Posts: 3,194
Threads: 100
Joined: May 2012
Staff roles: Balance Dev
(05-20-2024, 06:17 AM)Reddy Wrote: Back in the day people used to have ships in most factions so when a fight happened they could swap around to balance
This is still the case. What has truly, fundamentally changed between "now" and "then" is that people, especially shot-callers in groupfights, were expected to keep an eye on the progression of a groupfight and adjust their side's "participants" as needed. Is the opposing group struggling to even chip away a few bots while your own side's shredding 5 nanobots from the main target every second? Everyone can easily extrapolate that that'll quickly get out of hand and result in a steamroll. So, you've got options, like:
Replace your strongest players with a weaker player sitting around. Pull out "Wesker", put in your fresh recruit and let him get some experience.
Simply fight outnumbered. Wesker can stay in, but you're giving the weaker side numerical overweight.
In addition, if your side takes out a ship, it used to be "proper etiquette" to take a player on your own side out of the fight. If you're only winning by a little, this is an opportunity to actually bench someone a bit weaker, if needed. You'd get - justifiably - chewed out in your faction feedback thread if you were found lacking in the fair play department. Nowadays I often hear people talk about the snowballing effect of brawls where taking out a single ship quickly lopsides it and results in the fight taking a decisive turn and ending soon thereafter. Guess what? That was always the case, people just intentionally prevented it from happening.
As someone who was quite often benched in this way in the past, I know that it's not particularly exciting to show up to a fight only to sit there twiddling your thumbs. I honestly still show up to fights rather frequently only to realize that whichever side I'd join would become slightly too favored for it to be a net improvement to the fun of the participants, so I just sort of bide my time until the fight resolves or until one side gets enough of an advantage for me to be able to join the other. Nowadays we've all got jobs taking up much of our free time, so I do get that people just log in and want to shoot shit, not watch other people shoot shit. Still, for the purposes of good PvP I don't really think there's any better solution.
And yeah. If you're asking someone to disengage but they don't, here's the solution: sit out yourself. You might not be able to control others, but you can control yourself. Hopefully.