We have different concepts of fair fights. It’s hard for me to put my idea into words.
I don’t think you mean fairness, I think you mean equal teams, as in inhouse games with arranged teams.
Too bad, abuse has caused the devs to close down custom matches from progression; otherwise there might had been some culture evolving around that.
I was playing in a fairly good team in two tourneys. I always got matched against wings, except one time, where it was a premade wing of pugs, once we lost one match; So most of the wings actually fought each other; This whole system is a good concept, but of course it can be refined. But it will never meet both criteria, being competitive, and allowing everybody to win.
I also saw a lot of corporations, who are playing fairly well, are not that old, and gave a hard game, but lacked experience in how strong games can be played, usually ending in the “Guardball of Desperation” Move.
For someone who has run through fire and hell to get through T3, as in my time all major corps everyone whispers with caution and fear were still flying a lot of T3 actively, a lot less restricted, I can only say, the playing quality of the overall population has gone down down down since implementing “solo friendly restrictions and rules” or other measures to bring people out of T3 into higher tiers. Think about this. If you are not challenged, you cannot grow. If no one shows your team once in a while, how strong a good group can get, you will not improve.
This was really feelable with some younger corporations and their teams, as I mentioned. It’s okay, lack of experience. It’s not like I have played thousands of wing games either.
I don’t feel T3 is bad for veterans. In fact, T3 is better for veterans, since it does not boost their efficiency with winner-implants, or provide ships with almost no vulnerability. T3 or T4 are awesome for public competitive matches; T5 I am not sure what its really good for, except some 3yo corps who want competition, but still want to be on the winning side as long as possible, and keep it that way, even if they are only playing it every once in a while…
The problems imho are not in competition. Rather…
* The Teams wait 10 minutes together. Why not throw them in a common chat channel.
* Show the team composition, so teams can prepare, even if they dont know each other
* Allow ships to be changed and equipped until the last 1 minute timer (maybe a toggle ready, which gets toggled automatically)
Actually, overhaul the whole GUI through the entire hangar system. More transparency, aka more information. Easier ability to find other games, squads, see what is happening. Better preparation lobbies. Better group features. It is the nonplusultra weakpoint. I mean for god’s sake afaik “remove friend” is still in the group popup menu. For me this is a disaster in product design.
Take the player seriously, show him information about what is going on, even in a queue, and not with artistic animations and placeholders.
Better Lobby Software, at least something scalable, and more servers to handle all the players. For me this is particulary curious, since I am used to a single server handling more connections, than 2k, and this is my line of work.
It was really sad the prime time tournament (the last one) with almost 400 players had laggy games and disconnects.
But overall, great new feature. Really.
And I don’t think it will have the same fate as sweep. But well, let’s see.
