12-19-2017, 07:27 AM
Speaking mostly about VHFs, I doubt that new players get annihilated because they lack money to build a proper VHF with AU8, since a lot of the new players I meet in Connecticut are capable of immediately buying one after I tell them to get one. They get annihilated because they don't know how to build a pvp-viable ship, and face significant challenges in simply learning the technical setups to make pvp not impossible. So many of them don't know how to put debilitators on their ship, use guns that don't fire with same or similar speed or have poor refire synergy or get baited into hard to use guns like krakens and codenames which can be very unfriendly to newbies, don't know how to make their hardpoints efficient, don't know how to disable vsync or how to use frame rate limiters to mitigate input lag (this one is a real killer, from personal experience), don't know how to use weapon groups, get tech-nerfed into oblivion and don't know why, etc, etc. It takes a long time to explain all these things to someone and even aces who regularly mentor people are prone to forget some of these things since these are taken for granted and this one is not even including learning the skills to not die all the time to someone who only knows 24/7 right clicking on their crosshair in pvp.
Even if the issue is lack of money, it's not about making things cheaper for them (and by extension, us), it's about making sure they know how to make money, where to sell goods, where good transport ships are sold, because making money is very easy in this economy. Useful things like /restart which help to map out houses and commodity buy/sell points are not advertised to them, and they waste a lot of time having to acquire an enormous amount of information about commodities, bases everywhere. Actually, even if they do use a /restart, they still have to sift through an enormous selection of commodities and an enormous amount of information about their sellpoints to find one that works. The most profitable trade routes use mined ores stored on PoBs and there's no information anywhere about that in-game. As far as noobs are concerned, ores don't even exist for trading.
What we need to do is advertise, in-game, not just the tools we have, but also the forums as an invaluable source of information as to the tools that we as vets use, and give them a basic understanding of how the game works first. Vets have no real issues with this game because they simply have the tools needed to play this game and know how to use them. /restarts, FLStat, FLCompanion, technerf chart, basic pvp guides, ore PoBs, etc, these things all exist to make our lives easier but noobs have it hard because they don't even know they exist, how to find them or how to use them. There is a lot of information stored on the forums (some even compiled very nicely and even pinned such as this) that you cannot reasonably find out for yourself in-game without asking people who know their stuff or an insane amount of self-exploration. Merging AU8s by default after removing the cost is a short-term bandaid fix that doesn't address more serious issues as to why noobs have it harder than everyone else, with regards to pvp and making money.
tl;dr Making the armour come freely may help, but is not the solution we need, it's about resolving the in-game obscurity of an overwhelming amount of necessary information to play this game.
Even if the issue is lack of money, it's not about making things cheaper for them (and by extension, us), it's about making sure they know how to make money, where to sell goods, where good transport ships are sold, because making money is very easy in this economy. Useful things like /restart which help to map out houses and commodity buy/sell points are not advertised to them, and they waste a lot of time having to acquire an enormous amount of information about commodities, bases everywhere. Actually, even if they do use a /restart, they still have to sift through an enormous selection of commodities and an enormous amount of information about their sellpoints to find one that works. The most profitable trade routes use mined ores stored on PoBs and there's no information anywhere about that in-game. As far as noobs are concerned, ores don't even exist for trading.
What we need to do is advertise, in-game, not just the tools we have, but also the forums as an invaluable source of information as to the tools that we as vets use, and give them a basic understanding of how the game works first. Vets have no real issues with this game because they simply have the tools needed to play this game and know how to use them. /restarts, FLStat, FLCompanion, technerf chart, basic pvp guides, ore PoBs, etc, these things all exist to make our lives easier but noobs have it hard because they don't even know they exist, how to find them or how to use them. There is a lot of information stored on the forums (some even compiled very nicely and even pinned such as this) that you cannot reasonably find out for yourself in-game without asking people who know their stuff or an insane amount of self-exploration. Merging AU8s by default after removing the cost is a short-term bandaid fix that doesn't address more serious issues as to why noobs have it harder than everyone else, with regards to pvp and making money.
tl;dr Making the armour come freely may help, but is not the solution we need, it's about resolving the in-game obscurity of an overwhelming amount of necessary information to play this game.