I’m currently seeing pretty long wait times for air battles, especially at higher PS.
Thankfully, normal battles seem busier than usual, but I don’t want air mode to fail.
It seems like we get more confrontation points for air mode, which is a good start, but clearly not enough,
I propose that air battles should give out either plastic or electronics, so that those of us that prefer to not do raids can still grind those resources, and encourage more people to play the mode.
Thoughts?
(And can we steer clear of “air mode sucks, kill it off” comments?)
I know on PC I haven’t been having any issues at mid range PS for PVP air battles. I haven’t tried it with Higher PS though yet.
It probably wouldn’t be a great idea to give out Plastic and Electronics mostly because raid participation is fairly low at the moment too. It took a fairly large hit from the solo badge loss. I end up with a lot more 2 and 3 player teams now than I use to.
I agree that they should incentivize helicopter play with plastic or electronics or copper. I’m an old player and am tired of raids. They don’t add much to the game. Also, it isn’t important to have a group to do raids with except Invasion. Most raids I’d rather hit solo.
If you like raiding in random groups I could see where that would be an issue.
I definitely don’t want to punish PVE fans, but it doesn’t seem to me that raids are suffering from the long queue times that air battles are.
Long queue times lead to death spirals, where even players like me who enjoy air mode don’t play it much because the wait times are so long, which makes wait times even worse.
Besides, it seems to me that plastic and electronics raids are the most lucrative ones, and less vulnerable to not having enough players.
They probably shouldn’t have doubled the que’s by separating the air/ground modes. Though I can understand why they did it. Heli just isn’t that popular with everyone and not everyone that it is popular with is going to play at the same PS range. Are you having the same issues of high que time at lower PS ranges?
That’s pretty much the only draw for raids to start with. I find them relaxing but most people seem to describe them as stale and boring.
I find them useful to find people that aren’t prone to rage quit fast. The issue with lower player turnouts in the raids is that they often toss you into already running raids, which lowers your score out/rewards for the same fuel cost.
I get in about 5 pvp heli battles at around 7k (for batteries or wires) after I finish dailies in patrol and raids (2 hard, 2 mediums) per day. That normally brings me to near the daily reputation bonus limit. I generally don’t have to wait very long for a match at that range though if you compare it to patrol wait times it feels longer though.
I haven’t bothered going to higher PS’s in heli for pvp as I’m waiting on getting the flock. I kind of figured there’s enough missile spam at lower that I can’t see it being much better at higher PS ranges.
In patrol I haven’t noticed any change in the que wait time though and the que isn’t split for that. We have never heli players that are acting just like the never hover players use to and we know how crappy that turns out in regards to fixes and developments… So I’m willing to put more weight behind that being the issue than it just being a matter of rewards.
I also kind of worry about them shutting down more PVE too as that has a different crew draw then PVP does. (i.e. different gaming market segment). They’re already run half as many raids at one time as they use to. It’s not hard to notice that each raid group in terms of difficulty is running same map and same enemy which would allow them to run it as the same pool with different rewards.
To be clear, I don’t mean that plastic or electronics raids should be removed. I definitely appreciate that there are people that prefer PVE, and the game needs them too.
I’m glad you brought up patrol, as I also haven’t noticed any difference in queue time. Maybe if the bots were flying too, the never-copter players would snub patrol too?
If they start giving out casings for air battles, that might be the ideal solution.
I knew you meant as a secondary source, when you said it. Honestly I use to ask for them to be added to pvp rewards too long before I got use to raiding.
I’ve been wondering that myself. Reading through the test result for changes to flight mechanics really got me thinking how negative some of the players are to the inclusion of heli’s though. I really wouldn’t put it past them.
I’d love to see flying bots, though I’d probably test them in the awakening area or something first. It could be really weird since they have such good aim. They probably really would need to update the pathfinding though for them, it’s more noticeable if you do small team custom games vs full bot teams. It’s kind of like they didn’t bother giving them any map tactical sense so they just run for the base.
Castings would work but I’d still like to see those go back to the Awakening area too there are plenty of ways to make use of them as I’ve mentioned before, paints, decor, some specialty weapons i.e. revolvers and a few others could easily fit in. The casting prices is pretty insane right now it’s around 16g per 100. They use to be dirt cheap.
Rehabilitating adventure is a whole other conversation, and I’m not convinced rewards needs to be considered too much.
I’d like to see bedlam incorporated into adventure, and aircraft added. Maybe Invasion could be incorporated: would be fun to run into a player Leviathan rampaging through that big map.
I’d probably switch bedlam onto the large map rather than have it rotate between maps. A mixed PVP/PVE version of Awakening would be neat too if all you could lose was what you picked up in a session. I really want to fly on that map too. I think it would be good to reconsolidate the modes to make them more cohesive too.
I don’t want to detract from the other conversation topic though either. Some of the added issue could be people not getting into the grove with clans a bonus to confrontation scoring might not cut it by itself. Shells seems viable though if they make the workbench better.
Second set of codrivers might work well too. So we could have ones geared towards flight, mixed, ground… There’s a lot of little crossovers that might work well like that. So you get intel for ground or air some using different portions. That only lasts for a little while though as people gain them the usefulness of the tally resource runs out.
I would like to see a separate blue print section for Heli builds to correspond with the build section in the garage. Providing separate file sections with & without ground movement components would be nice to separate current building files. Along with the suggestion from Dirty_Hamster with the Co-driver option. These would enhance the game nicely.