I find 2-3 huge design problems with the current situation.
It would be long post.
First one is that the game is too skill based, it should be skill based but I kinda does not like the moment where I leave for 3 months and then I cannot kill anything non-nub in fighter or bomber for a bit time till I start to train again etc. This is the main problem also with the declining numbers, 90% of the games on the market are just too easy, indeed Disco would have its core fans but they wont be enough to make the difference.
Fighters vs Fighters in let say 5v5 snub only is extremely boring for causal players with bad aim like me. I know how it would end even before it starts, the side with 1-2 of the good aiming pilots( I guess they are like 30-40 on the server) would slowly eat the bots of the other side and win, it makes no fun for the receiving side to play this.
Fighter 1 v1 Me vs someone in Conn- Same story I win in 80% of the time without giving even a chance to the other side, in the other 20% when I meet someone good I loose without having a chance.
I consider myself as bad/medium PvP pilot and I am casual Disco player.
I cannot train 20 hours PvP per week in order to be able to be good in PvP, I does not want to use macros or camera mods in order to have better aim as well, because people running the game on lower res then full HD need to move the mouse less/have zoomed camera in order to hit more or using macros etc.
The current balance is good for the core discovery base, I can deal with it but it kills the casual/new player type, that kind of players that I as bad PvPer can beat 3-4 vs me. My personal best is 7 vs my Roc- new players die too easy. This casual players feed the mod with people, if they get owned so easy in PvP by the veterans they just leave and we got small amount of total players in the server as result.
Bombers- Light bombers should not be able to mount novas,Snac needs 20% DPS nerf. Medium bombers should all become Heavy ones that have bad dodging like Barghest, Thor/Nada Devi/Challenger should be rebalanced to dodge worse. Heavy bombers should have 6 bomber guns, all light ones only 4, 5 gun bombers should be fixed. The useless bomber shield torpedo should be removed or rebalanced.
Light Fighters- core nerf, guns nerf- max lvl 8,small shield boost, 500 speed and custom better CD. All should be on the size of Liberator.
HFs-this is really mystery for me. Hardest thing to do.
Fighter guns- small speed boost but with higher energy requirements.The idea is to reduce the aiming skill factor a bit without killing it.
Now second point-caps.
When the casual player finds out that he have no chance in fighter or bomber he trade his way in order to buy cap.Unexperienced battleship is as easier to kill then fighter.
Capital ship/Transports bot concept- give 90% of the bots in form of armour, so they wont be able to feed much, fix the armour/bot ratio issue.
I see GB with bots of LF, cruiser with the bots of bomber and battleship with bots of GB if we take the today values. Reduce snub bots with 10-20% with exception of SHFs- they should have purpose as bot donators-300 bots on each or similar gives any purpose of this kind of ship in group fight.
Capital ship guns and transports.
Assign all capital ship guns to new class, give transps new class shield that absorbs 50-80% of their DPS.
Cruisers and Battleships-
Battleship concept is wrong, battleships should be really expensive, restricted,they should use fuel for moving in impulse on 90, otherwise they should move on 30. I guess that if they receive proper fuel usage they would need transport in order to be effective in battle,so they wont be spammed like today. In exchange for the huge nerf I propose 50% more hull,better shield and proper Solaris/Razors that allow battleships to create "safe zone" around it- with let say 1-1,2k distance Also battleship missiles- double the recharge time, make them slower bigger with better tracking/turning and killable from escorts but not stoppable by CMs and with really high DPS- 3 battleship missiles hitting a cruiser should be able to hurt him bad or kill him. Battleships does not need so many guns- 4-6 Solaris dedicated 360 slots close to each other at the center of the ship guarantee that the aim glitch wont be factor,you can combine the 4 primaries slots in 2 only.2-4 support slots for razors/pulses/secondary and same story with the heavy slots. The 3 groups of guns should be made to work as different arrays- on the front part of the ship-heavy anti-cap guns, Deadly accurate Solaris in the middle and the support guns on random but good spots( so one can use double razor/pulse/secondaries in the middle and 1 360° flak slot at each end of the ship.)
Make the BS guns with a lot of health and less on number would make bombing more strategic via sub-targeting the guns. Avoid the extremly crappy gun positions and arc balancing-it is crap at first place and secondly they create more lag, Liberty carrier could be more effective with 16 proper placed guns instead of 27 lag creating guns.
Battleships should be expensive to use and they should have hefty dead penalty but they should be really hard to kill.
Cruisers right now are more then fine- only 2 addons- 1 cruiser flak and a bit better battle razor.Cruisers should be the mainstream capital ship- powerful and with wide usage but still easy to kill for 2-3 bombers.
Transports- give them modules that use cargo space in order to be more battle fit- explained that in other topic around.
In general updating and life testing of the changed features each month would allow everything to be balanced.It is really bad that we have OP GBs for almost a year now and OP RM bomber for 2-3 years. Such stuff should be fixed faster even with temporally not perfect fixes.
TLTR:
1. Reduce aim skill factor in snub fights by increasing the gun speed.
2. Fix GBs by removing GB primaries.
3. Reduce bot sharing factor by reducing the bots of snubs a bit and huge cut in caps with fixing the armour/bot ratio.Exception SHFs.
4. Fix bombers-remove the Medium kind.
5. Making battleships tactical weapons of war.
6. Dead penalty for all kind of ships -small for smaller, medium for transports,gbs,cruiser and huge(50-80m) for battleships.
7. Transports-better shields and guns that take good amount of cargo place, keep the current ones as well.
Before you go impossible...
For the whole deal you need Cannon only for the fuel usage of Battleship- something that he proposed long time ago. The dead penalty works in DoD it could be implemented in the GC as well.
Live testing is the key for anything else.
(10-09-2013, 10:51 AM)Knjaz Wrote: Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)
Can't agree with you on goup fights, Govedo.
Group fights aren't that hard, really. You usually don't bother yourself about outmaneuring, you just shoot at your target.
I suppose most people can't do good in group fights because they are desperately trying to track the crosshair, which isn't right.
Instead of 1*1 PvPs in Conn, try chasing someone.
On the other points...
- Death penalty would lead to less PvP in general - that's bad.
- Transports don't need to have better weaponry, they need to hire escorts. Though, some steps could be implemented to encourage this. Such as transport thruster speed lowering, and hull strength buff.
- Medium bombers aren't much different from the light ones.
- Battleships could play tactical role IF cargo requirements of special modules were lowered, allowing cloaking carriers (such as original Osiris), docking modules capacity could be increased too. But with today's rule loopholes battleship cloaks are just cheap non-die modules, used for multiply reengagements.
I prefer more fun server that is full with people, there is nothing realistic in freelancer anyway, it is arcade shooter, physics and everything is far away from real. If you have good aim you would have fun in group fights if not well you wont have any, 80-90% of the players does not have good aim.I can guarantee you that new/casual player have 0 fun from current Disco PvP because he need to die 100 times in the first 2-3 months before he scores his first blue msg. I am speaking about new/casual player not about people that play Freelancer many years in many different servers like us. The result is even more emptier server and less fun for all. It is not normal to win in 3v1 fighter fight no matter how good or trained are you if we look at the logic.
Battleship cargo space should be very important and tactical- as I said- you should decide if you want to use it for fuel for your 90 speed engine or you would use 30 speed engine and use the fuel for your cloak or you wont use cloak or fuel and move on 30 but have 3-4 dock stations, carriers should be able to have small transports up to 1000-1200 cargo that can dock on them to support them with fuel and less anti-cap guns for exchange.
(10-09-2013, 10:51 AM)Knjaz Wrote: Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)
(11-04-2012, 12:26 PM)Govedo13 Wrote: The current balance is good for the core discovery base, I can deal with it but it kills the casual/new player type, that kind of players that I as bad PvPer can beat 3-4 vs me.
Newbies make a lot of newbie mistakes, things like standing still while they are firing, while the vet they are shooting is dodging while firing, so the newbie dies fast and the vet is unharmed. I see this a lot even with moderate players, I still do it myself sometimes. Dodging while firing is probably half of "skill". Also newbies do everything slowly, they dont have muscle memory for things like weapon groups and so firing an alternate weapon takes them longer. This stuff cant be fixed in the game unless you add time delay to everything so that everybody does everything slower, firing has a delay, using regens has a delay, etc., so everybody moves like newbie. Possible to do but not in this mod.
The other big "skill" factor is aiming. I miss so many shots with fighter guns that it takes me 20 minutes to kill a bomber with a fighter. You can fix this with more generous auto-aim targeting cone, so that shooting the model (and not just the crosshair) sends all of the fire to the center of the target where is most likely to hit. I dont think this can be done in the mod either.
Anyway, my point is that most of what constitutes skill cant be fixed with the mod. Increased weapon speed to improve hit rate is pretty much the only way to do it, and the devs have said over and over that they arent going to do that.
Ursus, dear, you miss the whole point of chasing fight.
Unlike the pvpwhore, guy with aimbot will not do any good in chasing, really. I'm sure about this because i've fought agaisnt aimbots couple of times.
PvPwhore takes into account not only the crosshair poition, but also the acceleration. Which ends up in shouting far away from the crosshair most of the time. Means, NO AUTO-TRACKING. Sure thing you won't hit with all guns most of the time. With ships like Titan or Eagle, you almost never hit with both 1st and 2nd guns, because they're too far from each other.
So this:
Quote:You can fix this with more generous auto-aim targeting cone, so that shooting the model (and not just the crosshair) sends all of the fire to the center of the target where is most likely to hit.
would just screw the whole thing so shieldrunners could become nearly invulnerable.
Sending all fire to the center of target in some cases is counterproductive. Sabre and Tridente for instance have huge gaps in the dead center, while aiming slightly above top center would ensure a good fuselage hit. Aside from that, the crosshair position on the hitbox is configurable - if there's any models where the crosshair position (while both the target and yourself aren't moving) isn't correct, report that as a model (hitbox) bug.
Wide awake in a world that sleeps, enduring thoughts, enduring scenes. The knowledge of what is yet to come.
From a time when all seems lost, from a dead man to a world, without restraint, unafraid and free.
Mostly retired Discovery member. May still visit from time to time.
(11-05-2012, 11:15 AM)Sava Wrote: Ursus, dear, you miss the whole point of chasing fight.
Unlike the pvpwhore, guy with aimbot will not do any good in chasing, really. I'm sure about this because i've fought agaisnt aimbots couple of times.
PvPwhore takes into account not only the crosshair poition, but also the acceleration. Which ends up in shouting far away from the crosshair most of the time. Means, NO AUTO-TRACKING. Sure thing you won't hit with all guns most of the time. With ships like Titan or Eagle, you almost never hit with both 1st and 2nd guns, because they're too far from each other.
So this:
Quote:You can fix this with more generous auto-aim targeting cone, so that shooting the model (and not just the crosshair) sends all of the fire to the center of the target where is most likely to hit.
would just screw the whole thing so shieldrunners could become nearly invulnerable.
This is totally true. No matter how bad you aimbot the crosshair, you won't hit, because I've also fought aimbotters. Unless the speed is ridiculous, like the case of the GB turrets. Then it's just insta- hit.
(06-19-2016, 12:06 PM)Mao Wrote: inb4 Sirius gets renamed to XTF.