lowrank can contribute to the fight he gets carried through. I think none of us mind when a beginner only adds a little damage and helps mainly by being a decoy. Only on ranks 4+, for example, you would get penalized for not contributing damage. And the higher your rank is, the more severe the penalty. Finally, this should be toggleable, with the default being "on" . Although I do not know if this is feasible in StarWarfare, I personally would not mind to have a tank on the team, whos main contribution is soaking up damage. So, another modifier for the attack decision could be the player's total HP. All we need now is a way to avoid that people can drop a few shots and then be spared for x seconds. Maybe this: The higher your counter, the higher the chance the boss attacks you. If higher ranks are present, low ranks get either ignored, or a huge modifier to their counter, so chances are low that they get attacked. Your counter starts with a number equal to your rank, plus a modifier for your maximum hp. For every second that you do not shoot at the boss, counter goes up by one. For every second you shoot, counter diminishes by 1. Yes, if you fire constantly, you will "save up" time by getting your counter into the negative. The numbers added/substracted to/from the counter could be further adjusted for rank, and even for damage dealt per shot or second. The boss' attack decision would then do a random roll for each player, based on the counter. If the first roll is negative, it continues for the next player until it finds a target. So, a level 12 doing nothing but brandishing his sword would have the boss go after him FAST. While a level 3 could go run-and-hide, get a shot in now and then, and still be mostly spared.
I do take out swords in rages when the shield is up, the waves practically do 0 damge but checks to see if the shield is down, so the first solution is bad. JK but if that happens it would be funny, the second idea is great. But the rank idea is awesome, sheinfell is right, it should be based on rank but the problem is we can't have any more fun matches with horrid weapons. DBC I was quitting but then freyr responded.
