it’s easy to not see one’s own mistakes in a 4man team
it’s way too easy to be ignorant and blame everyone but oneself
it’s easy to blame the weapon/career/Fatshark overlords/whatever when there is no baseline, no immediate comparison to be made, no good way to measure personal performance… green circles hold no real value on Cata unless you have 5x more dmg than everyone else
The solution
A tutorial of sorts, the pits of qualification, where scrubs and ugly elves become men, the place that Sigmar and cousin Okri use as a playground whenever they are bored and/or drunk out of their kruting minds…
Make it light in terms of additional development hours and brainpower, I’m not asking for anything crazy here:
put together a series of rooms (Drachenfels pls) filled with scripted enemy spawns and encounters
make the full completion rated, say 0-3 stars, 1 star for time, 1 for not taking more than 50% of your HP in dmg, 1 for total score (based on headshots, optional objectives etc.), you get the point
add a few achievements for completions with all classes, all careers, all 3 star runs etc. paired with a few portrait frames
scale the whole thing with difficulty and use it as a qualifier before people can queue for said difficulty (gotta complete the thing with at least 5 careers, 1 career per class… or maybe just 3 because everybody hates the Elf and they probably have a second least favorite class as well)
perhaps even curate the builds people can use here, let people choose between ~3 builds per career, maybe curate the gear but let people figure out talents (?) and make them power 600 here as well
Optional QoL stuff:
allow people to conveniently repeat a single room till their fingers bleed
if you’re feeling extra creative, paint the doors of each room with useful tips and tricks
compile these super sweaty tips into a book in the Keep, the ultimate Okri manual
add a custom room where people can spawn enemies of their choosing and train/test, think creature spawner mod but on live realm because we all know that 99% of people won’t ever bother doing this on modded
Example: 5 rooms, doors close on you when you enter, add a bit of terrain/furniture to take advantage of.
Full run be like: a room filled with tier1/2 mobs, a room filled with elites, a horde to solo, a crowd of elites with a stream of specials joining in on the fun… and a boss to solo. Adjust per difficulty.
Focus on the basics here; everyone should be able to carry their own weight during a horde regardless of their career and build; everyone should be able to dance with a boss (at least Roger and/or Troll); everyone should be able to shut down a few specials while dueling elites etc.
It’s way harder to blame everyone and everything for failing Legend when you can’t qualify for it in the first place while others can.
It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t think it’ll achieve the things you hope it does, for a single simple reason: The difference between someone trying to get better, and someone who feels the failure must have simply been to external factors instead of themselves all the time is one simple thing: Mindset. That’s how it works in everything in life.
Even when a clusterfck clearly was due to external factors, your mindset will determine if you go “What bullsht, stupid game/elf/bug/Fatshark/Obama/Glitch, this is not my fault and everything needs to change and do it nooooooow!”, instead of “Unlucky, but was there a way I could have salvaged it if I had made another decision earlier on? And lets try to do that in the next run.”.
No fancy gauntlet will change this. It’ll just result in some people complaining the gauntlet is unfair or something, some people considering the gauntlet as an e-peen measuring contest, some people requiring PUGs to run it first to see if they are worthy of their exalted presence in quickplay matches, and comparable shenenigans. While people with the right mindset don’t need it at all to simply improve.
I think there are possibilities to change the mindset atleast… i saw that in League of Legends when they decided to integrate the honor system, most ppl atleast improved their behaviour. Imho FS should get rid of the green circle bs… just replace it with a milestone a character achieved in a run, like most elites, most revives, least dmg taken, etc., just 1 category for each player… and maybe let ppl vote for others to honor them, maybe combine it with that Schilling-system for Lohners Emporium (give players with lot’s of honor-points some Schillings) and swoosh, players will start to improve to get those.
It might not change the mindset of most people but it would, at the very least, force them to learn the basics and actually help build up their confidence in order to pull a minor clutch here and there and maybe save the run instead of simply throwing it when others die because they don’t want to be in the spotlight like that - which is understandable for inexperienced players.
Also, if this actually worked as a mandatory qualifier before being able to queue up for X difficulty (at least outside of private/friend-invite games), it would serve as a very clear indicator of whether or not you can pull your own weight in said difficulty and if you couldn’t even pass it with minimum requirements… well then it would require ignorance lvl 9000 to actually believe that it was someone else’s fault.
At the end of the day I know I’m naive thinking that this would turn the community around or something major…
I see more value in this serving simply as an informative tutorial thing (because the current tutorial is a one-time deal and it doesn’t teach people anything) for new players and convenient testing grounds for people trying to perfect their builds.
I think it’s an interesting idea but you could simplify it and probably achieve a better result. Basically do this:
And the quality of life stuff is nice too, but for the tips portion I don’t think Fatshark would want to spend the time trying to develop too many(but definitely some) because they’d probably get scrutinized and if players contributed to that then people would scrutinize that too. I guess that comes with the territory though.
What’s important here are fundamentals. You can utilize them on recruit and you can utilize them on whatever hell you want to place yourself into. I enjoyed the prologue tutorial that was made for VT2 because it has story and teaches people some very basic stuff at the same time.
The star idea would be good because it’d be super simple, non-recorded, and a personal goal/test that a player could use to see if they’re doing okay. Have players be able to immediately retry a challenge or room to practice it. You can even do something like another star for a great playthrough. It could teach people some stuff like how to deal with specials better, hordes, fight a boss etc. It could also teach people how to deal with prolonged engagements or situations with little to no resources(including the lack of downtime to charge their active) or practice in how they might best utilize limited resources.
A reward could be good or bad. It might incentivize someone to try and do it. It might also be used to lord over others or “this thing I can’t get and it’s frustrating”. If it’s just this non-recorded casual place to learn, then it might ease a player into the experience and they may get a lot more from it. But who knows.
