Back from work, and besides a few obligatory tl;dr-posts there are some serious answers, so let's get started
Well, I actually read it all, can in no way give an official reply but will let you know that you highly overestimate the amount people read anywhere on the internet ever.
Most people are conditioned to press OK/Accept/Ignore as soon as a message pops.
I saw the amount of people deleting/STFing their mains although warnings pop.
I saw the amount of people who put fail trades up because they clicked OK twice when a warning popped up asking if they really want to offer that trade...
If you think stuff like "Warning! This mod is not only about killing others, it's about making your team win!" would have any impact then let me tell you: If anything it would get the few people's hopes up that actually read it just so they can be shattered again the first time they spawn into a blob of voice spamming, wildly swining trolls
This is absolutely terrifying, what you are telling me there, if you really have more than only "a few" idiots who delete/STF their mains and so on. But you said yourself, people are used to small windows popping up, making them confirm their decision. Never mind if you want to close a browser window with a few tabs, quit your game or overwrite an old file. Placing some kind of warning sign on the pop up window could already help a bit.
One important point of my suggestion is the fact that before you try to download a mod you have to decide whether you want to try it out or not. People want to know if it is interesting for them or not, and this is the point where you have their full attention. I don't want to real long walls of text just to find out if something suits me, eventually... perhaps..., and I know of a few single player mods that started their presentation by listing up the history of the various factions, and of course I skipped that, too. What I usually read is the feature list, and by the features implemented I can see what kind of mod it is supposed to be, and thus I can decide if I like it or not.
If you would have a description page for newcommers, that would start like:
What is cRPG?cRPG is a multiplayer mod which focuses on porting single player to multiplayer as good as possible, complete with organized battles and personal character development.
What are the main features?- A system to support organized battles with real units and real maneuvers
- Equipent you can buy and use as long as you want
- A constant character with your own choice of skills and attributes, that develops constinuously and becomes stronger
- Plated Charger
I guess more or less EVERYBODY who wants to try out this mod will read those few lines. And thus the chance is higher to get influenced by them.
Don't get me wrong: I don't expect this measure to FIX the problem of lemmings, but I am confident it will help to reduce their amount.
Couldn't you also argue that, as infantry is probably the most populated class, the APP is lower, in part, due to turnover?
I am as sure as hell that the absolute number of infantry player with an insufficient APP is higher than compared to other classes, due to the amount of melee on the servers, so we agree on that. But I would even dare to say, that the PERCENTAGE is higher. Or, to say it differently: infantry is a class which depends more on teamplay than let's say cavalry for example. Due to the self centered point of view of most players these flaws aren't as obvious in the case of cavalry as they are in the case of infantry.
1) This solution could be tried, but you can't necessarily shove the philosophy down a new player's throat. At best, a new player will come out enlightened and a new member of the holy order of cRPG. At worst, this new player will feel restricted as to his or her goals, and either quit or just be trollish and assholey.
I don't think this will be much of a problem if you make clear from the beginning that this is the wrong mod for persons who want to have their own one-man-show. (Although currently it is the PERFECT mod for them
). If he didn't invest any time playing it before recognizing this mod doesn't suit him, there is no motivation for him to be assholey or trolly.
2) [...] In my own, personal opinion, a commander system should only have the benefit of possibly (assuming you get a good commander) leading you to easily multipliers.
We actually agree on that. The part with the rewards was only meant to convince players who already have different habits to using the command system, too. I already suggested a complete command system in this forum, and there I mentioned that I would remove the rewards after some time. The hope is to have most players not only being used to using tactics, but also to make them REALIZE it's the ONLY way to keep up a high multiplier constantly.
3) [...] I got a little lost and confused at "Another nice side effect is, that you actually don't want to kill too many enemies before attempting to take one of their flags, otherwise you will conquer it with only a few spawn points left." This, for me, raises the question: why should the team be penalized for taking the time to eradicate the active resistance to it?
The idea behind my statement above was the following: if your team prepares a squad to conquer a certain flag (which should be no problem to coordinate with the help of a commander system
), and they decide to attack (which means they are confident they will win) it would be the smartest to kill not too many enemies before having captured the flag. So killing peasants who throw stones, lonely Ninjas at the flanks or enemies who retreat due to the enemy superiority wouldn't help you much, before you captured that flag. Otherwise some of these spawn effectively will be taken from YOUR spawn pool, instead of the enemies, who will lose the flag and the spawn points anyway. You get what I mean?
Enemy has two flags and 40 spawns left. You have one flag and 20 spawns left. While charging one flag you kill two harmless peasants, one ninja, one dismounted cavalryman and two players who are retreating from the flag, which are 6 kills in total that were no really neccessary. Enemy loses 6 spawns, and THEN you conquer the flag and get it with 17 spawn points left, which means you have 37, the enemy has 17 spawn points left. Now assume you waited until the flag was taken, and THEN you killed what you could. Let's say two of the enemies would be able to escape during that time, so you would only kill 4 of them. You would have 40 spawn points left, the enemy 16. Better than before.
Yesterday me and 4 guys of meciless had somewhat called teamwork.
We decided to keep against an wall with our backs with some shieldwall and let an xbow and archer shoot.
And we went on a hill on the cav map, Thing is we LOST almost every fight.
BECAUSE we had 5 merciless working together 11 randomers, the 11 randomers just went to charge in to plain ground ground and got cav fucked.
Then we needed to kill 18 enemys by the 5 of us because teammates dont listen to tactics and just charge and die.
This is sad, but it's not the fault of using teamplay. Actually it's NOT using teamplay, that made your team lose.
mh, I read it all and it makes mostly no sense to me.
"Do you want to reward players for good skills? Or for good teamplay? Or both? In which relation? How far do you want to incorporate those "indifferent casual" players?"
Of course they want both, and why should be necessary to exactly determine in which relationship? And how do you want to measure that, in abstract figures? and why again?
I think my question is valid, because the developers did almost NOTHING to make teamplay and coordination easier for the players, besides of that crappy voice message system that's nothing but annoying. And you have really a lot of words at disposal to describe the relation, you can even use rough percentage values.
APP and BPP paragraph makes no sence to me and has if at all only a little influence on game balance. IMO most people run ahead like lemmings because it is simply impossible to control such an amount of individuals. We live (mostly in western "abendland" world) in an extremely individualised world, everyone thinks of himself first. You won't get people to change their behaviour continiusly except you implement a strict military education before letting people play and you'd need a strict military-like hierarchy.
And then again, suddenly you have this rare moments where all work as team, like a miracle. But you can't produce that outside of groups like clans or set events.
I think you are wrong on this one.
First of all APP and BPP have ENORMOUS impact on class balance on the servers. For example someone else posted here, that it's an old rule in strategy games that the effectivity of ranged units grows EXPONENTIALLY if you concentrate them at one spot. So if archers know this, and always group up as good as possible, the balance between archers and infantry shifts.
I agree on your opinion that it's the modern way of life to be egocentric, but this doesn't mean people won't help each other out. If people realize they will benefit from helping others, you can be sure as hell they will turn to Mother Theresa herself! The only point is to make them realize it. This is why I want to use small rewards for following orders as kind of "bait" for those players who are too lazy to think about it, making them either create the habit of playing in a team or, even better, recognize the advantages it brings.
Joker why your posts are always toooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo long? what is your problem?
I have a weird quirk - I always have to try to fit my posts to the length of my cock. God help you if I ever write a post while having a boner.
