sparring incenvitves

[bloodykiller]

sparring is what used to keep a decent amount of players online when there were no raids or events (which is 70-80% of our daily 24 hours), so bringing people back to spar would also help raiding activity and the overall playercount.

moving the spar complex next to unstick was good and now it's easier for people to get there.
the problem is that people still don't spar since they see no incentive since:
1. they get owned and don't want to "ruin their stats"
2. they see no point in sparring and don't realise that if they don't spar a little bit they'll suck forever
3. you get zero money for kills, waste a shitload of ammo and also have to pay for revs

doing something about this would be nice, i'm not going to suggest what to do or nothing is going to be done

[Stephen]

Originally Posted by bloodykiller

sparring is what used to keep a decent amount of players online when there were no raids or events (which is 70-80% of our daily 24 hours), so bringing people back to spar would also help raiding activity and the overall playercount.

moving the spar complex next to unstick was good and now it's easier for people to get there.
the problem is that people still don't spar since they see no incentive since:
1. they get owned and don't want to "ruin their stats"
2. they see no point in sparring and don't realise that if they don't spar a little bit they'll suck forever
3. you get zero money for kills, waste a shitload of ammo and also have to pay for revs

doing something about this would be nice, i'm not going to suggest what to do or nothing is going to be done

Were there incentives in place when sparring was previously more popular? If not, there may simply be something discouraging people from participating and it may only be necessary to repair that aspect rather than coddling players.

[bloodykiller]

before:
1. players would seek improving their skill rather than laming or trying to obtain better weapons
2. there was no economic reward for kills. now there is but not in the spar complex
3. there were no /sparstats so there weren't any stats to ruin since spars don't add to deaths on your profile

if i walk into a server i've never played on i obviously don't know HOW i can improve, so players are attracted to ULMS or BH PK cuz they get a random kill once in a while although it doesn't help them improve unlike sparring.
after days/weeks/months of ULMS and BH PK these new players will be very discouraged since they keep getting owned in 1v1s and will most likely quit since they havn't improved enough to compete with most players, although they gave up a lot of time PKing (in the wrong places)

i'm not a sparrer type of player but i dare anyone who actually PKs on era to tell me that sparring isn't the basis for all skills required in other PKing disciplines on era. it's necessary to become a decent PKer without having to spend 2k hours playing

[Tim_Rocks]

What ever happened to bragging rights?

[bloodykiller]

think about this: nobody ever goes to the spar complex but everyone joins TTS or 16-man spar for a worthless EC that 80-90% of the participants don't even have a chance to win
a small incentive for sparring would benefit era in all manners

[Supaman771]

Originally Posted by Tim_Rocks

What ever happened to bragging rights?

With such a small community, it has been shown before (poorly) on the unofficial forums, that it is pretty simple and actually a matter of common sense to be able to list the most skilled players in order.

We know who is where, the spar and top player lists generally don't change outside of player inactivity. This is why it is so simple to pick 10 players and call a gang elite. Or why GangWars has become a strategic bout of pairing up players rather than randomized sparring.

Spars are either known victories, or absolute upsets, there's rarely an in between.

I actually agree with Tks logic, players are being brought up by clicking a warper and being instantly healed/allowed to lame people. They earn a random kill every now and then and believe they are playing properly. I've seen them actually revel in the 'ability' to kill a top player, when they magically appear in front of them with a full health bar and shoot them once, and die mere seconds later as we re-build our killstreaks.

Yet when the time comes for a real raid or gang event, where dying is significantly punished (out of action for a period of time, or removed completely), they have no chance. As shown when Myself and Cloyd, or Rainbow and I have achieved 2v4 victories in the past weeks events, by wide margins.

The incentive of sparring has always been to improve yourself and hone your skills. As stated, sparring is the most raw form and basis of all PK you will be doing on the server.

Overpowered weaponry, laming tactics, and 'insta-warp-for-kills' events have lessened the need for any skill to be present for players to believe they're advancing in the game. But then you see the same dozen top players win every event, spar, raid, or award... as they run around you in a circles while you make every excuse for why you died.

Originally Posted by bloodykiller

think about this: nobody ever goes to the spar complex but everyone joins TTS or 16-man spar for a worthless EC that 80-90% of the participants don't even have a chance to win
a small incentive for sparring would benefit era in all manners

They don't join because they will win or even knowing they can learn to play better.

TTS: They join because there's a 50% chance they will be randomed onto Wil's team, and get a free EC. Half the players tend to leave after they get their free team rewards, I see it every time. It truly is a sight to get him to 10 health on my own life (150hp), then watch 8 other players fail to hit him a single time (800-1200hp).

16 man: Half the players who join either afk or ask for 'gun pls', they're clueless. I haven't seen a full 16 in a long time, they even offer double-ec for a full 16 people now a days.

Lol.

tl;dr
We shouldn't have to pay them to come die to us in the arena, they will aim for the incentives and not learn anything in the process. It is pretty difficult anyway to advance and learn anything with the current stats for guns, I actually have to downgrade my arsenal for sparring to get the same 'trying' feeling I used to get.

Back when I was training, even with .1 freeze being around, I had to step back and find a semi-auto gun (ended up with Sten, which has since been my favorite), to further punish my shots and strive to utilize them better. After thousands of spars with Rams, Raven, Slash, Ish, Anfo, Neo, Kaz, Wil, Koho... dozens of others. Making a private ranked spar in my home and training consistently many nights until 5am when the player count started rising again, I still can't get the effectiveness of those players who trained with uzis and handguns back when stats were balanced.

Skill is directly proportional to sparring/training, which is needed based on weaponry requiring skill.

Guns are lame, people don't have to try; sparring dies.

Hue, I blah'd so much in this post.

tl;dr2
The key to emphasizing sparring is to emphasize skill. And the only way to do that, is the make guns require it.

[Kohola_KinG]

I have said it for quite a while now. The /sparstats reward system needs updated. Pretty sure Tim said he would work on getting a 2v2 spar in there as well. It would also be nice to see a classic spar room where AK, uzi and handguns are only allowed.

Apart from that there is nothing that can be done. It's pretty annoying for me and i'm sure it is for others as nobody really spars me because they don't really have a chance of winning. I'm not bragging, just saying that people don't spar because they don't want to lose. So it must have something to do with their stats or an ego problem as they can't be seen losing.

Who knows why they don't spar much... It won't harm updating it to see if it increases activity.

[-HateD-]

I agree with rogue as far as skill needs to be important for people to want to spar, but that's not what people find fun anymore. The game has shifted to the one click lamability that is raiding (BHPK rather) now and most people just don't get the same enjoyment from spar. I like to step in every now and then with my trusty pink ak and win/lose a few but I get frustrated with lag and laming and stop. Maybe I get frustrated easier than others, but whatever. It doesn't seem that there is an incentive to spar, so yes there needs to be some sort of update if we're gonna hope for a more skill centered playerbase in the future.

[Kohola_KinG]

Originally Posted by -HateD-

I agree with rogue as far as skill needs to be important for people to want to spar, but that's not what people find fun anymore. The game has shifted to the one click lamability that is raiding (BHPK rather) now and most people just don't get the same enjoyment from spar. I like to step in every now and then with my trusty pink ak and win/lose a few but I get frustrated with lag and laming and stop. Maybe I get frustrated easier than others, but whatever. It doesn't seem that there is an incentive to spar, so yes there needs to be some sort of update if we're gonna hope for a more skill centered playerbase in the future.

Remove all these OP guns they are releasing with ridiculous stats then we won't have laming in the spar. Nerf all guns and things would be a lot better. Then we would have another crying matter. You just can't win.

Honestly, era could have a future but with this current community it does not have a future.

[Godzilla]

What i've noticed lately (on the forums) is the voice of many gets things done. Exploit that. but...

You're not thinking of the 'pick up and play' aspect of Era anymore and the incentive for 'newer' players to get online and ultimately buy a subscription. I'm not justifying the ridiculous stats on some weapons which I don't doubt there is but if Era went back to 'strategic' based PKing than I don't doubt a lot of the 'strategic-less' players would be discouraged from partaking in Era.

Era was designed to follow this guideline; Join the community, Do a certain job or even all of the jobs to be able to pay for a decent weapon, join a gang or start pking and building a reputation for yourself.

In my personal opinion I think to be able to balance weapons properly you would have to delete half of them, if not more. There is what? 60+ weapons on Era? That all "NEED" to have separate/unique stats, It just won't happen. I personally think that is why other gun based games are so popular, there isn't 100 weapons to try to balance, they all have their weakness and strengths.

tltr; Delete half the guns, balance the remaining guns, make weapons cost a lot less, make era revolved around pking again.

[Tim_Rocks]

Yes, 2vs2 spar is in the works. Just gotta find time to implement.

[bloodykiller]

@rogue
yeah i actually forgot about the team EC bullshit, but even before it was implemented noobs would still join TTS (maybe not as many)

sparring doesn't have to be particularly fun. players MUST do it to improve though and there needs to be an incentive since, as of now, it's the only PKing activity which decreases your wealth and it's not the most enjoyable especially for noobs

i see how .05 freeze guns can be annoying in poorly designed gang bases but there's no doubt that they're harder to use effectively in most situations: holding D is retarded and any skilled played will own a D-holder since his speed and direction are fixed therefore he's easier to hit.
when i havn't been playing for a few weeks i use BAR as my primary weapon because it requires a lower rate of button clicking to be 100% effective therefore it's easier to use and can compete with any gun on the game.
if you're having trouble against noobs using .05 freeze guns you should consider changing your PKing approach and focus on close-range combat and circling in particular. when .1 freeze became minimum freeze era turned into a boring defensive game which limited the more skilled players since they couldn't press buttons at their maximum potential rate

[Fiberwyre_P2P]

I stopped sparring because of the high amounts of lag.
I used to hover around 70-80ms, and now that I'm around 180-220ms on a good day, It's not that much fun and doesn't make for a great experience in general.
Even if you're arguing that people shouldn't spar for fun, spars where both sparrers are above 200ms won't make you better at the game, just better at laming, since that's most people's main response to lag.
(And for good reason: It's easier and less frustrating than trying to compensate for the lag.)

[Supaman771]

Originally Posted by Fiberwyre_P2P

I stopped sparring because of the high amounts of lag.

Wanted to thread about the lag issue itself for a little while but I just saw this so:

I've noticed this more recently, and Fiber is completely correct.
The past 2-3 days I've been at unstick trying to gather some people to the spar arena. Most everyone who ends up there is over the 200 mark, which used to be unheard of.

Even my own ping is 140 at most times with random spikes of 200 at a usual interval of 5 minutes, while I constantly can maintain less than half that playing League of Legends on foreign servers (50 max on NA, 80 EU, and generally even <150 when I tried the Asia server... never receiving spikes even close to the +50% I get on Graal). Similar or even better (hosted maps on Wc3 give me like 10ms) performance on battle.net servers for various games.

This leads me to believe the heart of the issue is Graal itself.

Spars themselves seem to be extended in duration by large factors, the average used to last 30-40 seconds, now it takes over a minute or two to bring down these intense laggers using every lame tactic you can just to register your hits on them. This not only makes each individual spar reach bore-point, it extends the queue time making less people want to sit around and wait.

It is not only less enjoyable trying to lame the **** out of someone just to make them receive damage while you watch them catch 20 bullets-to-the-face and not get hurt. But it takes more time and ammo for the same kill/win stat you'd get before.

I suppose this contradicts my prior post. But these lame guns are the only thing we have to deal with the insane amounts of lag most of the player base has.

Not sure what's in worse shape right now, Era itself, or the server it's hosted on.
Combination of the two has lead me to not renew my subscription as of the other day, and play less each day as the same old annoyances rise.

[Frankie]

Originally Posted by Tim_Rocks

What ever happened to bragging rights?

the community has changed. back in my early teen years the game was so much more competitive. there was a hierarchy of skilled and respected players/gangs and everyone wanted to be accepted and noticed. I'm sure this concept still exists today but no where near on a scale as it was 10 years ago.

the reason why I started typing with better grammar on the internet was because I wanted the high end players to respect me. it's crazy how much of an influence the overall community had on other players. it's not the same anymore. no one wants to impress anyone. they just want to build their bank account and inventory up and get the lamest weapon so they can breeze through any sort of hostile contact.