(12-01-2024, 01:33 PM)Haste Wrote: I randomly began writing some incoherent thoughts on this. Quick disclaimer: I'm keeping up with this thread, and I don't want this post to come across as dismissing players' criticisms, as that's very much not the intent.
On Snubs:
The notion that fighters have somehow changed to cater more to veterans, in my opinion, is incompatible with reality. Almost every major change we've made to the class was done explicitly to close the gap:
- Standardized, vanilla-sized shield hitboxes to help weaker aimers get through shields so they can chip away at hull.
- Several passes on missiles designed to encourage their use, reduce the degree to which they are stigmatized, and generally integrate them properly into the snub landscape.
- Loads of individual ship balance passes. The reality is that outliers in power level are usually found by the best players, and then also exploited by the best players. A more even playing field benefits the average player more than the ace.
- Near removal of Nanobots and Shield Batteries dropping on death, which was a mechanic exclusively used by aces punching down to refill their supplies and fight ridiculous odds -- or at the very least to abuse the fact that Jimmy The Newbie came to help his friends and instead accidentally ended up helping Wesker -- on the enemy "team".
- Most recently, the changes to Class 1 fighter guns, normalizing 800+ m/s velocity guns. I have seen many players with weaker aim literally double their effective outgoing DPS by using them. Their hybrid nature also benefits players that hit less, as getting through shields is often a challenge for them, while aces can trivially deshield without a single dedicated anti-shield weapon.
- And yes, the removal of various types of instakill loadouts, whether they're SNACs or Mini Razor shotguns that could one-tap ships up to a certain armor threshold. Of course, aces were intimately familiar with these thresholds, while that fresh-faced LN ID fighter might not have realized that the Guardian's 11,000 was in fact well below it (while the Lynx' 12,400 was not).
The notion that weaker players could snatch a win from the jaws of defeat using things like SNACs is, to me, a seemingly very severe case of nostalgia glasses. For many years, I myself wouldn't lose shields in the vast majority of fights I took. Shield hitboxes were miniscule, strafe forces were absurd, and microscopic, insanely responsive ships were available if you knew where to look for them. In the rare case that anyone managed to deshield me, the odds of them also landing a SNAC on a small, barely-functional hitbox moving extremely evasively rounded down to zero percent. Instead, I remember cases where the SNAC allowed me or other bomber abusers to take on a literal dozen players at once, and by refilling my regens over and over, come out victorious. I wouldn't describe that as a friendlier PvP environment for the casual player.
On Capital Ships:
I'm very surprised to hear claims of increased keyboard-fu being a necessity for Battleships, of all things. I still have most of my old Battleship keybinds as they occupy a part of the keyboard I don't really use: I have five keys dedicated to firing weapons 1-5 manually. You absolutely needed six weapon groups as you needed to dedicate several groups to various kinds of blindfire, including a completely empty group for blindfire without convergence. Nowadays, I can both make do with one less weapon group and those manual fire keys are just entirely obsolete and are instead replaced by an infinitely more intuitive "toggle snap" key. Add to that a key to toggle shields, and if you're really sweaty, a set of subtargeting keys. In theory you could make do with one (or none, if you mostly participate in fleet fights), but let's say you want two to really minmax. You're still down net keys. Top it all off with a manual reload key -- the most luxury of luxuries, in my opinion -- and you've almost arrived back where we were ten years ago. Except for toggle reticle snap, all of these are also more optional than those blindfire keys ever were. You'd literally never drop the shields of anything smaller than a Bismarck without them, back then. By comparison, you get small incremental gains to your efficacy from mastering each of these mechanics now, and if you don't find yourself getting into duels often you can make do without half of them (or more).
Similarly, we deliberately moved away from STS in Gunboats, Cruisers and Battlecruisers because of the carpal-tunnel-inducing nature of the mechanic. That, and the fact that you could fairly easily macro it without anyone ever finding out, getting a massive advantage for automating a chunk of the game. I personally swapped four keys out that I used to strafe with for two that I use to roll -- and in many fights in many capital ship classes I don't really bother to use them. So, sure, we've added keys that can potentially increase your effectiveness in combat, but we've also removed some highly APM-intensive button mashing to make up for it.
I have to just assume that players who claim there are so many more keybinds required these days chose to use neither STS nor blindfire. But then that means they were heavily gimping themselves. How exactly is that different from playing today's Discovery with half of the newly-added keybinds not bound -- except for the fact that you're probably losing less power doing that nowadays? Not blindfiring in the low-mass-high-response capital ship era or not STSing in an era where that casually doubled your ability to dodge fire was a huge loss.
In my opinion, all of the mechanics we added create a nice gradual curve to climb when it comes to skill expression, as each only really adds a small, incremental advantage once mastered. That's always been the goal we set out with, and I feel like it's one we achieved.
(11-30-2024, 11:54 PM)Tenshi Wrote: In my experience since 5.0 released (I've probably been in three (?) fleet fights ever since) anything above a 3v3, maybe a 4v4, gets so complicated with how many things you need to keep in mind that at this point it's just better to not bother with it.
In my humble (and quite possibly wrong) opinion, the fact that it's virtually impossible to keep up with all the mechanics in a fleet fight is a triumph of the system, as it simply means that you can ignore the vast majority of micro mechanics and focus entirely on good positional and tactical play, only choosing to subtarget in the most niche of situations. The advantage of crazy-high-APM, absolutely optimal play in fleet fights compared to simply not doing so is very small, in my opinion, and unless you're doing a line of coke or something I don't think it's worth the loss in focus elsewhere.
I do agree, wholeheartedly, with the notion that some of the more explosive moments of old Discovery -- no matter how rare they were in reality -- lent themselves better to "Youtube Highlight Reels", and I also understand that that's something people miss. I'm all for suggestions on how to add some of it back. I just don't think instakilling SNACs are the way -- largely because I genuinely don't know how to balance such a weapon in modern-day Discovery with much, much higher hitrates in snub land, mostly by virtue of upscales and actually functional hitboxes. Any stats even remotely similar to the old ones would result in five-second fights at high skill levels -- especially, of course, punching down.
As for support roles: fire away with suggestions. It's something I'm definitely interested in implementing, and if we somehow managed to make support tools much less skill-testing than conventional weapons, that'd be even better.
You've raised some very salient points, and you're correct in the fact that a lot of people are simply forgetting how things were a long time ago, or more accurately before 5.0 rebalanced things. You're also very correct that intra-class balance is more than likely currently the best it has ever been across the board, but the larger issue is inter-class balance. By rebalancing things so that any ship can theoretically kill any other ship with a minimal numbers and/or skill advantage, you've effectively taken the impact out of flying larger ships, as balance currently stands, a handful of snubs can effectively neuter an entire fleet and make bringing any sort of mixed cap force entirely pointless.
You rightfully wanted to do away with the rock-paper-scissors mechanics, because that led to boring gameplay such as five Cougars just spamming Novas at clueless battleships that had no way of countering them. That is absolutely a good thing, having hard counters in PvP is not an enjoyable gameplay experience for anyone involved. One issue is we also don't have soft counters as of current balance. Let's use a relatively small group of VHFs, let's say three of them, and say they're engaging a single gunboat with everyone having a similar skill level. As balance currently stands, unless one of those fighters makes a rather large mistake and eats a gunboat mine, they are going to whittle down that gunboat every single time and the gunboat has no tools to counter this happening to it. There are no tools (let's be honest here this is almost exclusively weapons) that the gunboat can choose to take that make it more viable as an anti-snub platform. Gunboats are by far the most viable ship to engage snubs with currently too, and would be realistically the most capable of actually engaging this group of fighters.
Take that same group of fighters and put it up against a cruiser and the cruiser is going to struggle to even deal with those fighters, as the current hilariously inefficient weapons cruisers have to deal with smaller craft are so useless as to not even be on the ship. This is the part where Haste is going to bring up flaks being a thing again, and this is the part where I offer my entirely anecdotal evidence (yes I know you hate that) and say that flaks are effectively an annoyance at best, and are completely incapable of preventing a motivated enemy from flying in and doing damage to you. That's actually probably about where they should be as far as weapons go, but if that's the balance we're looking for on flaks, then we need to consider that we need weapons that can actually force an enemy away by doing actual appreciable damage to them, which current cruiser prims are simply not. From looking at the actual numbers, you're trying to make cruiser prims only be effective at close range against enemy snubs, so why not simply limit their range severely, but make them extremely capable within that range. From a casual overview of current weapon stats, the best range you would get out of a non-seeking fighter weapon is 575m. So instead of having grossly inaccurate prims that have 1750m range, why not remove the dispersion entirely, shorten the range down so they're an entirely point defense weapon (no more than 600m) and reducing the weapon velocity to no more than 1000m/s (probably closer to 800m/s). This would achieve all the same goals we have for the weapon, while allowing them to be more intuitive to use. If there is concern about these weapons not being viable against larger targets like gunboats because of the range difference, then simply offer an alternative weapon that goes in the same slot with increased range at a lower fire rate.
This brings me to the other major issue with the current cruiser and battlecruiser prims, and that is how the player behind the ship feels when using them. I understand that this is not something that can be properly balanced with statistics, but it still influences how people play, and impacts their satisfaction with the game. As it stands, the weapons feel weak and ineffective, and as if they have no impact. This is again, entirely anecdotal, but still an important aspect of gameplay. You can make a game mechanic as efficient as you want, but if it is simply unenjoyable to use, then the people playing the game will simply not use it. There is no way to balance around this, unfortunately, and the current sentiments are directly a result of making the game overall more balanced.
I feel we may be going to far with this. Excluding the top 10% or realistically the top 1% of the playerbase, there is effectively no difference between ships within the various snub classes, making them all feel incredibly bland to use. This is even more pronounced with bombers, which for most of the playerbase are currently just less maneuverable VHFs with no distinct advantage over them in dealing with caps, because the one weapon that bombers have that allows them to deal with caps at range is extremely limited by the availability of ammo. This also affects HFs, which while they are currently in the best state as far as balance goes in probably the entire Disco balance timeline, are so similar to VHFs as to at a glance be entirely indistinguishable. I feel that the best way to alleviate these issues would be to make the various snubs play more towards a "role" within snub balance, but going into the details on that here are outside of the scope of the current discussion, and also I feel require more time put into them before I'm comfortable putting forward the idea fully.
With that said, I believe we're due for a patch very soon, so a lot of what I suggest here may have either already been implemented or been made irrelevant due to other changes.
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