Oh look, someone actually pointed out something I've been talking about ever since I joined disco.
You're 4 years too late. And I was about 3 years too late. But hey, that's what "progress" is for... oh wait.
So let me get this straight: Somehow, somewhere along the line, missiles became effective? That's amazing, considering the lag was always so bad for me that I could hit targets repeatedly with regular guns and cause No Damage. Missiles? Don't make me laugh: Sometimes they flew backwards. And now, because they're "capable of killing aces," we need to nerf them to maintain the laggy 4-hour slugfests I recall from years ago? What the Hell are you people? Masochists?
Then again, I guess it's not your fault the Sirius Credit got inflated by a factor of a hundred thousand, that stat bloat finally and irrevocably erased all vanilla ships with low hitpoints, and that instead of balancing ship classes to fit reasonable roles (instead of, oh I don't know, a single bomber capable of solo-killing battleships?) it was deemed necessary to add armor multipliers on top of already horrendously multiplied armor.
In any case, it's incredibly amusing to me that the devs are finally trying to push the scales back into some semblance of balance... and folks complain about it. Having played the original game, I expected a mod of Freelancer to really make it balls-to-the-walls, knee-jerk dueling. You're flying spindly little fighters with transparent canopies in space, going thousands, if not even millions of kilometers per hour, engaging each other with neutron and particle weapons, dumping nuclear bombs in their wake, and launching super-hyper-duper-futuristic space missiles with warheads that make Cold War-era Soviets envious. Skill and kills should result from split-second decisions, and fighters ought to die off like flies both in large fleet engagements and in cut-throat, mid-asteroid-field ambushes. And you're telling me that in order for my 6 or 7 top-notch military-grade laser cannons to chew through your tiny little ship, I have to hold the fire down longer than my energy stores can even discharge? What?
And now we have missiles that "work." I'm skeptical, but regardless, how is this not a good thing? Does nobody here realize that there are a million more "problems" to be solved using stand-off weapons than a simple guns fight? Ergo: That it could take more skill to properly employ, and would benefit organized groups instead of loners? Instead of determining ways to make both systems work in tandem, or to give each system a purpose, we just need to nerf one into obsolescence?
Somewhere back there I heard something like, "In real life flares can dupe just about anything." This misconception is poisonous, but predictable given the cult of the gun: No, see, in real life missiles kill. In fact they kill a Lot. The USAF keeps guns on its fighter aircraft for contingencies, and in very specific circumstances you can push a fight using decoys or ECM and bring a gun to bear, but for all intents and purposes, if you let the enemy get within your heatseeker WEZ and their nose is still pointed at you, you did something wrong, and you're about to be a collection of free-floating teeth and eyeballs.
With that in mind, if it boiled down to a clan of "ace gunsfighter mercs" which are a dime a dozen in Disco, and a flight of professional Liberty Navy pilots packing missiles (who used them in an efficient and intelligent manner), then the Navy pilots should come out on top at least 75% of the time. I would fully expect them to vape half or more of the mercenaries before they even got into guns range. The missiles I'm seeing described here can't even come close to that, and now they should be nerfed? Nuts.
Y'know, for a server that has a dedicated PVP arena, and a mod that is open-source so that others can host their own servers, why hasn't anybody created "PVP balance test" servers or areas with modded stats? I get the impression nothing of the sort has ever been done because people are just petrified of new ideas, and so they'd rather add +10,000 to every stat and call it a day rather than test new mechanics in a lab environment. And no, 4 devs and one of their mothers is not a lab environment: Open it to everyone and let it rip for all to see. Don't believe me when I say we should have missile fights at 5km+, and guns fights that end with only a few bursts? Then try proving it a bad idea. Go ahead. I dare you. By now it's the hum-drum status quo that must be taken to account and prove itself, not ideas like this.
I was going to write a long and meaningful text, commenting nicely and eloquently on things, but then I noticed that Omi 's post would be direct enough for most people to properly understand.
Snubfights were okay in the past. Snubfights are okay now. Except that missiles reduce the skill ceiling to a point at which I feel insulted, because I actually put effort into learning snub-pvp to all of its merits. Oh well.
So before I go ahead, write what's on my mind and get smited for it, here's some tl;dr
if you really, really suck at a game
and don't feel like getting better at it
you deserve to lose
you don't deserve to change the game in your favor
tough luck
welcome to gaming
bye
Tachie
Make PVP non-mandatory in Disco and you can have all the skill-based pvp you want, as long as you keep the rest of us scrubs out of it. We don't want to be blue messages to feed someone's ego, just because they can afford sitting in Conn all day.
Though if you do manage to do so, I will miss making pvp elitists rage over how my cap or missilerecycler wrecked their ship and ''ruined their day''.
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PSA: If you have been having stutter/FPS lag on Disco where it does not run as smoothly as other games, please look at the fix here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid2306502
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Found the PVP elitist.
Please, post paragraphs on how you dare me to go to Conn or something and how any person can evade those things.
Go on.
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PSA: If you have been having stutter/FPS lag on Disco where it does not run as smoothly as other games, please look at the fix here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid2306502
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And so the thread will be closed due to "meanness" and nothing will change. The devs will do... whatever devs do. The admins will enforce rules, get pissed by the drudgery of it, and eventually will let that get the better of them. The players who roleplay will leave because there aren't enough people around to do anything, and the PVP players will go back to vanilla where every remaining server is Connecticut with Sabres...
How many times has this wheel turned? Doesn't anybody see how dreadful that is? It's no longer "bad ideas," it's literally nothing new at all.
On the bright side, I think this topic will see me playing combat flight sims again. Fox Three: The only friend you'll ever need.
I don't want to make this look like a witchhunt, "against" aces, because they are often excellent roleplayers, faction leaders and frankly that'd be silly, but: Turret Zoom QQ was immense. Proposals to increase gun speed in the past, and now in this thread, are rejected. Whole "issue" with missiles is about people "unworthy" of blues getting blues.
Beg your pardon, but so far the only game changing in someone's favor I see around is that one in pros' favor, at the expense of the rest of the server.
Some time after I became those few billions richer I realized I started telling noob traders to "just enjoy" being pirated and to "RP with pirates". I'm sure if I were a member of Pvp Squad One with Haste, Omicega and others, I also would be telling people how easy pvp is.
If snub pvp is so easy to master and keep the form as some claim in this thread, why is it so hard for so many?
Apologies to Mímir for changing thread's direction a little, but I don't think it's really offtopic, as "missiles issue" is mainly about the problem of disco combat's complexity. Increase gun speed, maybe even double, with adequately reduced damaged, and see how this works out. I don't think skill factor should be removed completely from this game, but definitely pvp shouldn't be that difficult as it is now. If some aces threaten us they'll leave, I'll ask this: and how many players left over years because they couldn't grasp difficult snub combat gameplay? This is of course Freelancer's nature as a shooter, and taking that under consideration our devs deserve big kudos for trying to change that situation, e.g. by fixing missiles' tracking abilities.
80% or more of our players aren't aces, they are noobs or average pvpers. Simple arithmetics gives an answer pvp should be made easier, not that much skill and practice dependant for that vast majority of our server.