What skills should be emphasized?

Request new features or present your ideas.
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kharnov
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What skills should be emphasized?

Post by kharnov »

What skills should be emphasized (e.g. dexterity, teamwork, strategy)?

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Viech
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Re: What skills should be emphasized?

Post by Viech »

Teamwork and strategy should be important, but not so important that public games would suffer.

Dexterity is tricky: Aiming (humans) and movement (aliens) should be of about equal importance so that skill is comparable ("I was defeated because my enemy was better" instead of "I was defeated by a weaker enemy because the game is imbalanced"). Quake and CS are popular because, among other reasons, they are highly competitive even in public games. A better player will nearly always have a better score no matter what team he or she is on.

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janev
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Re: What skills should be emphasized?

Post by janev »

Skilled players (dexterity and strategy) should be rewarded. Skilled teams that play well together (teamwork and strategy) should be rewarded more. Strategy should be important regardless. If one guy can pull off the strategy better than a team thats fine. However one man can't be everywhere at once and that should reflect the outcome.

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kharnov
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Re: What skills should be emphasized?

Post by kharnov »

I feel that teamwork and strategy should be emphasized a little more than dexterity. If you think about it, dexterity on its own focuses more on individual play. After all, why would you want to go around with your teammates when you have much better aim than them? Ideally, you'd have groups of players that formulate strategies together and all have good aim, but that's the optimistic situation and will never happen. Players can learn aiming and gain dexterity on their own, but the game design itself needs to emphasize teamwork and strategy, as I've said. Otherwise, you'll just get people rushing alone and being very miserable about it until they finally learn the hard way several months or years down the line, and by that point you probably lose the player. You need to have incentives for leaving the base together, perhaps working in conjunctions with disincentives to working alone.

I think that our recent work on voip and the existing implementation of vsays should help somewhat with teamwork. The latter, of course, needs a better interface. Urban Terror has a good example of how to handle vsays.

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seana11
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Re: What skills should be emphasized?

Post by seana11 »

Actually, urban terror has kindof hard to use vsays. I end up just memorizing the one for medic and I don't use anything else. It just takes too long to find what I need in combat. A better way of doing it would be to have less vsays, and maybe have multiple keys for them (kindof like how tf2 does it). I just can't be bothered to memorize all the key combinations for 90 vsays.

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KenuR
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Re: What skills should be emphasized?

Post by KenuR »

I think we should really move in a new direction and emphasize on seduction. I'm sick and tired of not being able to have sexual intercourse with a granger just because my armor isn't revealing enough.

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seana11
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Re: What skills should be emphasized?

Post by seana11 »

I think that a lot of this should be seperated into dm and metagame skills. In tf2, for example, dming is fairly long (fights average 10 seconds), and most of the focus is on consistant aim and dodging. The metagame is nonexistant in pub play, however it is really important in competetive play where everyone is on the mic. Knowing when to push and when to hold is essential, and although dm is important, it doesn'ty matter if you don't push at the right time.

In contrast, there are games like counter strike where dm is generally short (3 seconds average), and the focus is on detection and consistant aim. Firing the first shot in CS is very important, while in tf2 it doesn't matter as much. From what I have seen (I have never played CS competetively), denial of information (by smoke and flash grenades) is very important to winning a match. As long as a team has good dm, lays good screens, and has average gamesense, they will win matches. In tf2, everyone knows aproximately where everyone is, and most information is known by the enemy team (Uber %, number of players up...). The emphasis is much more on gamesense and predicting what the other team will do next based on what they are doing now.

I personally like the tf2 approach, where the you know what the other team is doing, and vice versa. This allows for much more of a strategic element because the teams are trying to predict the other team's next move. At the moment, Uv is leaning towards the tf2 side of things. Fights tend to be average (5-10 seconds) and teams generally know what the other team is doing. There is still information hiding (the aliens rely a ton on stealth, and moving bases/constructing forwards tends to be kept hidden for as long as possible), but it is to a lesser extent. I think this is a nice balance, but it could be tweaked. Atm, it is hard to id where people are moving bases in pub games. I suggest something to mark the location of alien* structures, like what freem suggested. This would allow more strategy since all team members would know of an alien base as soon as it was discovered. The minimap is a good start to this. It allows for more communication, but things still need to be marked, such as things on the radar. The vsays also need to be improved so that they are more useful. Location is really the key if you want good coms. Anyway, I like the direction, but it still really needs work.

*This section is written from a human pov. All suggestions apply to aliens as well.

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ViruS
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Re: What skills should be emphasized?

Post by ViruS »

In tf2, everyone knows aproximately where everyone is, and most information is known by the enemy team (Uber %, number of players up...)... where the you know what the other team is doing

err what? From what I've noticed, this never applied to any of my games. In fact, I didn't know what the hell my team was doing, unless they actually did something like use the chat terminal, or used voice chat. I turned off my voice chat because I mainly only hear 12-year old ragers.
Also, I never knew any feature such as being able to know the enemy's ubercharge level. AFAIK the only information given by the enemy is the location of the intels (if not taken) (CTF) and teamchat if you're a spy.

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seana11
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Re: What skills should be emphasized?

Post by seana11 »

ViruS wrote:

err what? From what I've noticed, this never applied to any of my games. In fact, I didn't know what the hell my team was doing, unless they actually did something like use the chat terminal, or used voice chat. I turned off my voice chat because I mainly only hear 12-year old ragers.
Also, I never knew any feature such as being able to know the enemy's ubercharge level. AFAIK the only information given by the enemy is the location of the intels (if not taken) (CTF) and teamchat if you're a spy.

I'm talking about competetive here. It's a very different game than casual tf2 because everyone is in constant communication. For ubercharge levels, it is well known what rates the ubercharge fills at, and given the spawn times of all players, counting the enemy uber is a skill people pick up. For example, I know that 10 seconds equals 25% uber. So if the other med dies 10 seconds after I do, then I will have a 25% advantage. Also: greyed out players on the scoreboard indicate that they are dead.

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seana11
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Re: What skills should be emphasized?

Post by seana11 »

I'd like a game that can be playe as an e-sport fairly well, but also played in pubs. Tf2 mostly does this right (a good medic is very op in pubs). It is still hard to topscore if your team sucks, though...

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