A few ideas to help better manage pub flow and fun.

[Buhlitz]

Most of you know how intense pickup games are. In my opinion pickup games show everything about this game, what works, what doesn't. Pickup games allow players views at weapon mechanics, map flow, and team strategy at the highest level. With that said, why can pubs not mimic this, what are the major differences between the two?

The two biggest that come to mind, are voice communication and a very specific knowledge of your role. The first, a problem of free will. Essentially you cannot force players to talk, or own a mic or use it, however you can encourage them to, give them a very clear path to it, and at the very least make sure they can hear what other people are saying (with a toggle off option obviously). Voice commands just don't cut it for the noob, and even for the advanced player nothing beats clearly annunciated instructions. My recommendation would be to somehow bundle TS3 with the Legions download or installer, and have a script that when you join a dedicated server, you are auto joined to a corresponding channel for that dedicated server. This way even if they didn't have a mic, they could still more effectively communicate with the other players on that team. This would also serve as a way to hold more players hands through the process of becoming acquainted with this community.

The second problem, while directly related to the first problem , can be solved separately. Just a simple button press once you join a server. A screen that shows all of the available positions one can choose from, accompanied by a brief description on what is expected of that player. This would not only create the illusion of 'classes' which would surely appease some, it would also allow players to focus more on specific objectives, like is done in pugs, without having any communication with their teammates. This could also allow a way to more appropriately categorize the plethora of statistics now made available for tracking. So that each 'class' or position, tracked it's own set of stats. So instead of arbitrarily blasting people with just EVERYTHING they've ever done in the game, they could see how many flag pulls to save a cap they got as a chaser, how many grabs vs carrier kills they've had as a stay at home, or the K/D ratio of you as a capper, vs you as a HO.

I really think either of these or both would help facilitate a smoother experience for new players and old players alike. Even if not my ideas, something to solve the problems I've highlighted.

 

[Astrum]

Voice communication is great for pubs in strategic FPS games where the penalty for death is high. Red Orchestra comes to mind as a good example. A bullet will almost always kill you and you have a limited number of respawn waves to complete your objective. Clear and concise communication is required to win. Now Legions is not a strategic FPS game when it comes to pub play, the penalty for death is basically non-existent. If you die you have a few seconds before you respawn and when you spawn you are completely ready to go since you spawn with all of your equipment. Legions pubs are the equivalent of two Zerg players facing each other in StarCraft where they only produce Zerglings. If some die, who cares, they're cheap and plentiful. Pubs naturally devolve into this mass Zergling rush type strategy. Most people go offense/midfield and plenty of people keep the cap train going. It's rare to have any defense at all because the offense is so strong. I don't think voice communication can alleviate the problem of flawed gameplay mechanics. If the game changes sufficiently I think voice communication would be a good idea (along with a command map and waypoints). As far as implementing voice in game you can get things such as the TeamSpeak SDK to include into the game. However, this incurs licensing costs which I'm sure is somewhere around non-free to very expensive.

Also, on that note I'm highly confused about the prevailing opinion about voice communication in game as expressed via the old-old SMF IA forums. Somehow including voice communication would require them to hear every prepubescent voice on the internet as it is clearly impossible to disable such a feature in your settings or mute people individually or server wide if you're an administrator. Yet they'll happily get on Ventrilo or TeamSpeak. That baffles me.

As far as choosing your position, I disagree. Back when Legions was still around I'd generally end up playing multiple positions out of necessity because of the generally diverse skill level. Let's be honest, this game is free and so it attracts a lot of younger people who don't grasp a lot of these strategic concepts and certainly weren't around for Tribes to know why things are this way. In pub play positions are almost required to be malleable to cope with the varying skill levels and the chaos that ensues from it.

 

[jedics (ovo)]

Im all for integrated teamspeak, it gives a new player the feeling of being in a team more, therefore theres more chance he might act like hes in one. Put this together with a description of 'player positions' and theory that gets flashed during loading and respawning and I think it would go a long way to improving the pub situation. Of course we need to be able to mute certain players out easily, the idea of having to listen to MAPUBEAR for real makes me feel sick inside but vote kick is coming so not so much of an issue anymore whoohoo, eat my vote kick mapu.