How save multiplayer from starvation death!?

[LUZITANO]

Well... tank crew is an expensive game, and I like it anyways but if someone ask me if the multiplayer is good, well... I have very bad news!

Many people ask me if the game is good and I confirm that it is. But about the multiplayer it's just unplayable most of the time, I'll explain how.

Currently there is not a good server with tanks, the ones that exist are in my opinion, 'a waste of precious time in a tedious and tiring game'.

The most popular server with tanks is an air server. The focus is not on tank battles. The bases are positioned in the middle of nowhere at very long distances from each other, most of the time it's a distance of at least half an hour to reach the main battlefield. This server has many scattered tank bases, where sometimes an average of one to two players are active on this bases, with huge distances between enemy bases and objectives... in short, a real waste of time for someone who wants a battle of tanks with action and fun.

The other tank servers usually have very arcade rules regarding battle realism and don't have good maps.

Tank Crew multiplayer is almost dead and apparently we don't have interesting ground battles online. I personally only play multiplayer, so I hope that tank crew eventually develops better in multiplayer.

 

[stupor-mundi]

I agree. The best times for tank battles were when most tank people were on EFront, and even before that, on Action Tanks, before those maps became weird.

Nowadays I can only hope for some patches of time in a mission without SloMo, which never much happened on EFront.

What was different was the relative paucity of AIs, mostly there were just stationary guns, and I don't enjoy the AIs at all. Especially the plane AIs.

But somehow the blue players left over time, apparently they didn't get as many tigers as they wanted or something.
But really I'd like a pure tank server back, without SloMo, without all the decorative AIs, and arbitrary rules.
And ideally without planes. Or just fighter planes for decoration, but no bombs. ?

Edited December 29, 2022 by stupor-mundi

[SCG_Junkman]

Its hard to keep all players happy. So If I want to just play for an hour or two I get on a MP sever with all the AI stuff and short drives point to point. (playing buy myself or one other person with me).

The better way to play is as you describe above, get together with a few people on Coms and travel as a group or make a battle plan and work it out. (this takes three or four hours to complete). As for the other servers with aircraft oriented play I hope they come around one day.

And yes single player TC needs some help more missions.

[stupor-mundi]

From my point of view, which is the point of view of someone who likes driving around in a T34, there's a fundamental problem in TC which has been around for ages and won't be solved I think. And that has to do with the concept that the game doesn't look for a balanced selection, and leaves that to the mission designer/ game server admin.

With the existing selection, you have German tanks with very powerful guns and turrets, which on the Allied side can only be somewhat countered by the turretless SU 152. I dislike having no turret, and the 152 gun has a lot of drop which is a big disadvantage, and really slow reload, and tiny ammo capacity. But for players on the red side, if you need to counter Tigers, and Panthers (depending on landscape), that's pretty much it. I haven't bought the churchill, which has good armor but an unimpressive gun in comparison, so I can't speak to that.

So in theory, how this would be solved, would be that mission designers offer missions, for example, just Pz4 and Stug, no Tigers, Panthers or Ferdis, to balance things off.

But EFront for example had such missions and the blue players just stayed away from those.

I'm sick of having to fight Tigers, and have been, for years, but I see no realistic chance that anyone would step up and provide tigerless missions.
(on Finnish, those exist, but I don't think those missions are adequate for tank to tank fighting)

[ShampooX]

Lately on FVP it seems as if we've had more tankers than ever.....over the holidays we were seeing at least 10 live tankers on each side on a regular basis.

[Arditi]

The thing about the super tanks is relative, you have to adapt and exploit the advantages of the tank. Since the stug came out I have not used the panther or tiger again in FVP and I think that my effectiveness to destroy cars is the same, if you use a car wrong it does not matter if it is a tiger or a t-34 you will die the same

[CountZero]

On 1/3/2023 at 1:04 AM, stupor-mundi said:

From my point of view, which is the point of view of someone who likes driving around in a T34, there's a fundamental problem in TC which has been around for ages and won't be solved I think. And that has to do with the concept that the game doesn't look for a balanced selection, and leaves that to the mission designer/ game server admin.

With the existing selection, you have German tanks with very powerful guns and turrets, which on the Allied side can only be somewhat countered by the turretless SU 152. I dislike having no turret, and the 152 gun has a lot of drop which is a big disadvantage, and really slow reload, and tiny ammo capacity. But for players on the red side, if you need to counter Tigers, and Panthers (depending on landscape), that's pretty much it. I haven't bought the churchill, which has good armor but an unimpressive gun in comparison, so I can't speak to that.

So in theory, how this would be solved, would be that mission designers offer missions, for example, just Pz4 and Stug, no Tigers, Panthers or Ferdis, to balance things off.

But EFront for example had such missions and the blue players just stayed away from those.

I'm sick of having to fight Tigers, and have been, for years, but I see no realistic chance that anyone would step up and provide tigerless missions.
(on Finnish, those exist, but I don't think those missions are adequate for tank to tank fighting)

 

Devs needed to think what make tank battles like they were in ww2, devs were lazy and they just took tank types that were historicly there but they didnt think why thouse tank types were there or how they performed there, its easy to be lazy like they were with TC development and then say its historical we give you tank types that were there.

What they failed to do with TC and why game deservably failed so badly is they didnt give players option to utilize big numbers of tanks vs small number of technicly demanding tanks. If you can spawn in t-34 with 3-7 your ai tanks under your comand and you can give them comand, and after your tank is destroyed you can switch in onother alive ai tank in your group, then you would have better MP expiriance even for single players, on both side, more targets for axis more options for allieds. But devs were lazy and tought its just tank game dont overthink it so game failed, and now nothing can save it as devs move to other game and TC is done. 

[super-truite]

On 1/3/2023 at 1:04 AM, stupor-mundi said:

From my point of view, which is the point of view of someone who likes driving around in a T34, there's a fundamental problem in TC which has been around for ages and won't be solved I think. And that has to do with the concept that the game doesn't look for a balanced selection, and leaves that to the mission designer/ game server admin.

With the existing selection, you have German tanks with very powerful guns and turrets, which on the Allied side can only be somewhat countered by the turretless SU 152. I dislike having no turret, and the 152 gun has a lot of drop which is a big disadvantage, and really slow reload, and tiny ammo capacity. But for players on the red side, if you need to counter Tigers, and Panthers (depending on landscape), that's pretty much it. I haven't bought the churchill, which has good armor but an unimpressive gun in comparison, so I can't speak to that.

So in theory, how this would be solved, would be that mission designers offer missions, for example, just Pz4 and Stug, no Tigers, Panthers or Ferdis, to balance things off.

But EFront for example had such missions and the blue players just stayed away from those.

I'm sick of having to fight Tigers, and have been, for years, but I see no realistic chance that anyone would step up and provide tigerless missions.
(on Finnish, those exist, but I don't think those missions are adequate for tank to tank fighting)

As a server admin, what I found was a good middle ground is to allow Tigers/Panthers in limited numbers and allow the allies to deactivate Tigers/Panthers spawns by destroying some objectives. At first, german players would just leave when there was no Tigers left, but now, I see more and more them stay. So the game starts with a few heavy tanks and then it is PanzerIV / Stugs only. If there are no Tigers/Panthers at all, players will just go to another server. And even as a (forced) 90% allied player, I would find it boring to see only half of the possible tanks available in the game. 

Regarding planes and AI, again it is a matter of finding a middle ground. If there are no planes, there are a bit less players and then the players see that the server is almost empty and move to another server, in all likeliness mostly populated by planes ... They also not realize that for tanks, the number of enemy tanks is almost as important as the distance between the spawn and the objective if you want to see some action.
If I do not put AI, during hours outside Europe playtime, there would be too few players to do PvP. It gives also something to do for those that join the server when it is almost empty and thus creates a "seed' for the population of the server to grow during peak hour.

[stupor-mundi]

What would really help, would be the availability of a 'simple-map' server without slow-motion-effect, as an alternative to AAS.

 

I don't regard Finnish as a viable alternative. While the concept of autogenerated maps is by now certainly quite successful for flying, for tanking I find those maps still very dull. This approach might work for tanking at some point, but currently it's not there yet.

 

What I'm looking for in a tank mission:

• No slo-mo.
• Full war server, no arbitrary rules about what you may and may not attack. The interesting thing about IL2 tanking, in contrast with more arcade tank games, is that you can work on ideal tactics to defeat the enemy.
• I have no interest in being bombed or strafed, so would be quite happy with tank-only missons.
• Basically want to fight other player tanks, in an interesting landscape containing hills, ravines, and so on. I.e. no interest in fighting AIs, infantery and such which I just find distracting and not fun.
• At least somewhat balanced missions, i.e. not too many tigers, ideally none. There is a need for limiting the most powerful tanks, but I get annoyed by other arbitrary limits which are not needed for the balancing. Now there are, maybe due to virtue signalling, some west-only missions without Soviet tanks. I want to drive my T34.

With the current online player numbers, AAS routinely gets way too many players to be playable for me, due to slo-mo. Since I find Finnish so dull, I am guessing that some of the people hanging out there, are also there because they get slo-mo on AAS. So a simple-map server would very much be needed for the people on lower end hardware.

 

 

[Drim]

There just aren't enough concurrent players to make up for the gigantic maps for tanks.  I'd love to see something adjacent to a battle of kursk type fight but that would probably require a different mode and a lot of tankers in 1 server.  I'd rather have 1 good tank server with all of the tank players than a bunch of combined arms with a few players on each

Edited January 14, 2023 by Drim

[stupor-mundi]

10 hours ago, Drim said:

There just aren't enough concurrent players to make up for the gigantic maps for tanks.  I'd love to see something adjacent to a battle of kursk type fight but that would probably require a different mode and a lot of tankers in 1 server.  I'd rather have 1 good tank server with all of the tank players than a bunch of combined arms with a few players on each

 

14 hours ago, stupor-mundi said:

What I'm looking for in a tank mission:

• No slo-mo.

 

In my post above, I only alluded to slo-mo, but I've written an entire thread about it here:
https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/82052-slow-motion-syndrome-in-multiplayer-on-advance-and-secure-server/

so I'm not going to be redundant and repeat all of that.

But, basically, what we currently have, when there are lots of people on AAS (>5 for instance), and sometimes even, when there are loads of tankers on Finnish (>25 or so), is that a subset of the players, those with weak hardware, experience slo-mo, i.e. degraded performance of their vehicles, and lack of responsiveness.
The way the missions are designed plays a role in this, and the other factor is player numbers.

 

So you effectively get a bunch of players on fast hardware who think they are great tankers because they are playing against people with a handicap.

And my suspicion is that many people who try out TC and get slo-mo and find it unrewarding because of that, just quit multiplayer after a while. Or maybe go to Finnish where the slo-mo is quite rare.

 

Those are the reasons why I'm suggesting a simple-mission, low resources, tank server.

Edited January 14, 2023 by stupor-mundi