(10-31-2012, 12:12 AM)Knjaz Wrote: Well, I can understand your pain, and pain of everybody else's that achieved a good skill level in snubcraft.
Actually I achieved a good skill with caps... Then everyone got auto aim and now caps are stat/distance wars. No more need for aiming while maneuvering. Dumb.
Let me ask you this: Are you willing to lose zoom in order to have these other changes implemented? If no, why? Is it because it makes it to harder to fly caps now? If it does make it to hard to fly caps, would that be comparable to the current difficulty of flying snubs? If yes, then there is your balance. Make everything hard to master.
Limiting zoom to 3x-4x definitely won't be a problem, if aforementiond changes taken into account. If required for balance reasons, after aforementioned changes, might be reduced even lower.
Removing it fully? Well, increase camera turn speed then, at least (it's already pretty damn low)
(10-31-2012, 12:26 AM)Blodo Wrote: The only reason for that is that you put your noobs in RM BS which is by far one of the most extreme ships on the server.
Well, tbh, I meant cruisers and carriers here. Not everybody wanted to fly a simplistic RMBS. (which isn't too simplistic, just like any other heavy cap out there). As of now, any cap or a gunboat is better choice for a newbie then a fighter. Even the Flying Coffing, a.k.a. Geb. (if it didn't get it's rear shootings 7's, in last 4 months)
Ok, let's continue.
Quote:It is newbie friendly. There are a small handful of players that can use skill in the current balance to their own advantage, those players have their ups and downs in activity, but when they are active people just get this idea that it is somehow a problem that somebody else can kill them in a fighter and it takes work to be able to kill him back. Skill should be rewarded with kills, it's one of the last things that keeps players interested. The only issue with VHF fights right now is lag, bot trading and not enough trick shots.
<Joker example>
As for fighters learning curves specifically: flying fighters is not for the lazy. If it becomes like that though, it will be just boring because fighter fights will be predetermined by the amount of fighters turning up on the field, and that takes all fun away from the fight. Freelancer capfights are already pretty well dictated by how many caps can be fielded by each side due to the way capship game mechanics work, I really don't want to turn fighters balance into more of the same.
<Connecticut Example>
In most of these points you specifically were adressing the outcome based on skill difference in 1x1 or low-scale engagements. But in such engagements Skill will still matter. Just, Pro fighter will win not with 90% of his b/b left (or 100% if he's extremely skilled, or using a LF, or something else), but with, say, 60-70% over the medium-low skilled one.
It's a team fight where you'll start feeling the difference, where a snubcraft won't be able to run 30k under the fire of multiple other snubs.
Quote:Bot transfer is essentially an exploit. It makes groups into a single unit which you need to drain of all regens in order to place one kill - and then they all either die consecutively in short intervals, or someone runs to base to bring reloads and we start over. It makes gun kills in group fights a rare thing, and those people who know how to instakill other fighters are the ones who win the fights for their group. This is incredibly suboptimal IMO.
Why calling an exploit a feature that was here since the beginning of times? It's not the bot transfer that is an exploit, it's that Disco greatly increased fighter survivability while not increasing their anti-fighter capabilities. If Bot transfer does not pose such a problem in any other ship above a Snubclass, and we all know that it does not prolongate the fight on transports, gunboats, cruisers, and caps the way it does on snubcraft - why consider it as a core of a problem when it's clearly visible that the problem is in Snubcraft department.
Quote:Projectile speed increase is not the way to go. As said above, it will dumb fights down. The only thing that fighters need is more high damage specialty weapon capability returned to them to make fights a bit more interesting (which I am working on). And removal of bot trading. Caps shouldn't trade bots either, then we can give repair ships a repair gun and balance the damn thing right, rather than the current cheese fest that it is whenever anyone fields a cruising repair ship with the 4k bots/bats that can always go to a nearest base for more reloads if he starts getting low. Seriously. I used this thing in Gamma raids, the amount of cheese you can accomplish with it is unreal.
You call it "dumbing down", I call it "making them more newbie friendly and popular". As I mentioned before, I wasn't talking about leveling a pro with a newbie. I was talking about reducing the gap by some amount, and a whole other set of ways to achieve a more balanced and thought-out gameplay, in a system. (under proposed system, fighters and bombers would have higher lethality rate, low maintenance costs, lower respawn" time, etc.)
First of all, I'd like to specifically point out, that, as we all know, damage sent/damage inflicted ratio on snubcraft is way different from any other ship class on disco. Therefore, that is the first thing to work with if someone would intend to make fighters more lethal to themselves. Today's Disco increased fighter survivability up to 2.5 times compared to vanilla freelancer, without changing their anti-fighter capabilities. (Not just gun DpS, but the actual DpS under various scenarios, taking into account it's evasive capabilities, on various skill levels).
Just giving them means of inflicting damage at a very high DpE ratio will, first of all, result in the increase of their anti-transport/gunboat/cruiser/battleship capabilities. Unless it'll be something really short ranged.
Now, remark about your proposed cap "rebalancing" and total removal of bot trading.
Nova spam:
Currently, the only 3 things that can help a heavy capital ship with escort to outlive bomber swarm is a) Cloak combined with either friendly NPCs or JH/JG b) Personal jumpdrive. c) bot trading. (edit: ) d) high average skill difference between escort and nova bombers.
For how long can you survive in, say, a Roc under the fire of average corsair fighter, in "full evasive" mode? (sending novas from time to time). Even noobs like me can hold on for a while. And that again brings us to the actual average % of shots that reach their destination in snubcraft vs snubcraft brawls. That % is very different between low-skilled and high skilled player. Thats what I was talking about, when I mentioned those "Maximum 20% of Pro's total firepower, after some Conn training"
P.S. Worth mentioning, that, in comparsion to Vanilla freelancer setting, current setting, especially after "Nova torpedo fix" requires fighters to actually be capable of relatively quickly dealing with a number of similiarly sized vessels, that are dishing out enormous amounts of damage and going full evasive at same time.
Large scale Close brawl (happens more often then long range duels):
The only way for a capship to stay alive in a close fight brawl for a little longer is a bot trading, which requires good coordination and teamwork. because average lifespan under those conditions is under 30 seconds for the first focused ship. That's another side of the medal, with fights taking extremely short time - and that makes them very teamwork and coordination heavy. Are you going to fully rebalance capital ships for that as well, with bot trade removal?
