The toxicity element was certainly one of our considerations when assessing methods of communication in our game but we also understand we need to facilitate some level of communication between players. In a future phase, we plan to have a system of emotes in our game that will hopefully assist in giving players ways to express themselves in a number of ways during matches.
here's what I think about that:
🤐🤐🤖⚔️🚁🤐🤐 😈💰💰💰👿 ♆𖤐♆ 💥🔥🌍🔥☠️☠️☠️
Pretty sure there's plenty of online games taking that approach. Warcraft Rumble if you're looking for a Blizzard one for the sake of adjacency. I don't think the lack of in-game chat is going to stop anybody from enjoying the game.
I think muting your opponent is a decent option too, but that doesn't stop them from first abusing you.
On July 11 2024 10:49 Agh wrote: The coddling really never ends. What a time to be alive.
I mean I do also blame the ‘it’s the internet so I’ll be obnoxious as possible because I have no impulse control’ crowd
Still a fucking daft call. Just make it elective if you wanna global mute or not, and a ‘your opponent does not have chat enabled’ alert so people aren’t talking into the void unknowingly.
It’s such an easy thing to do that broadly satisfies everyone.
it does not. the nano second my wife or her sister voice on an FPS game many guys start yappin. voice chat creates a situation where women essentially can not utilize the same features as men.
perhaps something like Nintendo Online would be good... or the non-voice in-game communication tools like in Helldivers2 might be good.
The toxicity element was certainly one of our considerations when assessing methods of communication in our game but we also understand we need to facilitate some level of communication between players. In a future phase, we plan to have a system of emotes in our game that will hopefully assist in giving players ways to express themselves in a number of ways during matches.
here's what I think about that:
🤐🤐🤖⚔️🚁🤐🤐 😈💰💰💰👿 ♆𖤐♆ 💥🔥🌍🔥☠️☠️☠️
I chuckled tbh
Though yeah fuck people being able to talk to me in games. If I have a good experience w someone in dota or something I'll message them, but dota I'm quick on the mute button, League I've got everything fullmuted immediately and I don't exactly miss getting hate in SC2. I can't think of any competitive game I play atm that does have basically any chat enabled.
It's not like I have thin skin or need to be protected or anything, I just don't see the upside to some rando being able to tell me to kill myself
On July 11 2024 10:49 Agh wrote: The coddling really never ends. What a time to be alive.
I mean I do also blame the ‘it’s the internet so I’ll be obnoxious as possible because I have no impulse control’ crowd
Still a fucking daft call. Just make it elective if you wanna global mute or not, and a ‘your opponent does not have chat enabled’ alert so people aren’t talking into the void unknowingly.
It’s such an easy thing to do that broadly satisfies everyone.
it does not. the nano second my wife or her sister voice on an FPS game many guys start yappin. voice chat creates a situation where women essentially can not utilize the same features as men.
perhaps something like Nintendo Online would be good... or the non-voice in-game communication tools like in Helldivers2 might be good.
i prefer no voice chat of any kind.
But then I’m not having a good time. Although often I don’t. I have made long-term friendships that persist to this day from gaming encounters. I like the experience of getting a bit of feedback and personality, that I’m playing against another living human.
Giving users options in this area isn’t going to 100% satisfy 100% of people, but it’ll come much closer than this move does.
I agree entirely with your point re women online, 100% but that’s a wider cultural problem, and one that we should have made much more progress on in the gaming space over the years.
I find it depressing and pretty pathetic that things are still largely as they were when I was a teenager, and that’s literally half my lifetime ago at this stage.
On July 11 2024 08:26 MegaBuster wrote: they did an AMA
I thought this response was interesting on the topic of 'will you allow people to speak to other people'
Muzzlemaster General at Uncapped Games
The toxicity element was certainly one of our considerations when assessing methods of communication in our game but we also understand we need to facilitate some level of communication between players. In a future phase, we plan to have a system of emotes in our game that will hopefully assist in giving players ways to express themselves in a number of ways during matches.
here's what I think about that:
🤐🤐🤖⚔️🚁🤐🤐 😈💰💰💰👿 ♆𖤐♆ 💥🔥🌍🔥☠️☠️☠️
I chuckled tbh
Though yeah fuck people being able to talk to me in games. If I have a good experience w someone in dota or something I'll message them, but dota I'm quick on the mute button, League I've got everything fullmuted immediately and I don't exactly miss getting hate in SC2. I can't think of any competitive game I play atm that does have basically any chat enabled.
It's not like I have thin skin or need to be protected or anything, I just don't see the upside to some rando being able to tell me to kill myself
CS2 would come to mind that has both voice and text chat enabled until you actively disable it. And at least voice chat is an integral part of the game unfortunately
On July 11 2024 16:37 WombaT wrote: But then I’m not having a good time. Although often I don’t. I have made long-term friendships that persist to this day from gaming encounters. I like the experience of getting a bit of feedback and personality, that I’m playing against another living human.
I typed all this waiting for a Fire Pro Wrestling opponent. Not many around in the morning.
On July 11 2024 16:37 WombaT wrote: I find it depressing and pretty pathetic that things are still largely as they were when I was a teenager, and that’s literally half my lifetime ago at this stage.
its been that way long before you and i were teenagers. "give a man a mask and he'll show you his true face", Oscar Wilde , 1890. Control your controllables and don't worry about the online chaos. Games are marketed for optimal profits by appealing to our child and teenaged instincts. Games are not a vehicle for health improvement or spiritual ascendance. If you're looking for that perhaps some Nathaniel Branden or Judith Sheindlin content is in order.
On July 11 2024 16:37 WombaT wrote: I agree entirely with your point re women online, 100% but that’s a wider cultural problem, and one that we should have made much more progress on in the gaming space over the years.
find the proper bowel of the internet and you'll find women dogging men hard. immature people hate the opposite sex. NA culture is manufacturing people who , regardless of their chronological age, are processing reality from the perspective of a 12 year old. and if you remember... a lot of 12 year olds hate the opposite sex.
All I do is worry about assisting in the development of the young people in my life. I can't impact the leaderless. rudderless cultural toilet bowl that is NA. Compare Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden to ... JFK and Pierre Trudeau. All time great heroes versus useless, braindead, amoral morons.
Control your controllables.
All this is to say. Games are far better off with zero integrated voice chat.
On July 11 2024 16:37 WombaT wrote: But then I’m not having a good time. Although often I don’t. I have made long-term friendships that persist to this day from gaming encounters. I like the experience of getting a bit of feedback and personality, that I’m playing against another living human.
On July 11 2024 16:37 WombaT wrote: I find it depressing and pretty pathetic that things are still largely as they were when I was a teenager, and that’s literally half my lifetime ago at this stage.
its been that way long before you and i were teenagers. "give a man a mask and he'll show you his true face", Oscar Wilde , 1890. Control your controllables and don't worry about the online chaos. Games are marketed for optimal profits by appealing to our child and teenaged instincts. Games are not a vehicle for health improvement or spiritual ascendance. If you're looking for that perhaps some Nathaniel Branden or Judith Sheindlin content is in order.
On July 11 2024 16:37 WombaT wrote: I agree entirely with your point re women online, 100% but that’s a wider cultural problem, and one that we should have made much more progress on in the gaming space over the years.
find the proper bowel of the internet and you'll find women dogging men hard. immature people hate the opposite sex. NA culture is manufacturing people who , regardless of their chronological age, are processing reality from the perspective of a 12 year old. and if you remember... a lot of 12 year olds hate the opposite sex.
All I do is worry about assisting in the development of the young people in my life. I can't impact the leaderless. rudderless cultural toilet bowl that is NA. Compare Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden to ... JFK and Pierre Trudeau. All time great heroes versus useless, braindead, amoral morons.
Control your controllables.
All this is to say. Games are far better off with zero integrated voice chat.
For you.
Some people like these things, some people don’t. Giving people the option to disable voice or text chat if they want, rather than outright removing them and taking away from folks who do find them useful is clearly the better option.
I don’t want to join a fucking Discord server for literally every game I play, I’m already swamped enough by the trend of ‘let’s move everything to Discord even when it’s clearly not the best platform for every use case’
I’m unsure where you’re jumping from that sole central point to me looking for spiritual ascendence, or how Joe Biden shapes up against JFK, it’s very unlike you to go on tangents
Now that they boosted the earn rate, the game really shines and I finally got my deck right. I still have some issues with a few mechanics. Eg a lot of T2 are so rock paper and scissors.
I now have a deck with no antiair at T1 and go straight to stronger anti air at T2 if needed. The deck building is surprisingly more interesting than I imagined.
I'm feeling a bit bummed that I got my beta key two days before I headed abroad for my family's summer vacation. The few games I was able to squeeze in before we left were pretty fun, and if they've boosted the earn rate to the point that you can actually grab a few units and start playing around with builds, I think I'd be having a blast with it.
I really, really, really hope that they come out with an option that will let me just pay a reasonable amount of cash to unlock everything. I don't have the time to grind out tons of games these days, but I'd really like to play around with all the different units.
Nice vid with Brad Shoemaker from Giant Bomb, now Nextlander, where he shows how he got to Platinum as someone with a casual backdrop in RTS.
Just watching people of casual descent and seeing them actually get units out and deal with strategy and compositional considerations it really does seem that Battle Aces is the best demonstration of a neo-RTS game actually 'raising the skill floor'. I don't know where the rest of the architectural elements are in the skill house — skill ceiling, skill walls — but I do think they successfully remodeled before any of the other companies who mentioned doing similar.
That said it seems like being connected to sources of information that are out there such as streams or talking with other players seems pretty essential from someone to get to developing strategy and considering their compositions. It seems like Brad is advantaged there as a media guy, but that can't be how everyone is. So while it seems like the skill floor has been lowered it may only be for a subset of people. Many people are just going to have varying abilities to find and decode information or have the understanding on how to do deliberate study outside the game at all.
So like what is the plan to let players educate themselves? Certainly its believed RTS campaigns don't cut it anymore, but the replacement is nothing? Just mass gaming?
Mass gaming teaches you slowly but for many it could just end up as mass frustration. There are so many enumerable skills that you need to know to to even learn how to approach learning. Do new players even understand a metalearning concept like you should 'buy a unit to test it out so you can figure out its capabilities'?
Then consider things like buying units obviously severely hamper learning by experimentation. The 10 games vs bots that they do as mobile game style 'onboarding' teaches you nothing beyond which buttons to push.
Are they really just going to hand off all the teaching to youtubers and streamers? Because for one they might just not do a good job of it. They might overlook making stuff that's appropriate for a completely new audience in favour of making something that just retrains SC2 players. They also might just wave it off because of the high effort and low ad revenue involved in the short term, causing a kind of ecosystem collapse where the educational materials don't exist so the game doesn't grow, so nobody makes educational materials and so on.
Then there's this issue that all the neo-RTS have which is that if you only have established SC2 streamers creating your educational materials off platform, then well that introduces new players to very established communities that can just feel overly occupied and prevent any new culture from emerging. In effect the there will never be a feeling of newness with these new games and they will turn away an audience without even knowing it.
Then there's this issue that all the neo-RTS have which is that if you only have established SC2 streamers creating your educational materials off platform, then well that introduces new players to very established communities that can just feel overly occupied and prevent any new culture from emerging. In effect the there will never be a feeling of newness with these new games and they will turn away an audience without even knowing it.
I am not sure that analysis is correct. I think the main danger for new RTS games is no community at all, not that it springs out of existing communities.
Afaik, SC2 mainly came from previous BW and WC3 players, but I don't think that was a problem at all.
If there is a problem, I think it is more the genre itself (more games are played on mobiles and pads, and even mobas are considered complicated now) and that it takes a massive marketing budget to make a break into the general public.
I think it is perfectly possible for Battle Aces to get a healthy playerbase going, though, and maybe some e-sports as well.
Edit: another problem with Battle Aces is that it seems like it has a strict 1v1 focus for now. The Blizzard RTS games all had strong single player campaigns to draw players to the game, and player made MODs to keep them there. Serious 1v1 players are only a small minority of the total player base, but heavily over represented in forums line this and beta tests.
Community is a blanket term and means different things to different people, and it's not a new thing since it existed even back in the War2 / BW days. There were pretty significant divides even back then, but much more gameplay overlap.
For new players I think Battle Aces is the most attractive option currently. It's similar to something like Smash64 in the sense that it's extremely accessible with an incredible skill ceiling. Knowledge checks are relatively minimal and when one does happen it isn't like you had to cough up 20+ minutes of your life to receive that feedback like you would in some other titles/rts. I think the time limit and pacing of the game is one of the most defining things about it.
People that are wanting interaction can do so through forums like these, discord servers, or perhaps a friend request option in game.
I personally would like to see in game chat avenues return, be it lobbies as well as in actual matches. I think options to police botting/spamming/advertising as well as excessive toxicity are easy implementations.
beta ends today! I had fun, i think a lot of people did who played. just wish it had more to it... more modes, maps, camaign, editor, themes etc. but the core gameplay loop is fun.
Didn't manage to put more time in the game sadly. logged 40hrs which easily could have been 60hrs. Definitely very good for first impression, and the core gameplay loop is great.
There are things I think need to be fine tuned, but nothing like stormgate that just felt off in everyway possible and even struggled to get 5 games in. Next up is stormgate EA and hopefully it made some improvements.
On July 15 2024 15:31 CicadaSC wrote: beta ends today! I had fun, i think a lot of people did who played. just wish it had more to it... more modes, maps, camaign, editor, themes etc. but the core gameplay loop is fun.
What is their roadmap now im terms of beta/ release? When will the content/ units design be finalized?
I am resolutely confident that the reason they are going with emotes instead of an in-game chat is just so that they can lock fashionably looking emotes behind $$. A lot of mobile games do the same thing.
On July 15 2024 15:31 CicadaSC wrote: beta ends today! I had fun, i think a lot of people did who played. just wish it had more to it... more modes, maps, camaign, editor, themes etc. but the core gameplay loop is fun.
What is their roadmap now im terms of beta/ release? When will the content/ units design be finalized?
I'm not sure exactly a roadmap exists but they did say next beta test will be sometime this year, and they also want to add event modes. Unit design will be tweaked as well as adding new units to keep the game feeling fresh. Unsure if anything else is planned.
On July 15 2024 15:31 CicadaSC wrote: beta ends today! I had fun, i think a lot of people did who played. just wish it had more to it... more modes, maps, camaign, editor, themes etc. but the core gameplay loop is fun.
What is their roadmap now im terms of beta/ release? When will the content/ units design be finalized?
Only thing really mentioned is at least one more beta this year with additional units.
Overall this one went extraordinarily well for the most part. Downfalls being: -The unit unlock cost for people that got keys (they later fixed this but was absolutely crazy and I didn't realize until I was helping a friend.) -Latest update where King Crab buff made the game objectively terrible. It's fine to test and experient in a beta but just do it within reason.
On July 15 2024 15:31 CicadaSC wrote: beta ends today! I had fun, i think a lot of people did who played. just wish it had more to it... more modes, maps, camaign, editor, themes etc. but the core gameplay loop is fun.
What is their roadmap now im terms of beta/ release? When will the content/ units design be finalized?
Only thing really mentioned is at least one more beta this year with additional units.
Overall this one went extraordinarily well for the most part. Downfalls being: -The unit unlock cost for people that got keys (they later fixed this but was absolutely crazy and I didn't realize until I was helping a friend.) -Latest update where King Crab buff made the game objectively terrible. To be fair at least they told us but whatever diversity hire intern's napkin math they stole for that adjustment needs to be sent to forum moderation. It's fine to test and experient in a beta but just do it within reason.
i think king crab was actually in a good spot at the end, except for the early game where it was clearly too strong when paired with all-ins.
EPT
