AGN: Consolidated Community Clash Feedback Thread

[Hamma]

This thread will be used for consolidated feedback of Community Clash. I will add YouTube videos to the OP as well as time goes on. You can also provide feedback via @ps2commclash on Twitter or [email protected]

[Desy]

This is feedback given from the point of view of someone that works in video production and streaming technology for a living.
This was a well done stream for a grassroots community driven event. It's a learning process.
Reflect on the issues you had, learn from them and practice, practice, practice!
 
Feedback:

Tournament Structure -

• Rules and Scoring need to be decided and sent for approval before game
• Rules need to not change EVER during a competition
  • If this was for money your tourney would be null and void due to rule changes
• Any changes need to be made no sooner than 24 hours before the match with approval by both teams
• Sudden death and any other scenarios need to be figured out ahead of time and included in the rules
• Better mehod of dealing with griefers and greenies
• Community marketing was very limited

Stream Quality -

• The show had many elementary mistakes that could have been prevented with rehearsals and tech tests:
  • New software days before a LIVE show
  • Audio looping issues
    • Virtual audio cable (Soundflower Mac)
    • Enables advanced audio routing within Windows/Mac
    • Make sure if your watching your stream it's muted ;P
  • Graphics/Cropping happening live during the show
  • Sound Quality
  • Camera Quality
  • Skype Integration
• Additional Observers Stream Lag vs commentary
• Additional Observers would stutter and lag
  • Bandwidth issues?
    • Do your Math ^_^
  • Bad Hops?
  • Congestion?
• Stream drops without warning
• Sloppy/Jittery Observer Cams
  • Lower Sensitivity
  • Smooth your movements
  • Work on more cinematic shots
  • Don't zoom
  • Practice, Practice, Practice
• Boring, un-energetic commentary
  • Needed Talking Points
  • Better structure
• Needed stats/other informative graphics
• Poor, Muddy encode during movement
  • Check KeyFrame (GOP) Settings
  • Buffer size
  • Profile (Main/Baseline)
  • Run Tests for best settings
  • Bump your bitrate
  • Use custom settings don't use presets
• Poor Stream promotion ahead of time

[robocpf1]

Some format suggestions:

1) Having a concrete "Round Timer" accessible to everyone would be a nice addition. The /yell broadcasts at important timestamps were good, but having an actual clock ticking down somewhere would be immensely helpful.

2) In-between round timers. Let us know what kind of timeline we're working on. Do you want us set up and ready to go in 5 minutes, or 10? Let us know where and when as exactly as possible so we aren't standing around wasting people's time, we hate that, and we know the audience doesn't like a lot of downtime. We're happy to oblige and do things quickly, just let us know!

3) Hard Spawn AMS set up earlier. I feel that the referees or moderators could have sped things along by having some AMSes set already. We can pull our own Mobile AMSes, but that one Hard Spawn was a pain to coordinate and prevent from deconstructing. If we could have that set up beforehand, that would be fantastic.

4) Round time increase for 3-point bases have already been brought up, you guys are on it.

5) Possible increase of starting distance or choosing a spread-out base. It seemed like attackers could be on the points before defenders could really do anything to stop them, and we saw that in Round 3 and Round 4. GOTR pushed straight in to all three points in Round 3, and though we didn't keep them, we were in before any real defense could be set up. In Round 4 we saw TRG smash point B and hold it for most of the game with no need for their mobile AMSes, and while I applaud that strategy I felt bummed out that I physically couldn't get our interceptors up fast enough to put mines down or pull vehicles to force the exterior fight. In both situations, neither team had any time to prepare defenses, other than jumping into a turret or standing at the railings. Now, maybe it was just the base - we saw a LOT of exterior fighting in Rounds 1 and 2 for Cairn Station, that was intense and had a lot of skirmish gameplay around the base exterior.

6) You could allow the attackers to choose what vector to attack from instead of assigning their starting place. We both knew exactly where the AMSes would be coming from and instead of it being a tactical deployment to flank the base, or defenders needing to be prepared for anything, it was a race to see whether the attackers could ram their AMS into a secure place and get on point before the defenders. That should be a valid choice of strategy, but not the mechanic that defines the start of the match.

[Calista]

From a spectator standpoint, you definitely need to consider starting earlier, shortening the time, whatever but finishing after midnight on an East coast school night is not likely going to do much for viewer count.

[Kalee J]

Originally Posted by Calista

From a spectator standpoint, you definitely need to consider starting earlier, shortening the time, whatever but finishing after midnight on an East coast school night is not likely going to do much for viewer count.

I concur. I mentioned last night that I needed to go to bed and that I would be paying for it at work tomorrow. Here I am, paying for it and dragin' ass, but I did it for Vanu!

[Calista]

Originally Posted by Kalee J

I concur. I mentioned last night that I needed to go to bed and that I would be paying for it at work tomorrow. Here I am, paying for it and dragin' ass, but I did it for Vanu!

To be fair though they did have technical difficulties that delayed things quite a bit and some other issues throughout that slowed things up. But anyway yeah keep in mind most of US pop is East coast and we do have 2 servers to West coast one. Great action though and a nail biter to the end.

[Hamma]

Great feedback Robo! Many of those items we are already working on.

Originally Posted by Desy

Community marketing was very limited

I'm curious what you meant by this, because we had some pretty significant advertisement of this stream. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, PSU, Official Retweets etc.. not sure what more we could do.

Excellent feedback overall though thank you! 99% of what you mentioned is answered with one thing: It's a community event for fun. We never intend to have money on the line. And the answer is the same for video production quality - it's a community driven event we are literally learning as we stream. Most of the participants simply don't have the time to go on for extensive pre-prep.

I do have a ton of notes from the production piece though and I definitely seek to improve that. We also have some better graphics on the way to bring more details to the viewers. I cropped in the map mid way through the show because I saw it requested and wanted feedback on it.

I am never.. EVER.. installing virtual audio cables The software actually manages audio well. The loops were because Deringer forgot to mute his speakers and we were getting his voice back. The reason I missed that was due to another issue with my sound board, I should have that rectified for the next showing.

Last but not least we are going to move away from "Talking Head" video, aka Skype and Webcam video for the next show. It added to many variables and kept breaking anyway, Skype video quality was crap and I'd rather focus on bringing game footage to the viewer.

I agree on most of the observer cam stuff except the zoom - I think it's a really neat feature we could use effectively.

The observer Bandwidth issues should be resolved next week - issues were not on my end but on the small server we were using for private cam feeds.

[Bryno]

Watching this really made me miss the old PS1 UI where we could see the health of the entire platoon. Some sort of overlay one team across the top and the other across the bottom, showing health bars would have really helped, especially in sudden death. This may be a pipe dream, but hey its a feedback thread!

All in all, this continues to improve! Thanks to all who make this possible.

[Hamma]

Also, I hate Skype.

[Hamma]

Originally Posted by Bryno

Watching this really made me miss the old PS1 UI where we could see the health of the entire platoon. Some sort of overlay one team across the top and the other across the bottom, showing health bars would have really helped, especially in sudden death. This may be a pipe dream, but hey its a feedback thread!

Yea this requires development time. The observer cam is under development all the time so I'm sure as time goes on we wil start to see things like this.

[Calista]

One other thing. Someone in the stream chat mentioned something about wanting to hold things up until the Sun came up. While it may be an interesting aspect to sometimes play at night it makes viewing difficult. It's kind of like going to watch a football game at night and they decide to dim the lights to make things more fun for the players. Meanwhile the crowd can't see crap. I don't know what could be done about that since the game controls the environment in PS2's case but yeah it would probably be more entertaining to the viewer to have more light on the match.

[EVILPIG]

What's wrong with having Draws?

[Hamma]

One thing we are going to do is add between round timers, that should help some. Organizing things in a game that is inherently a huge sandbox is difficult sometimes but we definitely understand that feedback.

Fixing the starting late issue comes with time as we lock down everything more and more, we will start closer and closer to on time.

[Noxxia]

So, a lot of the feedback is being addressed and are problems we know about. Personally, I appreciate the feedback regardless. I'll address the rules, given that I am the one primarily responsible for coming up with them, though they are approved by the other hosts.

between round timer
This was the first thing we discussed, especially considering that we are considering increasing the round timer for 3 point bases. I like the idea of deringer and myself getting the hard spawn sunderer set up, this can indeed help a lot. There will be some rule updates coming this week regarding this issue.

on the spot rule changes
Rules were approved and decided on beforehand, but we had some technical difficulties with the server for Cairn, where the team that owned the base could not spawn there. I submitted a bug report myself, as should everyone else. That required some ad-hoc rule adjustments. As far as hard spawn and mobile sunderer start locations in this regard, to the fault of us not pushing for base selection sooner, we weren't able to decide on some of this stuff pre-match. I believe from now on we will be deciding on the bases and will be releasing screenshots so each team can see where they need to be before the event even starts. Our rules do state that depending on the base location, we may allow or disallow various vehicle types, such as air. With host selection of bases, we can also clarify base specific rules pre-match. This is something that without a symmetrical world has to be up in the air, simply because we do not want one team to have an advantage over another based on location. All rules have been made, we were announcing the rules to the viewers so they knew, and just clarifying with the outfits since nothing is well established at this point. You can find rules here for now: http://www.reachcastshow.com/agnrcccrules

starting distance and location
So, starting location needs to be solidified simply from a fairness standpoint. distance is tricky and can be base dependent as well. Ideally, on multi point bases I would like the attackers to be able to secure a point before the defenders can arrive, or at least arrive at the same time. I feel like this makes things a bit more interesting. It was a totally different story with the last base (name forgotten) because the points were so close. I didn't know which base was the second one until the first half was over...this was our fault. WIthout diving too deep into tactics, it creates a predictable first attack, and if outfits want to be tricky, they could bypass that obvious choice in hopes that the other points aren't very well defended. at the same time, this does make defending harder. There are no boundaries on where outfits can drive their vehicles either. If they want to turn the sundies around and delay and attack from multiple fronts or the "back" of a base, that's totally fine. Driving head on, is simply a choice. This is part of the evolution of competative planetside though. It doesn't exist, so tactics as a whole will be fairly simple and primitive (not to the fault of teams, it's a part of trial and error. head first collision is generally the first tactic attempted). Sometimes terrain plays a factor into this as well, and I think we could have just picked a better location for the second half simply on the rounds that mountains blocked the possible movement around the base and created a chute.

if the outfits are ok with this, we can experiment with starting distances trying to find a good balance between excitement vs. making things too easy or too hard for the teams. What i want to avoid is situations where the defense has too much time to set up, and it becomes virtually impossible to take. but just know, what the other team gets, you will too. We did increase the distance this time compared to the previous encounters in such a way that the hard spawn and starting locations were different. I personally really liked how it went, but obviously there are base specific problems.

Grief
We have a solution in the works.

[Noxxia]

Regarding overall length, that was actually the first thing we talked about, which led to the between round timer. We don't like it being too long either!

Hopefully the between round timer helps, as well as host selection of maps in order to allow deringer and I to prep, etc as discussed above. These things should reduce the time between rounds and overall shrink the length of the event. We also discussed actually starting on time too! sadly there are going to be a lot of problems as this is fresh off the ground atm. We have a lot of things in the works that should really help reduce the overall length, despite increasing round length for 3 point bases, something we feel is a must given the 7 minute cap time, vs the 4 minute time for the single point bases.