What Would You Change About… Star Conflict?

November 2, 2015 15:44 ( Articles, F2P News ) 0

We’re asking “What Would You Change About… Star Conflict?” this time round as we head off to the uncharted space of Sector 1337 for a high flying, missile dodging, aerial space acrobatic shooter. The game has been around for some time and offers some exciting combat focused content, with a variety of missions for both open sandbox world PVE, real time world PVP and a variety of queue to play team based PVP modes. The game is pretty fun from an initial play, but as we dig a little deeper it’s easy to see the problems that we have with the game.

• Better Tier Matchmaking - The Matchmaking, in general, is actually pretty terrible and responsible for two of the issues we have on our list, but the first is matching players into a higher level Tier 4/5 game, who are only bringing to the table one Tier 4/5 ship and then bulking out the rest of their personal fleet with Tier 1 ships. Ultimately the team with the most T1 ships is going to lose nine times out of ten. We’re not sure whether it is mistakes, confusion or lack of patience that makes players jump into high level games with a retinue of ships that just aren’t going to survive, or whether it’s plain arrogance that they think they’re so good that they’ll only need their initial T5. Being matched with a player who has a bunch of T1s is a catalyst for a team falling apart due to toxicity from the beginning of the match. Realistically players should have to fill their slots with the same level, or even one tier down, before they can join a match and basically throw the game for the rest of the players.


• Queuing With Not Enough Ships - Similarly to the above it is annoying when you queue up and see your team roster, glance over to the enemy team and see them sitting there with a fully complement of ships, each player with four ships in their queue (essentially giving them 4 lives), and then in your team you have two players with one ship each. This is a numbers game, and whilst many players might not even get through all four ships, the fact is that the team with fewer ships is very much facing an uphill battle. Combined with the fact that Star Conflict is a game that really benefits on team play, the chances are that you’ll often be facing a team with players working together, so if you’re a solo queuing player with only 1 ship then you can singlehandedly throw the game for the team; as soon as you die then the snowball effect can spiral the game downward for your remaining allies. Either players should have 3 or more ships to queue for PVP or the Matchmaking needs to do a better job about balancing out matches so that the odds aren’t stacked against one team with multiple 1 ship players on a single team.


• We Don’t Like Random PVP Modes - This isn’t just for Star Conflict, this is a particular annoyance for any PVP focused game where we only get to join a random map/mode rotation and consistently seem to end up on the same map/mode that we just don’t enjoy. This can be offputting for a lot of players, for many it’s enough to make them not want to play, which triggers a bit of a catch 22. The main reason for the Random PVP Modes is that if players simply queued for the mode they wanted then the small game population would no doubt send queue times through the roof, the issue being that Random Modes being the “solution” puts players off, meaning an even smaller population, which means we draw ever further from the chance of removing this feature. There’s not really any solution as to what the Devs can/should do, as we know the reason why it’s being done, but it is something we’d love to change.


• Restrictions on Dreadnoughts - One of the most recent big additions to the game was the implementation of Dreadnoughts, which for the most part are a really cool concept. The issue we have is that after playing the game for a while things can get a little repetitive, stale and grindy, so the implementation of new features definitely stirs up some good will and optimism with the community. The problem is that the Dreadnought is a Corporation ship (for guilds) so if you aren’t in a guild.. you won’t get to benefit from it. If you are in a guild, well you need to be in a guild that is going to be around long enough and successful enough to grind to get access one. Even with access to one the chances of you being in a position within the Corporation that the higher ups let you use it is even slimmer. At each stage of trying to get to fly a Dreadnought the chances grow lower and lower, for a game that needs an injection of new content to make such a big update focused on such a small portion of the community was an interesting and unfortunate choice.

So that’s what we’d change with Star Conflict, but more importantly what do you believe should be changed? What do you think could/should be added to improve the game? What would you add to your own personal wish list? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

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