Online features and community

[Berzerk!]

Versuscity.net have an interesting series running on the topic "Making Fighting Games Better"

The piece on making a better online community is really relevant to DOA, which through online features attained a lot of its core players. We've all grown and understand that the right way to play the game competitively is offline, but online connectivity is still very important.

Take a look at the features mentioned - do you think TN could/should implement some of these?
http://www.versuscity.net/2012/05/04/how-to-make-fighting-games-better-part-3/

I particularly like the stat tracking and community hub/communications ideas.

 

[DrDogg]

I'm actually against some of the stat tracking because that puts more value on stats, which encourages people to DC when they're about to lose or avoid matches against good opponents.

I'm also not really in favor of the hub stuff, unless it were to tie directly to an established community. For example, if DOA5 had this, I'd want it to tie in directly to this site. Not only does it bring more people to the competitive community, but I don't have to worry about the site dying when all of the casuals move on to the next shiny object.

Scrubs dominate fighting games, especially online. They hate to lose, and they especially hate losing to "competitive tactics"... or as the scrub likes to call it, "spamming". They also hate being corrected, or shown how to properly play. I'd prefer to avoid a community with them...

 

[PhoenixVFIRE]

I would assume the stat tracking would be able to record disconnects. In fact. I would make it so the tracking can tell the difference between quitting the game and an actual internet disconnection. But, those people who care about stats so much would just pull the internet cord then Whatever...it's their loss, they are one who is gonna have to wait for the internet to come back up and reset their connections and shit. Either way though I wouldn't care if there was stats anyway, I'm happy with just ranked and player matches when it comes to that sort of thing. Also I wouldn't mind if DOA5 connected to this site tbh. I mean, aren't there players here who are somewhat close to TN anyway and apparently they watch this site, why not?

 

[Berzerk!]

Keeping history - or lack thereof - is one of the things really holding gaming back, having good record of how players do, what they've achieved. By doing more to support having solid data to tell stories about how we play, the interactions of players, will make it a stronger community and more visible to those outside who may wish to take an interest.

 

[Echo01]

Having the game tie in or direct players to FSD would be a great feature and I really don't know why FGs as a whole aren't doing this. Surely it wouldn't take too much effort on the devs' part to identify the main relevant sites according to region, and promote them within the game. Newer players to either DoA or FGs in general could then easily find a site/community to help them learn the game and improve, as well as allowing for healthy matchmaking options.

 

[Talim JP]

I think TN, as a company tryin to make money, would find it hard to link to community sites (that aren't run by TN itself).

And if they did, to be fair they'd have to link to more than one (or would have to link to all of them).

 

[Berzerk!]

They don't have to link to more than one. They can link to more than one on a links section of their own site, but in game they could link to a site that wins a tender or is recognised to have the right feature set.

You'd want to have a robust section within the game though as much as possible. The always-selectable move list and move data is a great thing, but the principle the versuscity series calls the "push" principle is a good one. It says that games should do more to present information to the player that's beyond the basic movelist, and connecting to the community to ask questions should be well behind having a proper tutorial and strategy/usage information threaded into the game

 

[Talim JP]

Each DOA site would want to be the linked one and I don't think TN would want to show favoritism puttin one community site over another.

 

[Rikuto]

Eve-online has a nifty little feature where out-of-game 3rd party utilities are basically allowed to request data from the core servers regarding player stats and map control information in real time.

If Tecmo wanted to step up their game all they would have to do is set up a server where this information is mirrored and let the fansites automatically download it and do whatever they wanted with that information.



.... That said, online stats are really troublesome, and team ninja has always had some truly bizarre ideas on how to rank people which are not anywhere near acceptable to a serious community.

I like online ranks more as a way to filter out the garbage when I'm just dicking around trying to find someone make me stay awake. Unfortunately most other people use it as a sign they are actually good at something and have a reputation worth defending, which is an unfortunate misunderstanding on their part. There is something to be said about the joys of griefing people who do take it seriously though, so it's a mixed bag.


Soul Calibur has this system where every other week it has a temporary "tournament mode" for Global which lasts for a couple of days. This mode is actually not a tournament at all, its just a temporary leaderboard which disappears after an alloted time frame. There is absolutely no incentive to play in it.

Borrowing from that horrendously flawed concept which was born from netcode and lobby engineers not having any idea what the fuck a tournament is, why doesn't DOA 5 run something more along the lines of where every couple of weeks it allows players to queue up at a specific time. it then starts to auto-run a tournament in double elimination format and points/titles/rank progression are given to players based on how they place inside of these tournaments, and how big the turnout was.

Before entering the queue, the third party server basically pings you to see if you're a laggy son of a bitch. If you don't meet a certain downstream/upstream criteria, you are barred from entry. If your connection experiences a sudden drop in quality during a match that is completely inconsistent to how you are flagged when the test ran, you are auto-DQ'd. This is to prevent scrubs from just turning on the torrents to fuck with people. Having the infrastructure to do this also ensures that anytime someone ragequits they are appropriately detected for doing so and punished.

On the same ticket, you have multiple regions where people can enter during this timeframe. People in different regions will not face off with each other to prevent horrible lag scenarios and general lameness. A person would only be able to enter one region per tournament night, obviously.

This kind of infrastructure basically holds internet scrubs accountable for their bullshit. The two major questions are, is Tecmo willing to go the extra mile like Namco did with SCV and maintain third party servers? And can internet scrubs actually handle getting their shit tossed and being called out on it? When I look at certain websites and the way scrubs cry, I can't help but wonder if some of these companies are actually trying to give them an easy way out of getting their asses kicked.

 

[Allan Paris]

This sounds nice as shit. To bad they are not taking anymore feedback, Rikuto.

 

[Rikuto]

Yea, well I wasn't gonna try fitting all that into their dinky little feedback tab anyway. heh.

 

[Awesmic]

Eve-online has a nifty little feature where out-of-game 3rd party utilities are basically allowed to request data from the core servers regarding player stats and map control information in real time.

If Tecmo wanted to step up their game all they would have to do is set up a server where this information is mirrored and let the fansites automatically download it and do whatever they wanted with that information.



.... That said, online stats are really troublesome, and team ninja has always had some truly bizarre ideas on how to rank people which are not anywhere near acceptable to a serious community.

I like online ranks more as a way to filter out the garbage when I'm just dicking around trying to find someone make me stay awake. Unfortunately most other people use it as a sign they are actually good at something and have a reputation worth defending, which is an unfortunate misunderstanding on their part. There is something to be said about the joys of griefing people who do take it seriously though, so it's a mixed bag.


Soul Calibur has this system where every other week it has a temporary "tournament mode" for Global which lasts for a couple of days. This mode is actually not a tournament at all, its just a temporary leaderboard which disappears after an alloted time frame. There is absolutely no incentive to play in it.

Borrowing from that horrendously flawed concept which was born from netcode and lobby engineers not having any idea what the fuck a tournament is, why doesn't DOA 5 run something more along the lines of where every couple of weeks it allows players to queue up at a specific time. it then starts to auto-run a tournament in double elimination format and points/titles/rank progression are given to players based on how they place inside of these tournaments, and how big the turnout was.

Before entering the queue, the third party server basically pings you to see if you're a laggy son of a bitch. If you don't meet a certain downstream/upstream criteria, you are barred from entry. If your connection experiences a sudden drop in quality during a match that is completely inconsistent to how you are flagged when the test ran, you are auto-DQ'd. This is to prevent scrubs from just turning on the torrents to fuck with people. Having the infrastructure to do this also ensures that anytime someone ragequits they are appropriately detected for doing so and punished.

On the same ticket, you have multiple regions where people can enter during this timeframe. People in different regions will not face off with each other to prevent horrible lag scenarios and general lameness. A person would only be able to enter one region per tournament night, obviously.

This kind of infrastructure basically holds internet scrubs accountable for their bullshit. The two major questions are, is Tecmo willing to go the extra mile like Namco did with SCV and maintain third party servers? And can internet scrubs actually handle getting their shit tossed and being called out on it? When I look at certain websites and the way scrubs cry, I can't help but wonder if some of these companies are actually trying to give them an easy way out of getting their asses kicked.

Rikuto uses "The Most Brilliant Idea for Online Features in DOA5"!

It's super-effective!

 

[Rikuto]

Wouldn't go that far, but at least I'm fairly confident it's got a decent chance of being seen here since we know they poke around....

Whether or not anyone from team ninja cares is entirely different. If any of them have accounts, I imagine a good portion of them probably have me on ignore lol.

 

[Echo01]

Love that idea, Rikuto, makes much more sense than SCV's tournament...thing, which essentially boils down to being Ranked 2.0. Problem is it sounds far too advanced for dev. teams to even bother considering =/

 

[Rikuto]

Love that idea, Rikuto, makes much more sense than SCV's tournament...thing, which essentially boils down to being Ranked 2.0. Problem is it sounds far too advanced for dev. teams to even bother considering =/

By rule of thumb, if any concept that is written down takes up more space than is available on a bar napkin, it's too advanced for the average dev. Fancy mathing does not a creative mind make.

(and this is why I probably get put on ignore)

 

[RoboJoe]

Before entering the queue, the third party server basically pings you to see if you're a laggy son of a bitch. If you don't meet a certain downstream/upstream criteria, you are barred from entry. If your connection experiences a sudden drop in quality during a match that is completely inconsistent to how you are flagged when the test ran, you are auto-DQ'd. This is to prevent scrubs from just turning on the torrents to fuck with people. Having the infrastructure to do this also ensures that anytime someone ragequits they are appropriately detected for doing so and punished.

I like this part best, too bad it would never happen. Team Ninja running a tournament that excludes customers, I mean.

 

[Rikuto]

I like this part best, too bad it would neverhappen. Team Ninja running a tournament that excludes customers, I mean.

That truly depends how high you set the bar of qualification. It doesn't take too great of a connection from what I can tell. even two mediocre connections in SCV's netcode are actually pretty stable as long as you are geographically reasonable to each other. but if two mediocre connections from opposing coastlines meet, or god forbid overseas, you can expect the match to go into e-rage territory. I think this is what happens most of the time with the "bad matches" a lot of us have online.

Part of the reasoning behind making tournaments region specific is so people with somewhat mediocre connections CAN still play without getting barred, so I don't see tournaments that exclude customers being a big deal. Even then It would take a seriously horrifyingly bad connection to get barred from your own region, and if the connection is really truly that bad, that person probably shouldn't even be playing modern games on the internet. All they have to do is not advertise that particular feature as being guaranteed on the box, and the few batty old women in the FGC will have nothing solid to complain about. Better yet, if they tried to turn it into a major media thing, the rest of the FGC would jump down their throats immediatly and never give them a moments peace since we know exactly who it is screwing up our online games.

And there is nothing saying that these guys couldn't play in the regular online modes that the game provides... they are the ones typically getting shoehorned out of rooms anyway, so this shouldn't come as much of a surprise to them.

 

[RoboJoe]

Can't say I'm super knowledgeable about internet connections and all that, so I can't estimate how often laggy games are a result of distance or just bad internet so I'll just take your word on it not being too big an issue.

 

[Rikuto]

SCV has a little map that shows where your opponent is located in the world. Let's just say it's a pretty damn amazing option.

 

[Chris Harris]

If there isn't some type of mode for us to have fun with/test the game I'm sure someone will be running consistent online stuff. It would be a medium work load to run something like a "league" but if someone did make it I hope that person has in their post "DOES NOT REFLECT OFFLINE POWA" or something like that and the word power must be "POWA"