Online newbie and online newbie haters

the problem is... alot of players tend to "smurf"... hide behind screen names with 0, or very low games... making them look nuby... and because the MP community is so small, everyone immediatly thinks "smurf" rather than "new player".

its kinda sad... and its a issue that is often tossed about the forums...

if you get a few games (even like 5) to your name... people will recognize you as who you are and not as a smurf. (if your feeling really pathetic... use ico and host 3 games of you vs 9 unfair ai... and... one of you vs a easy ai on a small map so that you get a win loss record of 1 wins and 3 losses... and then you look pathetic, and you will be last pick, but at least people will be much less inclined to think your a smurf. (though, any game with "skilled" in the name will be out of reach for hopefully obvious reasons)... i know thats a BAD way to work around the system... but... at least untill smurfs start doing this... it may help)

I have noticed that the smaller the game, on a less random map, and the more "non-prime time" the game is, the more inviting the players are, (since there are not other people asking to join in) and the more casual the players (in other words... uber people like raging amish and JJ and so forth are unlikely to join a non-random 2v2 at a wierd hour of the day.)

In other words... the 4v4 and 5v5 player games that kick off every 15-30 min in prime time are generally filled with the hardcore people, and the slightly rarer 1v1, or 2v2 tend to not be.

Welcome to our community JTKiller.

Sadly, the online player counts for this game have been slowly atrophying.  There are newer players out there, but I see them playing against the AI, mostly, in comp stomps.  I think that Pbhead's observation is right on--you're more likely to find newer players in smaller games and not on random maps, perhaps in games with normal speed settings.  You might also find more newer people in regular Sins.

The best way to get into a game is to join between, say, 4 pm and 11 pm U.S. EST and host a game yourself.  You could also add "newbies" to the game title which might help attract some newer players.

Aside from the issue of smurfing, the thing that can make it hard to get into those attractive 5v5 games is that the players want to play with balanced teams, skill-wise, and preferably with their friends, in order to have a more interesting game.  In fact, we even have two team captains draft-pick the other 8 players in the hopes of getting even teams.  ((We call them pugs--(P)ick(U)p (G)ames matches.) It's like a clique or an athletic club where you need a membership card.

There are three reasons why you might get booted from those games.  As Pbhead mentioned, there is a concern about smurfing where an experienced and skilled player will create a brand new player name, which could mess up the player draft and the team balance.  (A guy who should be a top 3 pick shouldn't end up as the 8th pick, giving his team a windfall.)  The other thing you're liable to see is that 16 players want to join a game that can only accomodate 10 players, so the host is liable to boot out people he doesn't know so that his friends can join.

Finally, there is the concern about team balance and player skill.  Although you are probably great against the AI and perhaps very knowledgeable about the game, the online multiplayer team game against human opponents is just a totally different animal.  Humans will do things the AI would never do and they'll make much, much better strategic decisions.  So, these very experienced, skilled players will probably be 10 times tougher than the AI.  You will get thumped and perhaps even steamrolled your first couple of times out, which might essentially turn a 5v5 into a 4v5.  (Even experienced, good players can get badly thumped and even steamrolled from time-to-time.)

However, I do think that you can get into the 5v5's if you tell them that you are new and that you want to learn and play in the pugs regularly and become part of the pug community.  (We do, in fact, need more players.)  Your best bet for getting into one is to join one where they're waiting for that 9th or 10th player.  Don't despair too much about your skill gap.  if you're determined to improve and to become competitive, you can watch the game replays and pay attention to the good players and try to learn from your mistakes and from what the other players do.  It'll be easier if you have online multiplayer experience with other RTS games and it might not take you long to get up to speed.

The other thing the people want is for you to understand that it is a TEAM game, which makes it very different from the single player games and comp stomp games.  So, you personally may be losing, but if other players on your team are winning their battles, then you can win if your team wins.  So, instead of just calling it gg and quitting when you're getting beaten, we want you to hang in there and to do everything you can to either get yourself back into the game so that you have a prescence and threat that cannot be ignored or to delay your assailant as much as possible to buy time for your teamates to take care of business on their end.  Sometimes you just get a bad starting position on these random maps (such as being sandwiched between 3 opponents on one side and 2 opoonents on the other) and then you need to try and hang in there and figure out a way to maintain a game presence as opposed to just quitting.  Also, instead of losing your ships and fleet for nothing, run away and migrate to the middle of the map.  You won't be helping your team if your ships go down without even taking out a couple enemy frigates.

So, anyway, just keep trying and see if you can get a couple non-pug games under your belt which will make it easier to get into the 5v5 games.  I'm sure that you'll be able to get established and to get some games under your belt if you're determined.  Sadly, Sins is just an older game now with lower player counts.  I doubt it's the first game which has had this problem; there's also talk in the Unreal Tournament (FPS) community about how it's hard for people who are new to the franchise to start out online since they will get fragged very quickly and lose interest.

You should try to host a newbie game only.  Also try comp stomps with other players. Do 3 human vs 7 unfair ai's.  Takes awhile but if you can handle that you should be able to hold your own in mp games. I too started playing this game in SP and playing against multi ai's help me play online games. Note ai battling strategy wont work in most mp games. Good luck.

I think it sucks that the "skilled" players aren't willing to take a loss every once in a while.  Okay, so you have a newbie on your team and you lose the game.  Does that mean it wasn't fun at all for you to play?  Get over yourselves and allow the newer players a chance to play with you.  Sorry if this sounds like an angry rage post, but I'm really tired of seeing posts like this where the newbies are pretty much being turned off from the online multiplayer community because of the more experienced players not willing to bring them into the fold.  So they're new, give them a break and let them play.

And even if they are a smurf, so what?  While they might tip the balance of teams, it's not guaranteed to completely ruin the game.  The only way that would be possible is if they lagged everyone out or something of that sort.  You're all still playing the game, which is what really confuses me.  I see two types of threads here all the time.  One is about new players wanting to get into games but getting kicked because they're new.  Another is how the community is so small and there are no games.

I'm wanting to get into online play (waiting to see what Diplomacy does, but probably still will anyway).  I've played one game online and it was fun.  I was killed easily of course but oh well...  This type of stuff is what makes me not even want to log on though.  JT has a point about people coming into the lobby and trying to find people to fill up slots.  I saw it a lot when I was in the lobby and I didn't even try to join the games because I'd probably get kicked for being new.  It's a deadly cycle...

Sorry if I went off topic and such I was just typing this all as it came out of my head. lol

I agree; what more can I say?

As for smurfs.  It would be nice to put an end to it.  There is something worse than smurfing though, and that is those who throw a tantrum and make baseless claims of smurfing every time someone new shows even the most basic understanding of the game.

I think people need to stop being whiney babies and just play a game to play.  That's the whole reason for having a game isn't it?  Or maybe I'm just the odd man out. I could care less about winning games it is all about playing for me, and if more people were like that maybe the MP wouldnt be so dead

It's not that people aren't willing to lose; it happens all the time.  It's just that these games are a large investment of time and people want to play with balanced teams which makes it more interesting.  I think we're all hoping to enjoy one of those epic games where it becomes intense and suspenseful, where neither team is clearly winning until someone gets a breakthrough later in the game, where every decision you make can affect the outcome.

I agree that we need to be more accomodating and welcoming.  One way might be for us to adopt an alternate protocol for when we have an odd number of newer players.  We should just try to balance out the player skill on the team that has the most newer players.  So, the normal player draft order for a 5v5 is A-BB-AA-BB-A so that the first captain has the first and last picks.  (Or rather, in the case of the last pick, whoever is left after the other 7 guys have been picked.)  If one new player is in the game, then the first team needs a boost, so perhaps the draft order could be slightly modified;  A-B-A-B-A-BB-A.  That may or may not compensate depending on the players available.

Smurfing is just offensive to us and leaves a bad taste in our mouths.  It's like someone walking into our meeting room and blowing a big stinky fart and then laughing about it or someone violating an unspoken and informal contract amongst the players.  Since we do have to make an investment of time to play this game, we want to get the best experience possible; we hope to be able to enjoy an epic game, and smurfing ruins it by destroying the team balance.  If the pugs were set up on Internet Relay Chat where a channel operator could ban IP addresses for various lengths of time for bad behavior, people would either be required to log into an account name in order to join the channel or could suffer temporary bans for smurfing.  (That's how it works in the Unreal Tournament capture-the-flag community, or at least how it used to work back in the day when more people pugged.)

The real problem is that there aren't more newer players for people to play with and not much of a player population inbetween "very experienced" and "new".  I think this is a symptom of the game's always having relatively low online player counts for a game that must have sold well over 700,000 copies and it's being an older game.  In the first three months after the game's release in March of 2008, the online player counts rarely exceeded 250 people, if I remember correctly, which just isn't nearly enough to sustain sufficient online player counts long-term.  (It needed to have, say, 2000 people online at once.)  In retrospect, I am actually pleasantly surprised that we still have the player counts we do today.  I don't know how much longer online multiplayer Sins activity will last; hopefully until close to when Sins-2 is ready.

There were a couple problems with the game that may have crippled the online player counts.  It suffered from minidumps (game crashes) and desync errors, and the biggest one IMHO is that about 85% of the players couldn't host games; you had to adjust your router settings and perhaps even DSL modem settings in order to host; this was before Alloy was added to the game last year.  Still, it's curious that such a good game that must have sold over 700,000 copies doesn't have 1% or even 0.5% of its purchasers wanting to play it in online multiplayer a year-and-a-half after its release, which would give us an online multiplayer community of at least 7000 or 3500 people.  It's not that people came online and lost interest, it's just that most purchasers never even considered it or were completly unaware of the possibility of playing against other people.  One explanation is that, very simply, for whatever reason the customer base the game appealed to was composed 99% of single-player only people, which I do think is amazing.  Even shortly after its release when you would expect excited purchasers to want to come online, the player counts still rarely exceeded 250 people.

If a Sins-2 is released, I'd like to see them try to do something to tastefully encourage people to consider playing it online.  I have some ideas in those regards.

Keep at it.  I think you should try to join the games and as soon as you join, politely explain that you are brand new and you really want to play it online and to become part of the pug community and to become a better player and that you have mastered the game against the AI and that you're willing to be a team player and try to help your team.

Alternatively, you could also try to host games; there's no law against your doing that.  Be sure to give your game a title so that it reads "3v3 or 4v4" and not "<Name>".  The settings that you would want to use are:

• Locked Teams
• Pirates Off
• Normal or Large fleet sizes
• Fast everything
• Quick Start

(And of course, set it so that anyone can join and not just people on your friends list.)

What name will you be playing under, btw?  Look for me under the name [DT] Dirty Sanchez.

Perhaps players' demeanor accounts for lower player counts on the order of, say, a difference of 150 people, which is a very significant number at this point, but I don't think it has any bearing on the overriding problem of so few people playing the game online.  As I said in the previous post, even shortly after the game was released the player counts rarely exceeded 250 people.  Thus, players' attitudes had no effect on the game's not having an online multiplayer player base of 7000 people simply because the 99% of all Sins purchasers never even came online at all and thus never got to see any attitudes, good or bad, in the first place.

yeah i guess, Just wish people would play online lol its no fun comp stomping

Yeah i would be happy to play with a newbie it makes it a much more interesting match when u are helping them learn plus its good practice going over sins with someone. The matches i remember the most where the ones with newbies in them rather than just the boaring ones where everyone tires the same old rush stratagies on each other and drag on till someone makes a mistake.

Thanks a lot everyone for the comments and suggestions.  I will try hosting a few games with computer opponents on ICO (SP yay!) and get the stats up. 

I have certainly played a bunch of RTS online, so I had an idea of how a SP community is quite different from a MP, but I guess the much smaller player base on ICO now, for example, than on bnet certainly changes things.  What no one has also mentioned is that since this is a RTS - 4x hybrid the potential for games lasting VERY long I'm sure turns a lot of people off.  Hell, it was the main reason I haven't played MP till now!

Appreciate the support.

you should try 3v5 or 4v5 games till u get ur bearings. The skilled players will let you play on the 5 side.

My story:

I go online for the first time since i bought entrenchment.  Literally seconds after joining Chat, someone asks me "How the smurfing's going" and then constantly calls me a smurf, and just lols whenever i tell them that im not and i just dont play online.  Another player came to my defence which was quite nice but still, its totally ridiculous that i should have to logon and deal with some ass just because i have a low play count?  5 games... i must be a smurf right? Especially since 2 of those are losses.  Last i checked, smurfs are supposedly an issue because they WIN games, not lose them...

Its easy to lose 100 games and use that account to smurf someone.  The smurfs with low records are the worst because they are just so lazy.

What is your online name so peopel dont confuse u with a smurf then.

=ESF=*Battlespud

And i only lost 2, not 100

I was wondering about this. I have played SP only so far, or LAN with my roommate/friends. WE tend to comp stomp and thusly my strategy is getting stagnant, and a little old. I try your guys stuff out sometimes, but in that situation... it doesnt really matter, you screw up and youve still won.

Ive logged on to ICO a few times to see a grand total of 3 people. I then logged off.

Admittedly this would be my first rts game that I am actually play online (i only recetnly developed an attention span after 27 years of video games and flashing lights) and playing counter strike is infinitely easier to find a game without having to talk to anyone.

but yeah, my roommate got transferred and my gf is in grad school, so on weekends i dont have a whole lot to do. it would be nice to get on.

as for not joining the online community, i havent needed to yet, and i hadnt even heard of this game until i was wandering around the web bored at work a few months ago.

The best time is on weekends, actually, from, say, 1 pm to Midnight U.S. EST.  You might not see too many people idling in the Lobby, though, since most of the people who are counted as being online are in games.  Sadly, the game doesn't have the player counts it deserves, but if you're patient games will open up and fill eventually, especially if it's during a prime playing time.  Just set Sins to windowed mode and surf the Internet while you wait.

That's why I prefered smaller games with people I knew, and no, for a competitive player it's not the losing that isn't fun my friend - it's the never having a chance. Sins is a game where it's very difficult to carry a team on anything but the largest of maps, which I hate because someone invariably D/Cs/leaves/afks before it'll end, and the AI is atrociously bad at best.

I rarely lost because I was good, not because I liked stacked teams - I loved challenges. Back when GEC still existed I often did lop-sided matchups with my team being either outnumbered or putting more good players on the enemy team (In house, so everyone at least knew what they were doing) the problem is when you get some totally new player that is as much a liability as a  help. My clan mates would at least be on ventrilo so I could tell them what to do, where to go, what to build etc. But a new player has a good chance of being totally indignant and throwing the game on purpose from what I've found if I try and explain to them how to win, which frustrated me to no end, leading me to playing 2v2 or 1v1, occasionally uneven teams if I was with one of my better friends against pugs. I recall some crazy 2v4/3v5s against puggers that were pretty intense until people started leaving but I digress..

Seriously, good competitors don't mind losing, we always want a challenge - but there is no challenge in a game you cannot win and get steamrolled because your allies can't hold their own. I don't care about the mark on my record, I care about having fun. Competing is fun for me, win or lose. Getting steamrolled is not.

The game never did take off for MP, partially due to it being a primarily single player type of game (Most of the people I know that play it, regularly save for playing insanely long games, which isn't practical for MP outside of a very organized clan-like community) and partially - imo - to them balancing the game for single player, yet changing MP too early on. I recall the early patches, like when siege ships were nerfed in MP and SP because the AI spammed them in SP, which made planet killing neigh impossible, etc. Those things were what made me quit, on top of the small community. Much of GEC felt the same.

In that case, you'll be happy to know that as of the last patch, seige frigates have been buffed up.

sorry but Im tired of hearing the age old excuse of Smurfs.......Its that newcomers arent openly welcome as much as smurfs. Im willing to bet alot of online players could careless if the player is smurf or newbie both are "just going to pull you down" and RUIN your experience. Get over it, people need to realize a BIG part of why the MP is not growing is because continuiously newcomers to MP not necassarily newcomers to the game, are shunned because they have no stats. Albiet Id get tired of Smurfs if I were in your shoes...but Im willing to bet theres a way to organize the game so the "possible" smurfs arent effecting the outcome. How about instead of kicking them for lack of stacks put 1 no stat player on one team and put another on the other. That way when the real smurf reveals himself you can either decide to let him get jumped by the other team entirely or just remember to keep an eye out for him next time.

Pink, build a capship factory

Pink, your capship can attack roids on its own

Pink, you need to upgrade your planet infrastructure, you're losing money

Pink, don't build any more turrets

Pink, don't build any more cobalts

Pink, you need repair bays.

Pink, don't quit, why start a team game if you only had 30 mins to play?

Joking apart, one of the more important reasons that newcomers aren't welcome especially in larger games is that they haven't tested their system online and often disconnect.  Also there aren't nearly enough 1v1 games, where players can learn the basics before moving on to bigger games.  The second expansion should change 'feed' enough to have an impact on the larger games, though this won't work to the advantage of newcomers...

What we really need is an Elite warlords lounge, something for online players to aim at.  Offline players get 'achievements' and 'medals', lets have them for online.  Also, when I'm relaxing among my Elite fellows, I want the waiters bringing me my expensive drinks to have the names of the non-Elite players present in the lobbies.  It's not Sins of a Solar Creche, is it?  How are Empires founded, if not by large numbers of medals and fawning inferiors, then?  Of course if an Elite player still wanted to 'smurf' and have my boots rest on his craven backside as I sipped my chilled Chablis, more shame on him.  Pah!

Gamelists- so it is visible who was playing who- would also counter smurfs.  They would be far duller than the Elite lounge, though.  

Glad to see that there are still people annoyed by smurfs. Maybe that way they'll 'fix' this issue one day, and that will be the day I return to the online community.

I'm one of the main proponents of that, and honestly, I understand. I don't force this on players, but I will defend this because the fact is in online play the pace is quicker and just one game can save a player a lot of pain. That's the main reason I do it. If a player's frustrated I save him the pain I went through when I was a newb (back in the days of yore).

When I saw the statement I just wanted to defend this teaching method. It works, but SHOULDN'T be forced on anyone.

I have to agree. I mean, comp-stomps aren't exactly very fun, but I'll play them with new players so they get a better grip on online play. I was actually playing a 2v2 with a new player a couple weeks ago, and he did say how the faster pace changes things a lot.

But yeah, some people learn online play better by jumping into large games. Whatever increases the memberbase is fine with me.

Suggest after you play an online game to watch the replay of the player who did the best and see what he did.