Its more due to my preffered gaming time slot and location, I've found that the majority of players on at the times I usually game tend to be asians or russians (I'm australian) and the language barrier this creates is quite detrimental to cooperative gameplay...relying on other players voice comms for battlefield info doesnt work so well when about 50% of the players online at the time dont speak english or have limited english skills...and I dont speak russian or any asian languages lol
Teamwork is always inherently advantageous; to think it will totally ruin communication and teamwork because red dots sometimes show up is something of an exaggeration. No matter the genre, it will always be a key feature. Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft, Counterstrike, RO2, GW2, ARMA, the Battlefields, even Call of Duty, when it comes to winning it was the more communicative and disciplined teams who get ahead because they share the information that the game isn't spoonfeeding them. Even being able to say to your buddy in CoD 'I just died but he's reloading now,' or 'he's coming around that corner, get ready' gives you an advantage (and that's in a game that has red minimap dots out the wazoo). That's not mentioning reports on objective statuses, enemy numbers, positions and tactics, giving call-outs for focussed fire or requesting extra resources at certain locations, which are things I'm sure will factor into being a successful force in EC. The spotting system just helps people out who may be connected to a different network than you. And let me be clear: the spotting system I would most like to see in the game is one like RO2, where you basically place a marker where your crosshair is aiming that shows up on the map, not the kind of 3D spotting you see in BF:BC2 core which is tantamount to X-ray vision. Having enemies show up on the minimap every time they fire seems excessive to me, and I'm a 19 year old from the 'teeny bopper' generation you seem to think so very little of. Say a battle involves 100 players from one side; most of those are listening to their separate strike forces in a third-party program like mumble, a few have their music cranked up, quite a few are lone wolves who aren't co-ordinating by voice. Is it really so hard to believe you might be able to relay spotted enemy information to nearby friendlies non-verbally in the 41st millenium? And would the presence of such a spotting system not be an encouragement to teamwork in and of itself? You're letting players in on the info who otherwise not know what was going on. That silent lone wolf can actually help out you and your buddies by marking up some enemy positions. That's positive inclusion which is going to help your wider team act more effectively. You speak about the 'fog of war' experience; again, the game is slated to have battles involving more players than I have ever played a shooter with simultaneously. Is it going to be that easy to keep track of 80 enemies swarming you through the ruins of a broken city? Do you think you'll never be surprised by jump troops or walk into an ambush? Do you think you won't still hear the 'klik' as a bolter chamber empties and you rush a fool with your choppa out? I believe all of these things will still be possible, and that the game won't suffer as greatly as you claim even if it does have a softer spotting/minimap system.
The system is more complicated than that, I simplified it so I wouldn't spend a paragraph explaining it, but it didn't pan out as I had hoped. Simply put the system works by giving weapons a default detection range. eg. Bolter -> 30m det(ection range) An enemy player who fires a bolter within 30m of you will appear on your minimap and disappear about a second after he stops firing. But this distance is modified depending on what attachments are being used. In ps2 there are 3 barrel attachments, compensators, silencers and flash suppressors. These all affect that base detection distance positively or negatively depending on what perks the attachment is meant to bring. eg. Bolter with compensator ->45m det but the shooter has less recoil allowing for more acc at distance Bolter with flash suppressor -> 15m det but the shooter has worse hipfire recoil due to the weight of the attatchment Bolter with silencer -> 0m det but bullet velocity is reduced and a slightly higher damage falloff over distance It allows a player to pick and choose how they want their weapon to work in exchange for a reduction in certain stats which aren't key to the role they want to fill. A stealthy player isn't generally going to be fighting long distance as they'll be sneaking through an enemy base, so the lower b.v and higher falloff at distance won't largely effect them, a player that wants to provide long range cover fire isn't going to care about showing up on the minimap because his whole job is to keep the enemies attention and the reduced recoil allows him accuracy at that distance.
Well said Spirit. As far as your comment: When I refer to "younger" gamers I have my 6 and 12 year old nephews in mind. I'm thinking of the "normal" servers they play on when they're playing PVP. I've watched them play Halo and COD since they were about 3 years old. While a lot of the mechanics and UI elements in those type games(ie red dots, red name tags, no friendly fire, deatch cams, endless/fast respawning ect) are great for assisting younger gamers, I would think most seasoned gamers(to include 19 year olds!) with an actual attention span would prefer a more challenging "hardcore" gaming experience when they play Eternal Crusade. And it's not that I think less of younger gamers, obviously not... I love my nephews... What I have a problem with is the fact that I really don't want to see all the "bells and whistles" that cater to kids, present in Eternal Crusade. From what I've seen thus far in Pre Alpha: -floating icons over objectives. These icons can be seen from through walls, through buildings, through mountains. The icons blink and show if a "bad guy" is capturing the objective. The objective Icons can be seen from ridiculous ranges. Are we to assume the average gamer cannot open their map, use their compass and navigate to these objectives via terrain association? Should every player withing a 1000 meter radius be able to see a "second by second" status of all objectives in their immediate area? -Red Name Tags over enemies. As if we can't tell an Ork from and Eldar, a Chaos Space Marine from a Loyalist Space Marine? Personally I find it insulting, as well as immersion breaking. Not only are those red name tags immersion breaking, it takes away from the premise of introducing friendly fire. Players should have to physically ID their targets. -Red Dots on the minimap. enough said on this topic. So from what we've seen in pre Alpha, I have to ask what crowd Behavior is trying to appeal to? It seems they are appealing to casual gamers and the lowest common denominator. Are casual gamers the ones investing in the game at this point? Are casual gamers the ones visiting these forums? Are casual gamers going to bring in their thousands of friends, guild mates, clan members from console and PC ? Will casual gamers sustain EC 2, 3, 4, 5 years from now? I'm not hating on casual gamers. I have a lot of friends online that are casual players. Casual gamers will needed for EC as far as revenue and spreading the good word, and hopefully many will become 40K fans. However, casual gamers come and go. Hardcore gamers are the ones that sustain a games longevity. It appears that what we're going to be playing is a "sector control" or "conquest"(normal servers/not hardcore) from COD/BF4 reskinned in a 40K universe. It's not enough to just say "hey it's a 40K MMOTPS it will be great regardless!!". If a game look, feels, and plays like a kiddie game, regardless of the genre, I will lose interest pretty fast and I'll tell my friends not to waste their money. It would be one thing if Behavior gave us the option to choose between "hard core" or "normal" servers. Since there will only be one server world wide, this isn't an option. Even Warhammer Online had normal and HARDCORE servers, and those hardcore servers were the ONLY servers still up and running when the game was at it's end. The "normal" server populations dwindled and died out much sooner than the Hardcore. -
How Spotting should be: "CAN'T YOU SEE IT!? LOOK I'M POINTING AT IT!" View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzNejayDmQI For people who want to skip to the part it's 1:40-1:52
Can you throw up some screenshots of the through mountains thing? Or the 1000m radius? It seems like you are going into some extreme exaggeration to try and make it look like a far far bigger problem than it actually is. People don't go to a shooter to play hide and seek with capture points, they want to fight. Being able to identify which point the enemy is at seems like a reasonable approach to ensure they a base is fought over instead of ghost-capped. It was a problem in BFBC2 and was seen as such and was scaled back in the sequals. Name tags is pretty damn helpful for learning the good players and clans from the bad or mediocre. If you get steamrolled by the same dude 10 times you are very quickly going to learn to not mess with him, but if you don't have it, you never learn it's the same guy and instead you start to think that it's the weapon and not the player. It simply allows people to attach a skill level to a player (or clan/outfit/guild). You also (inadvertently) point out that the name tags aren't generally there for FFI, it's pretty damn easy to identify what faction they belong to. Yeah, funny how enough has been said when you want it to be, strangely after I posed some real questions about your system and the potentially big flaws it has. You seem to have answered your own question there and yes, 'casuals' will come and go but they may also find the game engaging enough to join the 'hardcore' group. You also seem to conflate being in a clan/guild/outfit as some sort of mark of 'hardcore'ness, it doesn't work like that. Yes, the is a higher percentage of 'hardcore' players amongst them but there are plenty of them which are groups of friends or communities that like to play together, regardless of the game that happens to be. Honestly, I'd rather not have you if you are going to go on and on about how the game is too 'kiddie' because it has some features which aid teamwork at the cost of a bit of realism. You sound like someone who's just turned 18 and is desperately trying to seem 'mature' and 'adult' by deriding anything you think is 'kiddie' or for children.
As far as screen shots, watch last weeks Twitch Live Stream. It's no exaggeration. As one of the devs is leaving one base that was just captured, he's moving through a mountain pass to the next base in the distance. You can clearly see the objectives at the next base though the mountains at an extreme distance. The red dots issue, there's about 20 pages of discussion on the topic in various threads. I didn't want to drag on for 5 paragraphs to get my point across... referencing existing topics seemed fitting. Most of the "kiddie" comments I've made are towards mechanics and UI elements that I see quite a bit when I watch my nephews(6 and 12 years old) play their games on Xbox. How else should I explain that? Those UI elements diminish the effects of team work and communicating on voice comms with your team. They cater to solo players and a much younger crowd. Red dots comes to mind... that's the system doing the communicating for you, giving lone wolves inflated situational awareness and diminishing the overall effectiveness of team work and voice commuications. Out of curiosity I'm wondering why you want to make this a personal issue. Agree to disagree, no need for chastising and berating me personally. I'd gladly step outside and settle any issues you have with me out in the street, unfortunately that's not a possibility. And I'm 45... not 18.
Ok fair enough, that is a little extreme. Then can you point me to the posts that answer the questions I asked? I genuinely want to see them answered because they are some major disadvantages for not using reddots and I want to know how you'd solve them. I'd just like to point out that Halo and CoD have clearly printed little tags that say M 15/17+. Those games aren't aimed at children, even if children play them, therefore the mechanics (like red dots) aren't there for children. So to say they are 'kiddie' is a little disingenuous. I'm just doing a little chasing because you seem to dodge answering any time your viewpoint is seriously challenged. Also whatever age you truly are doesn't matter, you go on about 'hardcore games' and not having 'kiddie' mechanics but then make the 'if this was irl i'd bash you' style of rebuttal (even if said in a more subtle way) says a lot about how mature you actually are. You may be 45, hell you could be 65, but you talk and act like someone who's 18 and that was what I was pointing out.
I usually dont feed the trolls. I'm still wondering why you insist on carrying on with the insults, and I'm wondering why the mods aren't taking action on your clearly inflammatory statements. I see no need to try to carry on a thoughtful discussion with you in lieu of the incessant low brow comments.
You made your opinion known and were quite vocal on why you think it is the better option. I responded with a few counter arguments and asked a few questions relating to how your system would work under some believable conditions. You have since dodged answering those questions and are trying to draw the discussion away from them. I'll ask them again... How does having enemies show up on the minimap reduce teamplay? What happens to players who don't have or don't want to use mics to comm with teammates? What happens when a squad is made of players who don't speak the same language? How many players constitutes a 'team' and how does this 'team' communicate effectively within a larger force? I admit that suggesting that you were an 18yro with maturity issues was not mature or wise on my part, but given how you responded to that..... it seems that I may have been more accurate than I initially realised.
