Hello there, forum reader I have been playing a bit during the quiet time on cobalt, and i find it extremely slow. Even when looking out for a fight, it ends up feeling like a ghost cap. I guess 2 unlocked continents is too much for 50 players to find each other. The solution to this is of course to play during active hours, or have multiple accounts on multiple servers That's no fun. what about somehow limiting the areas the small amount of players can be at to encourage fights. I know it removes some of the gameplay like locking continents, but when gameplay is this slow, I feel it hardly matters. I also know that it is a lot to ask of a new feature, if it can only benefit the 50 players active on a Wednesday morning -but asking never hurts. Now that you've heard me out, dear reader, please tell me; Is this wishful thinking, or would this feature actually make sense?
Wouldn't that mean during quiet hours, all the literal low level players safe in Koltyr would be massacred by battle rank 120's like endlessly? What happens if those players stay logged on, until the active hours? Would it kick, or leave these incredibly deadly players on? -- The lock-down of areas may make some sense, given Koltyr is not the full battle experience anyway.
Honestly, I think it would be great to make an alternate Koltyr and call it 'Queue Battlegrounds'. Outside of the dead hours where it's all ghost capping, there's also times where people are sitting in queue and they just spend time running around in the VR endlessly firing at the brain dead AI. I feel like this would open up more opportunities for these players to occupy themselves while they wait for room to open up. The only thing I would say, however... is instead of following the lattice system like they currently do in Koltyr, make the Queue Battlegrounds all one big point map. There would be, say... 6 points throughout the map, and whichever faction holds them the longest wins. Winning doesn't lock the Queue Battlegrounds - it simply says which faction was the last winner and provides a map-wide leaderboard for that session. Continent bonuses should NOT be a thing in the Queue Battlegrounds because Koltyr is already way smaller than an actual continent... so having cheaper air, grenades, armor, etc. would tip the balance way, way, way too much. The Battlegrounds should simply have a notification that informs the players that one faction was victorious previously and say who the top combatants were. This would also be great for people who want to have outfit battles for fun. There's actually quite a few outfits who play multiple factions who wouldn't mind squaring off against one another just for funsies.
I would also appreciate a number of Koltyr sized continents or islands scattered around the larger ones. Smaller scale battles would help alleviate the heavily populated latency issues, and imo, they're much more fun.
Honestly, I think Koltyr should be open to all BRs, but players with a character on their account above BR 15 lose: All upgraded ranks of suit slots, abilities and implants All ability/utility/defense slot items for vehicles Attachments for weapons Non-default vehicle weapons (restricting access to vehicles period may be prudent) Combat vehicles (non-sunderer, galaxy or valkyries) have 750 nanite cost or are unpurchaseable In addition, XP gain for direct combat actions (damage, kills, etc..) is decreased by 75% but XP gain for support actions (sundie spawns, healing, ammo supply, repairs, saving allies, squad spawns, leadership ribbons, drill sergeant ribbons, etc..) is increased by 150%. In a nutshell, veteran players are reduced down to the precise efficacy of new players, though they still have access to camouflage (which may be a problem due to identifying friendlies and enemies, but that's part of the real game so they might as well learn soon), and they will be heavily encouraged to actually play on Koltyr to help new players learn and increase their fun, rather than stomping all over them with visibly mismatched skill. This still leaves the potential issue of entire outfits and/or platoons coming to Koltyr just to stomp on new players, even with their gimped loadout. I'm thinking veteran HP/shields could be reduced by 25% or so to ensure this is harder to do, but this might impact players' impression of times to kill, which will hurt them once deployed into the other continents. Perhaps a hard limit on how many "teachers" (veterans) can be in a squad/platoon (3 per squad?).
I disagree completely. A veteran doesn't roflstomp a newbie because he has better suit slots (or whatever). He does it because he has practice and experience. I think getting roflstomped over and over again in Koltyr would be a massive disincentive for newbies to stay with the game. Secondly, I doubt XP would be an issue. I know that I'm not hard up for XP, and I'm basically a bad. Directives and Auraxiums, however, are a major driver, and those run off kills.... I can easily see Koltyr getting turned into a noob-farming zone for grinding out Aurax's and Directives if your plan went through, so they'd have to disable Directive and Aurax progress as well. Thirdly, this is the internetz.... never, NEVER forget the troll factor. There are people who WILL abuse this to harass and stomp on newbies. I'll admit, I don't know what the answers to player retention, the learning curve and the skill-cliff are, but I'm pretty darned sure that THIS isn't it. That said.... there may be some value in incentivising good players (although how you judge who's worthy, I don't know) to spend some time on Koltyr teaching newbies (possibly with some sort of unique weapon / camo / cosmetic / title etc.) but the problems with that are substantial.... like: Who qualifies to be a good teacher? For example, I like to think I've got a pretty solid handle on the infantry game. But I don't know much about vehicle play and nothing about the air game. Do I qualify? What makes a good teacher? For example, I've got a lot of experience, and I play all three factions, so I think I can give decent advice. I'm also a fully qualified mentor at work, and about 1/3 of my time is spent teaching or developing courses and I generally get pretty good feedback from my students. Am I a good teacher? Or do you have to be a BR120, KDR 5+ dude who knows nothing about teaching? What makes a good leader? Plenty of "good players" are terrible leaders. It's a completely different skill set, and one that few people have mastered. In addition, how much of their experience will actually translate to Koltyr? I've never been there (1k Directive points before it came out), so I don't know whether the environment is anything like Live. Even if we somehow manage to IDENTIFY a target group of "good" trainers, how to we incentivise them? They're not paid employees of DBG after all.... why should they give up their time and progression etc. to spend time handholding newbies? Hell.... should we incentivise them at all? At least that way, we'd only be getting volunteers from people who care about the game and want to contribute to the community, rather than just "doing it for the gun" or whatever. Except, of course, from the trolls. I could go on, but I think you get the picture. When you really get into it, it's not NEARLY as easy as it looks on the surface.
