Getting more FCOL activity happening

terryoc · Post by **terryoc** » Mon Aug 02, 2010 3:21 am

As Paul Franz noted on one of the podcasts, what drives activity on SFBOL is tournaments and campaigns. I've got a couple of ideas but not quite sure how to go about it.

1. Tournament: Uses the Origins tournament rules. Because, at first, you're likely to get few participants, it'd be an everyone plays everyone else sort of thing. Everyone signs up and emails their squadron selections to the tournament organiser. The organiser then posts match-ups and you have some amount of time (2 weeks? 3?) to get your game in. If you had, say, six players, everyone would play 5 games. Best record is the winner.

2. Campaign: Something based on the Simplest Campaign system from Starmada. Will work up a detailed proposal later.

Savedfromwhat · Post by **Savedfromwhat** » Mon Aug 02, 2010 3:57 am

Terry, I think both of those are great ideas, I just wrote up a campaign heavily drawing from the SFB Admirals game I think it would work very well as a format for an online campaign where there are two teams of admirals and the scenarios can be divided up to other players. I basically re-wrote and in many places outright copied the admirals game info word for word so I will not post it here but I think it shows promise.

Krellex · Post by **Krellex** » Mon Aug 02, 2010 4:18 am

Another positive note to this is the large number of ship cards being added into the client the last couple weeks. We should *kinda* soon be getting to all the empires, etc.

pinecone · Post by **pinecone** » Mon Aug 02, 2010 6:47 pm

I agree. what about if we did an "FCOL introduction" tournament. After there is some interest, we could do battles where one FCOL "Newb" could be paired with one FCOL "Vet" and we would only use the Klingon D7 or Fed CA. That way, even people with just the demo mode could play and learn.

ericphillips · Post by **ericphillips** » Mon Aug 02, 2010 7:49 pm

I had suggested having a week of free-full access to FCOL, with volunteers like you and I scheduling times to be on so people can learn about, see all the ship cards, etc. It would need us all to put time in so that people sampling will be able to play, not just sit in the chat area.

There was an idea to set up a tournament on FCOL to get players, but that's only good for someone who is sure they will subscribe 9or already do). We need to get more players on period.

pinecone · Post by **pinecone** » Mon Aug 02, 2010 8:16 pm

If that suggestion becomes reality, I'd be happy to help out with providing players. I'll provide myself

terryoc · Post by **terryoc** » Mon Aug 02, 2010 10:52 pm

There's also a problem of hardly any activity at all. I'm hoping to get some actual games happening, so that people who want to play FC online will have a chance to get some games in. When I joined FCOL I let my subscription lapse because there just weren't any players playing at all.

ETA: Also, if a tournament scene is started, I can write up the results and so on for Captain's Log, Communique and Facebook and so hopefully get a bit of a buzz going. I agree that having vets around to help introduce players to FCOL is a good thing, but IIRC you can play some of the FCOL ships for free.

ericphillips · Post by **ericphillips** » Mon Aug 02, 2010 11:09 pm

terryoc wrote:... When I joined FCOL I let my subscription lapse because there just weren't any players playing at all.

...you can play some of the FCOL ships for free.

I also had a subscription I let lapse because of lack of players. Between Pinecone, Gar1138 and SavedFromWhat I have done a of playing this time.

As for the free ships, yeah, but to really get people on board with the free week I propose, you want them to really see the benefits of subscribing, and getting a look at all the cool ships. other games have done freeweekend trials and so on. Its a good hook.

pinecone · Post by **pinecone** » Mon Aug 02, 2010 11:19 pm

ericphillips wrote:
terryoc wrote:... When I joined FCOL I let my subscription lapse because there just weren't any players playing at all.

...you can play some of the FCOL ships for free.
I also had a subscription I let lapse because of lack of players. Between Pinecone, Gar1138 and SavedFromWhat I have done a of playing this time.

So did I. But there are at least four regulars now, in fact me Gar and Eric are in the middle of a three-way battle! And though I have not played you yet saved, we will battle soon

In seriousnes there are definetly enough people to play. you can't just go into the bullpen and expect to find someone, but you can try to arrange a battle here and It's likely that someone will be available. So join in the fun everyone! You hear me!? JOIN IN THE FUN!!!!!!!!

Savedfromwhat · Post by **Savedfromwhat** » Mon Aug 02, 2010 11:32 pm

I am actually online now waiting for a SFB game

but if it doesn't pan out in a little bit maybe we can do some fedcomm.

JimDauphinais · Post by **JimDauphinais** » Tue Aug 03, 2010 1:05 am

I would be interested in playing in an FC Online tournament based on the Origins Tournament format. Yockbo and Orgyockbo may also be interested. The three of us have been playing two or three player FC Online games over the past couple of months (next wednesday evening we will be continuing a Gorn vs. Klingon Tournament scenario we are currently playing). One thing I would encourage is the use of Ventrilo server or some other speech software during games. We have found it has helped to make FC Online a near face-to-face experience.

FC Online still needs a bit more cleanup. The Hydran Attack and several of the Battleships Attack ships have been added, but non-generic counters need to be added for them (Scoutdad was going to send them to Paul).

Also, there are still a few bugs with the weapons systems. I have alerted Paul to a problem with the End of Turn Action dialog box for Photons having an error in regard to tracking photon status properly and another problem regarding the lack of pre-game preload functionality (like that for Photons) for Hellbores. I expect he will soon have those fixed.

Folks might want to play with the various weapons systems some more to make sure everything is working properly. I found you can do this fairly well by setting up an offline game, adding a ship whose weapons system you want to test and adding a shuttle of another empire so that you have a target to shoot at. If you select Speed 0 for the ship you are testing, you will only need to overide the lack of movement warning only once per impulse.

terryoc · Post by **terryoc** » Tue Aug 03, 2010 1:30 am

Eric, talk to Paul Franz about that is my suggestion. (I don't know if you have Skype or something, maybe you could ring into the podcast he does and discuss him with it on the podcast?) If something like that happens, I'll resubscribe to the client and do what I can to help.

Since there appears to be good support for a tournament, I'll post a draft set of proposed rules in another thread.

pinecone · Post by **pinecone** » Tue Aug 03, 2010 1:32 am

Great! I'm in for sure!

gar1138 · Post by **gar1138** » Tue Aug 03, 2010 3:56 pm

I'm certainly interested in an FC tournament of some sort as well, time permitting (it seems my summer schedule has been somewhat crazy and unpredictable lately).

Garrett

Puentepegaso · Post by **Puentepegaso** » Wed Aug 04, 2010 9:59 am

I want to learn to play, but there is never anyone on the Demo Server