Greetings, Balance and the Community at Large:
Balance is a permanently difficult question, I will not deny it. It is the bane of any game designer with an environment capable of competition. As soon as a player versus player option is presented, balance becomes a permanently upfront and notoriously delicate question. Ignoring balance makes the game unplayable in the most literal sense. However, since the cruiser rework in the 4.XX’s, I feel that balance has been handled somewhere between suboptimally and very poorly.
The very first, most prominent problem is the concept most completely captured by the Korean competitive gaming community term “썩은물” (seogeunmul), or “Stagnant/Rotten Water”. The term refers to a competitive or semi-competitive game community that has had very little or no changes, where the masters of the game are so far above the average that they are permanently untouchable, and have been for a long time. While the actions taken by balance in regard to Capital Ships has, in fact, partially solved this problem, the actions in regards to snubs have not. This has also introduced other problems, which I will continue to elaborate on.
The second problem is a matter of efficacy and engagement in battle. In a well-timed and well-formed thread by Chuba, a very common, and perhaps the most common, community sentiment was that inputting effort into raising their skill level provided little to no reward. The top reason for this was the aforementioned “Stagnant Water”, in that the top competitors were untouchable regardless of practice effort. Other, very important reasons, however, included current balance significantly downplaying personal interaction. In a quote:
(11-12-2024, 02:11 AM)Lythrilux Wrote: For me, I really enjoy PvP in games where you can do some cool shit, share the clip with people and it's fairly easy to appreciate what is going on even to someone with only surface-level knowledge of the game. [...] In essence THIS GAME HAS NO SAUCE.
There is no “compilation potential”, like was had with SNAC compilations, anywhere in the game currently. All forms of PvP are currently agonizingly slow, mechanically overburdened, or both.
The third problem is the matter of the combat fantasy of each faction. These fantasies, since the cruiser rework at the very least, but especially since 5.0, have been either not met, denied, or actively stamped out. The most egregious act in this regard is the removal of the Hurricane’s forward guns, completely stomping on the Coalition Fantasy of unleashing a forward gun barrage, mimicking the Freelancer Opening Cutscene, while loudly blasting the USSR marching song of your choice (Or the Red Alert 3 Theme). Other such fantasy losses include K’Hara permacloak and the “Predator in the Nebulas” fantasy, and the LibDread and Bismark’s “Unstoppable Force” and “Immovable Object”, respectively.
Currently, the entire focus of balance is on “winning” and “effort put in to win”, leading to horribly labor intensive fight mechanics like battlecruisers controlling strafe, turn, roll, shield regen, weapon groups, and crosshair snap, let alone managing enemy missiles and actually aiming and firing your own weapons. Your reward for managing all of these simultaneously is 10 or less seconds of firing your weapons at an enemy who is also doing the same in order to minimize how much damage you can do to them, and likely being forced off your angle of attack by another member of the groupfight, or reaching a position where you need to drastically change your orientation to allow your guns to fire again. In short, you put an extreme amount of effort in, and your reward is the feeling of impotence, ineffectiveness, and relative uselessness, regardless of your real contribution. This sentiment is echoed in many balance complaints, but I'll include the freshest example here.
(11-25-2024, 09:26 PM)Steven.Hiller Wrote: But then all was cleared and revealed the favour was thrown to snubs
as all their guns could do damage on any cap but even after draining a caps core completely
could barely take down 1 gunboats shields and not even singlehanded drain 1 snub as its impossible to
hit and if u manage to drain the shield the power core is completely drained and the snub just regen.
And Cap still sit with Empty core with bunch a enemy craft against it and able to do Jack.
So here with forward fully stating,
withdrawing 100% from any event since the big nerf on cap guns
snubs conn bots can have the whole event to themselves not interested in playing it anymore.
To contrast this, I offer the age of CDable Missiles. Even your worst snub pilots can be on CD duty, and despite flaks and other options existing, they can contribute in a visible and meaningful way to the group fight. CDable missiles also did not suffer from the “Discovery has no sauce”, as a difficult but cool trickshot was CDing a torpedo fired at snubs to detonate it. I myself rarely play capital ships anymore due to the sensation of complete impotence in combat, regardless of successfully attacking a target or not.
The other two main points cannot be relevantly contrasted with older versions, due to the Stagnant Water effect being unchanged as per older versions, obviously, and due to faction fantasy being nearly non-existent in the current environment.
I am primarily not here to focus on people's emotional content. Nostalgia is a pleasant and highly addictive mentality, and I'd like to separate this topic as far from it as possible. All my forum PvP would be, ideally, rooted in logic.
I have little to no interest in solving the Stagnant Water issue. I acknowledge that it is a problem for most of the community, but I have no input on it so I'll recuse myself from that particular argument. One of my favorite pastimes was simply seeing if Wesker was online, and logging something hostile to get PvPd to disastrous effect. "I did hull damage" was a legitimate bragging point for me, and was a euphoric feeling.
I have a vested interest in solving the other two problems. I firmly believe that not solving these problems makes PvP not fun in its most basic form, and that not solving the faction fantasy problem bleeds into ruining RP experience as well. PvP and RP are all I do on this game. My engagement with PvE, PoBs, and powertrading are very minimal and usually a forced interaction due to ingame money constraints.
My main goal with this thread is to create a floor to acknowledge the problems and to instigate the process of inventing options and solutions. I find it paramount to gain a broad degree of options and ideas before judging or deciding on any of them. I do not encourage arguing against other peoples points, narrowing options or cutting off ideas with absolutes and "win-lose scenarios". We can judge ideas and reach conclusions in a different thread (or, ideally, Balance will).
What I'm asking everyone is to participate in a collective search for solutions, especially reasonable and well-explained solutions, for the problems presented. We currently have very impressive individuals on the development team, we are in the environment best suited to fix these problems. So, I look forward to your responses. tl;dr: Godslayer Balance Essay. Scroll back up and read the post you lazy bastard.
I'll do something about my superiority complex when I cease to be superior.
"Whatever happened to catchin' a good old-fashioned passionate ass-whoopin and gettin' your shoes, coat, and your hat tooken?"
