MoO2 league, newbies, setup, game rules (resp to Activity
Posted: Wed Jun 03, 2009 12:09 pm
Greetings,
I believe I came on this forum several years ago, trying to find MoO2 internet players. There were some then but I played with no one in the end and went back to other games.
I just came back by chance ( or fate ) because a friend of mine just started playing and for future usage we're looking forward to tweak the game.
Stumbling again upon your forum, I noticed something : in a year or so, several new players have posted on the forum, explaining their problems to have the game work, and then finding online players.
Consequently, there MUST be a quite small number of MoO2 players looking forward to play on regular basis.
Furthermore, I read the post named "Generating MOO2 activity" speaking of using a specific ladder for casual gamers. Several ideas arose from this post but nothing quite solid yet I believe.
Surely, there is a reason why you cannot get more than 8 regular players. And I believe I know that reason. Let me try to explain it to you.
1. Game install mishaps :
Upon joining your forum, guests are asked to install your latest 1.4 version and play the Dos version only, using Dosbox for dos emulation. You made an extensive howto but in my experience, there are often workarounds to find depending on your own PC that will not work on other systems. Add NAT problems to that ant setting up the game to work online soon resembles a nightmare to the casual player.
When setting up to play with my friend, he simply downloaded the game from an abandonware site ( v 1.31 which is the version every casual uses ). Then I sent him my old Kali95 version. We then set-up his NAT and truly, 30 minutes later, the games was starting ( so we needed only 30 mins to install MoO2, Kali and the NAT ). I believe this is the simplest way to play if you want to start playing FAST and it WILL work on almost any PC configuration.
I must add that we only use the Orion95.exe version. It may cause crashes from time to time, there are one or two mouse issues but in the end we manage to play in 4 hours of uninterrupted sessions, without any problem !
2. Player balance
As it is sais in your post, you cannot compare the skills of a casual player to the ones of a hardcore games with hundreds of games behind him. Thus, you DEMAND that newbies accept to loose often.
That I did when I started playing back in 1998 or so. And the 50 first games I played with humans, I lost but I wanted to go further... It was a difficult time for me, and it was seldom fun, being crushed at 1/5th of the game...
I cannot admit that a hardcore gamer would have fun crushing someone who just started playing... Fun arises when there is a challenge, thus when the players are quite equal in force and experience. Even then, there are things like starting conditions that can dramatically shift the odds towards a player, rendering the game quite useless ( let's say a Silicoid who would start with a large ultra rich system with natives ).
When I played regularly, I created a little program that used simple rules to generate Races picking depending on galaxy size, number of players, etc etc...
The most important thing in this program was that each player was able to pick one of two available races for him. For example, in a small galaxy with 6 players, player 1 could choose between Gnolam and Trilarian, Player 2 from Meklar and Human... Races considered too efficient in some scenarios were simply put aside, or all human players would be proposed one.
I believe there is an important challenge there too : when I got to your Irc chatroom, everybody told me that you only played custom races. Therefore, added to your extensive experience, there are surely a number of preferred choices for race design, that will :
a. Render the casual unable to compete
b. Make all games quite alike, since race picks will always be optimized and thus recurring traits will occur almost every time ( like rock eater ).
I firmly believe that fun games should arise from these conditions. Should you make the game simpler to use and funnier to play online for casuals, there would be plenty willing to play.
Needless to say that on top of the game, there needs to be tools available to make things possible to happen :
A dedicated community website for MoO2 online games including:
1. Software setup howtos
2. InGame setup rules and assistants.
3. A utility to swiftly and simply find an opponent willing to play.
4. A ranking for completed games between members.
I have extensive web-development capabilities and could easily make the website.
There lacks only the will of your team to "open up" to new players...
Anyone willing to play with the terms described above, feel free to contact me at paul.tabet_at_analemme.fr
Hope to fight you all in the stars !
I believe I came on this forum several years ago, trying to find MoO2 internet players. There were some then but I played with no one in the end and went back to other games.
I just came back by chance ( or fate ) because a friend of mine just started playing and for future usage we're looking forward to tweak the game.
Stumbling again upon your forum, I noticed something : in a year or so, several new players have posted on the forum, explaining their problems to have the game work, and then finding online players.
Consequently, there MUST be a quite small number of MoO2 players looking forward to play on regular basis.
Furthermore, I read the post named "Generating MOO2 activity" speaking of using a specific ladder for casual gamers. Several ideas arose from this post but nothing quite solid yet I believe.
Surely, there is a reason why you cannot get more than 8 regular players. And I believe I know that reason. Let me try to explain it to you.
1. Game install mishaps :
Upon joining your forum, guests are asked to install your latest 1.4 version and play the Dos version only, using Dosbox for dos emulation. You made an extensive howto but in my experience, there are often workarounds to find depending on your own PC that will not work on other systems. Add NAT problems to that ant setting up the game to work online soon resembles a nightmare to the casual player.
When setting up to play with my friend, he simply downloaded the game from an abandonware site ( v 1.31 which is the version every casual uses ). Then I sent him my old Kali95 version. We then set-up his NAT and truly, 30 minutes later, the games was starting ( so we needed only 30 mins to install MoO2, Kali and the NAT ). I believe this is the simplest way to play if you want to start playing FAST and it WILL work on almost any PC configuration.
I must add that we only use the Orion95.exe version. It may cause crashes from time to time, there are one or two mouse issues but in the end we manage to play in 4 hours of uninterrupted sessions, without any problem !
2. Player balance
As it is sais in your post, you cannot compare the skills of a casual player to the ones of a hardcore games with hundreds of games behind him. Thus, you DEMAND that newbies accept to loose often.
That I did when I started playing back in 1998 or so. And the 50 first games I played with humans, I lost but I wanted to go further... It was a difficult time for me, and it was seldom fun, being crushed at 1/5th of the game...
I cannot admit that a hardcore gamer would have fun crushing someone who just started playing... Fun arises when there is a challenge, thus when the players are quite equal in force and experience. Even then, there are things like starting conditions that can dramatically shift the odds towards a player, rendering the game quite useless ( let's say a Silicoid who would start with a large ultra rich system with natives ).
When I played regularly, I created a little program that used simple rules to generate Races picking depending on galaxy size, number of players, etc etc...
The most important thing in this program was that each player was able to pick one of two available races for him. For example, in a small galaxy with 6 players, player 1 could choose between Gnolam and Trilarian, Player 2 from Meklar and Human... Races considered too efficient in some scenarios were simply put aside, or all human players would be proposed one.
I believe there is an important challenge there too : when I got to your Irc chatroom, everybody told me that you only played custom races. Therefore, added to your extensive experience, there are surely a number of preferred choices for race design, that will :
a. Render the casual unable to compete
b. Make all games quite alike, since race picks will always be optimized and thus recurring traits will occur almost every time ( like rock eater ).
I firmly believe that fun games should arise from these conditions. Should you make the game simpler to use and funnier to play online for casuals, there would be plenty willing to play.
Needless to say that on top of the game, there needs to be tools available to make things possible to happen :
A dedicated community website for MoO2 online games including:
1. Software setup howtos
2. InGame setup rules and assistants.
3. A utility to swiftly and simply find an opponent willing to play.
4. A ranking for completed games between members.
I have extensive web-development capabilities and could easily make the website.
There lacks only the will of your team to "open up" to new players...
Anyone willing to play with the terms described above, feel free to contact me at paul.tabet_at_analemme.fr
Hope to fight you all in the stars !