Poorlaggedman
10-27-2019, 10:27 PM
Nobody's posting anymore so I will.
I see a bleak outlook. A lot of bug fixes, improved stability, flag spawns, new skirmish areas all help. The elephant in the room though is that basic infantry combat is a rather poor experience after the novelty of it wears off. I see no indication that this is going to change as the focus has moved to check-the-box completion of crowdfunding promises which do nothing to solve the underlying issues. The only major changes to infantry combat over 2.5 years of Alpha: role limits, flag spawns, larger servers caps, and suppression changes. And the regiments spawn separately. Did I miss anything?
In normal video games, the killing power of the individual player is far greater and this can act as a substitute for true quality gameplay as each player pursues their own competitive enjoyment sometimes with loose cooperation of teammates. That's what most multiplayer shooters are like. You can reach a higher level of enjoyment with some organization in those games but your standard player enjoyment hinges on really basic privileges he enjoys in normal gameplay.
WoR doesn't have that. The player has a slow-loading musket and a nerfed bayonet. You aren't really going to do your own thing and have a lot of fun or success competing like that, nor should you. So why play the game? Because the enjoyment is supposed to be in playing as part of a team, closely.
If I had a nickel for every time a game talked up the 'teamwork' possible or the 'team-oriented' features of a game, I'd be able to buy someone another copy of WoR. Of course teamwork is possible. A game doesn't have to be complex to have teamwork, all it has to have are teams. This game does no favors to provoke teamwork beyond imperiling the success of the team based on the actions of individual players ('out of line' deaths). Anyone is free to work as a team, like in every other team game ever made, but for a game which really badly needs teamwork to be enjoyable the lack of focus and structure is frustrating and debilitating.
I've played some stupid mainstream shooters and I know how to enjoy them. I just have a real tough time imagining anyone from any background buying a game like this and expecting anything else than formations and teamwork regardless of where they came from. So the lack of focus on this is strange given the desperate need in order to provide an experience worth enduring. Otherwise why the hell not settle for a game that gives me semi or fully automatic weapons?
1. Players need more than just a team score to use a formation. I think it was imagined by many others beyond just me that there would be tangible punitive effects to the player killed 'out of line.' At the bare minimum, players who're getting killed out of line need to be known to their team. I am totally against a 'score' but I see nothing wrong with displaying to the team your 'death score' whether that takes the form of a ticket loss you incurr on your team or a literal count of your formation, skirmishing, and out of line deaths displayed and updated. This allows for transparency and admins to identify and remove players who're draining the team in an event whether they're deliberately F9ing or just playing on their own.
It's awfully cruel to leave the fate of a team to individual players dying in stupid ways and give no way even to tell who's doing this without creating a surveillance state on the server. The greatest power of the individual player is to anonymously sink his own team and that needs to change.
I always assumed that there would be punitive actions against players who die out of line as in: you can't spawn on a flag, you take longer to spawn (your death screen is longer than 20 seconds), or you take longer to spawn in or don't get priority. Why there aren't those steps two years into Team Morale is beyond me.
2. Leadership cannot be grab-and-go and also create a successful team environment. You positively need to foster better and more accountable leadership. Public gameplay is a complete exercise in futility and the turnover is startling. The torch is getting passed off alarmingly fast between groups of players filling up open servers during non-event times. To fill the leadership void already the game is showing every sign of being event-only which is no different than it would have been had no effort to promote teamwork have been made in the first place. There's always plenty of people willing to try and reenact, not much is required for that attempt to be made.
Curiously there are no easy tools to run events. [Server] messages are next-to-worthless. There's no serious provisions for communicating with players beyond a server name. No rule screen, no effective announcements. All this has to be done outside of game or with serious ground game on the fly. You need an organization infrastructure just to run events well and most are still messes on one team or the other. If the purpose of not developing those admin tools was to not be invasive to the player, I'd say changing the time of day on a whim is far more disruptive and you see that all the time and I see that happen at least every week. Admins can be held accountable by smart server hosts. Players who are clueless as to what's going on (because you have totally ineffective ways of communicating to them) are not.
Cannons aren't going to do anything to improve this situation. 11457
I see a bleak outlook. A lot of bug fixes, improved stability, flag spawns, new skirmish areas all help. The elephant in the room though is that basic infantry combat is a rather poor experience after the novelty of it wears off. I see no indication that this is going to change as the focus has moved to check-the-box completion of crowdfunding promises which do nothing to solve the underlying issues. The only major changes to infantry combat over 2.5 years of Alpha: role limits, flag spawns, larger servers caps, and suppression changes. And the regiments spawn separately. Did I miss anything?
In normal video games, the killing power of the individual player is far greater and this can act as a substitute for true quality gameplay as each player pursues their own competitive enjoyment sometimes with loose cooperation of teammates. That's what most multiplayer shooters are like. You can reach a higher level of enjoyment with some organization in those games but your standard player enjoyment hinges on really basic privileges he enjoys in normal gameplay.
WoR doesn't have that. The player has a slow-loading musket and a nerfed bayonet. You aren't really going to do your own thing and have a lot of fun or success competing like that, nor should you. So why play the game? Because the enjoyment is supposed to be in playing as part of a team, closely.
If I had a nickel for every time a game talked up the 'teamwork' possible or the 'team-oriented' features of a game, I'd be able to buy someone another copy of WoR. Of course teamwork is possible. A game doesn't have to be complex to have teamwork, all it has to have are teams. This game does no favors to provoke teamwork beyond imperiling the success of the team based on the actions of individual players ('out of line' deaths). Anyone is free to work as a team, like in every other team game ever made, but for a game which really badly needs teamwork to be enjoyable the lack of focus and structure is frustrating and debilitating.
I've played some stupid mainstream shooters and I know how to enjoy them. I just have a real tough time imagining anyone from any background buying a game like this and expecting anything else than formations and teamwork regardless of where they came from. So the lack of focus on this is strange given the desperate need in order to provide an experience worth enduring. Otherwise why the hell not settle for a game that gives me semi or fully automatic weapons?
1. Players need more than just a team score to use a formation. I think it was imagined by many others beyond just me that there would be tangible punitive effects to the player killed 'out of line.' At the bare minimum, players who're getting killed out of line need to be known to their team. I am totally against a 'score' but I see nothing wrong with displaying to the team your 'death score' whether that takes the form of a ticket loss you incurr on your team or a literal count of your formation, skirmishing, and out of line deaths displayed and updated. This allows for transparency and admins to identify and remove players who're draining the team in an event whether they're deliberately F9ing or just playing on their own.
It's awfully cruel to leave the fate of a team to individual players dying in stupid ways and give no way even to tell who's doing this without creating a surveillance state on the server. The greatest power of the individual player is to anonymously sink his own team and that needs to change.
I always assumed that there would be punitive actions against players who die out of line as in: you can't spawn on a flag, you take longer to spawn (your death screen is longer than 20 seconds), or you take longer to spawn in or don't get priority. Why there aren't those steps two years into Team Morale is beyond me.
2. Leadership cannot be grab-and-go and also create a successful team environment. You positively need to foster better and more accountable leadership. Public gameplay is a complete exercise in futility and the turnover is startling. The torch is getting passed off alarmingly fast between groups of players filling up open servers during non-event times. To fill the leadership void already the game is showing every sign of being event-only which is no different than it would have been had no effort to promote teamwork have been made in the first place. There's always plenty of people willing to try and reenact, not much is required for that attempt to be made.
Curiously there are no easy tools to run events. [Server] messages are next-to-worthless. There's no serious provisions for communicating with players beyond a server name. No rule screen, no effective announcements. All this has to be done outside of game or with serious ground game on the fly. You need an organization infrastructure just to run events well and most are still messes on one team or the other. If the purpose of not developing those admin tools was to not be invasive to the player, I'd say changing the time of day on a whim is far more disruptive and you see that all the time and I see that happen at least every week. Admins can be held accountable by smart server hosts. Players who are clueless as to what's going on (because you have totally ineffective ways of communicating to them) are not.
Cannons aren't going to do anything to improve this situation. 11457