Just to clear this up:
PvP is the heart of FAF and this will and should never change!
PvP is what the success of FAF is built upon. This means that divisions, TMM, balance etc. will always be more important than PvE at FAF. However i would like to see more love and time to be given to PvE and casual play.
No, most casuals are not lowskill competitive players, which is one of the main arguments of that video. I know its hard to belive that some people just have no interest at becoming better in PvP, but its true!
Most people that played SC2 never even try to play multiplayer. The majority of RTS players has no interest in ever touching PvP, at all, not now and not in the future.
And we already have social features, so we don't need to fix that. We should fix what we don't currently have, which is good skirmish match vs-AI experience.
PhantomX games btw. are not for causuals, they are PvP. Sure they are maybe not what your typical ladder tryhard would enjoy, but a "true casual" will neither play ladder nor PhantomX. Survival and campaigns are the only PvE experiences that are somewhat consistently fun currently.
Well, a sense of progression can be enjoyed by non-casuals as well, so divisions are great, but it is still PvP, so irrelevant for the certified casual.
@blackyps said in FAF for Casual Players:
Nice, structured post!
There is just one thing I don't understand. You say that casual players want to progress, not necessarily improve, but then you only talk about improving at the game as a way of progression. You say that the player should be able to select the difficulty of the AI but then you say
So our casual player selects a difficulty, the game should not stay that difficult the entire time. There should be a diffiulty progression
How does this work? You even say that auto-scaling difficulty is quite a hated feature.
Well, if you ask any somewhat higher rated player if playing against AI makes you a better player, they will tell you that playing against AI will in fact make you a worse player at some point.
And from the point of view of competitive play, they are probably correct!
The causual player still likes the feeling of becoming "better" just like a competitive player would, it is just that their definition of "better" is completely different from a non-casual. So i use the word progress to differentiate "improving your skill as defined by a competitive PvP" from the causual point of view.
the game should not stay that difficult the entire time.
This was badly worded on my part. This is meant longterm, as in "over the curse of 20 hours, the game should become harder". THe trick ist to try to still adhere to the preferred skill gap selected by the casual player, and keep this gap static as the player improves at beating the envirnment.
You can think of it like this: A PvE matchmaker (which i am not convinced is better idea than just improving custom match creation) should match me with AIs that are offset from my rating by a static amount, and i should be able to adjust that offset.
For skirmish matches, all of this is irrelevant, because skirmish matches are so short that we do not need to change the difficulty during a single skirmish match (unlike an imaginary multi-hour PvE campaign, which should get slightly harder towards the end). So we can just leave it up to the player to change difficulty whenever they feel like.
@brutus5000 said in FAF for Casual Players:
In theory you just throw the AIs in the mix in a beta phase and have their ratings sorted out by truskill. Once defined, I'd fix their rating forever (to avoid rating inflation over time).
Everything afterwards happens in a dedicated truskill rating not interfering with global rating.
I think that Trusekill is not really a helpfull mechanism to facilitate PvE play. What exactly does Trueskill matchmaking achieve for PvE over players selecting AI opponents themselves, if we assume that it is clear at which skill level each AI plays at?
Additionally i don't think that making a queue like with TMM is possible if we give casual players all the options that they should have.
So i would not advocate for a PvE TMM queue. PvE TMM queues are not the right tool for the job, or they would be so different from PvP TMM queues that they should have a different name (like "coop team finder"). Custom games are already closer to what would be ideal, if we can make the experience of hosting vs-AI matches not suck.