FTL - Faster Than Light

[Sullla]

Came across this YouTube video which had been self-posted on FTL Reddit and I simply had to share:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCxiH28DLi4

I don't know if it's the complete and utter cluelessness, the endless stream of profanity, the repeated trips back to the same store, or the innumerable acts of self-sabotage, but I found this absolutely hilarious to watch. (I hope this doesn't make me a terrible person.) I used to wonder how people could state that it took them 150 games to defeat the flagship for the first time, or why the Internet reviewers kept claiming the game was impossibly difficult.

I no longer wonder about those things.

[T-hawk]

Yeah, the FTL Reddit can be a bewildering place for us hardcore gamers. But that's how the casuals play things. This guy apparently didn't even realize that crew can repair systems, so he's jumping around with shields broken and other systems on fire. There's a whole generation of iPhone "gamers" and internet reviewers whose sense of agency literally doesn't go beyond clicking on whatever a game prompts them to do.

This one is pretty extreme even for Reddit, but there's no shortage of obliviousness out there. Reddit is full of so many posts about getting trashed by the flagship or just barely winning... with something like 4 bars of shields and weapons and no purchased systems. What were these people doing for eight sectors? Yet we see that over and over. There's a vast population of players who don't process the idea of finite resource availability and a ticking clock. They're used to anything from GTA to Candy Crush to even Minecraft where you can just go grind up more whenever you want. The concept of a game as an exercise in optimizing inputs is unfathomable.

[novice]

Yeah, the FTL Reddit can be a bewildering place for us hardcore gamers. But that's how the casuals play things. This guy apparently didn't even realize that crew can repair systems, so he's jumping around with shields broken and other systems on fire. There's a whole generation of iPhone "gamers" and internet reviewers whose sense of agency literally doesn't go beyond clicking on whatever a game prompts them to do.

This one is pretty extreme even for Reddit, but there's no shortage of obliviousness out there. Reddit is full of so many posts about getting trashed by the flagship or just barely winning... with something like 4 bars of shields and weapons and no purchased systems. What were these people doing for eight sectors? Yet we see that over and over. There's a vast population of players who don't process the idea of finite resource availability and a ticking clock. They're used to anything from GTA to Candy Crush to even Minecraft where you can just go grind up more whenever you want. The concept of a game as an exercise in optimizing inputs is unfathomable.

I keep reading this... description... and can't stop laughing.

[Commodore]

He only didn't mention LoL because sacred cows.

[sunrise089]

Well done T-Hawk.

[T-hawk]

I wasn't trying to be funny or insulting, but actually trying to step into and understand and express the casual perspective. Looks like the post hit somewhere on the Unintentional Comedy Scale instead. LoL never came to mind. I don't get any sense of hilarity from seeing such efforts, what I get is a drive to go show them how to do it right but know it would fall on deaf ears.

I can actually understand not knowing at first that crew can repair something on fire. In stuff like the various Facebook clicker games, if a fire destroys something and the game doesn't prompt you for a response, it's just gone and you were never expected to do anything about it. The prompting approach has even filtered into Civ, in Beyond Earth that tells you ninety times a turn what you're supposed to do. I'm not being insulting, just descriptive, in saying such babysitting has had to become standard behavior for games to get and sustain mass casual appeal.

FTL in particular is very trappy with mechanics that aren't what you might expect. Weapon autofire is a huge trap - of course you always want to fire each weapon right away after that big long charge time, right? Ions are another as we've discussed. And crew skill. I remember one particular discussion on Reddit where someone was complaining about how much damage they took even with maxed shield skill. Nobody could get through to the guy that shield skill hardly matters - how often does a laser get through in the 0.1s between the skilled recharge and when an unskilled shield would. Nor that shields don't do anything against missiles. He just had it in his head that "SHIELD SKILL IS DEFENSE" and couldn't understand anything to the contrary, probably coming from some game where defense is indeed wrapped up into a single skill stat.

There are a lot of ways to do things wrong in FTL and brutal punishments for them. Both possibly more so than in any other game of its popularity level. So it really stands out for how much we see of it in unskilled play and the harsh reactions to it. Nobody is ever going to blame themselves for a miserable failure rather than blaming the game.

[Cheater Hater]

There are a lot of ways to do things wrong in FTL and brutal punishments for them. Both possibly more so than in any other game of its popularity level. So it really stands out for how much we see of it in unskilled play and the harsh reactions to it. Nobody is ever going to blame themselves for a miserable failure rather than blaming the game.

Is that a good thing? I don't think so, especially for something that's trying to hit a relatively wide audience. Obviously there has to be some middle ground between telling players everything and nothing, but even FTL makes some unintuitive choices (running with oxygen off constantly is the best choice, fighting more battles is always a good thing, most augments other than Long Range Scanners and Scrap Recovery Arm are situational at best). I'll admit I don't play FTL at the highest levels (I play Easy almost exclusively, mainly since I want to feel like I have a good chance at winning every time I start without performing quite as much micro), but I read Sullla's reports and understand what top level play looks like, and just don't feel an urge to push myself to higher levels because of some of these problems, even though it is interesting.

I'll be honest, I'm surprised any rogue-likes have gotten such relative mass-market appeal--I know I certainly haven't liked the idea of such a penal design, but I guess both shortening the lifespan of a game and carrying over a limited amount of progress (whether ship unlocks in FTL, or the upgrades in games like Rogue Legacy) have made the category more approachable.

[novice]

I wasn't trying to be funny or insulting, but actually trying to step into and understand and express the casual perspective. [...] I'm not being insulting, just descriptive, in saying such babysitting has had to become standard behavior for games to get and sustain mass casual appeal.

I got that, but I found it funny nonetheless. You were describing a hilarious reality.

[greenline]

I managed another no damage run of the final boss on hard, this time with the Stealth A.

The key to this run was picking up a Zoltan shield augment in the Zoltan cruiser quest in Sector two. My weapons were rather limited then so having that for defense plus cloaking really helped.

Ended up with Mind Control, Hacking, and Cloaking, but only three weapons: Flak 1, Hull Laser 1, and the Dual Lasers. That meant relying on hacking the evade or mind controlling the pilot to be able to deal damage.

Still, I repeated the strategy of disabling the missile launcher over and over again, and it was working. Got through to phase 3 without a scratch.

Breaking through the Flagship's Zoltan shield took forever, but they also took a while to break mine. Still, my cloaking cooldown left an opportunity for the missile launcher to fire on me... but they all missed! Then I disabled it, and that was that.

[Jkaen]

To be honest I struggle with some ships on easy to get a win, nevermind the difficulty levels you lot play on. the idea of pausing constantly to micromanage timings perfectly or to judge if you want to let a drone shoot based upon where its pointing is past what I can do, and I am enough of a gamer to hang round here.