Community Warning

[Culbrelai]

My only concern with enforcing fairplay is with sieges.

With sieges, the attacking side often has to be 5-10+ players more than the defending side especially if the Pob has multiple weapon platforms, because shields are very important now with boosts and the attacking side will be deshielded most of the time. I look forward to how the admin team will handle the first siege after this policy/rule change.

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#NotMySNAC

[Dave Synk]

Maybe in time there won't be a fear for certain people to pass through a system and out of the blue you see 5 folks logging going out at you. Just to mess around with the said person. It's petty, ruins the fun and makes people nope out of here.

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Rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh, you touch my mind, fumbling in ignorance, incapable of understanding.
- Sovereign

[Lord Chaos]

As this turned into a discussion thread I'd like to ask something too:

Let's say two or three players want to kill or pirate another player. What should we do in this case? Split the fight into 2v1 or 3v1 duels where everyone gets a chance to kill that player?

I know the intentions here come from a good place, but this isn't Connecticut where it's a fair battle arena where everyone agrees on terms before a fight starts

That's the pickle, it's hard to define ganks - especially in snubs where someone like @Haste could easily beat off three randos without breaking a sweat while I would barely know which side of a valkyrie is the part that faces forward. We want people to judge for themselves whether or not the person they're fighting is great or new, and try to be as fair as possible to the best of their judgement. Until we get an actual workable and objective method to decide what is and isn't fair, the staff can only really stick to handling the super obvious stuff - like having a bunch of camps sit on a base to spawncamp snubs, or 10v1s. We will be devoting significant time going forward to finding out how we can steer the culture of the community in a direction where we live rent free in everybody's head and we don't need to sanction people in order to get fights to a place where everyone can have fun.

So RPA and IMG be WARNED, you can only gank BMM with equal... hehe jk jk guys cmon...

Its always easy to come and complain at Admins about everything, anyone got solutions?
I have a sugestion that might be interesting,

In order to not hurt anyones "feelings" we could have a mixed solution.
Il use as an example Bretonia

Security Zones:
Level 1 SZ - Capital system NL, only 1v1 alowed
Level 2 SZ - Border systems - Manchester - Cambridge - Leeds - Newcastle, 1v2 oponents max - mini gank
Level 3 SZ - Taus - Omegas - Anything can happen man, its deep space
Mining Zones: DUBLIN - Mining area bro, EXPECT to be ganked, fly alone at your own risk, there is a reason for the word "escorts" and its not to name a faction.

These security zones could be "augmented" by equiping the npcs decently in the relevant areas.
As an example a corsair entering Bretonia, Police in Omegas is weak, in Cambridge a litle harder and in New London a npc would be actualy dangerous.
In the same way a Bowex ship that travels to Omicron Gama (wth he doing there) would face similar escalating npc dificulty as it aproaches the Corsair Capital system.

(yes idea from Eve kinda)

During Siege Timers these rules are void.
I made sure to include Dublin because mining areas would need particular atenton,
As a group of miners can gank competitors or be ganked by pirates, its something to be expected guys.

So, this way, if you get ganked... well you had it comming mate.

Just an idea.

[Corile]

I've been informed that this thread exists and there is at least one person who is interested in my opinion on this. It hasn't changed since this post 4 years ago, but reading this thread it seems that the problem has only got worse.

I have said before many, many times that Discovery has completely lost the plot when it comes to PvP balance. Someone has watched an extra credits video on how balance is done in league of legends like 7 years ago, came up with a counter chart straight from rock paper scissors 2, and that strategy has dictated the direction of PvP balance changes since then until at least the time I stopped playing disco.

The problem is, this idea doesn't fit the Discovery environment and it seems to me like no one has seriously tried to come up with a balance framework that actually makes sense for Disco.

There are multiple factors that ruin the "everything has a niche and a counter" model about Disco such as:
- Respawn timers. You don't get to jump in immediately with something else to adapt your strategy, there is very limited ability to adapt your strategy while you are in combat.
- Number of players. There is no "matchmaking" and skill disparity during every encounter is very likely.
- Information assymetry. During groupfights you only get the ship names of your opponents from the player list, if you know what they fly and they don't know what you fly, you have an advantage.
- First mover disadvantage. If you play corsairs and raid alpha in 5 battleships, the outcasts have a choice what to log and if they log 5 bombers, even if the numbers are even, you are dead. Likewise, if you see that there are 10 enemies in your home system and there are only 3 people online from your faction, the winning move is to not log because there is no chance that you can win this.
- Variable team size. In league the game is always 5v5, in disco the team size is variable, people join and leave during combat.

If you continue with the "niche and counter" strategy for PvP balance, disco is just going to become a team game of coordinated faction groupfights, where if you are a lone player that doesn't have or want to play with a faction, you have no reason to actually log because the chance that you find encounters that are going to be pleasant for you is greatly diminished.

I think that in general the Disco PvP balance should actually be, you know, balanced, and every ship class should be able to stand against any other ship class (or, alternatively, any snub class should be able to stand its ground against any other snub class, and the same for caps; there should be absolutely minimal interaction between snubs and caps). Then, each class gets a skill rating. Low-skill ships are easier to play but also low reward. High-skill ships are harder, but come with benefits that let the player stand his ground against multiple opponents.

A ship that had a sidewinder or a firestalker in place of a CD was much easier to play and could stand its ground even against a more competent player, but the reward was low because if the enemy decided to run away, there was nothing you could do. Practically anything that allowed for risky instakills was fun to play because it was high-risk, high-reward (reward here being the regens you got from the dead enemy, /Z/ vs KNF Kusari HF fights years ago were a perfect example of this). Bombers almost always died to VHFs, except if they could land a precise SNAC. LFs could outturn VHFs, but they had to be very careful about their shields because they died to one nuke. Forward nuking was a risky tactic against enemies that ran away, but it landed a lot more damage than just constantly aiming at a boxing target. These are just some of the examples.

There were some disadvantages to this model of course, especially back in the day when Disco actually had some new players and those new players would get knowledge-checked by someone who knew what he was doing (like the fact that if you have no shield you must watch out for nukes) and they would get instakilled, but rather than address the immediate problem the entire balance shifted so as to completely remove instakills.

If PvP balance actually worked in tandem with the way that players actually play Discovery, if someone could think about how individual players and groups actually decide whether to log, what to log, what to play, where and how, and if balance worked in a way that actually incentivised fighting to win even when outnumbered or disadvantaged, rather than running away or ganking, then maybe there would be no need to issue these kinds of warnings.

But I'm not sure if it's not too late for that now.

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Reflections on the Revolution in Gallia
Custodi // High City of Heraklion // The Cult of Archangels
Log Filter // Post Creator // Manhattan

[NOVA-5]

Nicely deflected, one faction gets a warning, cries, tells tales and then the whole servers a dick & gets warned,
makes you wonder who's pandering who.

[SnakThree]

Make it proper notice, so this shows up on home page. Not everyone reads sanction threads.

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[Jayenbee]

Nicely deflected, one faction gets a warning, cries, tells tales and then the whole servers a dick & gets warned,
makes you wonder who's pandering who.

I've been around long enough to see who started it too.
I said from day one that a certain faction's conduct wasn't productive to Discovery.
Not saying it excuses it however, just explains.

Regardless, the warning is rightfully directed to us all.
Tit for tat gets us nowhere.

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When contending with a monster, you'd be wise to give the devil his due.