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An increase in game speed as an option.


JericoHellsangel

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Hello everyone,

after playing skylords since it´s beta and before until it shut down, i´ve been thinking about increasing the game speed. While playing and watching other games like Starcraft, age of empires and similar games to these series, I´ve noticed a returning theme. There is a normal gamespeed for everyone at which everyone can enjoy it and there is an option to set it higher. Star Craft 2 has 5 which are 0.6x, 0.8x, 1x, 1.2x and 1.4x and in Age of Empires 2 there are even 4 options. 1x, 1.5x, 1.7x and 2x. I would like to see something similar in Skylords aswell in the future.

If you are playing Singleplayer, you can simply do whatever you want with any speed. Are you a very new player or an older who need a bit of time? Slower it down. Is the game to slow? Speed it up. Do you want to really go crazy? Speed it up even more. This would affect ingame times aswell. So if you would put the speed to 2x if it would be possible, a 30 min timer would suddenly be a 15 min timer in reality since it would tick down faster so you couldn´t just simply abuse that part.

Now i fall into the category that i´ve played my fair share of games and i have a decent understanding and mechanical skill and the game just started to become a bit to slow for me. I would love to see how it would be on different speeds like 1.3x or 1.5x, maybe like Aoe2 where the norm became 1.7x since the game was slow to begin with and with all of the mechanical things going on in skylords like unit turnradii, acceleration, slow reaction time, a faster speed would maybe benefit the game as a whole.

Now which speeds would i like to see? The basic ones would be 1.5x and 2x. But if we want to be more advanced then adding 1.3x and 1.7x would be very nice. Would i want slower speeds? No, not really. The game is slow as it is and decreasing it further would hurt it more then helping, then again, maybe it would be a good for new, younger or older players to slow it down to 0.8x or even 0.6x. Accessibility is never bad.

But how would this work in multiplayer? You open a room, set the speed and people who look at your room can see the speed and dicide wether they want to join in or not. Same with difficulty for rpve and campain maps. Now pvp however is an entirely different beast. The way that Aoe2 and SC2 handled it was to let the community dicide what gamespeed should be the default one for matchmaking. I don´t know how it was in SC2 but i remember in AoE2 it started at 1x, then people opened lobbies with 1.5x and found it more enjoable. With the improvement of the game over time people started to enjoy 1.7x the most and is now the standart for matchmaking. This would be the most obvious and quickest solution to that.

Now to the possible problem. If you would speed it up, that means you can complete missions faster, grind faster, get your quests done faster and this speedup may or may not affect the 45m timer aswell. From an egocentric point, i´d love that. Getting those done quicker would be a delight. Right now i am at a point where i´ve done things i wanted to do and am waiting for the nex update. Doing my daily quests and maybe 1-2 more rpve matches and going out for the day. Having this be done faster is something i´d like.

However obviously that means that i spend less time in the game in real time. Meaning that i engage less potentially with the community and with the rest of the content. Now i don´t know how much the devs care about actual time spend and engagement itself or if they just say "aslong as people are playing it, we are happy". In that case the ingame speed could potentially not affect the 45min timer.

I don´t know how much possible with the engine but i´d like to see something like that implemented.

Volin likes this
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While I think that the idea sounds interesting, there were two things which immediately struck my mind:
1. Speedrunning. Being able to play the game at say 0.8x speed, it would make it much easier to hit crucial timings and micro more efficiently. This would (probably) make speedrunning somewhat easier, but also more time consuming, since every reset then means 25% extra time loss.

2. Grinding. Giving the option of increased speed would mean, that people can complete maps much faster, also the typical farming maps like BH and GoL or even rPvE9. They could speed it up to a point, where they can still manage to play correctly and control their micro, but maximize the gold gained per time. Since farming is already usually seen as problematic, this would definitely not help with that issue.

All in all I am not a priori against such an option, but I would not want it at any cost and make sure, that it does not break anything/make it worse when being implemented.

Kubik likes this
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Technically it is super easy to implement the change of speed, and apply (or not) time multiplier for time based rewards.

The two biggest problems was already mentioned, and other problems I can think about are just variations of slower speed make it easier to do X, faster speed make farming even faster.

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5 hours ago, Metagross31 said:

While I think that the idea sounds interesting, there were two things which immediately struck my mind:
1. Speedrunning. Being able to play the game at say 0.8x speed, it would make it much easier to hit crucial timings and micro more efficiently. This would (probably) make speedrunning somewhat easier, but also more time consuming, since every reset then means 25% extra time loss.

2. Grinding. Giving the option of increased speed would mean, that people can complete maps much faster, also the typical farming maps like BH and GoL or even rPvE9. They could speed it up to a point, where they can still manage to play correctly and control their micro, but maximize the gold gained per time. Since farming is already usually seen as problematic, this would definitely not help with that issue.

All in all I am not a priori against such an option, but I would not want it at any cost and make sure, that it does not break anything/make it worse when being implemented.

1. Speedrunning could be solved by stating that in order to be a speedrun it has to be atleast 1x and it could be seen in a replay which was the base speed by force. But if that is that much of a concern, then don´t include slower but just faster speeds. 

2. Yeah, that is a nice secondary thing. I wouldn´t mind having an easier grind. If that is to bad the amount of reward cash you get would be lowered the faster you play. While faster grinding would be nice, my primary reason is to have a faster game experience.

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saving that information to the replay client generates would be a really hard thing 😞 and the game would not show it, so that would be another hard thing. And faster speeds can in theory also help speedrunners when map is easy enough, but long, and there is only  one spot at the end that can make the difference.

My implementation idea did not even involve the game knowing that the speed changed, and that is not technical issue. 🤔 maybe game designers? ImaginaryNumb3r and Eirias?

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I don't think speedrunner should be a steakholder here, as it touches balancing and game experience. They have to work with existing tools, and if this brings a meta shift there, I would not even consider that a bad thing.

14 hours ago, JericoHellsangel said:

The game is slow as it is

Strongly agree! Would love to see a lets see x1.5 game experience.

Slower speed could also be appreciated by some, to give more people access to some harder game modes.

And additional options would not hurt others, that are glad with the current game speed.

Like the idea very much.

Ofc this should only touch match speed, not daily timers and such

 

PS: Many rts even allow to adjust speed (in single player and campaign) during the match

Edited by Volin
Ps
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