(12-01-2024, 01:33 PM)Haste Wrote: 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).
My experience with capital ships started in the edge of 4.91, and my approach did not change until 5.0, where I seldom play them anymore. To contribute to a fleet fight and not be a detriment to my team, all I needed to do was bind my secondaries to one weapongroup, and in the case of the Marduk my hellbores and prims into another one, and simply turret steer and shoot. Not only was this enough to contribute to a fleet fight positively, adding strafe keys let me have a fighting chance in most duels I engaged in. The same thing applied to the Irra and LABC, where cerbs and prims on one group and secondaries on another was enough to fight. The KuDessie, Siris, and LSC required more groups for respective heavies, but I was able to cut down on those when Saronsen missiles showed up. Being good at capital ships required a vast amount of effort, but contributing required minimal. I've tried cruiser combat several times. I realized I had to add roll keys if I wanted to use the LM on the Siris or KuDessie. I realized that I had to add reticle snap and shield toggle keys to use any cruiser. I realized that I needed a separate weapongroup for each heavy on the KuDessie. I realized that I have to have a manual reload for my desolators on the KuDessie, or else I'll spend 80% of the time I should be firing reloading. Recently, I fought an already very weak BCR, dry and severely damaged from NPC battlezone, and not only did I barely do damage and lose with relative ease, I also used more than half of the keyboard in the process. I took more than a few minutes to stop and ask myself if I should redownload the APM/eAPM tracker I had from my days of Starcraft just to see how many unique button presses I was putting out in a minute. And even with all of that, it was laughably inconsequential.
My experience in battlecruisers and battleships was significantly worse, in that on top of trying and for the most part failing to keep my weapons at firing angles, even when I did fire, they were easily dodged by players who were significantly more skilled at the movement mechanics, or they hit and simply were inconsequential. Missiles ended up with roughly the same outcome, with the additional punishment of Nomads not having Harpoons and everyone else did, so even the simplest strategy regarding capital ships was not available to the one battlecruiser I had remaining. The option remaining was to die colorfully and pad someone's killstreak.
(12-01-2024, 01:33 PM)Haste Wrote: 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).
Again, my experience with this is simply the opposite. My main signal that someone is new to the game is if I win against them in PvP. If they're even marginally higher skill tier, regardless of ship mismatches, I will do barely any damage to them. The last kill I've landed on a player that wasn't brand new to the game was when the player got tired of pvping me and just stopped and let me kill him to get an event point. In contrast, in 4.9 I fought some veteran names, and while I wasn't close to winning, I wasn't close to losing either. The reason why I (poorly) copied Rax's fighting style is that by mimicking what he was doing, I could land damage onto him, and I spent 2021 and 2022 in Conn for almost every moment I wasn't pvping in the RP environment in an effort to scratch something usable out of that style. Now, I'm wholly ineffective, regardless of loadout, except against new players. I had some barely competitive moments with a Delusion-Moonblast Defender, and in a NomProto-Railgun DEagle because I got lucky many times in a row against players who, realistically, would have beat me with ease. Across a variety of loadouts, including bugged/unintended ones, I provide no competition to anyone so much as slightly above my skill level, and there really isn't a way forward for me, even if I didn't have a job or sleep schedule. I don't even have meme, one-off strats like the two-wardog minesitting that I used to beat Werdi, as those have also been removed. The option remaining to me is to charge in valiantly and be a statistic in a killstreak, which is acceptable in that I can still provide RP to the story environment, but isn't particularly fun from a gameplay perspective.
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?"
