So, I'll just give you these replays: https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425264https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425279https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425282https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425292https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425302https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425304This has been most of my zk evening so far. More or less same team, and overall same outcome: 1 team gets stomped because multiple players sit at the back. Six times in a row. Now, I don't think this backsitting is or should be reportable. But, no matter how you put it, this is not a good situation. I am pretty sure I am not the only one who finds this extremely frustrating and unfair. And it's not about losing itself, but being barely able to play the game because you more or less get stomped in the first 10 min. It's also very hard to justify putting efford into any of the later games because, hey, why even bother if it doesn't matter in the end? Now, yes, sure you can say the viable alternative is too not play the game. But I do not think not engaging with the problem will solve anything. So, any ideas about what could be done? Is mixing teams up after one or 2 games at the cost of balance worth it? Probably not. But if anyone has any idea, please let us hear it. Also, at this current rate I am losing between 60 and 90 WHR PER DAY. I doubt this is good for balance overall, because I can hardly be the only one affected.
+2 / -0
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Zero-K breeds bad players by enabling stupid shit in TAW all day. At this point, I don't have any mild solutions better than purging the community. I hope tomorrow I can think more calmly about it. Today I stopped playing ZK and revisited other games because palladium didn't get going and TAW is cancer.
+2 / -0
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Obviously "purging" is not a desirable solution at all. But    madez is reminding me of another effect this has: If only very few people find TAW an enjoyable experience, less and less players will bother to play it. In fact, the spectator list is quite often significantly larger than the playing portion, and pretty often the people that actually play are rated silver or below, while the spectator list is full of purp/blue/silver. And they are not joining because they fear games like I linked above. What is different to the times before the palladium existed is that the pot has trouble to get going. And at that point, noone, absolutely noone profits from that. I think I am at the point where I find palladium to stressful and TAW too frustrating, so the obvious solution seems to be: Close game, look for another timesink. I do remember a week before steam release where I was usually the only (!) player logged in. Downward spirals can go hard and fast. I don't want this to happen again.
+0 / -0
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The early exits (-282 and -304) shouldn't count; players failing to join or dropping minute 1 is a different problem entirely. For the others, there mostly wasn't a massive difference in the amount of backlining going on although some players were frontlining ineffectively (mostly Dirtbag, Puppy and/or Skuttle); if a large team loses a game off of the decision of one extra Red Dwarf-rank player to go gunships, it's probably a symptom of broader coordination issues or getting outplayed more generally. The one glaring exception was the 3-player Singularity Reactor rush in -292, where one of the frontline players was also lagging/crashing during the opening. The residual complaint, I think, comes down to the anti-synergy between one particular two-stack that kept going on katastrophe's team later in the sequence.
+0 / -0
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It doesn't change the fact that none of these games were remotely enjoyable for me. I start to think that there should be a mechanism against short-term static team-compositions. One can argue that this will lead to more imbalanced games, but the games here were all obviously quite unbalanced already. Oh, also: This was a particularily bad day, but this is roughly how things are going since I started playing again last december. I have some good games and some where the team I am in wins regularly, but the majority of games are more mild versions of the linked games I played today. I assume you don't want replays to all these games listed here, so what you see is only the tip of the iceberg, albeit that tip is also peak in terms of severity. And actually I am doing this for around 10 years now. And it has never been that bad.
+1 / -0
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This is not a trail, I do not think we need to worry about the level of documentation related to an issue that we know exists and has been a long term underlying problem in the game. I do think we need to expand our understanding of additional problems that contribute to this issue as a whole and start working on more than just a solution to the potential backliner problem. I am suggesting we should expand the scope of things that are contributing to the health conditions of Zk as a whole and not fixate exclusively on this issue.
+1 / -0
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Absolutely, my apologies if the op reads as if I'd exclusively blame backliners. Why I am doing this now and not earlier is that I get the feeling that the frustrating exp. of TAW slowly affects way more players than just me and a few others. I have just seen these situations where dozends of players sit there and don't want to unspec because they are afraid of having a pretty bad time.
+1 / -0
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https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425264 - this seemed fine for frontliners? You had one backliner. (trollbot backlined) https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425279 - you had three backliners, so 4v5 frontliners. (ruru, trollbot backlined, vxd air) https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425282 - early exit https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425292 - two people rushing singus and then a nuke at the back (trollbot and imbombu). A third (ruru) backlining. Opposing team also had three backliners (824654 with army at back and fusions, psaniac on air, chonky with GS). https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425292 - trollbot backlines flooding dirtbags to the front while slowly building singu. Ruru backlines as air. Ibombu makes units this time. Chonky backlines with GS. Opposing team has two backliners making this 6v7 frontline. https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425304 - You instant resigned. Okay so basically some players are mostly doing the same thing every game. But with players this consistent their elo is based on them playing the way they do, which means teams are balanced around them playing this way too. I didn't feel these games were unwinnable. To be clear, I empathise. We can acknowledge that the way some players play is frustrating while also realising we can still play around it or avoid it. The players you're consistently struggling to play with are chonky, ruru, trollbot, I_bomb_u. If teams are small and there's a critical mass of these players, maybe avoid? This is especially the case in small teams where they're required to hold a front to not autolose. As for playing around it, I found that I struggle a lot less when I settle short of the 50% mark on the map and wait for my team to catch up. I play positions where I feel comfortable 1v2 or 1v3 because I know I'll have to pick up some slack. These players usually contribute eventually if you give them the space.
+3 / -0
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Related to backline overdriving what if we considered a change to the OD payback mechanic to lean into large od buildings being something that does not pay back evenly to the player that built the overdrive, possibly a reduced payback system so the first players to see benefit from od are the ones committing action instead of eco. Its not a true solution to this issue but it could be a stop gap measure. Im thinking something along the lines of builder of large economic buildings would get a reduced share, then after a slower payback period is fulfilled it would revert back to standard metal distribution.
+2 / -0
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quote:
If teams are small and there's a critical mass of these players, maybe avoid? |
quote:
Now, yes, sure you can say the viable alternative is too not play the game. But I do not think not engaging with the problem will solve anything. So, any ideas about what could be done? |
+0 / -0
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quote:
I start to think that there should be a mechanism against short-term static team-compositions. |
I fully support this, mostly to keep things interesting, and not have boring games. Take PlanetWars games for example - it was completely imbalanced many times and I still enjoyed because it takes off the pressure of "oh, it's 50% chance, I have a chance to win it".
+0 / -0
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As a personal experience I also feel that some people's (repeated) play style that leads to nothing, make me not enjoy the games and it determines me to ocasionally stop playing for that day. I think this is mostly a social problem altough I find it very hard to put myself in the place of people doing that. I have seen funny, imaginative, although very toxic trolls, but for me that is not the issue. What I perceived as complete lack of interaction with team, map or situation is the issue. I can't understand why don't those people play bot/chicken games - what do they miss in those? Do they want / know that their play style upsets others? Do they get that much joy from ocasionlly winning 1 in 10 games, by luck? Is it a language barrier? What else could it be? Please share if you play like that, or if you talked with someone that plays like that... Note: based on my statistics there are more people (around 50%) more hours spent playing bots and chickens that casual taw, so lots of people do enjoy playing by themselves, is not that uncommon.
+0 / -0
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A message displayed on the screen when a player places themselves away from the front line may help somewhat - something like... "Most games are won by the team that has the most players on the front." I think a part of TAW is negotiating this - you only have control over your players. I will sometimes intentionally leave a player trying to backline exposed so they are forced to build military and focus my efforts elsewhere. Occasionally you do see a teams starting position and know it's over straight away, but sometimes the opponents team has an even worse starting layout hahaha. Changing the eco payback system would help somewhat, but make it harder for good players to build eco. I assume that mex are repaid similarly though?
+0 / -0
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play palladium instead of TAW. maybe add lblue+ or yellow+ room.
+0 / -0
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