why are you posting in the multiplayer area if you have never played a multiplayer game?

are u a mod ?! are u in charge of policing threads ?!! i find that Toothless-OMO'S post #74 is on topic...he gives one theory to explain why some people might be quitting early in a game :

they dont like the feeling of being rushed by bangers who just want to crush them fast & furious.

in fact, dear Conan Bloodbane, a mod might consider your #75 post as « trolling » : it does not contribute anything positive to the thread's main topic AND it points the finger at a guy who (at least) took the time to compose a lengthy post on his theory.

the point this thread brings up has been unfortunately mis-interpreted by about 20 people who read the first post of a thread, and jump to conclusions faster than Bush in the Middle East.
people who do not want to play ranked games, that's fine, stay in your noob teamers - however there should be an option for people who want a more challenging experience, and who want to play the game to win. if the situation is not changed, then how is the game ever going to avoid the eventual doom of as soon as a person sees an army they cannot beat they quit - if (and this seems to be the case based on this thread) people would prefer to quit and try again then stick it out, and try and turn the game around

bringing in AI for people who quit is under no circumstance a "solution", it is at best a stall. if i wanted to play with computers, i would play single player

The point is I will not quit. I stick games out until the end; so I rather not play to serve someone's ambition to win at all costs so their name gets on a listing.

I never said do not play to win, but if you simply play to win the most games possible, it is an eventual slide to play games against people that clearly have no chance of winning, just to get another win.

I am simply pointing out what I have seen in many RTS style games online. People play others who they "likely" know cannot win, and simply crush them. Yes, it is a win, but is it fun?

If you are a seasoned player then take the time and help someone else along so they get better. Leaving a game where someone shows up at your front door with an armada and you are still trying to figure out, which techs to research, is not unreasonable.

A Dev said something similar yesterday in ICO and just to emphasize again, it is completely wrong.

Half of the games under "games played" are reloads or remakes after a few minutes of playing because someone dropped.

Of the remaining half of games (the ones actually played) I only have wins and losses for a third.
Thats 1/6 of all games listed "played" for me! Does that make me a leaver?
Why only a third? Because I simply dont want to waste time bombing 5 colonies of an inactive empire of to a player who left .

As i already said I think an over-sophisticated ladder will cause more problems than solve them. However, the current system is not only pretty useless, but possibly harmful.

Disconnection? considered that?

The post about rushing in AoE is off-topic. Asking someone to stay on topic with a winky at the end isn't trolling. The contribution is to focus discussion on the OP. Reply to this one if you like Sorceresss but I won't be following this line of discussion with you any further.

m8chor this may contribute a small amount, but of the games I've played, disconnection has featured in very few, compared to people leaving after losing a battle.

toothless - you can quit all the games you want even if we get the ranking system i want! - just don't play ranked games

since when is it inappropriate to talk about other games to make an analogy ? i dont recognize your self-appointed right to define what is « off-topic » and i especially do not recognize you any power to police a thread by pointing the finger at other posters to brand them as being « off-topic » (according to your little opinion)



again ... according to your opinion on what it is to be « on topic » and on what is or isnt « trolling » ... its very easy to insert winkies & smileys after putting down another poster



focus the discussion according to your tastes & criteria ! we may focus as we see fit : no need for a good shepherd who has his own little conception on the direction a thread should or should not take (especially when hes just an ordinary forum user like all of us)



     (<<< just to be sure im not trolling, according to your own little Law)

TOOTHLESS-OMO

i agree with most of your opinions and i do hope u wont let the self-appointed Thread Police deter u from posting

according to my own little opinion about the discussion focus on the OP, u never were « off topic »

***IMPORTANT***

Please address the ICO's quiting system. IMHO there are two things that must be done.

1: Allow disconnected players the ability of returning to play. They have this for simple games like chess and hearts on yahoo games, so there really should be no reason to not have it on a game as amazing as SoaSE.
- To prevent exploitation either limit the amount of Disconnect protects per game, or create an interface that asks the playes in game to bring a vote on accepting the player back in or not. This way, repeat offenders get the boot.

2: That UI thing brings me to my next issue. There needs to be a way where players aren't allowed to quit unless everyone agrees. (Again, implementing a UI for voting in game) This will prevent people from leaving like cowards when they are lossing badly. This should not be a problem!!! Instead of quiting you force them to surrender which counts as a loss. And if issue 1 is also addressed then frivolous disconnecting is also stopped.
- In regards to quiting a game and rsuming at a later time, if everyone agrees to quit, (again in game voting) or a majority agrees to quit then the game closes and no one is affected. The game resumes later and when the game is finished wins and losses are distributed.

I really feel this is an airtight solution to the problem with ICO and MP games. I 'm going to post this again here somewhere to amke sure it isn't lost and I'll prbbaly post it on the thread I saw about this problem.

Love the game guys. I can't wait for all the improvements for years to come!!!

This is really an issue... a leaderboard would definitely help.

Sins clearly wasn't intended to be some hyper-competitive RTS, but the least they could do was make it painful to just run out on a game.

I'm a casual gamer, but I only resign when I have other pressures or the situation is clearly hopeless (160+ LRMS vs. 1 Cap ship = GG). Play games with friends and have Skype on; you'll find it a lot more fun than with just random people.

It's cute that people here (well, the 4-5 posters responsible for most of the thread) apparently believe a problem endemic to multiplayer games the world over can be easily solved by things that other games have already tried. I say again: people quit very short, ranked competitive multiplayer games. A very long game like Sins with ranking is hardly going to fare better.

Ranked/unranked would at least let e-peen players pad out their profile without bothering new or casual players, but provides no real benefit to those casual players - as experienced players will join unranked games anyway because they will a) tend to be easier and not count towards their e-peen if they lose. The problem of noobs quitting after a setback (or whatever) would still exist. This is all visible in existing games and isn't some baseless theory, jump into any RTS forum. If the devs want to humour rankers (honestly, it seems like a good idea) that's fine, but it's not going to help 'regular' players - but they're not as noisy.

Thelun's comments make it sound like ICO has some pretty serious problems with regard to loading games if it's tracking wins/losses as he describes.

Heh :/ I agree with people quitting short games as well. If the average game lasted 5 minutes, you would have people leaving in the first 30 seconds because they didn't buy crystal for less than 500 :/

I'll ignore the "e-peen" bait and otherwise agree about not needing to bother casual players, and add that competitive players like me will be be able to find like-minded people for their team games. I personally think all games should be ranked though.



Yes I agree with point a), even having all games ranked, ppl could still use smurf accounts to pwn newbies. I can't see a solution to it though, and having ranked games doesn't make it any worse for casual players than it is now.



I don't mind them "Surrendering" in 1v1 and FFA, but they shouldn't be able to just "Quit" without acknowledging defeat unless the other players agree to it. In team games it's true that they can't be forced to play, but at least with rankings I can make sure the players in my game are good enough to know when it's still worth hanging in there.



This would be great

While I can stand the frustraion of the OP, and I think I would be pretty pissed off too if my enemy left when the going got bad, I have to sympathize with the so called "noobs" as well. Honestly, this game takes far too long to complete if its going to be one sided throughout the entire game. 4 hours is a long time to sit and stare at your computer screen frustrated as you realize you've had no chance to win since you made that first mistake at the beginning of the game where you didn't reserve enough money to bribe the pirates and your colony got destroyed. Or you didn't expand fast enough and now your economy is crippled. 2-3 hours is a long time to sit there sighing in frustration.

Firstly you need to get off your high horse calling them noobs. You were probably one too, and even if you're the greatest player in the world who does it truly matter to except yourself?

I didn't read pages two or three of this but let's face it, why do people play? Because they want to have FUN. It is NOT FUN to lose for many people or to feel like they are going to lose.

Adding ranking/points will not change this. It might even make things worse because if someone gets a "lost" mark when they quit they really have no reason to stay. They know they're going to lose either way so why stick around to extend the bad feeling they are probably getting?

I'm not saying it's a good thing to quit but this explaining why it happens. It's because that particular match is no longer fun and enjoyable for the other player. You can't really blame them for that and can't seriously expect someone to stick around giving up their free time to continue a pursuit which is making them less happy.

Ok guys this needs to be corrected. Newbie and noobs are two separate terms to describe two different players. A newbie is someone new to a game as the prefix new implies. A noob/noobie is a term for some lowlife player that describes their character regardless of skill. Noobie is more of a demeaning term than newbie. A noob may or may not be a newbie. You can tell the difference between the two by how they act. Noobs are the ones that will call your tactics gay just because they are losing, they are the ones that will quit as soon as their capitalship dies, even though the battle victor can not be determined yet, and they are the ones that will quit as soon as pirates get launched at them.

I agree this is a problem and I think a viable solution has already been mentioned by Yilmael. I think one thing needs to be added though. A in-game lobby warning/indicator that shows if a player has an unusually high quit rate or disconnect rate. But this should only be implemented after some fine tuning has been done to the quit-surrender situation.

You can click the icon next to the players name to see their win/lost/played/ping stats once they've joined your server and kick them if you don't like the look of it.

One thing I would like to see is a 'shitlist' as well as a friends list. People who can't join a game I host, ever again. I will always add someone to friends if they can sit there and take a beating like a man, but I don't like having to keep a list of people who can't.

There should not be ranking or something to show off to people or foolish pride (It's can people dislike you more) because it's can be very discourage many player online and they will move on to other game, and you only find hardcore player, very few. So case is not closed, game should be fun, not show off or bag to other people, it's selffish. Why should people suffer when enmeies easly crash them while they unable has a resoure and time to fight back at that time? Let's them quit as they see as fit, so you won the game if they do that, I dont know why some you has problem with people quit, why you want make them stay and make them suffering to watch your powerful fleet and thier puny fleet or world! Let's them go, and you won game.


There shouldn't be win/lost/played/ping stats eter, game mean to be fun, not show off! It's discourage people play game if they has lot of bad stats, but I dont play online, but even I do if there has a ranking or stats, I will not play game, and find other games.

The stats are tied to a player name, not an ICO account name, as far as I can tell. There would be problems with making the ICO accounts public and trackable to all, but perhaps there is some other unique identifier that could be used to track an ICO account used by an idiot player.

I don't think you understand the problem if you think it is about someone hitting 'quit' and then everyone else records a win. That would be just fine. That's not what happens. The problem is that a sociopathic little shit who is fanatical about their win/loss ratio can turn the game into a slogfest against a housekeeping AI for everyone else who would actually like to have a win stat recorded for a game they actually, you know, won. If the decent players don't have time or interest in doing that, then the sociopath expands his cover by making the background level of average quits higher. It is set up in a way that enables and aids bad etiquette and burns hours upon hours of other peoples time and effort.

If I am going to host a game you can be damn sure I want some way to screen out people who are very likely to make the game unenjoyable for everyone else. I have absolutely no reason to invite someone back to use my bandwidth and time, after they have demonstrated that they are unable to handle a competitive game if it involves them losing it.

Hi all I don’t know how much im actually contributing but i feel that i need to put my 2 cents here  

I feel the problem of people quitting is not a game mechanic problem but a philosophical problem.
As said in another post newer players quit cause they are losing and get frustrated and its the easy way out

I feel that people who start a multiplayer game online have a DUTY to play it out to the bitter end
Its common courtesy, but what happens is they see it’s not going well so they leave instead of trying to put up a pointless fight for the sake of trying and having fun

i say take some responsibility once YOU start a online multiplayer game stick it through to the end.
It shows you have character and respect for other better players
if you cant do that i suggest a single player game or maybe try co-op with a friend against the ai
as I understand this type of game play is not for everyone
just my thoughts

ps I disagree with adding a reward system I feel it will only compound the issue
in the meantime if someone quits during your game just sigh and try again.
After all no ones really hurt and its there character that shows lacking

Ps I don’t play online for this reason as the competitive style of play is not for me
you all have fun now youll hear   

Well, I changed my mind about quiting players now, after my third MP game yesterday: Basically, the guy "rushed" (if you can call it a rush after an hour) me with 3 Kol battleships, all Gauss Cannon up grades I beleive too. I beat them with my 3 caps, never losing a one. BUT, he did not quit, he did not chat, he just walked away from his computer (most likely went and watched a movie), and I was forced to spend over an hour mopping up a bunch of "ghost town" planets. I was determined not to quit the game (I thought it would show a loss on my part), but take it from me, that's worse than quitting. I wish I could state the guys handle, but is that not allowed on this forum?

There is a solution to this. Dedicated servers, which run a game even if the host or other players quit. Either replace dropped players with AI or a temporary AI while allowing someone else to join and then carry on where the other guy dropped.

Problem fixed. Nobody is forced to play or continue if the game is no longer enjoyable for them. They can quit and AI will take over, or possibly care-take until someone else joins and replaces the AI.

But like mentioned before you can't seriously just make up your own rules and ideals and expect others to stick to them, especially in situations where it is not enjoyable for them and they are not having fun.

xbluedragonx

I must be a bas%^&t here and say I disagree with you.
if its not fun then don’t start it I believe the saying goes if you cant take the heat applies here 100%

As it is the quitter that decides to join a game in the first place and that puts the onas on him to see it through
Also prey tell how much fun could it be for the player who is left sitting there mopping up ghost towns and fleets after all the hard work of securing a win

no in my opinion still stands people who quit should not have joined in the first place
its just disrespectful and rude to those how are there better to quit
There is no unwritten rules, just common courtesy and one hell of a learning curve

when I get my ass handed to me in pc games (as often I do) I try to figure out where I could better myself even if I’m loosing.
Infact, it is at that point I learn the most as I am free to experiment with new ideas and concepts as I have already lost the game.
but thats how i deal with it and would like to see the same curtasy and when they do quit it is only a testement to their character.
i think its a worldwide problem and not only in computer games there is just no sense of duty anymore as we don’t hold each other to a higher standard anymore(pity), but that’s way off topic and for another time.

on the positive side i like the idiea of dedicated servers wow that would be cool if they could get that right