Furball Arena

[CptTrips]

Split out from 3 hour timer discussion:

HiTech, the Free For All (FFE) area presently available isn't anything remotely like the furball lake experientially. Not-the-least-of-which weirdness is that when you mix human and AI together the humans apparently tend to collaborate against the AI.

Referring back to your earlier point about population, at some stage and for a brief period of AH3 you did have the now FFE (it's PT Corner Spikes) air-spawnable with no AI. Spontaneously it was populated, players started a thread extolling its virtues, how fun it was, the quality of the flying and a good-quality YouTube video was immediately published. You know one of those free and independent promotionals which might make prospective players who were probably watching aviation-related videos to think: "Ooooh, I'd be good at that and would like to try it". Numbers and interest was sufficient to suggest that somewhere like that would probably be a populated arena for at least some of the 24-hour cycle. Besides what does it matter if it didn't / doesn't have high numbers, neither does the TA.

As CptTrips mentioned earlier:

Consider the disposition of the online arenas from the perspective of a new and unindoctrinated player. Due to the present architecture - to have human interaction, you're realistically thrown into the late-war MA of old. That's not to say the ACM is of an intimidating high-level, it's rather the nature of arena itself. It's populated by long-experienced players who are highly attuned to risk assessment, usually fly competitive aircraft in competitive ways, often have long-standing squadmates or wingmen who know exactly how to utilise the arena's facilities to minimise their risk and maximise their danger to an extent new players are incapable of doing or knowing. Your ACM has to be very good to fly (initially) alone and not get swarmed endlessly by vets competing with each other to add a kill to their score. Where can prospective players acquire this? The answer is nowhere in AH3.

There's a big gap between staying engaged / interested long enough to find it a survivable challenge to build enough skill to become a steady subscriber.

Certainly the question of free online combat versus paying for a valid service should be addressed. The old DA / Furball lake (with a proportion of population something like 10%/90% split respectively), was a paid arena and I think that's fair enough. The present MPA is a bit schitzo because a good proportion of new / prospective players go there, but they're hardly equipped to duel. They mill around the FFA fighting the AI which is neither representative nor encouraging. There is no help there, official or otherwise. Neither can you put the AI at a fixed level to satisfy both newcomers and experienced players. It is neither fish nor fowl. There is definately a place for the AI you have devised. I'm not sure that is it. Regardless it is for you to strike the business model balance between 'freeloaders' and 'gateway drug' to facilitate players becoming subscribers. None of us have useful data to help in that regard.

A separate ideation thread ought to be made for what an 'ideal' layout might be if you wanted to have that discussion. Some (but not all  ) of Violator's suggestions have merit. We know that because we did some of those experiments already in private arenas. Of course that's all additional work. An economical first and easy experiment would be to either re-enable the fields at A1, A2 and A3 or as Dolby suggests reboot the old DA as it was, obviously announce the change, and see if a community of players could be recultivated who are not overly fixated with MA score and survival at all costs. That's only engaging to those who've already acquired ACM and AH experience.

Well that's my 50 cents and our lockdown is drawing to a close. Must get back to the potentially paying project work... 

I think there should be a human only Furball Arena.
 
I think it should be it's own venue  for maximum discoverability. (Replace Steal the Sheep?")

I think a Furball arena provides a quick action fix for vets who might only have a few minutes to play, and for noobs, it's an arena that lowers the cost of dying because you can get back into action again quickly.  That speeds up the cycle time so a noob can learn faster and doesn't punish them for learning with another 20 min flight back to a fight in the MA.

Could you migrate the forcefield boundary from WO:P?

I agree it should be over gently rolling terrain for depth perception and the added interest of dodging trees.

I understand the concept of all one side, however that can be confusing to people as you've seen from WO:P FFA area.  If you did that, I would make the arena config no icons.  So they don't hesitate to shoot at a plane because it has a green icon. The fights would be in close enough proximity that you could get away with it and in that context any other plane you saw was by definition an enemy.  If no icons, does that mean no name tags also?  That would help with ganging and griefing someone.  In this configuration, you really only need one base that everyone spawns at for even more simplicity.  It simple has several air spawn launch buttons.

Going way out on a limb...one problem, like the MA, I see it quickly devolving into two or 3 used planes that are maximally optimal in that setup.  That's OK but gets stale, but what if every hour it switched plane sets available to spawn?  You could do this with a running Staged Mission (No AI) that uses the Dot Cmd events to load a rotating set of arena configs or script files at regular intervals that enables alternating sets of aircraft to be available. So I think you already have that capability built.  Rotate Early, Mid, Late War on an hourly basis.

$0.02.

[DmonSlyr]

Here's a recent topic I created about this discussion.

https://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,398156.msg5277360.html#msg5277360

[CptTrips]

Here's a recent topic I created about this discussion.

https://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,398156.msg5277360.html#msg5277360

I think Easyscore was doing something like this in the Custom Arena wasn't he?  I'm not sure if he had all the settings as you describe.

I'd be willing to knock something along your specs and run it off my account 24/7 for a couple of weeks as a test.  I'm not really flying now days but still have an account.  I have a spare machine I can use.

If you could show you could corral 10-15 players in there on a regular basis, maybe Hitech would be more amenable to something permanent.

[Wiley]

I think Easyscore was doing something like this in the Custom Arena wasn't he?  I'm not sure if he had all the settings as you describe.

I'd be willing to knock something along your specs and run it off my account 24/7 for a couple of weeks as a test.  I'm not really flying now days but still have an account.  I have a spare machine I can use.

If you could show you could corral 10-15 players in there on a regular basis, maybe Hitech would be more amenable to something permanent.

FINALLY someone is doind this.  Good luck.  I hope it hits the cap so maybe there's some grounds for HT to consider a similar arena that's permanent.

Wiley.

[CptTrips]

I can get something up this weekend.  I'll start with my 4x4 terrain as a template.


So I propose... (Assuming the config lets me do each)

1.  Small Terrain.  Euro Summer.
2.  Fight over gentle land mass.
3.  One side enabled.
4.  3 spaced air spawns at 3k.  Also you can take off and land from the one enabled field.
5.  All other sides excluded from spawn.
6.  No icons.  Kill-shooter off.
7.  Mid-war fighters only (at least for this initial test.  Later I might try the mission swapping plane-set thing/no AI)
8.  Arena msg explaining the basic setup.
9.  3200ft downdraft.  Might have to get some coaching on arena settings stuff.
10.?

[Lazerr]

Id leave icons on personally, and label the arena Free for all.  It worked in the h2h days.  Icons off would probably be the reason i wouldnt play it, populated or not.

Just an opinion.  The reasoning for them be turned off wasnt very strong.

[CptTrips]

Id leave icons on personally, and label the arena Free for all.  It worked in the h2h days.  Icons off would probably be the reason i wouldnt play it, populated or not.

Just an opinion.  The reasoning for them be turned off wasnt very strong.

OK.  We can try it with them on first.

[DmonSlyr]

I can get something up this weekend.  I'll start with my 4x4 terrain as a template.


So I propose... (Assuming the config lets me do each)

1.  Small Terrain.  Euro Summer.
2.  Fight over gentle land mass.
3.  One side enabled.
4.  3 spaced air spawns at 3k.  Also you can take off and land from the one enabled field.
5.  All other sides excluded from spawn.
6.  No icons.  Kill-shooter off.
7.  Mid-war fighters only (at least for this initial test.  Later I might try the mission swapping plane-set thing/no AI)
8.  Arena msg explaining the basic setup.
9.  3200ft downdraft.  Might have to get some coaching on arena settings stuff.
10.?

Awesome! Thanks! Wish I could do this but not there in my life currently.

I think leaving it open 24/7 is the key. All it takes is 3 players to spark more interest for people to join.

I agree with lazer about the icons and the naming.

I think maybe a 5k down draft would be more reasonable. I do like that idea though. Who knows maybe 3200 would work better. You get there quick!

[CptTrips]

I've setup an initial prototype.

I don't know if i did all the settings correct.  I'll leave it up a couple of days to get some initial feedback if you would give it a try and let me know if something needs tweaking.

 

[Edit]  BTW, Downdraft layer starts at 4k.

[nrshida]

See rule #4

[Shuffler]

ROTFLMAO

[CptTrips]

See rule #4

[CptTrips]

Jesus Christ.

I said nothing derogatory, and carefully excluded quoting anything derogatory and spent 30 min carefully responding to each important technical point.

But I'm not re-typing it.

[nrshida]

Seriously? That took an hour to research the new arena's configuration, generate those points and go to the trouble of articulating it. Along with my normal sarcastic humour which has not varied since day 1 of coming here, an awful lot of valid points were simultaneously flushed down the toilet. I did not make a copy of that so even PMing it to CptTrips is impossible.

Why was that just done, because some people might get offending over satirically-wrapped dry humour?

Thanks for literally wasting my time while I was trying to help. Just about sums this place up.

[hitech]

Seriously? That took an hour to research the new arena's configuration, generate those points and go to the trouble of articulating it. Along with my normal sarcastic humour which has not varied since day 1 of coming here, an awful lot of valid points were simultaneously flushed down the toilet. I did not make a copy of that so even PMing it to CptTrips is impossible.

Why was that just done, because some people might get offending over satirically-wrapped dry humour?

Thanks for literally wasting my time while I was trying to help. Just about sums this place up.

Your last paragraph was the reason it was deleted.

HiTech