Discovery 4.87 Balance Discussion

[sindroms]

Yber, stop using the ye old ''get an escort'' excuse. How many traders do we have on the server on any given moment? How many freelancers do we have? And how many of said freelancers would trot from A to B while getting paid 2 million credits? If I had to fly from A to B and get paid 2 mil, I would rather do it on my trader instead. No freelancer IDed ship these days was created by a player with escorting in mind. Because it is a useless affair. The trader has physically no way to pay me as a freelancer to waste me time protecting him in order for us both to make a profit.

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[Govedo13]

Indeed with the changes made in 4.86:
- Killed pirating Transports and gave cruisers to pirates- both stupid ideas
- Buffed transports and routes making impractical/impossible to pirate with VHF
Changes made in 4.87:
- Killed the GBs,Cruisers and Transports pirating by buffing the speed
- Killed Transports pirating by nerfing the suitable transports via ID restrictions, via powercore nerfs and via transport gun and shield updates that benefit the 12 gunner lawful transports more then the unlawful ones due to the additional DPS/DPE value added per gun.
- Totally killed VHFs due to the speed update and due to transp guns updates.
- Leaving heavy bombers- only 4-6 ships from the total counts usable as single pirate device.
On the other side everyone and his dog can now powertrade in whatever he wants- big transps get enough hull and guns to run away, small ones are fast enough to dodge in order to run away.
Both are untouchable to caps due to the speed buff and longer cruise drain on cruisers.
12 gunner with Charon or Iron Hammer turrets have more DPS then Heavy GB with more range and its powercore never dries while shooting , he also have more Hull, more nanobots and more batteries...
The IMG heavy transp conveniently have 10 turrets with arcs allowing to shoot thought the ship giving full range of all turrets and only 160 speed.....
Smaller Transports like AT with the same turrets but with 160 speed are kinda unkillable while perfect for kitting GBs.

Totally escorting is waste of money for the power traders, next thing would be to nerf pirates even more if possible so only LFs can effectively catch up, so the powertraders can trade alone or in groups without hassle. Next point is to think how to kill the bomber piracy. I see several options here-make bombers bigger, nerf their hull and nanobots, nerf the bomber torps etc, you pick the one that suits you the best.

Continue the good efforts by giving players easy trading / access to all ships and tons of easy made money, without any serious cash sinks / so they can get bored faster unchallenged and quit faster. Right now you managed to kill the half of the population of the server, the other half is pending, at the end 20-30 powertraders would play only to move their ships from point A to point B making even more useless credits.

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€œ

Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)

[Zayne Carrick]

Suddenly: it was possible to pirate on VHF back in .85?

On other terms I agree with Govedo.
Gunboats are useless. Only purpose-RP as mobile command center.
But I still think that Ptrans can kill battletransport. Pirate will use cau6-8 and hauler only au8.
But hell, transport/heavy bomber shouldn't be the only vessel able to pirate.

[Yber]

Yber, stop using the ye old ''get an escort'' excuse. How many traders do we have on the server on any given moment? How many freelancers do we have? And how many of said freelancers would trot from A to B while getting paid 2 million credits? If I had to fly from A to B and get paid 2 mil, I would rather do it on my trader instead. No freelancer IDed ship these days was created by a player with escorting in mind. Because it is a useless affair. The trader has physically no way to pay me as a freelancer to waste me time protecting him in order for us both to make a profit.

Sindroms, stop reading half post and ignoring the rest.

Buff the cargo capacity.

There'd be more freelancers if traders actually hired them. If we achieve a "miner + transport" kind of relation it'll work out.

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inb4 Sirius gets renamed to XTF.

[Govedo13]

Suddenly: it was possible to pirate on VHF back in .85?

Stuff was more expensive,trading was 30% less profitable, there was no mining at the beginning, as result the traders used no capital armours on their transports. Ship sale plug-in was added later, people actually lost credits by buying bigger ship and selling their old trader to the NPC.
Transport anti-snub turrets were not so good then. Also the Code Guns Efficiency was quite better, allowing 3 pulse + 4 Codes Sabre to be effective as pirate ship. People in general had less credits so flying medium transps and no armoured transps was common sight,5kers were not standard transport ship. Now for 1 day each new player can buy au8 5ker and cau8 for it 4 days later, the ships and equipment have no value now because they are too easy to get. I pirated 2 months to safe money for cau6 then
mining mod and ship sales came and created ton of easy cash for everyone,additional some trader factions whined that mining is killing the normal trading and the normal trading got buff to compensate.
Also in 195/200 ( the last 5 slots were reserved for admins ) server was quite common to be pirated making escorting reasonable and logical thing compared with 30/225 server. Nuff said 4.85 was better gameplaywise then 4,86 and 4.87 combined together.

If we achieve a "miner + transport" kind of relation it'll work out.

Even this relation is non-existent now. After some heavy whining from the miner factions Hegemon have the old 2750 cargo reverted. The powertrader lobby in Dev team wont let any similar relation to happen.
I kinda agree with the rest, traders does not have the NEED to hire escorts, in the same way that the miners now does not have the need to mine in groups.

Devs are too concentrated on RP stories and technical issue, when they does not do stuff for the factions that they come from, so they neglect that the broken gameplay need to be fixed.

Two things can fix discovery:

1: Shield reflection based balance:
Good example is the total waste of efforts in balancing the PvP between different ship classes without realising that their approach is totally wrong and each change to ship A screws the balance of ships B,C and D.They does not have the ability to balance each ship class versus each ship class without affecting the others, so whatever changes they made they are useless.
The only way to balance the PvP between ship classes to remove the pulse guns and use the shield reflection to fine tune each ship class versus each other without affecting the balance of all ship classes.

2: Economy of Loss and maintenance:
Creating a lot more money sinks and nerfing the trading and mining with 50% would create more activity in all kind of factions. MK2 guns/shields/equipment with better stats but with high chance to loose by death, produced in POBs combined with Caps produced in POBs would do the trick. Space can be dangerous and spicy instead of dull, empty and too easy to buy immortal anything type of game play.

It is all Devs fault actually, the server can be full again if some small logical changes are made.

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€œ

Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)

[Jack_Henderson]

Funny. You talk as if every trader was a CAU8 Battletransport that is unpirateable for anybody.

This is not the case.

Most traders I see have UAU8 or no armor.

There are a FEW who invest into survivability and thus CAU armor and escorts, and their chances are better. They often fly in groups and are hard to pirate because they do things the right way. If you want to pirate them, do not try to solo it and expect success. As a transport whore, I also do not fly solo and expect 100 % success.

But hey... with which right you assume to win a confrontation 1on1 anyway? The pirate normally wins (80 %, I would say) if he doesn't screw up and knows what he is doing. Against the average trader, the normal bomber pirate wins easily. Same for the GB. GBs and bomber pirates sometimes (!) cannot beat a heavy-CAU transport fast enough before it docks. Ye. That happens. It's 1vs1. There is no guarantee that you win and a situation is much more interesting for both sides if it is not decided in second one.

And: There is no way you guys have already tested out what the speed buff will do in reality, how powerful the guns really are (I did), what types are only good when you look at stats and fail in reality, etc etc. What you likely do is looking at numbers, deducting what you think the consequences might be.

Why don't we just try it, and see what happens in reality. Because there are already some statements in these posts that are clearly wrong and I suspect that the reality might be quite a bit different from the horribly dark expectations that we see here.

And, just because that point struck me: You pirate players should REJOICE about the Hegemon. The solo trader miner, without armor, flying a BRICK will return. All the nice California madness, don't you remember? It was awesome. The solo-miner/trader will buff traffic and be an easy target. So please, don't QQ when you normally tell traders to not QQ. This change will make piracy a cakewalk again and will fill tradelanes with people.

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[Ursus]

Even I dont think commercial transports should be faster or more heavily armed than gunboats. Battletransports should be comparable, but regular transports shouldnt.

I have an old spreadsheet somewhere that looks at most of the variables, I'll try to find and update and make some solid suggestions.

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Discovery 24/7 Negotiating Tactics:

[Syrus]

If you (non-specific plural) take CAU 8 Battletransports as the "normal" trader, you are just making a major mistake. Most money-making traders use AU 8 at best and often the bigger transports, to maximize their profit.

One cannot expect traders to have money (buy big CAU + expensive transport) to go make money. That makes no sense and doesn't work.

And of course, a pirate / pvper suggesting a big change on transports feels a bit like the wolf talking about he wants the sheep served to him. In .86 a normal trader stood almost no chance against any normal (non-brainless) pirate even. In .86 the TS/TZ gave them better chances at fighting back, at the same time, Nova torp improvements (shield hitting now) meant a pirate could completly strip off all equip with ease, if he didn't blow up the transport first. Not to mention GBs slaughtering transports and snubs alike with ease. Why is it, that all pirates always tell transports to fly with escorts and such? It - does - not - help. Or it makes you miss all and every encounter which means: no RP at all anymore. How boring is that? Though avoiding most pirates is possible even without an escort if you are "smart". It's still no fun though. It's nice to sometimes get into some action, but it sucks when you know that if you meet a pirate it's very likely he'll demand insane amounts of money becaues he KNOWS you stand no chance.
Why is it not, that Pirates are told to not fly alone? I mean, most that I met weren't alone in .86 anyway, but in .85 we had many who pirated alone.

Back to the discussion...
Transports are "alright" as they are now. The Civ/House/IronHammer turret's range should be improved to 1200 m though. At the moment pirate bomber can just sit at >800 and snac away without any danger.

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[Pavel]

Quick and easy way to nerf zoner caps

I just had a thought, it may take some time before hull of zoner caps is buffed while armament receives nerf. How about Zoner ID technerf for caps changes from blue to red cell, while the ID still permits them?

That way Zoner caps would be available for anyone, but if someone wants them as a combat-capable ships he has to get SRP ID. No more warmongering zonerzonerzoners, while general zoner population still has their "RP tools" disguised as war ships.

1. Imo lot faster and easier solution than waiting few months (or years) before zoner caps are rebalanced to be more defence-oriented ships.
2. Enhances RP on the server, as people will have to get SRP in order to be able to pew things.
3. It's related to the previous point tool of control over zoner caps - delusional warmongering kind of zoners will lose its current ability of fight as equal against Corsairs/Order/Core/Houses.

[Sabru]

Quick and easy way to nerf zoner caps

I just had a thought, it may take some time before hull of zoner caps is buffed while armament receives nerf. How about Zoner ID technerf for caps changes from blue to red cell, while the ID still permits them?

That way Zoner caps would be available for anyone, but if someone wants them as a combat-capable ships he has to get SRP ID. No more warmongering zonerzonerzoners, while general zoner population still has their "RP tools" disguised as war ships.

1. Imo lot faster and easier solution than waiting few months (or years) before zoner caps are rebalanced to be more defence-oriented ships.
2. Enhances RP on the server, as people will have to get SRP in order to be able to pew things.
3. It's related to the previous point tool of control over zoner caps - delusional warmongering kind of zoners will lose its current ability of fight as equal against Corsairs/Order/Core/Houses.

Seems fair and sensible. just dont mess with the TAZ ID because, you know, we actually have a reason for pew capable caps. (you know, the whole system to patrol and defend.)

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