Discovery Gaming Community

Hi, I have been on and off this mod for many years. I will provide a list below why the PVP is garbage, I will also provide a list of changes that must happen in order for the PVP to not be garbage. I love this mod, and I love all the work, features and the love being put in to this. But the PVP is just so horridly bad compared to what else the dev team has delivered over the years. It's that one giant turd on a gourmet table of delicious food.

I enjoy freelancer, but the PVP has always been terrible. I just did the California event, which was my first pvp event and mass encounter I have had since 2010 I believe. Back in 2010 it took forever to kill anyone that was dodging, and I recall 8 v 1 situations where that 1 was just shimmy shamming around, with no shield, and nobody could hit him, even though we were 8 peppering his ship. It's really heartbreaking to see that this is STILL the case 7 years later.

I do balancing as a hobby for Team Frotress 2, where I have visited Valve, made a detailed spreadhseet of the things that needs to be balanced and they have implemented much of what I have suggested. Now Freelancer isn't TF2, but that doesn't mean Freelancer's PVP has to suck so hard as it does, core balance values has to apply, and in the current state of the mod, they don't.. at all.

Here's the two reasons why the PVP is utter garbage.

1. Too easy to dodge stuff
2. Time to death is too long

1. Dodging is an interesting mechanic where you do an action to avoid taking damage entirely. Most games make it so that dodging is something you can only do sometimes, and you have to time it properly. Who ever balances this mod has decided that you can dodge as much as you like forever, due to how the thruster and engine-kill works. Combine that with lag and hitboxes and you can stay alive even in a 1v8 fight. By having dodging being this easy, numbers don't matter, since the person never dies.

2. Even if you hit ALL your shots on a ship that isn't out of your league. Let's say Heavy Fighter vs Heavy Fighter. If I totally empty my clip in a fight, and it looks like all of my shots hit. All I do is remove the shield, and maybe hurt the hull worth 10 dmg, because the hitbox is so tiny when you don't have a shield up. Due to the fact that nearly all weapons have travel time, and are not instant hit-scan based weapons, makes dodging EVEN MORE powerful than it already is. Making the garbage factor of the PVP grow exponentially.

Balancing is hard, especially in space sims, since there is no ground to restrict movement making it easier to counter stuff. Which is why so many of the space sim combat just sucks.

Speed vs Power is hard to balance, how much speed relative to power is fair is nearly impossible to balance. Speed being movement, and power being Effective Health and Effective Damage Output. While dodging in this PVP state, your effective health is close to infinite, as you can drag the fight out as long as you like. Meaning you can add as much Damage output as you want, but if you keep dodging and you will receive close to 0 dmg.

Here's are some proposed fixes:

1. More hitscan weaponry and faster projectiles on everything.
The reason for this is simply to favor the shooter, right now the game is favor the dodger, who can dodge indefinitely due to thrusters having so god damn much capacity and charges up with engine kill, allowing you to thrust unpredictably forever. Having hitscan and faster weapons and even immobilizing weaponry will counteract this.

2. Dodging should be able to negate some damage, but not all.
The game needs to be tweaked so that if you are dodging, you can only dodge for so long

3. Properly balance Rock-paper-scissor system between different type of ships.
I asked this earlier and got 0 responses, but I will just make an assumption on how the balance goes. You have to balance in triangles, or else it gets too complex.

Ex:
Heavy Fighter Kills Bomber
Bomber kills Gunboat/Cruiser/Smaller Cap ship
Gunboat kills Heavy fighter

So if you are a Heavy Fighter, and you encounter a gunboat, you should be absolutely boned if you decide to engage, the same way if you are a bomber and encounter a heavy fighter.
Attempting to dodge against your counter should be futile, given the weaponry they should have at their disposal.

Light Fighters, should do more damage upclose, to reward the speed and agility they have to maneuver to closer enemies.

Right now, I'd say the balance between Transports and fighters are fair, since if you are a transport, and you encounter a fighter, you are absolutely boned.

I'd be more than happy to help create a balance matrix and guidelines for the dev team if needed. I believe that the PvP can be amazing in all aspects, but the current state makes it frustrating and unfun. It feels like playing hide and seek, and then someone decides to hide inside their own home that you can't access to not get found.

If the PvP gets fast paced and fluid, this mod will definitely draw a ton of more players, as the rest of the mod is just an amazing masterpiece.

Thanks for reading. As for myself,. I will do as little PvP as possible, as I find it unfun and boring.

You have literal zero experience in Freelancer modding and balance of said feature (TF2 is completely different game) and are throwing suggestions that are simply unachievable or even completely insane/unbalanced as far Freelancer's own engine is concerned.

Freelancer doesnt have hitscan capability (even beam cannons that are available are cheated in though many compromises and faked)

We dont have clips and neither they are supported, what are you talking about?

The fact that you can move your ship to the right and evade something hurling in your direction negates the whole damage. That's how real life works you know.

Weapon damage cannot be buffed/nerfed based on distance the projectile has traveled.

Gunboats already bone fighters if those decide to stay within engagement range of a gunboat. They are area denial capships. Bomber has fighting chance against fighter but keeping in mind how to actually fly a fighter in Discovery will net you way more wins than loses.

the rock-paper-scissor is to a certain degree already implemented. Look up bombers, capital ships and fighters? Also you obviously never seen a convoy composed of battle transports. These things hurt.

Caps > snubs. Fly caps if snubs are unhittable for you. Hopefully someone will notice that there's a problem when everyone starts flying caps and there's no snub to call to CD stuff.

Haha what

Well, PvP in Freelancer was always bad. Especially fighter vs fighter. Small crafts. If you look for PvP, then look for something bigger. Transports, gunboats or even caps. If you look for small craft PvP, unless you have a day or two a week to devote to learning how to do it, play something else that is more fun and enjoyable. I agree Freelancer PvP is bad, but I stick around for other things. I've started to avoid PvP for 2 years now.

Balance in any game isnt a movement of "hey, lets just do this." You could have a perfectly balanced game of freelancer pvp that forces turn based combat with a series of moves that could all technically be programmed through the hook. Why dont we do that? There's another element to balance than just making things fair and that is gameplay. Balance in a game like this is where things are "fair enough" that when playing the game as intended, it is both enjoyable and fair. Many years of development is also part of the reason why balance is hard to achieve, as new mechanics and things to do are constantly introduced. Freelancer snub pvp has a very "chase or be chased" feel until you learn the finesse of dueling, where you will, in almost every case, desire a fair fight. If this is your standard method and playstyle, you may find group PvP unenjoyable, much less if you have a ship counter somewhere else in the battle area. Here on Discovery, PvP deaths are an inconvenience in many ways, and can be incurred by merely docking. Without the luxury of switching, being countered in a fight as you suggest with "rock paper scissors balance" is incredibly unenjoyable, where as such balance works well in games where you can switch on your next respawn, or even sooner if you wish. Comparing this game to a first person shooter will only get you in trouble and will ultimately lead to either poor balance, or poor gameplay. Creating healthy balance is also difficult, as any time you upset the current "meta," people immediately assume you're bad at what you do, because people have their favorite ships to fly and favorite factions to play. However, mistakes happen, but a good developer knows to set themselves up for success by allowing for fine tuning in the future.

I've been playing Freelancer for nearly a decade and although I have only gotten into PvP, i've sensed that the situation with PvP wouldn't do well down the line. What you're asking for isn't possible with the engine, and the mods are already pushing Freelancer to its' technical limits in terms of features and some parts of gameplay. You can only do so much with what you have, and unless we literally build disco on a new engine, and I'm pretty sure most, if not all of the devs don't want to deal with that, just to fix one small problem that is easily fixed by just shifting towards more cap-focused gameplay.

Snub PVP is heavily skill and dodge dependent. However, I can land hits every firing pass, and I'm only upper-echelon average, using intermediate refire guns. Using even slower guns I can still land hits on people who know the dodging methods.

It's entirely about knowing your armourment, how to lead your shots, how to react to what people are doing, how to use their momentum against them. You don't only aim with your mouse, you aim with your ship, you aim with your strafe, you aim with every tool you've got.

Just something to consider. This puts lots of new players off flying fighters - and even older players who have been here for years without practicing PVP. Let me tell you this - one hour in Connecticut every week for three months will automatically make you better than half of the fighter pilots in this server, along with learning appropriate use of the strafe keys, engine cut, and reverse.

Also hitboxes are impossible to properly balance, but what we have is a pretty good compromise. General rule is: smaller ships turn worse than bigger ships of the same class (and do), or sacrifice guns, meaning they will be out-DPM'd in a straight line duel. Bigger ships are easier to hit despite improved turn rate, improving the effectiveness of slower, more cannon-like weaponry.

Balance here is bloody amazing for a commodity driven modification for a game that never tried to balance itself in the first place. Each ship is unique whilst being competitive against every other ship, rock-paper-scissors style.

(10-23-2017, 10:19 PM)Reliant Wrote: [ -> ]1. More hitscan weaponry and faster projectiles on everything.
The reason for this is simply to favor the shooter, right now the game is favor the dodger, who can dodge indefinitely due to thrusters having so god damn much capacity and charges up with engine kill, allowing you to thrust unpredictably forever. Having hitscan and faster weapons and even immobilizing weaponry will counteract this.

If you're suggesting this you clearly don't know how Freelancer works. Just to be very simple, faster weaponry is bad because Freelancer sucks at calculating things server-side. This pretty much means that on your screen you land a hit, but on the others, they are 10 miles away. The faster something is the more inconsistent it becomes. The range is also a factor in this.

(10-23-2017, 10:19 PM)Reliant Wrote: [ -> ]2. Dodging should be able to negate some damage, but not all.
The game needs to be tweaked so that if you are dodging, you can only dodge for so long

Thisn't a fix but a suggestion with no backing to it. You've pretty much said, "Do this, but I'm not gonna tell you how I think it should work." Also, it's a bad idea imo.

(10-23-2017, 10:19 PM)Reliant Wrote: [ -> ]3. Properly balance Rock-paper-scissor system between different type of ships.
I asked this earlier and got 0 responses, but I will just make an assumption on how the balance goes. You have to balance in triangles, or else it gets too complex..

With this playerbase such an idea will never work. There are not enough people to have a nice balanced counter all the time so 90% of encounters would end up one side being heavily outmatched because they brought the wrong ship types.

So many years developing this mod and yet most people chose to play here and do so without making edgy clickbait threads.

Sorry I couldn't resist.