I think the idea of separating players by skill ranking would work. It’s fine in arena shooters like War Thunder because a match only has maybe 20 players in it. In Battlescape, a match supposedly has a few hundred players, so the matchmaker would have a hard time if the range of skill was too small. So each match/server would have to be somewhat diverse in skill level unless AI could fill all vacancies.
If equipment meta progression will play a big role, then separation should be based on the equipment levels. If equipment will not get objectively more powerful, only more diverse, then some sort of skill rating like Elo should be implemented.
Depending on your performance in a match, your skill rating would change and this might change which servers you can access.
I love it when we get like this. This community is the best. And the dev team are the best+3000.
I would like to take a stab at this.
Undoubtedly, one reason is having difficulty landing shots.
I suspect another reason is the unfinished nature of some of the systems: missions, tutorial/help tips and menu.
My biggest thing is the UI (by which I mean the whole thing, not just the ship HUD). Since it isn’t finished yet, it’s in a weird transition phase where nothing is quite finished and everything is a bit more complicated than it needs to be.
Second to this, I would put the current lack of clear and beneficial missions. You enter the game and… what do you do?
Thankfully, we know these are in progress, but what needs sorting first? I’m not sure.
Add a 7th vehicle for npc and humans, hoverbike or hover truck for exploration and to help the noobs sight in their guns on an easy target for practice. add planet props you already have like water trees clouds and possible environmental procedural life to have interaction with the environment and to promote exploration as another “fun” activity the noobs can get into right away. add a commander role. pick up scrap metal and take it to a land base for credits.
I find that I need to force myself to play IBS, it’s not fun, wish it was otherwise. Now I tried to comprehend why it’s not fun, and a few things come to mind.
Fatigue, as a dev tier backer it has accumulated in great quantity.
Player numbers, there are just not enough players online to experience this game as intended.
Design as you go, it seems to me that the gameplay was never really designed in detail, the patches change everything so much that the overall vision is murky.
Market saturation, this is an external factor, but there is so much great indie stuff to play out there that finding time for something that is not fun is a challenge.
No extrinsic rewards, I’m not getting rewarded in any way for logging into the servers on a daily or weekly basis, there is just about no extrinsic drive to play.
For some reason the actual gameplay is not even an issue, because I just can’t get myself to play.
Some good points Critic. Fatigue is a big part of long drawn out development-build-playing, and i even had to take a pretty long break from Battlescape for it was quite frustrating for me a while ago.
The problem with all us veterans is we do not have the fresh perspective anymore, as much as we may like to try and get into the mindset of a new player. Sometimes we are lucky to get feedback from new players, but there is a self-selection mechanism where those who like it are more likely to show up on discord and forums and leave comments than those who quit in frustration fast.
Critic’s reward point is super important: A simple reward just for coming back and playing goes a surprisingly looooong way for multiplayer games. Heck, i even still play Planetside 2 after 6+ years and countless frustrations. A: Because it is a unique game and B: I still have some stupid arbitrary directives (sort of long term challenges/grind goals) to finish. It gives me something to do within an environment that is pretty much a permanent team deathmatch you never win or lose really.
If we could reward players for returning AND reward new players for leaving feedback somehow (and make it super obvious for them how to leave feedback in the first place) that would be quite helpful.
Small note on the UI:
The warning for exceeding safe warp speeds is blinking too fast. I also suggest not animating from fully transparent to opaque but instead half-transparent to opaque.
Got my TrackIR/vjoy/FreePIE solution to work tonight. Works pretty well. One issue is the you can only move 90 degrees side to side. The view range is less then using the mouse. This is ok for the small ships, but means you cannot fire at targets behind your capital ship.
I use Direct Mode to fight the capital ships. You don’t have a gun sight in Direct Mode. You only have the gun dots which are hard to see in a fight. The axis are borked in Capital Ship Mode. For example throttle controls pitch. Please correct the axis in Capital Ship Mode and add a gun sight to Direct Mode. For joystick users, there really no need for the two modes.
I’ll fix the view range limit and probably the gun sight ( it should still be displayed, but it always faces the front of the ship, so if you look in another direction you have no crosshair at the screen center ).
I’m less sure about the pitch axis vs throttle. It’s not a bug, it was done that way by design. We want capital ships to be controllable ( turning them around ) even when you’re looking in another direction, so turning them manually via keybinds is mandatory.
If we bound throttle back to WS, then how would you pitch the capital ship ? We alkready tried RF in the past but it felt awkward, just slightly too far from your left hand.
We also have the same problem with strafing; at the moment it requires holding ctrl, which is very awkward.
We’re still looking for a “miracle” setup that would allow independent look-around and manual keybinds for both turning and strafing. Any ideas are welcome.
Move from wasd to esdf? That would give you a/g for side strafing, q/t for up/down, and pitch/turn would be the same as wasd, just shifted over to the right one key. Actually, I’ve been thinking about suggesting something like this for a while. There are a lot of things you need to control, but having only q be the only key available to the left of wasd configuration (not counting z/x, although honestly you can remove z and just rely on the mmb) really limits what you can do. esdf gives you two additional easy access keys.
Other options would be to eliminate the throttle control via the numbers. You do not need ten keys to pick a specific speed. Use one, slap a radial menu on it to have the previous speed options, and now you have nine extra keys to play with for less-used options. I wouldn’t recommend using ship controls for the number keys, but you can move less-used stuff up there to accommodate the esdf transition.
Well that would be interesting to test… my brain doesn’t want my left hand to do that though, would take some time to re-train my hand position. It’s an interesting suggestion, although I’m not sure how easy it would be to use the Q and T keys for up/down strafing.
I personally want to see the “Set heading” function return, instead of only having “Auto-Rotate” as a toggle. Auto Rotate is useful in some cases, when in warp, or in tight combat situtations, but being able to quickly set heading and then turn back to a target keeps the turrets closer to the previous position.
The upside down Y is still shown in Direct Mode. The gun sight I am talking about is the white circle that in the center of you view in Capital Ship Mode. Just add the circle to Direct Mode.
I am talking about joystick axis not key binding. I am using a Thrustmaster Warthog with rudder pedals. I have all 6 degrees of freedom mapped to joystick axis. I now use a TrackIR/vjoy/FreePIE solution that maps View pitch and yaw to a vjoy device linked to TrackIR. Direct Mode works fine accept for the missing white circle.
Right now in Capital Ship Mode: Throttle Z axis is mapped to pitch; Throttle X (microstick) axis is mapped to yaw; Joystick X is mapped to roll. Maybe Capital Ship Mode will cater to a joystick user using mouse in right hand to control view. I think Throttle Z should control Z-linear Thrust, Throttle microstick X and Y should control yaw and pitch with a mode button to switch to strafe, Rudder Z should control roll.
Hehe, yes it goes against everything gaming has taught us, doesn’t it? However, is q/t easier than ctr+w/s?
It would be awkward playing with wasd small ship controls to then getting into a cap ship then having a totally different control scheme. If you test with esdf, you’ll probably need to go all the way with it to maintain a more coherent overall control scheme.
I personally believe esdf could work, though. I mean, in a cap ship, you don’t strafe all that much, outside of formation flying. In formation flying, like we were doing a couple days ago, I was constantly strafing, my fingers were playing twister with the ctr+wasd on top of the other movements I wanted to do. In a small ship, odds are you’d be strafing more if you had a dedicated key for it instead of the ctr combos.
Changing standard keys makes no difference for people like me that use custom layouts anyways. But having a set heading function (e.g. on boost, which is not needed in capitals) and at the same time allowing all the standard movement keys to keep working would be quite helpful.
Sooner or later we must decouple FPS flight controls/keybinds from Capitals controls / keybinds. Allowing the player to set very different custom key configs for both cases, cause both cases have different needs.
I thought about it a bit more, and I agree with you, so I retract my earlier statement that the strike ships have the same control layout as cap ships in a hypothetical wasd to esdf shift.
Interesting. Not meaning to be pushy, but would you mind saying why? To me, the only downsides is that it’s unconventional and does add yet another control scheme complication, but are there other reasons?
Assuming that esdf only apply to capital ship controls, and the number row can be freed up for less-used buttons, it does give you the side+top strafe dedicated buttons, which I would argue is better than ctr+wasd.
In World of Warships, you can hold control and be able to move the camera around, much like we currently have. However in WoW the free look does not affect turret orientation. Perhaps the same idea can be used for cap ships?
It would, but would you also include the Corvette in that?
I am very much in favour of Set Heading, and I think keybinding turning is a waste of buttons but…
Throwing my late-night thoughts into the cauldron:
W S - vertical translation
A D - horizontal translation
Q E - forward/reverse thrust
My reason is simple: the mouse is the primary rotation device. It doesn’t make sense for the default keys to duplicate what the mouse already does by default.
A modifier could be applied for pitch/yaw/roll
E.g. Shift + W = pitch up
So that option is still there.
Roll could also have a mouse modifier, e.g. Shift + mouse-x-axis
Also, I don’t want us to forget about poor R and F. They are useful keys! Yes they’re slightly further, but not uncomfortably so. They should be used for medium-importance commands.
Alternatively, unifying it more with the smaller ships again:
W S = forward/reverse thrust
A D = left/right translation
R F = up/down translation
Q E = roll
No keybinds for capship turning, but options for cursor following, no cursor following, and set heading (Shift)
“Alt” is a much better modifier key when WASD has to be held at the same time. One suggestion on the side.
This is my suggestion from back when
Yes but please not hardcoded. Double bind it in the default setup. The only reason not to double bind it is that warning at the startup that should not exist anyway and the posibility to use capital mode on the corvette.
The only excuse to use hardcoded stuff like the view event being used for multiple functions (*for instance this very switch to strafe … *) or capital controls interpreting general ship controls differently is time pressure. Which is fine to some extend. It just creates a lot of confusion as can be seen by many people trying to set it up the way they like. Like Grimleo.
Here are three options to make the “manual control” in capital mode not confusing:
Adding 6 additional axis and optionally 12 additional button events just for the capital control mode
Having a setting that says “use translation controls for rotation in capital control mode”
Unify all modes and have the same 6 DOF input for all ships (as of my suggestion from many patches ago). Would need option two to retain current behaviour with rotation being on WASD.
I personally think strafing is much more important then rotation and even cap ships already can and should be encouraged to strafe.
The freelook already does not affect the “automatic heading”. If you hold “view” … (as you currently do to strafe ) the “automatic heading” does not follow. Turrets do though. Many games have that option to look arround without the turret following. It’s a luxury feature in my opinion though. Would be cool if it doesn’t conflict with other stuff.
) the “automatic heading” does not follow. Turrets do though. Many games have that option to look arround without the turret following. It’s a luxury feature in my opinion though. Would be cool if it doesn’t conflict with other stuff.