I have been player GSB for 1 week, it’s quite fun once the game is on, but i have some troubles with finding challenge challenges. Basically, for the owner of the base game without DLC, it’s quite hard to find some interesting ones from the in game lobby :
half of them use DLC race
half of the rest does not, but for some reason is still tied to some DLC
more than half of the rest seems to be some specific experiments that are instantly stomped with a quite generic fleet
And if you want to test a specific fleet it’s very hard because you wont find a game that have the same requirements easily. Then, there are a couple of crash from time to time.
Basically only 10% of the challenges could start and be challenging.
Games listed on the forum are often better because the author cared more when designing them and because it’s often better described so you know what you are about to jump in, but is there a way to type the number from the game list screen ? i have only been able to sort by game ID and trying to scroll there, but it’s not very convenient.
Since I’m just a newbie maybe I’m doing something wrong, but i could not find how to work around those issues on my own so feel free to suggest.
But if I’m not, let me give a few ideas to the game designer :
Don’t display games players can’t play in the game list (or at least show an option to hide them)
Show the credit limit in the game list screen
Create a URL handler for something like gsb://challenge#123456 (with 123456 being the game ID) so that you can just click a link on the forum and launch the desired challenge
But let me just say that that i was globally positively surprised about how interesting the game is, even if those issues means i feel there is some unused potential.
Unfortunately, this issue is due to player laziness. When you post a challenge, you see a list of check boxes for the various DLC you have. A polite player will uncheck the boxes for DLC that is not required for the challenge. To our frustration, too many players just post the challenge without bothering to clear the check boxes, resulting in GSB thinking the challenge has all the DLC involved. It’s been a problem for quite a long time, and the community hasn’t found a solution to it.
You can always sort by difficulty or sort by attempt if you want harder challenges that don’t get stomped in half a second.
That being said, the game has always been rigged in favor of the challenger’s side. If you want a challenge you can always try posting a challenge instead of just playing them.
I am not fundamentally against DLC. I am considering buying the DLC. I think it’s worth it. But i find that DLC that degrade the experience of the base game owner is not a developer ethic i want to support. Before the DLC appeared I guess everyone could enjoy the fact that you could click a challenge and it worked. Today you get the kind of experience I described above.
For fans of the car analogy : if you buy a car and then suddenly a new kind of engine is invented, then for no technical reason just weeks after only 25% of the gas stations accept to deliver gas for your “old” engine, and you can only know if you will get gas by stopping at the gas station, does that mean the kind of annoyance you are having is your fault because you should buy the new engine ?
I’m not asking to play the challenges I did not pay for, but i would like to enjoy having a list filled with challenges I can actually play. This is not the players or modding community responsibility to develop a checkbox like “ only show challenges that you can play”.
I will probably just leaving with this mostly positive feeling : “It was fun and worth the small amount of time and money I put in it, getting to the limit of the fun i can get because of theses issues, let’s move on”.
I have all but stopped bothering with trying to download challenges any more. I have tried to download a federation challenge, only to get the message that I need the Nomads race or whatever. After 3 or 4 of those in a row, I move on. It’s spoiling waht is a great feature of this game.
As a Steam player on a Mac I do face the same problems because the Parasites DLC is not available for Mac players. And thanks to people who often forget to uncheck their tick-boxes I have no incentive to buy the Outcasts to play any Outcast challenges (since I assume that most of them require the Parasites DLC).
I do have the other DLCs, so I usually make it a point to uncheck the tick-boxes for DLCs that I am not including in the challenge (except for my most recent challenge which has supply limits, hence I left the boxes ticked). Unfortunately I usually play as either the Order or the Swarm, so most of my challenges require those DLCs.
BUT there’s a very quick way to find challenges that only use original content: sort the challenges by date. Any challenge that came out before the DLCs were launched is definitely original content only. And don’t worry about the difficulty: some of them have over a hundred victorious attempts out of more than five thousand.