Disclaimer: Several "posts" about this topic have been made, But I fear most of them have just been "I don't like this change". As such this post is more an analytical look at the repercussions of removing the chat / the worst case scenario of it's removal through a mainly logical lense. Hence I hope it keeps to the "only one thread on a topic" rule. Subject Contents:-Prelude-The Subject Matter-The Issue-Multi Tiered Game Explained-The Point-The Final Nail in the coffin-Conclusion (It is a Tl;Dr, read this if you cba with a huge wall of text)Prelude:I saw another post where, whilst the sentiment was certainly something I agreed on, it's organisation and coherency had much to be desired. This is fine as, let's be honest, not everyone is a pro critisiser like myself (being British, we are trained high in the mountains from birth to be the best at complaining about things you see ) .With this in mind I finally decided to dip my toes into the forums for the first ever time in the 2 years i've been here. So let's get started. The Subject Matter: So the new update brought a many new features to the game, that seem to allow for the more "hands on" organisation of squads / platoons. This is something I personally encourage quite strongly, as too many a time have I seen platoons that seldom work as a cohesive unit because the players in them were "too unwieldy to manage". The new system allows for organisation to be just a little bit more delegated between the fireteams now needed in all squads, allowing for less stress on squad leads (one we are all accustomed to the new system of course!) However, I must express my utter distain for a new feature (or rather removal of an old feature) that I fear could be the final nail in the coffin when it comes to the "grand scheme of things" for our game (Let's say for clarifications sake that this "grand scheme" is around 1-2 years of future game time). The Issue: I will be blunt, orders chat was one of the few threads that kept me coming back to this game. Now one can shout out it's inadequacy all day and night: -It could be a clusterfrack -It gave a platform for promoting platoons rather than orders -It caused outfits to argue quite publicly. However, I would like to counter these claims by stating that these issues are the symptoms of an active community. Name any online gaming community that is truly active and I gurantee you those 3 issues (along with the plethora of other issues mentioned about orders chat) are present within them. They are not a massive issue that needs to be cut away from the community, but rather an inevitable side effect of a bunch of players being able to interact with each other when it comes to the bigger picture of a "multi tiered game". Multi Tiered Game?!? What you on about pristine?: Well as far as I reckon it, this game has several "Tiers" on which a player can interact with the game. Whilst we all know about them, and describing them may seem condecending, there is purpose here. To ensure that when mentioned by name later, their meaning is not unclear to any who read this. These tiers are as follows: The "Shooter" tier: This is a player that comes in to shoot ****. They go to large battle zones, don't join squads, and just like to have fun as if this was a large scale Call Of Duty game. The "Squad Mate" Tier: These are the players who enjoy playing with a small team of people who can communicate with each other. Rush objectives together, head to the same warzones, make fully embarked multi manned vehicles. They don't care too much for coming up with tactics, they just want to have a good time with friends. Some of these people may even join outfits, if only to play with the same people regularly. The "Squad Leader" Tier: These are your players who love getting stuff done. They are the ones who lead squads, whilst working with other squad leaders in a platoon. They are the ones who get orders from the PL and ensure their squad gets those orders done ASAP in the best possible way. These are the people much more likely to join an outfit, to allow for coordination with like minded squad leaders in bigger platoons. The "Platoon Leader" Tier: These are the players who end up commanding entire platoons of people, they enjoy having 30-40 guys running around, taking territories, scratching off names and kicking some serious ***. These are your higher outfit leaders, the ones who may even begin communicating with one or 2 other platoons within the outfit if enough of them are online. The "Commander" Tier: These are the the truly organised players, these are the ones who (used to ) go on orders / leaders chat and communicate with other platoons from other outfits and what not. These are the true "community builders". Outfits that, for the most part, would work mostly internally, start to gain relationships, alliances and rivalries with fellow outfits of the faction (such rivalries and alliances are deep set in all online communities, be it guilds, regiments, cohorts etc etc of the same faction). The point Pristine! get to the bloody point!: So as far as I reckon it "most" of our community lies within the top 3 tiers. What is meant by this is not number of players, but rather the number of players that consider themselves in the community rather than just "playing solo / with a few friends". ^This mind set of community is what holds MMO's of any type together. It is what allows devs to keep these types of games running for years on end. And I personally believe that , for a healthy community, cross exposure to multiple outfits is key. This allows for people to meet who would of never met and talked without the bridges between these closer outfits. Friendly rivalries of "who can get the most territory in a day" and the like wouldn't form if one only has a brief knowledge of other outfits. And this is where in the problem lies. At the moment, we are fine, we have been used to real time VOIP communication with other platoons, and in turn outfits, for quite a long time now. So not much has changed... YET! Imagine a year from now, when outfits are born and die... when the big dogs have changed hands once or twice. How long will it be before the sense of community from the Command Tier dissapears. Where, due to the changes that influence and encourage newer players to become Squad and Platoon Leader tier players, the tier of Commander basically dissapears. The Faction community as a whole, the better and worse of it, slowly begins to dissolve. Being NC, Vanu or TR is but a colour and different weaponry. This loss of the Command Tier would in turn negatively effect every tier below it (apart from the "shooter and squad mate" tier). So what is the final nail in the coffin?: The final nail in the coffin is, whilst shooter and squad mate tiers are debatably the most "numerous" of the playerbase, they are not usually a huge part of the community. This has one very key side effect to their like of the game. Most members of these tiers lose interest in the game after a few months (I used to be one myself, and I initially dipped out of this game after 2 months personally). Because of this, I personally believe it is the top 3 tiers (Commander, Platoon Lead and Squad Lead) that keep our player base afloat. The long term players who stick around due to a love of the people and the sense of working together with (more often than not) strangers with an equal love for organised play. Removing command chat negatively effects Platoon and Squad lead, and effectively blue balls the commander tier into nothing more than "the guy in charge of 1 outfit". So effectively, by removing this feature, we lose out on a vital resource (I.E: The community that comes with outfit leaders and platoon leaders from varying outfits being able to VOIP chat with relative ease) that I believe is integral to the LONG TERM player base sticking around. Conclusion: Apologise for the wall of text, so I will try and make this conclusion put the main points forward without you needing to read my essay (though I do suggest doing so, as I think it also gives one a decent fundamental understanding of what keeps this community afloat ). -The new update influences Squad / Platoon focused play -The new update removed Order / Platoon Leader chat -Squad / Platoon based play is good as it makes outfit operations easier / more fun -Removing order / platoon lead chat kills any sense of a larger "Inter Outfit" community as real time, VOIP communication between Outfit leaders has been severely reduced. -Killing this sense of a larger faction community will negatively effect Outfit Leads, Platoon leads and potentially squad leads. -The fluid nature of outfits changing hands, making packs with other outfits, working on co-ops will slowly dissapear as the breed of player who was used to easy communication with these other outfits (and in turn knew them decently well) being to leave of their own accord for other reasons. -The loss of this cross outfit play will slowly lead to the decay of any sense of community outside of outfits. -The loss of community will lead to a dip in "invested player base" and lead to our player numbers dropping even further. i.e: Why the hell was this a good idea at all?!?!
How about a new Orders chat with some new stuff as well? - Outfit leaders can choose to create it and host it to be used for their own members and their associates, one universal Orders chat is always on. - Individual players can choose to follow it and receive messages from those who post on it or not - If abused for outfit promotion, in-fighting or just mishandled, either the player-base that follows the chat can vote to temporarily remove the privilege to post in /orders or can be reported. - Inter-outfit commander chat as well as squad/platoon leader chat, can get invited to it or not, mostly restricted for leaders only so commanders don't turn it into a *********** everyone reads, what happens there stays there. - /promo chat for outfit promotion. Can be followed or not. Would reduce the amount of out-of-place outfit promotion significantly, and the rise of new outfits can be monitored and followed. Relatively good compromise, not the best but also better than nothing.
well im going to still play till the nerf the lib furthing into the ground...main problems on nc for emerald is leaders get high smelling there own farts. they have no idea how to lead themselves out of a wet paper sack, it seems like they just like telling people what to do. it seems like every other day nc is double teamed to warpgate and half of nc fight the tr and half fight the vs, so its usually around 50% Continent pop fighting the 33% of nc(most of our leaders think its mathematically possible to defend) i used to put out orders like we all need to zerg the vs(mainly bc they had more territory). 1 min later and order would come out saying we all need to fight the tr. 10 mins later our pop was still split defending against and undefended force on both sides most alerts vanu starts with 41% territory and half of nc and tr pop will fight each other the whole alert.(vs usally wins) i try to educate the leaders on what ive seen and what i know will happen(not that im always right). basically nc will do the oppisite of orders chat, with that freedom mindset. another scenery that i remeber, vs starting the Continent with about 43% and they had xelas bio and NE warpgate and nc was battleing for 10 mins in at 48-96 about equal pop. i tried to explain to the leaders that the biolab fight was gonna last for the next hour n 20 mins if we didnt zerg it, and the guy leading a platoon on the tr front told me that would be stupid... and the fight ended up lasting the whole alert we almost got the gen to blow up one time in that hour...... Anyways i stop caring i started getting tells like stop telling people what to do, no one cares, and shut up....ect. and the only orders i putout were ones that i thought would help us win or the best decision at the time. most people i guess come on for 30 mins and just want to shoot people they could care less that this game has anything to do with teamwork or planing or w/e i think during prime time about maybe 35-45% of pop is running in platoons. but yeah i think they should bring orders chat back and each player could select if he wanted to hear or see it. mabey an decent xp bouns for cohesion and squadplay as well
I think you are both missing a couple of tiers, such as the "tried the command stuff but found a bunch of kids screaming at eachother for several days and tries to avoid it now" tier and you are grossly overestimating the amount of teamplay people want to do. The most used outfits? Zergfits that get by on the orders of "everybody go to X" and "we doing a galdrop get back to base". This is because the game only has a few mechanics for the higher tiers of teamplay, but it's missing just about everything for the lower tiers. There's little inviting a solo player to teamplay, except perhaps gunning for a vehicle which isnt that encouraging as it takes away your ability to move around yourself. This is reflected in how squads and platoons are led. Except for the top players you are better off just saying "everybody go there". Even during Miller's high days when it was considered the best teamplay server you just had commanders people listened too, but it was still "everybody do this". When I pointed out better strategies than going straight for a chokepoint I usually got the answer of "people dont know that one". And thats still the case. I've done a few platoonleads since then, and with a full platoon and a sweet but simple dtrategy drawn on the map and just about 3 lines of instructions of a microphone, you are Lucky if you have more than 3 people who actually listen. Ps2 currently has virtually no teamplay. 99% of "teamplay" is basically solo players who happen to be nearby eachother and are in competition with eachother over kills, rather than in support of eachother. Leading is secondary (or more like quartiary) to teamplay, first we need actual mechanics and features that allow teamplay before you ask people to lead over that teamplay.
THIS IS FROM TODAY HALF OUR POP JUST WANTS TO FIGHT TR NOT ONE CARE ABOUT AN ALERT http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=16556368725327158807
There's no Incentives for the Grunts to fall in line. They don't see DRASTICALLY better Certs or Survival by following orders. If anything, they tend to get less of both advantages b/c there's always lots more downtime involved or the Platoon is going into an outnumbered situation hoping to win on sheer skill alone This is why many "Holy Trinity" MMO's literally have to give huge BONUS XP / DROPS for high end Team-play because you always have to account for those large volumes of Down-Time spent just getting prepared. And this game does a horrible job of actively "Detecting" when Outfits win via "Coordination" versus when the whole faction just wins because of a 2v1 and Zerging
yeah i agree agreed the amout of iso and certs u get from 7 days total time of playing for the average player is about equal to maxing 1 implant maybe 2 if above avg, among wanting other things. stop being stingy db
no one ever payed attention to orders chat. The only thing i wrote once was to spam with Q the targets .... I don't understand the issue. It was only a place to let veteran blame noobs.
How about letting SL and Pl decide on fire teams rather than forcing that crap. Bring back command chat and hope the devs get a clue....
Apparently you don't understand command chat either. While I agree it was crap on a cracker it did afford some ability to coordinate and work together. Now that's not even a possibility.
Remember the tease a while back in a Reddit post about new respawn mechanics that Outfits will be able to form Alliances? Apparently only myself.
As a PS1 vet that played the PS2 beta I knew the lack of a Command Rank would end up hurting the game in the long run as it would create a leadership/information hole when it came to organized play. Much of us during the PS2 beta pleaded the devs for a CR system that had a strong leadership chat backbone but unfortunately it never happened. Orders and Leader were the best way for us to keep our entire population semi-organized and at least aware of some kind of game plan with alerts but now the best we can do is base hop and spam in /region or use Defense/Offense requests to get the mobs attention on where to go. Same as what Demigan wrote above, these were used primarily just to direct the zerg as anything more advanced would fall on deaf ears but it was effective and that's what matters. If the devs wanted to crackdown on spam in /orders why not just implement a tiered system like PS1 CRs to alleviate the issue? Not many people are willing to lead squads/platoons but its for that vary reason we might as well empower them and them alone. This kind of system wouldn't take any time at all to implement. Hell, they could even tie it into directives if they really wanted to. This change in itself just seems extremely late as I remember the first couple years of PS2, orders chat was a complete mess filled with outfit recruitment spam and drama (luckily the community changed over time). Why did the Devs not take a drastic measure like this way back then? It makes little sense to me. @PristineC On what you said about tiers, I've felt like the "Command Tier" has been more or less dead for VS on Emerald for years now. Much of the original people who took on this role weren't even platoon/outfit leaders. They were PS1 vets who were used to using Broadcast to issue large scale strategic orders to the masses so they just sat in squads of 2-3 people and coordinated most things. Unfortunately many of these people seem to have quit or gone to other servers since Emerald became a server. I cant really comment too much on the NC or TR but it seems on Emerald /orders has been even more barren than the VS during alerts for the past couple years. You'd think with large scale strategy planning at an all time low we'd get more tools for staying organized, not less.
Glad to see the support of this dislike, it is a serious issue in game atm and has done nothing but to completely extinguish inter platoon play...
It's so sad that such a minute piece of not even secondary importance to teamplay gets this much attention, while there is a gaping hole in creating an actual teamplay experience. With the current mechanics all orders chat, squads and platoons can do is point dozens of solo players to one area, but it wont be people teamworking but a mob of individuals simply because the game does not reward nor encourage teamplay. Could all you "teamplayers" make a thread about actually improving the core of teamplay, IE multiple people working closely together rather than just alongside eachother?
Some of the best alert wins I've ever been a part of were intensely coordinated via orders chat. Without the real time coordination it allows we would never have been able to pull off those last minute wins. If you didn't find it useful all you had to do was TURN IT OFF... Only an a$$hat would believe that completely removing it is a good idea at all. If you found someone annoying or uselessly talkative over orders chat muting that person COULDN'T BE EASIER unless DBG read your thoughts and did it for you. Removing this function entirely is just plain stupid, pure and simple.
Realistically, anyone looking at the map will have the same information as the person utilizing /Orders. Any message beyond that is asking others to act on what you believe is a priority. What's the odds on that?
