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Vrain Matari
Mikramurka Shock Troop
Minmatar Republic
1509
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Posted - 2014.02.01 18:26:00 -
[1] - Quote
I agree with your OP KingBabar.
I think CCP has made two errors with the way they dispense match rewards.
Error number one is merely fundamental: ISK payouts. Simply put, there should be an ISK reward for the win, and it should be big enough to matter to peeps.
Error number two, however, is flat-out poisonous: Passive time-based in-match sp rewards. This mechanic sends a message to every single player that the game does not walk the New Eden talk. After a few matches, whether they understand the sp mechanics or not, players realize that their effort or lack of it does not really matter very much in terms of skillpoints paid out for a match. It's a particularly crushing realization for new players, and i believe it sucks the romance right out of the space opera.
That realization, when it comes, destroys any credibility DUST might have in the mind of a player. It's a message that speaks to the core of the gaming experience and what it tells peeps is that CCP does not respect them as hard-ass immortal mercenary soldiers, but rather sees players as rather delicate creatures that need to be taken care of and have their egos stroked by the game mechanics because they can't handle New Eden as it is.
Some peeps are able to recognize, analyze and dissect these sp payout mechanics almost immediately, some peeps only sense the problem intuitively and 'smell' that the situation is somehow distasteful, but i contend that it deeply effects every single player and sets the 'moral tone' for mercenary soldiers in New Eden. Hence my use of the word 'poisonous'.
Somebody at CCP thinks that these things don't matter or that peeps don't notice, i say that in the long run it is a primary limiting factor on the quality of the merc experience, the size of the playerbase and bears directly on the survival of DUST in the New Eden universe.
What can be done? First and foremost somebody at CCP needs to champion the players and realize that peeps are up to the challenge of living and dying and earning a buck in New Eden. And also to do something about the nanny-state interventions that CCP is perpetrating on the players.
Once the will is there it's not hard at all to improve the situation. There are so many solid suggestions on these forums, all of which have been read and discussed by CCP on multiple occasions.
My personal choice for things done right would be to remove the sp dole and replace it with differential WP rewards - noob taking down 40 million sp vet running full proto should be damn well rewarded for it, that same vet should get fractional payouts for harvesting that same noob. But what we should all be rewarded handsomely for is the win.
I support SP rollover.
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Vrain Matari
Mikramurka Shock Troop
Minmatar Republic
1515
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Posted - 2014.02.01 23:58:00 -
[2] - Quote
Well peeps, there's a lot of good content in this thread as well as a lot of frustration. Solving the multiple problems we're talking about here won't be easy because there are multiple flawed or failed game systems/mechanics that are feeding directly into these problems.
But a fundamental starting point for the conversation has to be that we stop blaming players. Regardless of actions or squads or protogear, players are not, cannot be the problem. Responsibility for these problems lies with the game mechanics, and responsibility for the game mechanics belongs 100% to the DUST dev team and CCP as a whole.
It would be a tough design problem for any developer, there are problems inherent in setting an FPS in New Eden that no developer on the planet has faced before. I'm going to try and rank these in terms of importance:
- DUST is an FPS where differences in personal player skill are magnified by MMO skills. We can expect that this will be a very delicate balancing act, but I think we've already go enough evidence to know that it could be made to work. CCP got the most important thing right here: skills give linear benefits but have geometric costs.
- DUST is(or will be) both an arcadey lobby shooter(it pretty much has to be to get new players into the game) and simultaneously an ultra-hardcore resource-driven geopolitical economic and military simulator. At the moment we have both these groups crammed together in pub matches - It's really just a pit with rabid genetically engineered war-dogs thrown in with a flock of hand-fed spring lambs and just as ugly as you would expect that to be. This is due to several factors: multiple failed game modes, missing content and flawed mechanics.
- DUST is an economic simulator, which is a great long-term strength but also serves to magnify the frustrations generated in players by points 1 & 2 listed above.
- DUST is a combined-arms game. The synergies available to teams willing to think and experiment are tremendous. How do we allow player creativity and teamwork and simultaneously maintain good gameplay for all concerned? Another tough problem.
- As much as peeps call DUST a generic FPS, it has a lot of game-specific knowledge that is essential for a new player to survive and prosper. How do we get peeps who are coming in out of very different gaming cultures to stick it out long enough that there is enough time to get some New Eden education into them?
There's more, but that's enough. It's a hard problem for the playerbase, it's a hard problem for CCP. It's fitting the sandbox into a lobby shooter. It's a hard problem for anybody or any developer.
Where does the solution look like? Nobody knows yet. But i do think i know how it starts.
For us, the players, we have to stop blaming each other for destructive mechanics that CCP has designed and is intentionally leaving in the game.
For CCP it involves our new EP, CCP Rouge, forcibly extracting CCP's head from it's arse. That can't be an easy job and i'm sure that by now he's into it elbows-deep and has feet firmly planted on fleshy corporate buttocks. I just hope to god somebody high up in head office is in there pulling with him.
I support SP rollover.
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