Make CQC great Again.

[rootsrat]

If you're calling my idea "daft" you have no idea of the problem we're discussing.
The chief problem with CQC is matchmaking due to low population. Very simply, the more options you have the further you divide that population into smaller groups that make it increasingly harder to matchmake in a timely fashion. I don't want to see it cut, and I assume that currently the number of people queueing for Flag is so low as to be irrelevant, but if it wasn't then it should be cut.

An alternative solution would be to remove choice altogether and simply have a 'Quick Play' option that would match people and put them in a constant rotation of Solo/Team/Flag/Repeat. However, I'm trying to keep my suggestions "realistic". I guess it would be fairly straight-forward to add NPCs to Solo/Team and that would be a massive boost to CQC, but it would take additional work to get useful NPCs for Flag so putting it in rotation with the others probably wouldn't work.

The less choice there is, the more people are forced to play with chad try-hards. I am willing to bet this would have more detrimental effect on the participation.

You want to kill CQC completely? Because that's what your proposal would do.

I guarantee you that there would be a lot more people playing if we had a private match mode.

 

[Mr Lindsay]

I find the call for NPCs/Bots in what is supposed to be the pure Player versus Player experience slightly surreal.

Currently it is the Player vs Nobody experience.

I've spent many hours in matchmaking, and maybe an hour or so playing, to 'grind' up to Amateur. We'd need server data from FDev to run the numbers, but I expect that for years it's been functionally impossible to reach CQC Elite.

 

[Mr Lindsay]

The less choice there is, the more people are forced to play with chad try-hards. I am willing to bet this would have more detrimental effect on the participation.

You want to kill CQC completely? Because that's what your proposal would do.

I guarantee you that there would be a lot more people playing if we had a private match mode.

You're talking about nice-to-haves in a game that is functioning.

We're talking about how to salvage a game that is non-functioning.

 

[rootsrat]

Currently it is the Player vs Nobody experience.

View attachment 435990

I've spent many hours in matchmaking, and maybe an hour or so playing, to 'grind' up to Amateur. We'd need server data from FDev to run the numbers, but I expect that for years it's been functionally impossible to reach CQC Elite.

I'll tell you what it looks from our perspective.

I run a 400-people community. We organise CQC night. There are 20-30 people participating. We all go to CTF mode, as that's where the chads look last. We have an hour of good fun, with some randoms mixed into our crowd. Then a highly skilled player spots that there is a large group playing CQC. They call on their friends and join in. They steam-roll over all of us.

First match it's OK, 2nd it's OK, 3rd it's annoying, 4th it stops being fun whatsoever.

The 20-30 of us just decide to call it a night and what's left is those 3-4 highly skilled player now moaning there is nobody playing CQC.

Now consider this: if we could have a few hours undisturbed session every single week in private match, we could potentially train and get better. Learn the maps and get the skill. Learn the tactics, the ships, the equipment. Maybe in 2-3 months we'd be confident enough to move on to the ranked public matches and actually have a chance against the skilled players.

This is what would boost the numbers, not your imaginary "everyone will play deathmatch, becuase there is not other choice". Wrong, my friend - the other choice is not to play at all, because nobody likes to be steamrolled, CTF or no CTF.

And that's the true main issue of CQC.

We used tried to do CQC Tusday for a few months. The outcome was 100% the same. Every. Single. Week.

 

[Mr Lindsay]

And that's the true main issue of CQC.

Not even close. You've described a symptom that is caused by having low-population servers, ergo, it is not the cause of the low-population servers.
(Though of course it can be a factor that helps keep them low once the numbers have fallen off, as is common in many other old/unsuccessful games with only a handful of experts still playing.)

 

[rootsrat]

Not even close. You've described a symptom that is caused by having low-population servers, ergo, it is not the cause of the low-population servers.
(Though of course it can be a factor that helps keep them low once the numbers have fallen off, as is common in many other old/unsuccessful games with only a handful of experts still playing.)

Guess we'll have to agree to disagree then.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

I find the call for NPCs/Bots in what is supposed to be the pure Player versus Player experience slightly surreal.

I think it would be good for training and unranked matches. For ranked, sure, PvP only, but CQC has a huge issue with player numbers. If people getting to grips with the game and practicing against bots it might encourage people then to play ranked matches, thereby helping the pure PvP numbers.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Not even close. You've described a symptom that is caused by having low-population servers, ergo, it is not the cause of the low-population servers.
(Though of course it can be a factor that helps keep them low once the numbers have fallen off, as is common in many other old/unsuccessful games with only a handful of experts still playing.)

Its a bit of chicken and the egg. People sometimes don't even try to get a game because not enough people playing and matchmaking takes ages.

I think someone said earlier the game doesn't have ranked matchmaking, but correct me if i'm wrong, but i think it had some sort of rudimentary ranked matchmaking, but when the number of players is low it simply can't apply it, as there's often not enough people to even get a full game going.

 

[Darth Ender]

I never play it because i see it as an entirely separate game, involving something that's not interesting to me. Wing commander did something similar like almost 20 years ago and it bombed then and it doesn't seem like fdev did any better.

 

[GraXXoR]

You want to see Musketeer's avatar plastered everywhere around the galaxy?

I’d presume there were multiple leagues and he’d be in just one of them.

Many perceived problems can be bypassed with just a tiiiiny amount of thought.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

I’d presume there were multiple leagues and he’d be in just one of them.

Many perceived problems can be bypassed with just a tiiiiny amount of thought.

I wouldn't presume anything to do with CQC. It was launched in 2015 and has barely had any updates in 10 years.

I think FD have more or less written it off, short of disabling it completely.

 

[Aashenfox]

If you're calling my idea "daft" you have no idea of the problem we're discussing.
The chief problem with CQC is matchmaking due to low population. Very simply, the more options you have the further you divide that population into smaller groups that make it increasingly harder to matchmake in a timely fashion. I don't want to see it cut, and I assume that currently the number of people queueing for Flag is so low as to be irrelevant, but if it wasn't then it should be cut.

An alternative solution would be to remove choice altogether and simply have a 'Quick Play' option that would match people and put them in a constant rotation of Solo/Team/Flag/Repeat. However, I'm trying to keep my suggestions "realistic". I guess it would be fairly straight-forward to add NPCs to Solo/Team and that would be a massive boost to CQC, but it would take additional work to get useful NPCs for Flag so putting it in rotation with the others probably wouldn't work.

While I don't think it's daft, I can't help feeling that this puts the cart before the horse. If CQC was implemented so well that it addressed all the points @rootsrat made, then there would be less of a player volume problem. I don't really see how you can argue against 'some' kind of appropriate matchmaking.

I believe the thing that would kill it faster than anythign else would be players trying it and facing highly skilled players in their first few matches. This is totally demoralising and would make sure very few people ever bothered to persevere getting killed over and over until they reached a high skill level.

 

[Mr Lindsay]

While I don't think it's daft, I can't help feeling that this puts the cart before the horse. If CQC was implemented so well that it addressed all the points @rootsrat made, then there would be less of a player volume problem. I don't really see how you can argue against 'some' kind of appropriate matchmaking.

I believe the thing that would kill it faster than anythign else would be players trying it and facing highly skilled players in their first few matches. This is totally demoralising and would make sure very few people ever bothered to persevere getting killed over and over until they reached a high skill level.

If ALL of his points were addressed, Fdev would have put a large amount of time and effort into fixing CQC.
That'd be great, but as I said. I'm trying to be realistic.

FDev should 100% add Arx for CQC.
A simple bribe that presumably would be very cheap and easy to do from a coding perspective, and counting it towards the weekly 400 Arx wouldn't cost them a penny extra once it was done.

Beyond that, adding NPCs to fill empty slots, something that FDev is well capable of doing, has a higher development cost attached even if they could mostly recycle existing code. I'd love to see it, as I think it's the only way CQC Elite will ever become viable in the future, but it would obviously require a bunch of time and testing to implement.
Adding NPCs that can make tactical use of the power-ups and play Flag properly obviously isn't impossible, but probably requires an order of magnitude more effort than porting in existing SLF NPC behaviour.

That's already taking us into the fantasy category, let alone the other stuff on the list. Part of the reason this has come up again is that we've seen CQC being mentioned in the upcoming Vanguards system, so they haven't forgotten about it entirely.
I'd love it if one of the feature updates this year was CQC2.0, but failing that, encouraging FDev to put in a little effort on the things that would create the biggest improvements is, I think, a better way to go.

 

[Artie]

I just would like to chime in and react about the statement: "... but I expect that for years it's been functionally impossible to reach CQC Elite." - according to data on Inara, there is still possible to reach Elite (and above) in CQC. How hard it is to achieve, that's another matter (I don't know).

But I must more or less copy rootsrat's sentiment in regard of CQC - I had a lot of fun with CQC and namely Capture the flag mode when it was released until I've got bored by it, as there weren't many different arenas and as the rewards were negligible. I tried to revisit it later, just to check how it's going after the years and I was utterly destroyed by much more skilled players (which is not the players' fault, of course), in the still same arenas and with the still same negligible rewards. I haven't touched CQC since then. I guess even a simple adjustment like rewarding more credits to players for their time, to be on par with the main game activities, can be quite good motivation for players to at least think about playing CQC.

 

[huehnerfaust]

Sorry to be that guy, but you cmdrs realy believe the chads are legit? I dont believe that, since the early days, it was obvious that cetain top players use speed hacks to be the first at the wespon powerup. On top of that i think permanent weapom boost is also a chad feature.

A person who loves to destroy noobs and just take the fun out of the game for everyone (yes they where awsre about that, git gud was a meme back than), also will use chests in order to be effective.

 

[Doctor Dread]

While I don't think it's daft, I can't help feeling that this puts the cart before the horse. If CQC was implemented so well that it addressed all the points @rootsrat made, then there would be less of a player volume problem. I don't really see how you can argue against 'some' kind of appropriate matchmaking.

I believe the thing that would kill it faster than anythign else would be players trying it and facing highly skilled players in their first few matches. This is totally demoralising and would make sure very few people ever bothered to persevere getting killed over and over until they reached a high skill level.

...and most of all, bringing bots to fill the teams, so the waiting period is minimal.

Long, looooooong wait only to be killed instantly turned off a lot of guys I know.

 

[Lobstris]

TBH: I was fundamentally opposed to CQC when it came out and saw it as a waste of Dev resources that the main game desperately need. Then I played it and enjoyed it. I wish that Frontier hadn't linked it to the main game as now I'll forever have 'semi-professional' stuck in amongst my Elite ranks. So now, in a complete reversal, I'd actually quite like a CQC revival - needs decent matchmaking, lobby chat and better anti-cheat though, and I can see resources going into those now.

Also I have a nice screenshot of killing DBOBE during beta testing somewhere.