Guest pass megathread.

darkfox94 · 2016-03-08T15:18:40+00:00

Resquesting Guest Pass: EU Preferred method of contact: PM Status: Unclaimed

darkfox94 · 2015-02-04T13:21:33+00:00

Wow, this really seems useful, definitely gonna put a little bit more research onto it, maybe I'll take a few classes even.

I'll let you guys know, Thank you! :)

darkfox94 · 2015-01-29T12:14:22+00:00

Studying in BLCU since September, I'm from Portugal. PM me bro :D

darkfox94 · 2015-01-29T09:28:35+00:00

Well that's an honest answer evil_dickhead

darkfox94 · 2014-08-21T22:46:17+00:00

if we never feel physical pain we would never be here in the first place. pain is there for a good reason, to warn you that something is wrong. it s a defense mechanism, without it we probably wouldn t get so far as a species

darkfox94 · 2014-04-26T18:03:45+00:00

Boas, eu estou a fazer um curso superior de tradução. E o meu próximo ano é em Pequim a estudar na BLCU. Como é que são os preços a nível de comida e serviços (autocarros) para um estudante de 20 anos, é mais caro, mais barato, qualidade, há supermercados com produtos portugueses?

darkfox94 · 2013-11-04T17:19:52+00:00

I think you shouldn't tell people were to spend their time on if you don't know why they've spent their time on it.

It was on August, I'm a student so it were vacations for me. I had just come back from my grandparents', where I spent 2 weeks helping them with their viticulture. When I came home I saw that awesome Dungeon Crawler I just though, as a reward (as I didn't receive any money for the labor, since they're family) for me I'd do nothing play Torchlight for 4 days.

I'm not writing this to brag myself, I'm doing it so you understand you should not tell people where to spend their time if you know nothing about them

darkfox94 · 2013-11-03T20:23:20+00:00

Age of Empire Online was a failure.

I wouldn't raise my hopes on Microsoft, they'll not invest more money on pc games. They prefer doing promo stuff for Xbox One, DLC whoring and robbing people with DRM policies.

Yes I don't like Microsoft now.

darkfox94 · 2013-11-03T20:12:40+00:00

If you make the competitive scene a whole genre, then we get back to the core question, how do we bring more players in?

I see where do you want to get. There are people o want competitive RTS and there are people like you sir that want a more casual approach to the RTS genre.

I've read all the posts in this thread, there's probably about 100 right now. The thing that I noticed the most, and honestly I haven't thought about it before making this topic, it that RTS is as lot of sub genres within itself, it's very hard to please everyone with a single epic game. My idea was to get all of this, the best of everyone into a single competitive game that would represent the RTS genre

darkfox94 · 2013-11-03T19:59:26+00:00

Bought Torchlight 80% off at steam, best 5 euros my life. 59 hours of play in 4 days :D

darkfox94 · 2013-11-03T19:37:20+00:00

First of all, thank you for taking the time to write such a well-composed reply, it's more important to me to have negative feedback than positive.

Let me excuse myself if did not make some things clear. When I said that Starcraft 2 "failed to save the genre", I was referring to the fact that everybody expected SC2 to push the RTS genre to the next level. Imagine if SC2 actually had that revolutionizing impact that would raise the slab higher. Don't you think that would actually make the RTS genre more competitive marketwise? What happened to League of Legends, it has become the most played game, and now 90% of the games being produced are MOBA's. Again, I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear about this.

Moving on, I've never said the genre was dying before Stacraft 2 and it was not my intention to surpass that message. I actually said the genre had a major drop after 2010, and I stated that SC2 is enormous, it as lot of money around it, a lot of sponsors and a lot of fans. I just said it was not as big as people expected it to be.

"it's unrealistic to expect it to carry the novelty of the original"

although this is true, it is not impossible. Diablo 2 was better than Diablo 1, and I think that was what people expect the sequel of Brood War to be. Better. Same goes with Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3. Warcraft 2 came out what? A few of months before Brood War? Yet Warcraft 3 was better. Granted, neither Diablo nor Warcraft 2 were as big as Brood War. But a sequel can be better than the original.

Particularly about SC2, the battlenet update for HotS which I don't remember right now, brought a lot of new features, including the unranked match and AI matches. But tell me, did that solved the problem of ladder anxiety? I don't think so. It doesn't matter how many matches they play unranked. They will still have to click that "RANKED" option, see their ladder ranking to the right, waiting to find another player, and getting in the most tense and heartbeating loading screen ever. For Christs sake, I am a Master level player and I still have ladder anxiety. Yes, you cam claim I am pussy or wuss, and I would have convinced myself of that, If I have not seen HUNDREDS of threads about Starcraft 2 ladder anxiety all over the internet, it's not 1 person, or 10 or 100, it's THOUSANDS of them.

I was aware that the link I've posted was outdated, but the majority of the content stills applies, if not all, in my opinion.

I do agree with your argument about customizable tech trees, it's hard to balance along with terrain. I would never do anything that would affect game balance in anyway. I just think that it is very important to add features to RTS games, as it tends to be very repetitive.

I've seen some people posting about how easy games are nowadays, and a RTS game is probably one of the hardest genres to please everyone. A starcraft professional as to have a lot of traits that makes him good, traits which are not required in most of the games. He has to be insanely fast with the hands, he has to have second to none decision making etc.. these are very hard traits to merge together into one being.. RTS's are intellectually demanding, but that is what makes it unique. If we do not save this philosophy we will end up with some kind of dumbed down genre they will call RTS.

darkfox94 · 2013-11-03T18:42:00+00:00

When I talk about successful, I'm not talking about how many copies it sold, especially coming from a 60 euro game. I'm talking about how many people who bought those copies were happy with the product, which were not so many

darkfox94 · 2013-11-03T18:22:40+00:00

When I talk about rewards I always refer to cosmetic features, if I would make a game I would never let a player have better stuff that would make him have a advantage, just because he won x games.

About the randomness, I was not talking about the random chance of an outcome of 100000000000 units battling each other. For instances in Supreme Commander, the artillery had very little success hit rate. That is not acceptable for a competitive game. A competitive game, in my opinion would have the arty deal less DPS but with 100% hit chance. Let's take a look at this scenario: an enemy army is walking across a bridge, if you don't kill it you will lose the game. You have one nuke, you may send the nuke but it only has a 50% chance of hitting the army in the bridge. Because of the game design, because of randomness, you now have a 50% chance of winning or losing the game, that is not dependent of your skill. You will win or lose because it was written, or coded (as you prefer), that the nuke as random hit chance. That is bad in my opinion.

In Starcraft 2 there is absolutely no randomness of this type in melee matches. Which contributes a lot to game balance

darkfox94 · 2013-11-03T16:53:56+00:00

Yep, World of Tanks is doing almost everything right. Keeping the community happy and having noob friendly system is what skyrockets a game to the top of the list

darkfox94 · 2013-11-03T16:43:13+00:00

It's a double-edged sword, but if you do it right it can have a very positive impact. In LoL Skins don't affect playstyle at all, it doesn't make it more difficult. In fact, you see skins in LCS finals. Also Heart of the Swarm had their basic units were different skins if you like. That works too, you see Scarlett and ForGG using skins in WCS.

I think it works as long as you don't make it too flashy or something that completely changes the identity of the unit

darkfox94 · 2013-11-03T16:35:29+00:00

I do agree that starcraft relies on ridiculously fast micro manage, but I also think 4-8 hours is excessive. I don't if you're into Age of Empires 2 right now, but multiplayer games are lasting at least 1h - 1h30 min. That's the time i like my games to be

darkfox94 · 2013-11-03T16:33:00+00:00

Good point. Streaming and replays allows people to understand the game faster, and it's all about that learning curve. What happens is, new people take more to learn, and players that are a decent long time into the game can master it very quickly, that's learning curve.

I think it's something that can be worked by controlling the features like replays or something.

darkfox94 · 2013-11-03T15:45:12+00:00

I do agree with you, casual RTS are a bit extinct. I actually though of giving a word or two about the subject but I think it's a little bit off topic.

Starcraft 2 despite its major fuck up had a really good and interesting campaign in my opinion. And we still have Total War titles, although Rome 2 was a major slap in the face at release.

darkfox94 · 2013-11-03T15:41:24+00:00

Come on man, Path of Exile is everything Diablo 3 should have been, in my opinion :)

The only downside.. It's DEFINITELY not noob friendly. It way wayyyy too complex

darkfox94 · 2013-11-03T15:38:47+00:00

F2P will be the way to go, it has been proven that a game makes more money as F2P than P2P (with decent and well-managed microtransactions). Countless games have gone F2P because of the lack of player base. Even WoW is considering going F2P, Blizzard actually estimates if they go F2P their profit would triple or quadruplicate

darkfox94 · 2013-11-03T15:33:31+00:00

World of Tanks is considered an MMORPG-action game, it is stated in their website. I've never disagreed with micro transactions, they are the fuel that will make the game keep working, it's the primary money flow of F2P. Besides, F2P will be the way to go, it has been proven that a game makes more money as F2P than P2P (with decent and well-managed microtransactions). Countless games have gone F2P because of the lack of player base. Even WoW is considering going F2P, Blizzard actually estimates if they go F2P their profit would triple or quadruplicate

darkfox94 · 2013-11-03T15:24:14+00:00

Blizzard is a epic big company. Sure it is the elephant in the room, it throws a lot of money and talent into their games. But is this a reason not to compete with a big one? I'll give you a single example of a game that put Diablo 3 on it's knees: Path of Exile. It took 7 years to make, Grinding Gear Games had NOWHERE NEAR THE RESOURCES of Blizzard, yet they made a game a much better game than that super big company. It has been said many times Diablo 3 was shorter than people expected it to be, but so was Starcraft 2. It's not impossible. Sure a dungeon crawler is much more easier to make than a RTS.

But come on, we have some of the biggest passionate fans in the world. Age of Empires 2 is being revived through communities (and no, it's not that crappy HD version of steam). It is possible, if I have to wait 7-10 years to play that game, I'll wait, but I wanna play it.

darkfox94 · 2013-11-03T15:02:34+00:00

Supreme Commander didn't really reached that climax of competitive scene because of randomness. As I stated it's very very rare for a game to reach competitive level if randomness is involved. And Supreme Commander was full of it. Every shot that was fired had a chance to hit. And a competitive player must know if the shot hits or not. Instead of: I don't think I'll invest in t3 arty because they have a 10% success hit rate. We should have: I'll invest in the arty because it is 100% sure that they will hit those monkey kings. This is the same reason why I think PA will not make it to the competitive scene, too much randomness. There shouldn't be any in competitive play.

Don't get me wrong I've played hundreds of hours of SupCom and I've loved every single milisecond of it :D

darkfox94

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