(01-16-2019, 03:43 AM)Dark Chocolate Wrote: [ -> ] (01-16-2019, 01:36 AM)Grumblesaur Wrote: [ -> ]Besides, the plugin being buggy means that the implementation is flawed, not the idea. I think the current intention, which is to prevent instantly nuking a fighter with its pants down, but still provide a lower maintenance (if lower DPS as well) alternative to the nova torpedo, is perfectly sound, and despite the bugs you've mentioned (which they have apparently patched, minus this most recent one), isn't worth abandoning yet. It's probably a quick fix -- adding some rule that dictates its behavior against NPCs rather than players.
Most people would say the nerf is not needed at all... "nuking a fighter with its pants down" isn't very easy in the first place.. It requires tremendous amount of skill and practice.
But if a nerf really needs to be implemented.. Why not go for something simple like Antonio said... Increasing the damage, and energy consumption thus increasing the time between shots and power core management... making the shots much more valuable, and much more punishing if you miss.... Why not go fora simple nerf instead of making a convoluted plugin which is highly unstable, if at all a nerf has to be freakin implemented...
The issue here isn't whether it's easy or difficult, or that it requires practice. If it's available it becomes part of the greater combat metagame because the people who are good at it will use it, and the people who want to get good at it will practice it. Thus it becomes a tool for veterans to seal club new players. It's a deliberate subversion of the intended balance of combat and it gives bombers too general a role.
It takes skill and good reflexes, yes, but you could say the same thing of a
Paper Mario glitch. Does that justify its presence in the game? Depends on whether you like playing a broken game, and whether you think it even constitutes a flaw at all. I happen to think it does, since I pretty vividly remember a lot of fights where bombers were the primary snub and you just brought a few VHFs along for some extra cruise disruptors. Now the ship roles are better distributed, and keeping the SNAC doing what it was all along intended for (i.e. blasting holes in capital ships and making traders think twice about trying to run away) is, in addition to most bomber energy weapons being rather lackluster in taking down other snubs, the best thing to keep bombers from being VHF replacements. Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's a good game feature, and most of the people who seem to think it
is are people who've already been doing it for years.
It smells like a self-interested motivation to me, but it's important for a person to remember, "hey, this game isn't just for me, it's for other people too". Some of those other people are new players, or people who don't have a lot of practice fighting. Getting your ship instakilled doesn't allow a lot of time to learn combat by doing, lest you waste server slots dueling in Connecticut instead of participating in the roleplay environment.
Since Discovery borrows so much from 20th century naval combat for its gameplay, I think it's fair to assume that it violates the design goals of the mod to let a
Dauntless drop bombs on a
Zero outside of freak accidents. Because there are limitations to the game engine (foremost the fact that there's no gravity to make bombs really behave like bombs, let alone antimatter blasts) that prevent us from fully realizing this naval analogy, certain compromises have to be made, like letting the SNAC be what amounts to a big, slow gun.
While it might be difficult to technobabble out a good explanation as to why a big pile of antimatter plowing into a snub doesn't explode the pilot's brain into next week on impact, I feel like whatever lame handwave somebody
might come up with is perfectly reasonable anyway since 80% of the infocards in the game are nigh on pseudoscience anyway. (This isn't a bad thing, mind you; I rather like the laissez-faire approach to dealing with science, since it permits story writers and roleplayers to take more creative license).
Bugs and software faults are frustrating, but every new innovation has teething troubles, whether it's the software itself (like this server crash issue) or a policy problem (player bases, system re-entry after death, what have you), they always need tweaking at some point. I think we should be patient; no doubt somebody's working on a patch for this as we speak.