Weekly Kickball Thread

[vegetableknife]

Hopefully the "no Black team" portion doesn't have to happen too much and there are enough healers per game.  At least to me, the Black team was a meaningful way to shuffle in all participants and to see some new builds that didn't necessarily fit into the meta.  Because, lets be honest, the same 16 people on Beam/x characters would be picked over and over if there was no Black team.

 

 

 

 

[Glacier Peak]

Are emps still going to be picked first during team selection?

 

Edit: meaning they don't sit out if there are, say 4 emps in attendance. 

Edited October 23, 2019 by Glacier Peak

[barrier]

4 hours ago, vegetableknife said:

Hopefully the "no Black team" portion doesn't have to happen too much and there are enough healers per game.  At least to me, the Black team was a meaningful way to shuffle in all participants and to see some new builds that didn't necessarily fit into the meta.  Because, lets be honest, the same 16 people on Beam/x characters would be picked over and over if there was no Black team.

 

 

 

 

Maybe get really good on an on-meta character and then show up on your off-meta toon? Like, there are a good dozen people out there that I would pick on totally random toons just because I'd be curious to know what they know that I don't.

 

There is no use in seeing an off-meta character in play with 5 other random off-metas that were all on the black team, either. Or a bunch of people that cant lock.

 

There is a reason I don't bring weird disruption toons to KB's anymore... (I also want to thank Rens for breaking me off the habit, too many realistic toons we want to try in our scrims, many stupid ideas smashed in the bud).

 

 

Also, there is a huge difference trying off meta toons and bring a 1300hp grav/sonic with no accos when you get fatkidded. A captain shouldn't have to carry that. Yup. Personal.

[xhiggy]

I don't expect many 5v5s to be need to be run with this change, but if a second no-emp match/thunderdome is run at the same time the idea is everyone still gets to play every round if they want. Part of the issue is that if there's 25 people and only 2 emps (which I believe was the case on saturday) that would lead to a massive black team where not everyone gets picked anyway. Ideally we could run 2 games with healers at the same time and no one would have to sit, but that hasn't happened in a while.

 

As long as a player has shown themselves to be vocal, on target, and survivable I think most people will pick them on weird-stuff, provided it's at least somewhat useful. But if you're coming in as a new player to kickball it's not unreasonable that a captain won't want to pick you on a Warshade, for example. There's a balance to strike between people the upset about matches being not competitive/fun and the people concerned about inclusivity/too many rules/accessibility that we're trying to find by trial and error with these changes.

 

No changes to the emp drafting phase @Glacier Peak
 

Edited October 23, 2019 by xhiggy

[CoHSlothbear4]

11 hours ago, xhiggy said:

srry this was directed to mez's reply im a forum noob

 

 

Hopefully these should result in fun matches more often and incentivize people to switch/try out emping. Remember the mez changes are not on live yet so those rules are still in place. Some other points came up that might be worth further discussion here and on discord if you have thoughts, but no changes to kickball on for these yet.

• Allowing incan use on healers could partially address how high damage is right now as well as make it so they can be healed through 1 AP
• Only run the black team draft for part of kickball nights (e.g. only the first 2 hours on 1 night of kickball). This would keep KB inclusive for most of the night while also enabling some more competitive matches later on and be good incentive for people to looking improve their PvP.

This Seems to be separate from the Emp incentives with a different incentive all together.  which is what i was commenting on. im not seasoned enough player to properly evaluate the need for emps or to take actions in order to make people emp more.  

What im talking about is that last line where i think there should be more done in order for people to improve their pvp now that their incentivised to do so as this post says. Thunderdome while alot of fun may not be the best for that but its alot better than nothing. 

Edited October 23, 2019 by CoHSlothbear4

[xhiggy]

@CoHSlothbear4 Sure this is a good point, arena is not really accessible to new players and getting new people into it and giving them opportunities to improve is important.

 

While we want to get new players involved that last note people were discussing is more addressing that we’re losing regulars at kickballs due to match quality issues and drafting limitations related to the large black team sizes. By splitting kickball into sort of 'regular' and 'competitive' sections you would get people only showing up for part of the night which would 1) allow people to choose which part of kickball to attend that would be more fun for them, 2) probably reduce average black team size if people are waiting till later to show up, 3) hopefully incentivize people interested improving and more competitive play. It could be done like only 1 night a week, or adding a 3rd night or something; just a discussion point from discord I wanted to loop in on the forums.

 

And there’s also been talk by some people about a newbie friendly arena night which could be a better intro to arena than regular kickball.

 

Edited October 24, 2019 by xhiggy

[Glacier Peak]

I thought the format worked fine for the first match of the evening.

 

I am happy that there is someone (is it just one person?) willing to host these twice every week,  and I would totally attend a third night KB for new players. Mondays anybody?

[xhiggy]

I want to add: everyone has very different versions of what's fun, so if you have a viewpoint or suggestion that you haven't seen mentioned be sure to voice it.

[vegetableknife]

9 hours ago, Glacier Peak said:

I thought the format worked fine for the first match of the evening.

 

I am happy that there is someone (is it just one person?) willing to host these twice every week,  and I would totally attend a third night KB for new players. Mondays anybody?

Xhiggy is the President of Kickball and Coh pvp!  I wish I could send him a thank you card lol.  

 

For me I'd envision Newbie night as a once a month thing, maybe at the start of the month, but like, it would be an actual "workshop".

 

Like for 20-30 min you could take newbies into different discord channels and set up an arena events to practice specific topics like:

• Target calling
• Locking
• Evasion
• Healing
• Character build/useful binds
• Etc.

Then make teams mixed with experienced people and newbies and run matches for the rest of the night.  If they like it they can come join the weekly kickballs the rest of the month.

 

This probably WAYYY to much work and planning, but I feel it might be a little more useful than throwing new guys on a team and having them fight each other and might help retention.

[Neuronia]

So Smallz, Void and a bunch of other people just ran a gateway event on Torchbearer which was pretty nice.
The Blasters were a good mix of Fire, Beam, Psy and there were some nice other toons like Corruptors and so on.

We had enough emps to go 2xteam and Smallz and Pixel and M3z and Tempty and everyone explained about locking and were really cool.
There were some newer Emps and Blasters and stuff there too which was nice. A lot of the matches were pretty close, mid-level scoring (both teams had a dozen to a a little over a dozen kills) and stuff on the usual outside maps (Striga, Atlas, Steel, Skyway, Outbreak) and people were rolling pretty well.

 

They did a lot of what was suggested above, with binds/macros for insps/phase/dim shift etc, lots of questions asnwered. Certainly hoping they keep this up, was very fun.

It was definitely a different pace than kickball nights on Indom, but still good to get the rust out.

Late edit:
For views on fun, mine is mostly tied to map variety. I like Atlas/SKyway as much as the next person, but having Lab/Cargo show up now and then is cool too.
For powersets, it's hard to gauge but I'm guessing (almost assuredly) that beam weapon spikes would be a lot deeper/cleaner than a mixed group. But that's up to the KB organizers to settle, I guess, as well as the players.

 

 

Edited October 26, 2019 by Neuronia

[xhiggy]

FYI regular kickball on Wednesday isn't happening for the holiday season due to variable schedules and multiple PvP teams having things scheduled for the same time.

But, impromptu kickballs at random times have had a lot of success getting going lately so keep an eye on the #arena discord channel and arena-chat in game for when things pop off.

[Jawbreaker]

Is there an official chat channel in game, or just the discord? I'd like to get started on PvP

[MJB]

2 hours ago, Jawbreaker said:

Is there an official chat channel in game, or just the discord? I'd like to get started on PvP

we use the discord server from 

 

 

hope to see you there 🙂 gl hf

[vegetableknife]

Any chance a second kickball day can get started again?

[xhiggy]

there's the KB on friday which may become a semi-regular thing, plus the impromtu kb's which start up here and there.

problem doing kb on scrim nights is that half the regular people are playing or would prefer watching the scrims. maybe mondays if anyone wants to give it a shot.