Quoting myfist0, reply 2
That said... the only people that play Multiplayer now are the insane vets... and the occasional clueless noob that cant even beat a hard AI. Dont be that guy.
And everyone wonders why ICO is dead.
Those "Insane Vets" treat the room like it's their own special club. Ban them all and watch the numbers of regular people climb.
agree
the multiplayer base deserves to wither and die with that kind of mindset
It's like that in just about any online multiplayer game. There will always be veteran pros who know one another and who tend to bunch together. If that bothers people, they just need to grow some balls and tough it out while they learn the game. You just have to take your nooby lumps in order to be rewarded with being able to compete in online multiplayer. It's like that in many FPS games, too. When I started playing the original Unreal Tournament (1999) I could barely kill anyone and didn't even use my mouse for aiming, but I stuck with it and became a near-pro player welcome in pug matches. I do agree that it's harder to break into Sins online than many other games where there are thousands of people online at once including players of lower skill levels. (The pros are likely to congregate on private servers, perhaps playing pug matches.) The real problem with Sins online is that 98% of all Sins players never even contemplated trying to play it online. So, the hundreds of players online (at once) that are needed to offer lesser-skilled competition just aren't there.
Even shortly after the game's release the highest amount of players I ever saw online was about 280. Any game that only has 280 people online about two months after its release during North American prime time is destined to have low player counts later on in life. You can't blame that on the pros because back then almost everyone was a noob and few people knew other people.
Aside from 98% of all Sins purchasers never attempting to play it online, this game had a great many other problems that have nothing to do with pro players. Did you know that when it was released only about 15% of all players could host games and that minidumps were rampant? Do you remember what it was like to play without Quickstart and with a max speed setting of Fast? That made online Sins games take longer. Many people just concluded that it was a bad game for online multiplayer and left the scene then and there. Do you remember when Impulse was released and many players said, "F-that, I'm done playing Sins"? A large part of the problem is simply that online multiplayer just isn't very accessible and has barriers that require effort to overcome. I bet a great many Sins players have never visited the Sins website and are still playing the version that came in the box wondering what the "Ironclad Online" button was supposed to do and assuming that it's just a broken feature or a feature that was never implemented. I also wouldn't be surprised if many people click the "Multiplayer" button and conclude that online multiplayer is LAN-based only or that you need to know other people beforehand to play it online.
Now, I agree that the "insane vets" are part of the problem, just not more than 20% of the problem. Also, a great many of the people who play online, even in the 4v4 and 5v5 pugs, are not "insane vets". Many are merely experienced, decent or average players. I've seen new people come online and get up to speed in a couple weeks and attain that average skill level. Of course people who have only played it in single player for two weeks or even experienced single players who are new to online multiplayer are going to get squashed until they learn the game. (Shouldn't it be that way? If knowledge and experience doesn't make you a better player in a strategy game then there isn't much strategy to the game, now is there?) It's like that in any competitive online multiplayer game.
