Centralized Win/Loss Record Stat
1, 2
posted on November 28th, 2009, 11:12 pm
If you wanted, yandonman, you could try and setup an FO tournament similar to Eufnoc's. You could even record the games and post the scores. Then it would be like watching a play off season or something! You could set up 1v1 eliminations and even some team matches where people pick team mates and enter together. Those who do want to play competitively are more likely to join something like that. There could be a tournament once every 2-3 months or something. You could post the rules of what is fair/not fair to use in these tournaments, figure all that stuff out before hand and get some ideas from the community, then host the thing. Might not be a bad idea at all. 
posted on November 29th, 2009, 3:49 am
posted on November 29th, 2009, 4:53 am
posted on November 29th, 2009, 4:50 pm
posted on December 2nd, 2009, 6:19 pm
posted on December 2nd, 2009, 6:24 pm
posted on December 2nd, 2009, 6:28 pm
Hmm...what's to keep someone from signing up with a different account that's on their laptop and winning a bunch of times that way? I'd much rather see this kind of thing in a tournament. Overall, I just can't see records like this ever being useful except to foster elitism. 
posted on December 2nd, 2009, 9:12 pm
posted on December 3rd, 2009, 6:37 am
posted on December 3rd, 2009, 9:04 am
I wouldn't worry about discrediting anyone's concerns. New ideas and healthy discussion/debate are always good things. 
As far as balancing goes, it's rare that I don't know who's where on the totem poll, and if it's someone new, I usually ask them. Plus one quick game will tell you where they are, and you can get the balancing right the next time. Also, if the record is opt-outable, then you still don't know how to balance the game because half your players (and likely more) won't be a part of the ranking system. So you're back to square one. The players who probably won't mind having their win/loss ratio shown or recorded are probably the players whose ability is already known.
As far as your points on competitive play, I completely agree! I just don't think that a win/loss record is going to create this kind of competition. Those reasons have already been stated, but I'll add a few more. One, our online community isn't large enough. Like Rhaz's call of duty example, you don't look at their name, but their rank, because there's millions playing the game. We're more like the show Cheers "where everybody knows your name" or a small town, where everybody knows everybody. If there were thousands of FO players online, than a ranking system would make more sense. But until then, it wouldn't serve a purpose.
Clans are another way to organize larger groups into smaller ones and get a sense of community, but FO has had history with clans being really dumb. I wasn't there for all that, but look at HFG, the only "active" FO clan left. Yeah, they're real mature.
The other thing I've found is that people are either going to play competitively or they won't. There's not a lot you can do to as an incentive to make them want to play better. The age range for those who play FO is something like 16-30, and there are a lot of different mentalities. Those who play competitively are probably not going to complain if one aspect of the game is hard, like trying to deal with long ranged units. Every race can counter them, and a resilient player is going to be asking himself how he can overcome a certain disadvantage, and grow from the experience. Others are just going to whine about it. Or complain that the feds are underpowered, or what have you. So some people will advance and others will stay where they are skill wise. Some are casual players that don't have the time or aren't interested in investing the time to be competitive.
With that said, let's look at your four points on competitive play.
Absolutely! In fact your game recordings have helped a lot, especially if we could find ways to link them or put them on different modding sites or something. But anytime someone searches FO on you tube, they'll see some games and be impressed. More of this is always good.
Definitely. Especially someone new, who knows he'll be good soon, can make a name for himself. But this has a two-fold problem. One, as I stated before, is the pond is too small right now. That new player who is really competitive doesn't have a lot of competition right now. Right now there are only 3 "top" players. Really? Only 3?! There should be at least 10-20 "top" players. Again, maybe then, a ranking system would be novel. But right now, I feel it would only serve to rub those who aren't as good the wrong way. Secondly, this would more than likely backfire. It could lead to an elitist culture where people can be petty and point to their ranking and belittle people. I've seen that sort of thing before. 
Now while I admit that it gives me a great big stiffy to be mentioned in sentences like "Don't play against Dom, Mort, or Mal because they'll beat you into next Tuesday!", even that kind of talk bothers me a little, because we're all just regular guys trying to have fun and play a good game. Who knows, maybe I'm not a regular guy, maybe I'm a big jerk,
but most in the community are willing to help newer players out and teach them the trade. I was welcomed when I first joined and that's how I want to welcome others.
As far as doing things that interest competitive players, I want to persuade you again to think about tournaments. Promoted right, this is the kind of thing would appeal very much to the kind of players you mentioned. You could IM Optec and set it up that the winners of the competition get to play the developers. Or Zeich emails the winner a signed image of the Miranda II that you can put as the wallpaper of your desktop. The dev game has been done before, and I love the Miranda II, so that would be a very cool prize and Zeich might not mind being a celebrity. I'm sure the devs would be willing to work something out like that to help promote FO. I think this is a better outlet for competition than just a stat on a wall somewhere. Think about it. 
This is how the guide gets created. A lot of the games are played between Dominus and myself, or Dominus and Mort, and then Dom compiles everything into the guide. There's also tons of names of others who have contributed in some way, and Zebh made the website and wrote the map editor guide and other stuff. But most of the strategy comes from only a few players, and then everyone copies it, because they either don't know how or don't want to come up with strategies on their own. Or their strategies just aren't as good. There's some people who show promise in the strat departement, hopefully in the next patch they'll step up and it won't be just a few coming up with everything. The wiki section that will be added to the guide will let anyone add their strategy, as I understand it. And by all means, work on a strategy of your own. How many months has the patch been out, and I just now stumbled onto the Early Warbird strat? So Dom and I don't think of everything right away. 
Similar to the above. Scubes and probes are pretty much useless, so everyone stopped playing Borg Optimize. But after 3 weeks and 70 1v1 games later, we came up with a perfected Borg strategy that is very effective. Hopefully the patch will fix that too, because it's not fun to play as or against Borg right now. For the most part, exploits are found in a timely fashion.
Ultimately, you're interested in increasing not only the number of players we have, but also the quality of players, as well. I am all for that.
I'm tired of only feeling challenged by 2 other people. That's part of why I did my poll on people who don't play online. I want to see some new blood. It's just that I don't believe that rankings will help at all. But Youtube promotions, organized competitions, and things like it will achieve what we're both looking for, I believe.
As far as balancing goes, it's rare that I don't know who's where on the totem poll, and if it's someone new, I usually ask them. Plus one quick game will tell you where they are, and you can get the balancing right the next time. Also, if the record is opt-outable, then you still don't know how to balance the game because half your players (and likely more) won't be a part of the ranking system. So you're back to square one. The players who probably won't mind having their win/loss ratio shown or recorded are probably the players whose ability is already known.
As far as your points on competitive play, I completely agree! I just don't think that a win/loss record is going to create this kind of competition. Those reasons have already been stated, but I'll add a few more. One, our online community isn't large enough. Like Rhaz's call of duty example, you don't look at their name, but their rank, because there's millions playing the game. We're more like the show Cheers "where everybody knows your name"
or a small town, where everybody knows everybody. If there were thousands of FO players online, than a ranking system would make more sense. But until then, it wouldn't serve a purpose. Clans are another way to organize larger groups into smaller ones and get a sense of community, but FO has had history with clans being really dumb. I wasn't there for all that, but look at HFG, the only "active" FO clan left. Yeah, they're real mature.
The other thing I've found is that people are either going to play competitively or they won't. There's not a lot you can do to as an incentive to make them want to play better. The age range for those who play FO is something like 16-30, and there are a lot of different mentalities. Those who play competitively are probably not going to complain if one aspect of the game is hard, like trying to deal with long ranged units. Every race can counter them, and a resilient player is going to be asking himself how he can overcome a certain disadvantage, and grow from the experience. Others are just going to whine about it. Or complain that the feds are underpowered, or what have you. So some people will advance and others will stay where they are skill wise. Some are casual players that don't have the time or aren't interested in investing the time to be competitive.
With that said, let's look at your four points on competitive play.
competitive games can be fun to watch and would make for good advertisement for FO as such.
Absolutely! In fact your game recordings have helped a lot, especially if we could find ways to link them or put them on different modding sites or something. But anytime someone searches FO on you tube, they'll see some games and be impressed. More of this is always good.
some players enjoy the competitiveness and would be attracted to the game more with the feature
Definitely. Especially someone new, who knows he'll be good soon, can make a name for himself. But this has a two-fold problem. One, as I stated before, is the pond is too small right now. That new player who is really competitive doesn't have a lot of competition right now. Right now there are only 3 "top" players. Really? Only 3?!
There should be at least 10-20 "top" players. Again, maybe then, a ranking system would be novel. But right now, I feel it would only serve to rub those who aren't as good the wrong way. Secondly, this would more than likely backfire. It could lead to an elitist culture where people can be petty and point to their ranking and belittle people. I've seen that sort of thing before. Now while I admit that it gives me a great big stiffy to be mentioned in sentences like "Don't play against Dom, Mort, or Mal because they'll beat you into next Tuesday!", even that kind of talk bothers me a little, because we're all just regular guys trying to have fun and play a good game. Who knows, maybe I'm not a regular guy, maybe I'm a big jerk,
but most in the community are willing to help newer players out and teach them the trade. I was welcomed when I first joined and that's how I want to welcome others. As far as doing things that interest competitive players, I want to persuade you again to think about tournaments. Promoted right, this is the kind of thing would appeal very much to the kind of players you mentioned. You could IM Optec and set it up that the winners of the competition get to play the developers. Or Zeich emails the winner a signed image of the Miranda II that you can put as the wallpaper of your desktop.
The dev game has been done before, and I love the Miranda II, so that would be a very cool prize and Zeich might not mind being a celebrity. I'm sure the devs would be willing to work something out like that to help promote FO. I think this is a better outlet for competition than just a stat on a wall somewhere. Think about it. competitive play can force new strategies to be created
This is how the guide gets created.
A lot of the games are played between Dominus and myself, or Dominus and Mort, and then Dom compiles everything into the guide. There's also tons of names of others who have contributed in some way, and Zebh made the website and wrote the map editor guide and other stuff. But most of the strategy comes from only a few players, and then everyone copies it, because they either don't know how or don't want to come up with strategies on their own. Or their strategies just aren't as good. There's some people who show promise in the strat departement, hopefully in the next patch they'll step up and it won't be just a few coming up with everything. The wiki section that will be added to the guide will let anyone add their strategy, as I understand it. And by all means, work on a strategy of your own. How many months has the patch been out, and I just now stumbled onto the Early Warbird strat? So Dom and I don't think of everything right away. competitive play can expose imbalances/exploits within the game (when, if fixed, can lead to a better game)
Similar to the above. Scubes and probes are pretty much useless, so everyone stopped playing Borg Optimize. But after 3 weeks and 70 1v1 games later, we came up with a perfected Borg strategy that is very effective. Hopefully the patch will fix that too, because it's not fun to play as or against Borg right now. For the most part, exploits are found in a timely fashion.
Ultimately, you're interested in increasing not only the number of players we have, but also the quality of players, as well. I am all for that.
I'm tired of only feeling challenged by 2 other people. That's part of why I did my poll on people who don't play online. I want to see some new blood. It's just that I don't believe that rankings will help at all. But Youtube promotions, organized competitions, and things like it will achieve what we're both looking for, I believe.posted on December 3rd, 2009, 6:51 pm
lol.
I'd be a fool to try and quote that.
Hear, hear, Mal. Hear, hear. I dig the rational behind no competetive ranking. I have, myself, been teaming with new guys as of late (as there are sooooo many more all of a sudden) in order to help them get a crash course in team play online.
Also we've had so many instances lately of people getting d/c at random during team games that really any record being kept would be marred.
I'd be a fool to try and quote that.
Hear, hear, Mal. Hear, hear. I dig the rational behind no competetive ranking. I have, myself, been teaming with new guys as of late (as there are sooooo many more all of a sudden
) in order to help them get a crash course in team play online.Also we've had so many instances lately of people getting d/c at random during team games that really any record being kept would be marred.
posted on December 3rd, 2009, 11:16 pm
posted on December 4th, 2009, 7:54 am
Sort of like a beginner's tournament, an intermediate tournament, and a "leet operations" tournament. 
That sounds good. And yes, I have been waiting for months to use that phrase in a sentence.
That sounds good. And yes, I have been waiting for months to use that phrase in a sentence. 1, 2
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