11-09-2018, 12:31 AM
So the Tau-29 event between the Outcasts and Crayter has kept my mind for a couple of days now. I kind of want to lay out my thoughts and see if anyone else sees things the same way or not so here goes...
To start with the premise, around Monday morning I joined the Outcast event chat on Discord, not really knowing what it was about. I had been somewhat absent from Discovery as of late due to lack of interest and things to do around here. At first, totally forgetting Basilica was the Dreadnought I thought this was some PoB defense chat. Eventually, due to me being bored and at home due to sick leave, I looked into the whole discord and the event and realized that was the brand new shiny official event. Now I've lately grown to somewhat dislike events (mostly due to being first target in them or them being mostly caps and me liking snubs) so I was very much ready to completely ignore the event and continue my "not playing spree". But then I read that this event will have consequences and due to having my main character in the Outcasts and also leading an Outcast faction I instinctively had the biased urge to not want the Outcasts to lose stuff. This actually prompted me to log and play the game.
Turned out there were other people who were also logging their Outcasts. Some of those people I didn't even know that they had such characters. It also turned out there were more people around with Crayterian ships than I thought as well. I can only imagine they felt the same way about the event as I did. So I logged around when there were other OCs, monitored the Discord, we had a few fights, some we lost and logged off for the time being, some we won and sieged a bit. What truly surprised me was the amount of people that were keeping an eye on things and were willing to log, on a weekday at that (again, I was sick and at home so could log at odd times of the day). This was cool in a way, whenever I logged in Tau-29 I knew I could get into a fight. Contributing to the objective (as in sieging) was way less fun though. But I still regard the fact it was a siege an important aspect, I'll get to it later though.
After one of the evening scraps on monday I think, some of our more devout guys stayed and sieged the base down hard, like siege it down to 35-40%. Meanwhile Basilica was at 75+%. Quite the difference and knowing how long it took us to take it down to 30%, a disheartening one at that. But what happened on the last day was most amazing. Instead of giving up the Crayterians doubled down and brought the biggest fleet I've ever seen (I'll elaborate on the circumstances later). What followed was many hours of back and forth, different tactics, NEMPs, all out rushes, stalls, people returning after the 30 min mark, new tactics. A huge dynamic fight that seemed like it will never see an end. There were stare offs, there was even a point when both sides sieged uninterrupted their respective target. People crunched numbers, planned things, assured each other. I felt drawn to play, because even though it looked like we are very much winning, I wanted it to be ensured, to not let a damn chance it slips us because of me not being there. And then we won that final fight and went to siege the remaining 5% until Helios exploded. Game over, we had won. I logged off as it was late and went to bed happy. And then I had not logged since in the following 2-3 days. There simply was nothing as urgent to force me to, nothing to make me feel drawn and required to be there to see and experience. I also checked the Storta's activity for the event - 9 hours. Most likely all of them from me, across just 2 days.
Okay, so now that I've gone though how things went for me and how it looked in my eyes I'll go through some of the thoughts I had about it all:
Firstly I thought about the whole mechanic of PoB sieging. On one side I hated it, it was boring, dull, I simply alt+tabbed and let my ship shoot as I browse discord, youtube, read stuff for work. But at the same time I doubt it was going to work without a PoB. In a pvp event about kills you can simply log off if you don't feel like you stand a chance. If you're just as competitive about winning, you'd only take fights you're somewhat sure you can win. With a PoB this isn't possible, because every minute you don't fight the enemy, the enemy simply shoots your base and gets closer to winning the event. So in a way I do consider having some negative for not participating as a key factor as to why this event was as big and filled with interactions. Even when Crayter outnumbered us, we had to try and at least cull their numbers a bit before dying and then simply regrouping to retry in 30 minutes or however long it took us to get more people. Whenever we outnumbered Crayter, they also attacked us even when not having the odds to really win. Perhaps I'm wrong but at least to me it really felt the urgency that a PoB siege provides was a key factor as to why so many people had logged.
Of course this isn't taken into account other factors like Panzer's inability to bend a knee or Shooter's mad gamble of 20 billion credits to sponsor indies. Both showed exceptional attitude and where many others would just give up decided to fight to the very end. Kudos to them both for that. I sincerely was worried we might not have this in the bag until the very last fight ended. This made it all so well for me. So their exceptional behavior not to give up and to get other people to help them could have also played a considerable part as to why this event was so populated and not just the fact it was the sense of PoB urgency. I still doubt that if the event was a simple "get more kills", it would've been more pleasant and fun than it was now. And I'm saying that as someone who generally dislikes shooting battleships quite a lot.
Wesker personally claims PoBs bring out the worst in people as you need to ensure all of your fleet survives so they relog the battleships and siege with max people. But personally I've seen plenty of bad behavior when there were kill events as well. There were people sanctioning other people left and right whenever a kill wasn't theirs. There were people trying to deny themselves left and right in as vague as possible way to avoid being punished for it. I even remember a friend being sanctioned for having a stray shot accidentally kill a teammate from 600m distance and through all the chasers he was shooting. I wouldn't say that behavior is much better than the tryhardness of sieges. When people are pushed in a competitive environment they tend to get way more aggressive and some tend to resort to dirty measures to feel victorious one way or another.
Of course I do regard the fact this event kept me positive as I ended up in the side of the victors. I'm not entirely sure how the Crayterians feel, especially all they had given to the very end only to see Helios gone. I can only imagine they don't feel as positive about it as me. Where I am content that Basilica is here to stay, they may or may not (depending if I understood the event) have lost Helios. It sucks to lose something, even if it's just some dock point somewhere, I mean I still feel meh about Kirkwall even though I visited it like once an year at best. Thing is though, I don't remember other events where A and B squared it off in base sieging race that was just event bases. I still think that the consequences part was more important than simply the fact there was an event with bases to siege.
I also thought about Sigma-21 and it's war. It never kicked off from what I was told. There were some fights and then people got bored. It was done. To me it came to be such because of multiple reasons, but some of them contrasted with the event. For instance there was no urgency to log, you weren't putting anything at stake, be it event created PoB or a story asset. Of course it could've also been that KNF/RM don't have as devoted playerbase. Though then we go back to my first point about seeing so many people that I never thought played Crayter/Outcast just because the event was happening.
I've also been pondering as to how the event could be refined. To perhaps last longer, but also not drag out so long that it's absolutely boring. How to keep people engaged, how to make them feel like that if they could log they definitely should, rather than only bother when odds are at their side, but also skip the absolutely horrendously boring mechanic which is PoB sieging. And sadly I've yet to come up with anything decent. The closest thing that comes to mind is perhaps some trade event. But I really can't think how to make that one work in a way that also forces some form of interaction between the opposing sides. Perhaps if both sides need to bring some commodity to the enemy's base area? But it has to be taken and made with some sort of chokepoints so that traders can't just afk 50K above and then do the heroic dive and quickdock. Something to give initiative and possibility for defenders to defend while not spending more manpower than they could've had simply trading to match the enemy. If something like that could be done perhaps it could be an alternative to PoB's. Though shooting transports isn't as fun and there has to be some sort of initiative and ease for one side's defenders to simply move to become attackers and brawl it off with the other side's place.
Ok, it's 1:30 AM and I pressed Preview and this looks like one big mess. Guess it's time to post it. Feel free to give your thoughts on it all.
tl;dr: I have too much free time when sick and at home.
To start with the premise, around Monday morning I joined the Outcast event chat on Discord, not really knowing what it was about. I had been somewhat absent from Discovery as of late due to lack of interest and things to do around here. At first, totally forgetting Basilica was the Dreadnought I thought this was some PoB defense chat. Eventually, due to me being bored and at home due to sick leave, I looked into the whole discord and the event and realized that was the brand new shiny official event. Now I've lately grown to somewhat dislike events (mostly due to being first target in them or them being mostly caps and me liking snubs) so I was very much ready to completely ignore the event and continue my "not playing spree". But then I read that this event will have consequences and due to having my main character in the Outcasts and also leading an Outcast faction I instinctively had the biased urge to not want the Outcasts to lose stuff. This actually prompted me to log and play the game.
Turned out there were other people who were also logging their Outcasts. Some of those people I didn't even know that they had such characters. It also turned out there were more people around with Crayterian ships than I thought as well. I can only imagine they felt the same way about the event as I did. So I logged around when there were other OCs, monitored the Discord, we had a few fights, some we lost and logged off for the time being, some we won and sieged a bit. What truly surprised me was the amount of people that were keeping an eye on things and were willing to log, on a weekday at that (again, I was sick and at home so could log at odd times of the day). This was cool in a way, whenever I logged in Tau-29 I knew I could get into a fight. Contributing to the objective (as in sieging) was way less fun though. But I still regard the fact it was a siege an important aspect, I'll get to it later though.
After one of the evening scraps on monday I think, some of our more devout guys stayed and sieged the base down hard, like siege it down to 35-40%. Meanwhile Basilica was at 75+%. Quite the difference and knowing how long it took us to take it down to 30%, a disheartening one at that. But what happened on the last day was most amazing. Instead of giving up the Crayterians doubled down and brought the biggest fleet I've ever seen (I'll elaborate on the circumstances later). What followed was many hours of back and forth, different tactics, NEMPs, all out rushes, stalls, people returning after the 30 min mark, new tactics. A huge dynamic fight that seemed like it will never see an end. There were stare offs, there was even a point when both sides sieged uninterrupted their respective target. People crunched numbers, planned things, assured each other. I felt drawn to play, because even though it looked like we are very much winning, I wanted it to be ensured, to not let a damn chance it slips us because of me not being there. And then we won that final fight and went to siege the remaining 5% until Helios exploded. Game over, we had won. I logged off as it was late and went to bed happy. And then I had not logged since in the following 2-3 days. There simply was nothing as urgent to force me to, nothing to make me feel drawn and required to be there to see and experience. I also checked the Storta's activity for the event - 9 hours. Most likely all of them from me, across just 2 days.
Okay, so now that I've gone though how things went for me and how it looked in my eyes I'll go through some of the thoughts I had about it all:
Firstly I thought about the whole mechanic of PoB sieging. On one side I hated it, it was boring, dull, I simply alt+tabbed and let my ship shoot as I browse discord, youtube, read stuff for work. But at the same time I doubt it was going to work without a PoB. In a pvp event about kills you can simply log off if you don't feel like you stand a chance. If you're just as competitive about winning, you'd only take fights you're somewhat sure you can win. With a PoB this isn't possible, because every minute you don't fight the enemy, the enemy simply shoots your base and gets closer to winning the event. So in a way I do consider having some negative for not participating as a key factor as to why this event was as big and filled with interactions. Even when Crayter outnumbered us, we had to try and at least cull their numbers a bit before dying and then simply regrouping to retry in 30 minutes or however long it took us to get more people. Whenever we outnumbered Crayter, they also attacked us even when not having the odds to really win. Perhaps I'm wrong but at least to me it really felt the urgency that a PoB siege provides was a key factor as to why so many people had logged.
Of course this isn't taken into account other factors like Panzer's inability to bend a knee or Shooter's mad gamble of 20 billion credits to sponsor indies. Both showed exceptional attitude and where many others would just give up decided to fight to the very end. Kudos to them both for that. I sincerely was worried we might not have this in the bag until the very last fight ended. This made it all so well for me. So their exceptional behavior not to give up and to get other people to help them could have also played a considerable part as to why this event was so populated and not just the fact it was the sense of PoB urgency. I still doubt that if the event was a simple "get more kills", it would've been more pleasant and fun than it was now. And I'm saying that as someone who generally dislikes shooting battleships quite a lot.
Wesker personally claims PoBs bring out the worst in people as you need to ensure all of your fleet survives so they relog the battleships and siege with max people. But personally I've seen plenty of bad behavior when there were kill events as well. There were people sanctioning other people left and right whenever a kill wasn't theirs. There were people trying to deny themselves left and right in as vague as possible way to avoid being punished for it. I even remember a friend being sanctioned for having a stray shot accidentally kill a teammate from 600m distance and through all the chasers he was shooting. I wouldn't say that behavior is much better than the tryhardness of sieges. When people are pushed in a competitive environment they tend to get way more aggressive and some tend to resort to dirty measures to feel victorious one way or another.
Of course I do regard the fact this event kept me positive as I ended up in the side of the victors. I'm not entirely sure how the Crayterians feel, especially all they had given to the very end only to see Helios gone. I can only imagine they don't feel as positive about it as me. Where I am content that Basilica is here to stay, they may or may not (depending if I understood the event) have lost Helios. It sucks to lose something, even if it's just some dock point somewhere, I mean I still feel meh about Kirkwall even though I visited it like once an year at best. Thing is though, I don't remember other events where A and B squared it off in base sieging race that was just event bases. I still think that the consequences part was more important than simply the fact there was an event with bases to siege.
I also thought about Sigma-21 and it's war. It never kicked off from what I was told. There were some fights and then people got bored. It was done. To me it came to be such because of multiple reasons, but some of them contrasted with the event. For instance there was no urgency to log, you weren't putting anything at stake, be it event created PoB or a story asset. Of course it could've also been that KNF/RM don't have as devoted playerbase. Though then we go back to my first point about seeing so many people that I never thought played Crayter/Outcast just because the event was happening.
I've also been pondering as to how the event could be refined. To perhaps last longer, but also not drag out so long that it's absolutely boring. How to keep people engaged, how to make them feel like that if they could log they definitely should, rather than only bother when odds are at their side, but also skip the absolutely horrendously boring mechanic which is PoB sieging. And sadly I've yet to come up with anything decent. The closest thing that comes to mind is perhaps some trade event. But I really can't think how to make that one work in a way that also forces some form of interaction between the opposing sides. Perhaps if both sides need to bring some commodity to the enemy's base area? But it has to be taken and made with some sort of chokepoints so that traders can't just afk 50K above and then do the heroic dive and quickdock. Something to give initiative and possibility for defenders to defend while not spending more manpower than they could've had simply trading to match the enemy. If something like that could be done perhaps it could be an alternative to PoB's. Though shooting transports isn't as fun and there has to be some sort of initiative and ease for one side's defenders to simply move to become attackers and brawl it off with the other side's place.
Ok, it's 1:30 AM and I pressed Preview and this looks like one big mess. Guess it's time to post it. Feel free to give your thoughts on it all.
tl;dr: I have too much free time when sick and at home.
![[+]](/forums/images/collapse_collapsed.png "[+]")