Inukii

A while ago there was a TED talk about using Thorium instead of Uranium to generate electricity. He gave a convincing argument.

Here is the talk : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw

What do you think about this?

This is wonderful to hear!

My question is. What is it that we can learn from from rehosting servers of old MMO games? Is it more of a programming / coding perspective or is their a wider spectrum of skills involved that having the games hosted help the learning process.

You also mentioned hosting the servers in museums, institutions and libraries. Does this mean you would have to be within the building to actually play them or would there be some method of online access?

Thanks for your work!

Hello Chris Taylor!

I'm a big RTS player but I left my work within the RTS scene following the trending of the MoBA genre.

My question is about RTS as a spectator sport. I have a many answers of my own since this is the realm that I work in but would love to hear your thoughts and perspective.

What do you think needs to change, if anything, within the gameplay elements of an RTS title for it become a spectator sport in 2018 and onward?

Amazing!

One of my priorities for a new RTS candidate was team focused play. The reasoning for this is as follows;

It's not because Team based play is more or less interesting. People find 1v1 more stressful, more anxiety inducing, for some more 'intense' which is what they may be after. Toxicity is something that pops up a lot and comparing RTS and MoBA we know that MoBA has a more toxic environment but strangely enough I think a larger chunk of a MoBA's population wants that toxicity.

In a 1v1, you can blame only two things. Yourself, and the game (overpowered factions, cheese strategies). There isn't much obscurity into what went wrong and whose fault it is. Where as in a MoBA that is what I would like to call skill obscurity. There is a lot of blame being thrown around and most of the time nobody can really know whose fault it was that a game was lost. Even if a game was lost due to person A's performance, Person A can leave the game thinking that it was the fault of someone else and even though they come out of that game with a negative experience. That person is able to re-queue into the next game because they have confidence in themselves.

As we know, players are the first step to eSport. You have to have players that take the game seriously. In a natural environment, the next step would be players with creative skills to create content to be watched before the last and slow steps of moving into the more professional broadcast production standards and setting. However, quite a few games recently have skipped that middle step and thrown money to try and create an eSport. Sometimes working and sometimes not.

By focusing on team based play for an RTS game we can keep many more players interested partly because of that skill obscurity. Though the difficulty of focusing on team based play, let's say 4v4 in an RTS, is that balance will suffer for 1v1 / 2v2 / 3v3.

I also think identity is something that needs bringing into an RTS. One of the things with Starcraft is are you a Terran, a Zerg, or a Protoss. Very strong identities. I feel like this has not been explored enough in games. There was a game called Company of Heroes Online which I think was looking to explore this but unfortunately at the time THQ was going under and the project was cancelled.

If we're going for a team based RTS. I think a game should look at classes. In the case of Company of Heroes Online this was divided into many different things but we could categorise it as infantry, armor and air support. I think an idea to modernize the RTS genre would be to have these types of roles/classes for team building. Though it is a balance nightmare, one of the reasons Company of Heroes could get away with it was because the fundamentals of the game were more important than any single unit or ability. Positioning units behind walls, in the right cover, in the right place, and flanking from the right angle were the major factors in deciding a single battle.

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Not having the Camera move around is my speciality!I think having the action appear in only 1 or 2 places is an easy one to accomplish. However, as far as presenting a game to an audience. A caster / camera operator should be able to see what action is more valuable just by the allocation of units to an area. The more resources devoted, the more important that battle is likely to be. I've noticed some aspiring RTS casters flick the camera around too much which makes it difficult to follow the action or the 'story' of the game. This is just because the casters are treating the game as if they are players. Unfortunately, we miss so much beauty of the game by doing this and the viewing experience is decreased.

I would say that keeping action to 1 or 2 places at a time isn't so important from a gameplay design point of view, or one that needs to be addressed through gameplay design, but one that needs to be addressed from a casting / presentation point of view.Though if there is action happening in 4+ places all with significance then I do believe that would be a problem.

But one of the fantastic things of aiming for action in ~2 places at once is that if the game is a team based 4v4 match up. Teamwork is going to be forced and present everywhere. I think part of the problem with many team based RTS games is that there is most of the time no team work. A 2v2 will be treated as 2 1v1's or one giant 1v1. A 3v3 becomes a lane with left/middle/right. And 4v4 is either divided into 4 1v1's or a 2v2 with left and right.

This is why I think some kind of class system would be a way to push players into roles on the battlefield. A person who focuses more on support may work on the back lines. Healing up injured units, firing low damage but long range guns, building emplacements, or support with cheap/weak units. Anything that falls outside of raw combat. An infantry focused class would be the front line. Taking cover, moving up, capturing points, holding on to them for as long as possible. Armored players who have weak infantry units but provide the means to destroy other armored units. Air support with abilities to call in strafing runs and bombing runs. Paratroopers to infilitrate backlines. Thinking of different offensive and defensive type abilities to give players.

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Certainly though, there is a lot to explore and I understand it is a huge subject! I think the RS genre has so much room to grow. A quick last but I feel sad mention is that I think Warhammer 40k has a lot of potential as a game to be developed as a competitive RTS. It has that identity similar to Starcraft but much more fleshed out and far more identities. Sadly, the last two attempts suffered from poor balancing and the recent one just decided to not try a modern RTS at all.

To also offer some insight here. Since other countries are able to do it, and are not as rich as the US, you can literally ask other countries on how they themselves could impliment the systems.

That's part of politics. Reaching out to Allies. Reaching out to Experts. Reaching out to the Right People who can help you achieve a positive outcome for your citizens.

You don't necessarily have to know how to do it. But we do know that others already do it. We also know that many of those 'others' would likely assist in helping America set up the same systems.