Encouraging Socialization/ Forming a Social Environment

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WARNING
This post has officially been flagged by myself as the dumbass post.
Move along citizen, so I can hate myself in piece.
If I’m actually going to do any discussion, it will actually be in a discussion category, and not suggestions, because that’s all I’m good at, discussion, not ideas.

As the game improves further, we get closer and closer to where we were in GMT (Though, the days of having resort 1 from the good old days is far past us).

But one of the main aspects of GMT was that it had a very well built social environment.
As discussed in my earlier thread —> Compact the Servers
We had discussed that a majority of the social environment appears to be missing (though, some may disagree with that statement).

I personally had come to the conclusion that players are generally spread apart, only really connected by the global chat (which has actually been disabled for the time being, for reasons), and the few games people play together.

I’m still unsure of the capabilities for server strength.
Is it an engine issue? If so, creating a faster, larger server will be much tougher.
If it’s simply budget, and TU simply don’t have the money to upgrade the servers in general, then there is much more potential in the future.

As quoted by baby blue.

I was originally not aware of the EXP rates being higher for this situation.
This is good.

Currently, I’m wracking my my brain trying to figure out what GMT did to encourage it’s environment.
It may have been the limited nature of it.
There were only 2 servers, both on smaller maps, with high playercounts, as well as the fact that there were limited condos as well.

There were limited game servers as well, creating waiting queues for players to go do something else while they waited for the match to be over.
This caused players to go into public condos, or hangout in certain parts of the plaza, like the arcade, or the pool/beach.

Ideas:
1: Though, allowing there to be as many friend only/ singleplayer condos there can be, there could possibly be a limit on placed on how many public condos there can be at one time.
This will force players to wait for a slot to open, and check out other player’s condos.
This also limits the amount of condo servers there are, limiting the player spread.

2: Though, players may still host games, there could possibly one, maybe two TU hosted game servers for each gamemode that gives and extra boost to EXP and units.
There could also be a system in place to limit public player-hosted game servers, but that honestly isn’t very needed.

3: Consider in the future, to keeping the map smaller, to allow for more crowding.
The plaza is absolutely huge, and I think we all at least agree on that.
The plaza being as big as it is allows players to spread apart too much.

These are all meant to be ideas, and to be things to consider in the future.

If you have any further ideas, or any criticism for any of these ideas, please let me know here.

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Please, don’t. This is not how you ‘encourage’ socialization. It can be done in many ways, but limiting access to things is not the way it should be done. There are people who enjoy spending hours working on their condos, and if they are limited in being able to access their own condo then they are simply not going to play anymore (or, they are going to sit there waiting for a slot, not visit another condo). Sometimes people don’t want to visit other condos, forcing them out of their own condos is not going to make them visit others. (this also brings up the issue of people going afk in their own condos, hogging a condo slot from people who want to visit their own - would people now no longer be allowed to do that?)

You should also remember that condos are player-hosted now, there’s no limit to how many condos can be running at a single time - a benefit to everyone who wants to be able to access their condo any time they want. Adding a limit just “because” doesn’t make sense.

christ, how many times did i write condo in this post

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  1. then we have to tackle the fact that some people would wish their condos to be whitelisted, but right now there is friends only option if I remembered correctly. and here is a problem: if all condos are at a high number of users for a long time, then what about the other public condos pending to be listed?

  2. I guess matchmaking is really undermined right now, which could be exactly your point.

  3. crowding will end up server lag, et alas. i mean, the server is not optimised with the multicore performance, and performance for each building is possibly separated to get them used more. imagine 30 players moving together in the same place…

i understand this game focuses on social, but there are always trolls obstacle this goal, there are always people needing to join a specific server (for specific reason like event). :slightly_frowning_face:

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I Understand what you’re saying, but I believe you misread what I said.
I said to simply limit public condos.
You can enter yours anytime in singleplayer or with friends.

I do understand that limiting things to encourage players to wait around can be messy, and encourage certain people to not play anymore.

Do remember however, that’s how it went in the old GMT days, and the servers did fine.
There was still a large playerbase that wished to play, and wait in the plaza.

Obviously, however, it’s not the greatest idea out there, I admit.
But I mainly only brought it up, as that’s how it was before, and the game even then still had an active playerbase with those limitations.

Also, with the AFK issue.
Yeah, yeah, that’s definitely a problem.

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1: Possibly.

2: Pretty much.
It’s also to encourage more populated gameplay.
There’s still problems with that, however, but we can’t fix it all.

3: I never thought about the lag aspect.
It is true that a lot of players in one spot can really lag.
Aside from lag however, I personally like the feel of 30 players in one building, all talking, with that chaos.
Obviously, though, there may indeed be people who wouldn’t enjoy that.

Not everything can be fixed, or fulfilled, but my goal for now is to find what it is we can fix.
It’s always going to be a struggle.

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  1. lag really affects the outcome of playing, sometimes players supposed to have higher FPS got lower due to server having too heavy in load.
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While I don’t entirely agree with your ideas; I do think you bring up some great points. I hope your post here will spark some discussion that could lead to solutions

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That was mainly my point here, to spark discussion.
I have flawed ideas, and their made to be improved on.

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Indeed
FPS wise, yes.
Internet wise, un-conclusive, as I’m still unsure how much of the limitations are engine or server based.

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As much of a dumbass as I can be at times, or, well, most of the time.
I mainly am trying to splooge my ideas in a hope that something valuable can come of it.

With posting it on the forums, I can get help making out these ideas in possibly getting something out of it.
In fact, I probably, if I ever continue any more discussion like this, I should probably go to the discussions section of the forums.

My goal right now is to try and see what TU can do to bring back the appeal GMT originally had that made it so popular.

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No, just no. What if I wanted to build in my Condo? I wouldn’t really be able to build in my Condo then. I want to show my Condo off to people, I wouldn’t wanna wait a long time just to host my Condo publicly.

For PixelTail to host gamemode servers, it would be really difficult to get into a server if they hosted one, as all gamemodes have a max fewer than 12 players.

Simply, why? If you played the Arcade update, the Arcade sure was crowded, and it was quite a train wreck with frame rate issues. It will be quite difficult to get around with a bunch of people being all over the place.

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1: Maybe. Again, not the best idea of the bunch.

2: No one has yet to bother telling my the kind of limitations pixeltail has.
I’m in no way an expert of Unreal 4 or the source engine, thus I can not compare correctly.
I’m basing my ideas on what we had originally, and I don’t have a fecking clue how servers will run now than before. From my faulty memory, I remember there being plenty of players on the servers.
They also, from what I can remember, there was also two servers per gamemode.
The server ran fine, and players happened to like it, and I legit don’t know why it would be different, cuz I don’t know the engine limitations well!

3: Possibly, but I didn’t suggest for the map to be a tin can.
There’s just a lot of unused space, and a lot of unused space that will probably not be used for a long time.
It makes the map smaller, cleaner, but I’m not suggesting there to be one arcade machine for everyone to crowd around.
There’s going to be space, but ALL of it will be used, and nothing in the map would be too empty.

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I personally can’t see how limiting any game feature could be beneficial to the game in any manner.

Although limiting features may cause things to appear successful, it ultimately reduces the overall enjoyment that can be gained from the game, and in turn, the overall success of the game over its lifetime.

This is hypothetical, and a bit hyperbolic, but hopefully you get the point I’m trying to get across.

For example, let’s take a look at your proposed limitation to the number of public condos available overall. Imagine that you start up the game, and your only interest at the moment is to show off your cool new condo that you spent hours working on to the public.

However, when you try to open up your condo, whoops! Turns out that all the public condo slots are full, and you don’t know when any are going to be available. What do you do?

Well, since you’re only interested in showing off your condo, your first option is to just quit the game and try again later. You’re a busy person, and you have several other things you need or want to do. You might check up later, but not for a bit, since the slots are probably going to be full next time, anyways.

Or maybe you don’t have much else to do. You still want to show off your condo, but you can’t, so you might as well play some games with others. You boot up a gameworld and help to increase the amount of players in games, but you aren’t really enjoying the time you spend. After all, what you wanted to do was to show off your condo, not play Virus. You eventually get to show off your condo, but get discouraged from doing so again, because who wants to do something they don’t really want to do?

Although the second result was “successful” in the short term (by increasing player counts), both options are going to result in you enjoying the game less, and will cause you to play the game less.

Multiply this by the entire playerbase, and you see some devastating results. Sure, there will be a core playerbase that will keep playing the game no matter what, but most people aren’t going to be able to do what they actually want to do, and the overall game enjoyment will drop. People eventually just stop playing, and the game population reaches equilibrium, with the small remaining playerbase no longer hitting those limitations very frequently.

It is true that this is just a hypothetical, and might not actually happen, but I’ve had similar results happen to me personally when the larger updates happened. When arcade dropped and all the servers were full, I didn’t play games or join any condos, since I just wanted to check out the arcade. I ended up just not playing the game for a few days until the hype started to die down and the servers declined in player count overall.

This also poses a general issue to outsiders to the game. The game advertises being able to do X feature, and those limitations will likely result in the new players not being able to do X feature. Ultimately, their first impressions will be something along the lines of, “Wow! What a shitty game!” and they would likely stop playing entirely, even if there was a feature they would have enjoyed.

My personal opinion on why TU seems “less successful” is some of the limitations on connectivity, changes to the overall structure of the game, and pure nostalgia.

The separation of the game into multiple segments instead of one uniform area limits the amount of flow from one area to the next, but is inevitable with the amount of content available. Even if I might want to hop into the plaza from my condo to see if anything interesting is happening, I’ll have to sit though a couple minutes of load screens, which isn’t really worth it for a brief impulse. I enjoyed the initial connected chat options that existed early on in the game (condo to individual plaza, gameworld to individual plaza), which helped bring things together, and global chat could bring things further, but its current structure makes things too chaotic (not to ignore the rampant toxicity). However, this lack of connectivity doesn’t mean that a good social environment can’t form, just that the methods to do so currently don’t exist. There are a lot of people chilling in groups in condos or game worlds, just that there needs to be a better means to bring them together.

It’s also important that GMT’s success seems a lot bigger than it actually was. There were two servers with 64 players each, including players only in condos. There were additional players in gamemodes, but they were pretty much isolated from the plaza itself. At its peak, GMT did manage to get both its servers full pretty often, but there were a lot of times where the first server was only at half capacity or less, with the second server completely empty. In fact, during Lobby 2, the second server was shut down completely, only to be brought back temporarily due to increased attention from certain let’s play channels. Moments of the server’s popularity are memorable, but they’re not representative of how things actually were back then. You still see similar peaks in TU during the release of major updates, but they clearly aren’t representative of how the game is normally.

Anyways, end of rambling, and personally, I see myself dropping the game if the devs restrict features that were freely available before.

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This perfectly explains my thoughts as well.

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First off, can I just say something?
How the fuck did I think GMT servers were over 64.
I always thought they were, like, 80 or something.
Well fuck.
I think that explains the limitations problem.

Second, by this point, the fact of limiting condos is a terrible idea has been made concrete into this post, sooo.

Third.
Uh, well, fuck.
I can’t disagree with this.

STILL
I think it’s important to keep in mind that improving the diversity of the games played, and the overall social interaction.

Case closed, I actually wasn’t expecting much response.

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