Snub PvP; A deep dive complaint

[Oggdo Bogdo]

This is a thread that should have been made long ago, and it's going to be much longer than I want it to be, but I want to try to make every part clearly understandable to anyone who is willing to listen, and give some context as to why I think the changes are the way they are, and what alternatives I propose.

I've played a lot of snub PvP since 2007, and I feel that snub PvP is at a very low point, not in terms of balance, but in terms of fun, as a lot of options with regards to guns and ships feel like very bad choices, and quite frankly it's also becoming alien to what most people in Discovery have been used to.

Guns that were common place in previous patches no longer feel fun to use, and in some cases are demonstrably inferior choices. Slower ships no longer feel viable after the strafe nerfs and the changes to mine + CD combos. An entire movement strategy (boxing) was gutted outside of edge cases. The shield battery changes adds a layer of complexity that detracts from the experience of what Freelancer is supposed to be. There is too much unnecessary complexity and hurdles being added to a dated game that is supposed to be simple which most people simply enjoy out of nostalgia.

There's a lot more problems that contribute to this than listed, but I've had to edit a lot of content out of this thread already since it's too long, therefore, I want to address changes that I think affect PvP dynamics the most on a fundamental level to pave the way for a future conversation about issues that are on a more micro-level. I want to only consider VHFs and below in this thread, because SHFs and Bombers have their own problems that I think are too complicated to deal with in an already lengthy thread.

Part 1:Strafing

All of this began back in 5.1 where strafe forces were nerfed across the board for all snubs. I've warned many aces that I talked to, that changing a foundational stat like strafe force, that almost all ships of the same class share, across the board, is a terrible idea, and I gave more concise versions of the explanations I will give later. However, nobody shared my opinion, if anything, most aces were extremely excited to try this. The publicly stated reason in the thread is that it's to stop snubs from boxing capital ships. That is a fair goal, but there were other ways to accomplish that goal. However, I've also been told by multiple other playtesters and aces that another reason was to gut boxing in Snub vs Snub PvP. I disagree with this line of reasoning, and I'll get into this later.

Let's first suppose the goal is to stop boxing vs caps. Well, the way this problem works mechanically in the game, logically, is that shots fired by the cap player, do not reach the snub player in time before they can strafe out of the way. This is a very simple problem with at least two solutions that are very easy to see. You can either nerf strafe forces so they don't strafe out of the way, or you can buff the speed of guns that capital ships use to engage snubs, so they can't get out of the way in time. I think that buffing the guns on capital ships was clearly the way to go. When you are just adjusting a gun, it's a lot less likely that you will irreversibly affect the entire meta for caps. You only need to adjust the guns that were changed, if at all.

However, a foundational stat like strafe forces has always been taken as a given when balancing snubs. When values such as armor, turn rate, nanobot count, powercore, etc are assigned to a snub, it implicitly takes these foundational stats into account. There are other stats like this, for example, impulse speed, thrust speed and mass. When you change strafe forces, just about every other number that is assigned to a snub now has a higher weight in determining its overall place in balance. What exactly does this mean? Prior to 5.1, the power level of almost every ship within the VHF class was actually fairly close, and all of that is now upended and invalid because of the strafe change. The most obvious implication of strafe nerfs is that turn rates are now more valuable in determining whether a ship is good or not; ships that are faster are heavily favored in the current patch. This may not seem true intuitively, since all ships are getting the same treatment, but there are scenarios that prove this is true. For example, if you're fighting a faster ship on a slower ship, every single time the faster ship inevitably out-turns you and obtains a good position that you have to dodge your way out of, you end up eating more shots even with perfect play, because it's much harder to get out of the way with strafes.

The second scenario is related to the reason that I was given privately, that snubs had their strafes neutered specifically to stop boxing in snub vs snub duels. Slower ships usually rely on out-trading the opponent in head-on scenarios because they usually have some form of compensation in terms of their shape, their armor, and their powercore, usually also in this order of importance. Armor levels are very close among all ships, and the gap can be closed by a few extra seconds of fire. Powercore advantages can be nullified with different flight strategies. Therefore, most of the advantage comes from utilising the shape of the ship to strafe and out-dodge the opponent, usually by boxing. This is where the strafe nerf comes in, strafes have been reduced to the point where you can basically never out-dodge the opponent to any significant degree on the slower ships, and this means the superior front profile now holds less weight; in a head-on pass you can never gain enough of an advantage in the boxing situation on a slower ship to make up for the deterioration in your position when you get out-turned after the box. It becomes easy to see that slower ships are now at a significant disadvantage in the current meta. The only way this could have been avoided is with a complete balance pass on quite literally every snub, retuning at least some of their stats, but as you can see from the recent patch notes, nothing even remotely close has occurred. The balance team applied an important across-the-board change to every single snub with no consideration for the consequences.

So now, I've given you something else to consider; why not do that? Just rebalance every snub to account for the strafe nerf. For one it's extremely time inefficient, but more importantly, I don't think the current strafe values are desirable. I want to consider the overall effects on the big picture. First of all, this rather counterintuitively, in my experience, affects duels between lower and higher level players adversely. Lower level players struggle to deal with any amount of strafing at all, and they can rarely hit higher-level players head-on anyway. However, this does cause a lot of grief to lower level players because higher level players can out turn lower level ones even on slower ships, and put them in a situation where they take a lot of damage, and it's a situation that most lower level players don't really feel incentivised to deal with simply because the tools that you are given are inadequate. You can't even begin to learn to strafe your way out of this situation.

Now, as for higher level fights, I think the strafe changes also aren't very good for the game. For one, almost every ace, whether they can articulate it or not, is familiar with everything I've said so far, and knows how to exploit and force these situations. More importantly, the level of aim that aces have is at a point where you are guaranteed to take a lot of damage in every single pass, and even prior to the strafe changes it was still likely you would take some damage. Now, people can do much more severe damage to you with no counter-play. This means that if you fall behind even slightly in the damage race, you are almost guaranteed to lose, because there is little variance in the outcome of every single pass; you're going to take a lot of damage, a little bit more of a lot of damage, or slightly less than a lot of damage, and the window to hope for anything to turn around the fight is much shorter. What this accomplishes is that the most likely outcome of a fight is rushed, and it becomes too punishing even at the higher levels.

So, what about boxing? Wasn't it problematic and needed to be nerfed? What solution do I propose? My honest answer is that I am still unconvinced that this was ever a problem. Boxing isn't a magic bullet in every scenario and there are ways to out-trade and cause the boxer's position to deteriorate at closer ranges. The only argument I can see being made by aces is the box and counter-box stalemate that occurs at long range, where the only optimal response is to counter-box someone that's started boxing. This is not something that should be happening often, and it actually sorts itself out rather quickly. It's also not actually optimal to base your flight pattern around getting far away and starting a box unless you're on a slower ship, in which case the faster ship is at fault for even allowing it. Dodging shots in place doesn't really award you anything positionally.

Gutting a type of movement that Discovery has always had since vertical strafes were enabled, however, changes the identity of PvP in a way that leaves a giant void. There needs to be something else in place to make a change like this work, and so far, the game has been moving in a direction of prioritizing turning-styles and promoting faster ships, without giving any tools for slower ships to counteract this, and even taking away tools that have been used to deal with it (i.e. the CD changes to prevent CD+ mine combos). A lot of factions have slow VHFs as their only choice in the line and they're often a stronger part of the faction's identity compared to the lighter ships. I do not think it's good to leave these ships in the dust just to get rid of the occasional short-lived stalemate.

Part 2: Powercore changes and gun changes.

I think most of the community might be unaware that a lot of snub loadouts are nothing short of hot garbage. This is an ongoing issue that began in patch 5.2. The purpose of the gun formula changes is very simple; to try and make all guns, regardless of their speed and refire combinations, somewhat viable. The balance team does this by having energy usage/efficiency as the output of the formula, using its other stats such as refire, speed, DPS, as inputs. There have been some adjustments made to the formula, in the recent hotfixes. However, there is clearly a very strong bias in the implemented formula towards weapons that do energy damage, and an overly strong bias against weapons that have lower refire. It makes sense but goes too far. The penalty to guns that don't do energy damage is a problem that is plaguing almost the entire class 2 lines of weapons (to be more precise, massively under penalizing guns for having the hybrid property). If you understand this problem, you realise that it makes more than half the guns in the game extremely unsatisfying to use, and it incentivises you to find a way to game the system with gimmicky weapons and to avoid certain refires.

First I will demonstrate the bias towards weapons with energy damage with the most egregious example in the game.



These are both 750m/s 4.00 guns. The problem here is not that Tremors are more efficient as a hullbuster, but that the Warrior is far too weak. Tremors are strong enough to be used as a full set of 6 and do well enough in just about any scenario. Warriors are one of the weakest guns in the game dps-wise for a class 2 hullbuster and for a hullbuster, it's not particularly efficient either, and you need some debs to make the gun viable in a weapon set, which implies that in a full set of guns (usually 2 debs and 4 warriors), the set of Warriors do substantially less damage than the set of Tremors.

Yet, the Tremor somehow costs less energy to fire because it does 18 less hull damage and has a small amount of spread. On top of that, every Tremor does a significant amount of core damage to your opponent. Most snub guns today are wildly inefficient compared to patches prior to 5.2, so the Tremor doing damage to the opponent's powercore, severely affects their ability to fire. Tremors were very strong on release, and even when they cost 187 energy to fire they were considered broken. Today, they cost 172 energy to fire, and almost every other gun is substantially worse to use. I think there isn't much else I need to say about this, other than to make one thing clear, I do not think Tremors are the sole problem, and that just nerfing it, and guns like it, is not going to fix everything. There is clearly something very wrong with the way the efficiencies of every traditional hullbuster is set up. It's not just that Tremors are too strong, but everything else is way too weak to be satisfying to use.

Next, I want to look at one example that shows my point about the overweighted bias against lower refires.

These are both 750m/s lasers at differing refire rates. For context, I picked the Sammael because to most aces from older days, it's one of the most infamous weapons in Discovery. People had skype deals and put in tech requests just to get their hands on this weapon for its extremely high DPS relative to other guns, which was balanced out by its lack of efficiency. There have been several balance passes done on both of these weapons, but the Sammael retains its DPS advantage relative to most other guns, and the Heavy Flashpoint is a gun with an average, reasonable amount of DPS. Today, Sammaels somehow come out on top of the Heavy Flashpoint in terms of efficiency. This doesn't seem quite right at all. A lot of guns that I would classify as mid-level refires (3.03 to 5.00) really suffer from this problem (3.03 is arguably a shotgun, but they're also present in mixed loadouts). They're not really used the same way that shotguns (<2.00 refire) are, but they are penalised quite heavily as if they are also used the same way.

The last part about powercore changes that I want to address is a lot less important in regards to balance, and has more to do with the fun of it, and is related to changes in shield mechanics, with regards to core drain when regenerating shields. If you look at a blog post in 5.1,

Spicing up fighter groupfights

Finally, I'll briefly touch on how we're attempting to make fighter groupfights more interesting. Currently, they're all about focusing down the most threatening enemy player as quickly as possible, while that player has to dodge their ass off and last as long as possible. This is unlikely to massively change, but to make it more viable to play more tactically and - potentially - target multiple players, we've added powercore drain to all fighter shields, which is only active when the shield is below 100% capacity. This drain has been partially offset by making base recharge rates higher, but a fighter with an actively recharging shield deals substantially less damage. As a result, it might be worth it to spread your damage around a little bit more as a group and weaken the enemy team's damage output. Of course, as with cruisers and bombers, players have the option to turn their shield recharge off using the /shields command or hotkey, maximizing their damage output but freezing their shields in place.

We're hoping this change will add a little more decision-making and tactical play to fighter groupfights, as now you may want to not just pile on Wesker, but perhaps have some players put pressure on Cobalt, too, to reduce incoming damage for your allies. In addition, AoE weapons like Cannonballs that can strip the shields off of entire groups of ships at once get some interesting additional utility.

I want to argue that the powercore drain change is entirely unnecessary for snubs, because there already is incentive to split targets. I want to give credit to Dom from [tCS] for first talking about this here under chasing manual v1.2 in the section about Roamers. Today we call them "peelers" but the concept is the same and people have been using this strategy more often in the past few years and refining it. I'll demonstrate mathematically and conceptually why we do this, and it has nothing to do with draining the energy on the enemy team:

Suppose we have a 4v4 with both sides initially focusing on one enemy target. Once the targets on both teams realise that they are being shot at, they will immediately break off the other target and start running. So we have 3 players chasing 1 target on both sides. Now, assume only 1 team starts to employ the strategy of having 1 person become the Roamer/peeler. Because of the chaos in brawls, what happens is that the Roamer can get the jump on the enemy team that is chasing the allied target and do more damage to these players, than he normally would to the hostile target. When you deshield someone who is chasing a target, in 99% of cases they will break off to stop leaking hull points to the roamer. A decent enough roamer can easily peel away 3 players in a brawl. So the resulting situation is that his team will have 2 players chasing the hostile target, and the enemy team will have 0 players close enough to do damage to the allied target. This is an entirely worthwhile strategy to use.

So, hopefully this demonstrates that there already is an incentive to have split targets in a group fight. There's a variety of responses to this strategy and I think that players can figure it out on their own. Personally, despite the game being as old as it is, there is still a lot to explore about group fighting theory. It's entirely possible to beat mechanically superior teams just by creating enough chaos with target selection. I think if the game can be solved with first principles, the balance team does not need to intervene with non-vanilla mechanics.

So what are the effects of the powercore drain change on the game? In group fights, it's an unnecessary nerf to newer players, because this is one of the least important things to deal with in the hassle of snub PvP, they're not going to interact with it. It's also a perpetual nerf to the powercore in duels. Outside of SHFs and Bombers which force you into dealing with this mechanic, VHFs and below don't deal with it at all in duels because the trade off is basically never worth it. To pre-empt the argument of using this to make the shield drain more significant, I will briefly bring this up and leave it: I've tried it on SHFs and Bombers and frankly it makes an already difficult class to play even harder to use. It's extra busy work just to get the ship to function normally. I think most people would rather just have a balanced regeneration of both without having to worry about it than to have an optimization simulator trying to maximise both depending on what you need. We got rid of STS in caps, but for some reason we want to add this extra busy work to snubs. It seems to be an inconsistency in the balance team's direction.

Part 3: Shield battery changes aka Shield Boosting

While we are on the topic of shields, I want to bring up shield boosting. This was made with the intent to make shield batteries a valuable resource like nanobots. This is a change that applies to both caps and snubs, and it makes for absolutely comical situations and it exacerbates skill differentials too much since they're capable of absorbing too much damage.

They're basically used to gain functional invulnerability via damage reduction, and players frequently abuse this to absorb mine hits (sometimes literally run straight into them), do boxing (ironically), and just make things extremely awkward. The powercore changes have made it absolutely not worthwhile to shoot at a shield that has its damage reduction up, especially if you are in front of your opponent, since they can do more damage to you. You can gain significant advantages just by timing your shield batteries better than your opponent, by negating bad situations where you will take a lot of damage, better than they can.

It was already the case before that people would follow up with boxing or absorb mine hits with the shield batteries, but they would have to pay with actually losing the restored shield value. Now, you are totally unable to interact with them; you are FORCED to break off, early turn, do anything else other than be in front of an invulnerable opponent and waste your core on a shield that's barely taking any damage while they fire back, which means the restored value is almost always retained. While these are very funny situations to be in, I do not think invincibility belongs in snub PvP.

Part 4: tldr

-Strafes are one of a few important stats in the game for snubs that cannot simply be adjusted wholesale without a total balance rework of the affected class. It ruins viability of slower ships and gives too much relative power to HFs and other faster ships.
-The formula's current iteration makes too many guns extremely unfun to use and it creates problematic guns that are clearly overpowered
-Powercore drain due to shield regeneration is unnecessary busy work that nobody really wants to deal with
-Shield battery damage reduction is overtuned to the point of virtual invulnerability in snubs vs snubs and adds too many ridiculous situations to a fight

Part 5: Recommendations

Now that I've stated my case, hopefully it becomes clear how I am justifying what I suggest:
-Reversion of the strafe changes; Buffs to the speed of cap guns if snub boxing is a problem.
-Upward adjustment of efficiency for class 2 hullbusters. Lower efficiency penalties across 3.03 - 5.00. Downward adjustment of armor penetration will suffice for anti-cap balance.
-Remove powercore drain and readjust powercore regeneration values as needed
-Shield Batteries: No idea - but the damage reduction needs to at least be toned down if not reworked. Increase in regenerated values if needed. I'm well aware that certain shields are relying on this mechanic, so I won't recommend removing it entirely. Not in the main body, but I think being immune to damage vs caps is braindead anyway.

p.s. This is too lengthy for me to verify I edited everything correctly and that my train of thought is always complete. Hopefully it is, but you can post in the thread and I'll edit it if you think something is not clear.

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