I agree with Goafan.  Long-time players have serious reputations and a good match, where all players reach a point of actually getting a powerful fleet (where real skills start to show), is easily wrecked by a noob that doesn't know about how to defend themselves.  Many games for noobs don't last long enough for them to get any rich experience, and it's frustrating for EVERYONE, not just the noob that fails early.  So, I too recommend that you try to ask a veteran for advice.  I've helped a few new players, yet most seem to disappear.  If you really are interested in making a name for yourself, log into ICO (ironclad online) regularly.  Talk some trash.  We are all grizzled veterans and will let a ballsey noob have a chance if you don't come off as a weakling.

Letting a vet point out your flaws (as they roll through your fleets) may be unappealing to you, but it's a great way to learn fast and get to the good parts of online multiplayer.  It all depends on you, and how hard you want your learning curve to be.

I clearly remember telling you starboy not to impersonate my favourite song by the weeknd .. and don't you even dare abuse my bestest "false alarm"

Yes your probably wondering how can this be that this guy is in games and in the forums as well right? Well I pay attention to this place... yes its me "Mr Average gamer".

Now, play more 3v3 and 4v4 using and practicing techniques from grimms guide. more games online means you wont be kicked once you play 100

Perhaps the wait times would not be so bad if the pros would be more willing to let new players try their hand at it so they could get the experience needed to advance their game. I realize in the past the unfortunate blight of smurfing made it hard to balance teams with new players, but I would hope that has died down by now.

Yes pro players are good and no one has a chance of competing with them on their first MP game. But kicking new players willing to learn just so a guy with 1000+ games that everyone is a buddy with that was late to the party is toxic to the new players. Maybe the status quo is fine for you, but I think the current system has made the potential pro player base much smaller than it needed to be.

I sympathize. I've been trying to get back in after being absent from the community for years, and even with a handful of people remembering me and good performance in the few games I have gotten I've largely given up at this point. I need to set aside an entire day to have any reasonable chance of getting into even one 5's game, since it takes quite a while for lobbies to fill and I'm very likely to get booted a few times before I actually get to stay. Even then it's no guarantee, and in quite a few cases I walked away after many hours of waiting in lobby empty-handed. And I'm by no means a newbie; I've got the experience of hundreds of Trinity-era 5's holding my own against the top players, and I've yet to have a bad showing in any of the games I have played (which is surprising since I am quite rusty and know I'm playing over-conservatively. In particular I don't have a good sense for Corvettes vs capital ships yet so I don't know when I can stay in versus when I need to preemptively retreat). I can't imagine for people who actually do need to build that experience from scratch.

Shoutout to the handful folks who gave me a chance. You guys are awesome and it was great playing with you

I dunno!? When I started about 2.5 years ago there was always x2 5s rooms open & often even a 3s/4s room on the side, the lobby waiting times was not as bad. If there was 20 players then there is 10 now.

And yeah the community is toxic to new players, honestly I wouldn't bother if I was new at this stage the host(s) that let me play in their 5s are all long gone.

ps. Tell me how you go Star-boy, & if you see me hosting games you're more than welcome to join. The best advice I can give you is don't quit and leave your team shorthanded (even if loosing try to relocate, asking for feed & rebuilding).

I don't get kicked that much anymore these days (albeit Hummer pretty much kick me most of the times- so I usually just don't bother joining room when he hosts), but other than him I am usually fine.

I was talking about getting kicked all the times when I first started, I pretty much gave up on the game for close to a year then came back just to take a peek as the game still happened to be installed on my PC & I was bored one day. I got lucky when a player called "jinglycat" (or something like that its been a while), let me play in his games regularly.

Reality, it took a good year before I got to play regularly with out insta booted all the times (& only because I managed to be-friend a regular host). Back then the active community seems at least twice as large as it is today (so I usually had two 5s rooms to get kicked from).

As for 'star-boy' I've seen him around in the past few weeks, never actually played with him yet as he got kicked from every single game that I was part of

Well I just hope the community don't turn away yet another player...

IMHO the real problem is not the pros playing the 5s games.  It's all of the people who play single player offline (who have the time to play online) and the people who come online and only play comp stomps with their friends.  That's the reason why there aren't more games available for lower skilled players - because they're all playing comp stomps instead of each other.  Alternatively, perhaps those newer players who are interested in online multiplayer PvP simply don't have the patience to idle long enough to meet other similarly situated players, creating a vicious circle of lack of players.

Hey, I spotted this thread today and was looking for a community to play with. You're welcome to add me on steam (same username), I've been playing since the original game, just have never been active online ( preferring LAN games because of the 10 hour games ) but have sunk thousands of hours into SP. I have a Steam friend that also plays, that's why I decided to finally join stardock and start putting myself out there to play, so you would have another friend to play with. Anyone else that stumbles upon this can also feel free to send me an ad and PM me to play. As a fair warning though, I will most certainly unfriend trolls, and if you're under 18 years old please don't bother, without giving away personal info I'm well over 10 years out of high school and don't particularly like dealing with youngsters. Thanks for taking the time to read this, hope to see one or more of you in game