I do scenarios in less than 6 min. Doing tech 4’s right as I post this actually.
I do scenarios in less than 6 min. Doing tech 4’s right as I post this actually.
Scenarios put me to sleep in 5 min. Lvl 4 EVE missions were more fun than this crap, and those put me to sleep as well.
great thread…
My biggest probem isn’t the matchmaking. I don’t like the change, but my bigger issue is with the change in ship prices. It essentially means that I will not be able to play with my friends in tier 2 for weeks, becuase it will take them twice as long to buy a ship and put on the equipment they want. As this is supposed to be a primarily multiplayer game, its accessibility for at least the lower 3 tiers is very important to me so that I can get others to join me (I would think that the developers would want more people joining the game…)
Moreover, selling the useless equipment is not a solution, as equipment sells for only 10% of its purchase value. If we want an option to buy a ship with weapons, great! But let’s not _ force _ people to spend twice the money for equipment that most of us clearly don’t want.
The ‘hidden’ patch to matchmaking has improved things somewhat; tier 2 ships are playing much less of a role in my tier 1 games now (though they still show up, which annoys me).
I do agree, however, that the “crap tax” on ships is really frustrating. I have no use for Mk 1 gear.
The ‘hidden’ patch to matchmaking has improved things somewhat; tier 2 ships are playing much less of a role in my tier 1 games now (though they still show up, which annoys me).
I do agree, however, that the “crap tax” on ships is really frustrating. I have no use for Mk 1 gear.
this isn’t a “hidden” patch 
MM is adaptive to your skill and tech - it may be very wrong at start but getting better and better if you play more. If you are meeting an unfair matched team setups leave your screenshots and logs so devs will look at it and take some actions against if needed.
First off, I’d like to say that this thread is no place for rage. This isn’t a discussion about the recent patch, or how much you hate or love it. There are plenty of threads for that already. Seriously, go back to general discussion and throw a dart. You’ll hit at least three. Going back and reading all this, I realize it’s quite the wall of text. Please, just bear with me, and together we can change the game and the community as we know it.
Now, for what I really want to talk about: Mitigating outcry, and developing better community relations in general. Now, I don’t need to tell you that Gaijin had a bit of a PR mishap with this recent patch, not only in its implementation but in how the reaction was dealt with (ie. not at all). I’m sure I also don’t need to tell you that they could stand to improve a bit in that area as a whole.
Now, Gaijin. Let’s talk. Yes, I’m talking to you. See? I made a new paragraph and everything. That’s how you know this is going to be important. I know you’re falling back on the tried and true “wait it out” PR strategy at the moment, but that clearly isn’t currently working. It’s been more than a week since the patch and the rage is still erupting in full force from the volcano that is the current state of the community. I get that you’re a business. I understand that you have to make a profit. I fully realize that you debated the changes you made for hours, if not days or weeks, until you thought they were absolutely perfect, and that they suited your needs while having a minimal impact on the player. I know that right now you aren’t too keen on the idea of completely erasing this patch. After all, you put a lot of thought into this patch. You have a lot of time and effort staked in these changes. I haven’t met anybody who isn’t reluctant to just erase something they thought would be a good idea like that. It’s okay, you’re human. Also, I understand that breaking down completely, and forgetting this patch ever existed, might send the wrong message to your players. If you break down now, they might come to see you as weak, and themselves as entitled to anything they want. Then, there would be no end to the whining and raging. However , and this is a big however, there is no reason you can’t just come out and tell us any of this. There’s no reason why you can’t come out and say “Hey, we know you don’t like the patch, but here’s why we did it, and here’s why we don’t want to change it. Maybe if we all talk rationally, we can come up with a compromise that suits both of us.” This would be WORLDS better than the silent treatment you’re giving us now. All you need to do is talk to us. Make us understand your decisions. I guarentee, if you come down to our level and explain just why you feel have to do the things you do, you will get a lot more understanding from the community as a whole. Right now, most of the players see you only as a faceless company whose only interest is in money-grubbing. Change this. Make them see you as humans. This sort of conversation and explanation will only serve as a solid base for rational discussions of the monetization model, and how best to alter it so that everyone is happy. Please, please don’t assume that you instantly know better than us. If you talked to us once in a while, you might find that some of us have pretty good ideas.
Oh man, check out this new paragraph. What, you thought that was all I had to say? Nah man, that was only part one of three. Next, I want to talk to you guys. The players. The community. The people currently raging to no end in the general discussion. I know you guys, I’ve played with you guys, I’ve probably killed and been killed by more than a few of you. I share the sentiment that seems to pervade our ranks: The recent patch was subpar. However, I’m not going to discuss why. Remember my disclaimer, all the way up there at the top? Yeah, there are other threads for that. Rather, I’d like to talk about your reaction to it, and how it could potentially hamstring the game. Rage can be useful in shocking a developer into action, but it only works up until a point. While rage is useful for shock, it has little to no value beyond that. It isn’t constructive. It doesn’t give ideas or offer solutions. All it does it scream at people that they’re doing something wrong, without telling them what. Although you may include actual contructive ideas within your rage posts, since the text is overall negative and confrontational, anyone reading it that disagrees with it (eg. Gaijin) will be turned off by it, and will not want to accept the ideas within. If we go on like this, Gaijin might come to see us as nothing more than entitled, whiny, little kids who will throw a tantrum at the first thing that doesn’t go their way. This is not how we are. At least, not most of the time. However, more than changing their perception of us, this constant rage might instill them with a sense of learned helplessness. Allow me to hit you with a bit of Psychology: Whenever an animal is subjected to constant negative stimuli and their attempts to avoid said stimuli are met with nothing but futility, they will simply give up and accept their fate. For example, if you restrain a dog or a rat, and then repeatedly give it electric shocks, at first it will struggle and try to get away, but after a while of having it’s attempts at escape blocked by the restraints, it will simply give up and take the shocks passively. This is learned helplessness. Now, if you’ll recall before this patch dropped, a lot of people were up in arms about the premium squad limit. I know I sure was. Heck, before this patch, I saw that as the only barrier between me now, and me having at least twice as much fun with this game. Gaijin saw all this, and they thought they could make us happy by removing that limit. unfortunately, all the other stuff they included resulted in unbridled rage hitting them like a freight train, not the thanks they expected. I don’t think I’ve seen a single post thanking Gaijin for the unrestricted squads that wasn’t , on the whole, negative and filled with rage. This is how learned helplessness starts. They try to help us, but instead we throw rage back at them, rather than calm discussion and alternatives. Given time and repetition of this trend, Gaijin could very well give up entirely on trying to please us.
Wow, that paragraph was even bigger. Alright, here we go, one last paragraph. It’ll be short, I promise… kinda. This one’s to you, Error. Yes, the mod on these forums. The one I always see in every thread, either locking them or providing answers. This post needs to be read. These words need to be heard. I’m begging you, please make sure any Gaijin employees possible read this. If things work out like I envision them, we can save not only the community, but this entire game. Imagine what good we can do if the players and the devs work hand in hand, step by step through the process, creating compromises and promoting understanding and growth as humans. We can work immense good, but only if these words get read, only if these words are seen, only if they’re spread to everyone they can be, everyone that can make a difference and provide support. Thank you in advance.
And thank you, reader. This post may not have been the easiest to get through, but I hope you know I’m grateful to you for slogging through it. Though this whole post may be futile and utterly idealistic and naive in reality, there’s nothing stopping us from at least trying to make it happen.
So many paragraphs man…
Signed.
For SC continues to live, they need to encourage the use of real money,
The need pay salary For developers and servers.
But the game is a litle expensive … for something that still has a long way for develop.
The change with this Patch was very abrupt… small steps friends
I Think the online players, Drop very fast now… I think…
takes 5 minutes+ to get into a middle T3 battle , gg Gaijin well played
exactly how i feel bro, +1
I think it’s great that you were able to be so eloquent and polite about all of this matter currently at hand; however I think it’s in some way falling in deaf ears
While I’m a rather new member to the game in comparison to those that have been playing it for months before it hit Steam, a time when perhaps the developers might have given more face and taken in the input properly, right now from where I’m standing all that I see is one person that’s essentially doing the role of a spokesperson between us and the developers, or maybe more so from the developers to us; while we get no confirmation if we are being heard or not over given matters. Having a face that would step forward and confront the situation that’s clearly been set into place and tell if things are going left or right would be nice, but unfortunately it seems that either there is shame in doing that, or an absolute amount of stubbornness involved and the people behind this game are just like “Damn all this; we gave you all this, now we wanted to have this our way because this is how we envisioned our game, you aren’t going to take it away!”. Or at least I’d like to think it’s something like that rather than expecting that this is their motivation for us to buy a license or something. Currently though, the way I see it, they aren’t really caring much in either rectifying the situation or telling us this is how it will be, and as far as I’m concerned this isn’t a matter if it’ll show them as weak or thick-skulled, but mostly shows how rude these people who are trying to sell us a product and keep change it don’t even want to come forward and explain the reasoning behind such things and come to a consensus if it’s good or bad.
Hopefully a bright point on that matter, there was a poll in game today asking what were the most important things for a player between Rep, loyalty, experience and credits; may be related to this, but if they are just going to buff those values that only fixes part of the problem at hand.
I’ll also point out I don’t really believe much in the theory that you exposed concerning negative critique, lack of constructive critique, shocked dogs etcetera.
First of all, I’ll say that I do believe that a negative critique can be a good wake up slap and that ensuing constructive critique can be an excellent help to put people into work in what might be the right direction, which looking at the amount of people complaining and coming to similar conclusions probably would be. There certainly were enough slaps to the point that the devs’ faces are probably plump tomatos by now, but despite the constructive criticism - Because it is out there, N times, explained by more or less words but a number of people said similar ideas and the why were good ideas and other people agreed upon this - There was no response so far. No rollback on the update, no direct reply from devs to the matter, no nothing, and this is where the practical point you made comes into play: The devs are not dogs. They don’t act on a basic instinct, they don’t have to just lay there, but they certainly didn’t try to struggle against the shocks if you want to keep the same example. These are reasoning capable people who did not brought themselves forward over the matter, they were passive from the get go, and we are left to guess what they think, plan and want.
I’ll also say that the fact they threw in larger squads for free is of little to no counter balance for me. I may occasionally play with one friend, but that’s about it; and I’m aware that there are people out there who are much more social than that so it might be a treat for them, but as far as I’m concerned that isn’t an appeasement to me and they should instead work around this to actually try and make money. For example, every 5 days you get 100 star credits, or whatever it’s called – Why not have the license be split in several different parts with varying costs, one of these being the squad size boost which could take a portion of those 100 credits, leaving less credits to get an actual full license or other goodies, while at the same time providing other player different ways to use those credits, or even those who do purchase credits have the opportunity of focusing the resources where they really want.
But that last bit is just an aside that I don’t expect to even be remotely considered, much more when some people are far too happy with that little change.
I am well aware that this is most likely falling on deaf ears, but I do honestly enjoy this game, and I’ll be damned if it dies while I still had ideas I could have expressed about it.
I wasn’t here before Steam either, but even from the day it was put there, the only dev contact I’ve seen was in patch notes and a single ages-old Q&A page. It really is a shame the devs don’t make themselves more known on an individual basis. Once a community gets to know a group of devs as people, along with their personalities and such, the community-dev relationship becomes markedly nicer. I’ve seen this before in a group of games I used to enjoy produced by a company called Artix Entertainment. Nearly every day, they post design notes and updates on what’s going on with the game and where it’s headed, along with the occasional humorous office story or con announcement. To this day, I have not found a single game community nicer and more accepting than some of the AE games.
Although, now that I think about it, this lack of contact from the devs could be due largely in part to a language barrier. I doubt they are completely comfortable speaking english, even if they are perfectly capable of it. Even if they could have someone perfectly translate their words to English, they still probably wouldn’t feel comfortable reading all the English responses to their message, thus weakening the dev-community bond a little more. Or, again, maybe we haven’t heard from them because they’re in perpetual “wait it out” mode, eternally trying to gauge whether our reactions are just knee-jerk whines or legitimate complaints. In that case, the only thing we can do is persist. This is sort of what happened during the whole ME3 ending debacle. The players made a big stink at first, and Bioware did nothing. They tried to wait it out, but the players didn’t give up. They pushed and pushed until they finally got what they wanted.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on the benefit or harm of the community’s reaction, but I think you might be surprised at just how similar humans are to animals in relation to psychology. For example, learned helplessness is very common amongst deliquent students, who have given up in school because they can’t seem to pass a test no matter how hard they try. In my example, “struggling against the shocks” was the squad concession. They tried to please the community, but got nothing but continued backlash in return, albeit to a different set of problems. If the forum is filled with rage after every patch, no matter what concessions Gaijin believe they’re making, I fear they will give up all hope on us.
That license split idea does seem interesting, but it would be somewhat difficult to convey what was meant by it to those not viewing your suggestion. Most would see it as an unnecessary drain on their gold. Of course, if the devs bothered to contact us more and explain their actions, in the patch notes if anything, then this wouldn’t be a problem at all. Aside from that, that system also seems to have the benefit of encouraging players to log in constantly, so tthey can collect their gold and thus split it for a license. Although I’m sure most people would prefer the current system for squads, this might acheive the same thing while also netting the devs slightly more income.
tl;dr (for the casual observer):
devs pls talk to us. Tell us your ways.
TL;DR?
Stands for “Too Long; Didn’t Read.” Usually used as a way of summarizing long posts, which, as you can see, there are quite a few of here.
this isn’t a “hidden” patch
Then the fact that i get pitted against T3 and T4 ships in my T2 setups meens i’m a good player? Damn…
waiting for tl;dr…
tl;dr (for the casual observer):
devs pls talk to us. Tell us your ways.
If you want something a little more expanded, we want the devs to actually explain the reasons for the changes they make, and in general stay in contact with the community a lot more than they currently do so. This should lead to the community and the devs working together to find compromises that both fulfill Gaijin’s needs as a company, and our desires as players.
Or, you know, you can actually read it all and come up with your own response.
Then the fact that i get pitted against T3 and T4 ships in my T2 setups meens i’m a good player? Damn…
Take it as it is. Honour to whom honour is due 
(…)It’s been more than a week since the patch(…)
Nope. I hear patches here tend to come on thusdays, and it’s only six days since the last one. If no change happens in like… 15 more days, I’ll feel with you. Now I just call you impatient. Changes have to be tested beyond the initial outcry, and the next version has to be made too.
By the way, I still like the new MM. Hope the cred/loyalty income gets a buff, but I could live without it.
*wonders if anyone else will read paragraphs that long. it’s the interwebz*