' Wrote:And what if certain pieces of tech are not available to a faction, or have appalling performance in PvP, yet the use of out-of-faction technology is not detrimental to RP?
Certain pieces of tech, like what? As long as you have faction guns, all the rest is common-pool and shouldn't be nerfed.
As for guns with appalling pvp performance, that's no fault of the new system and is an issue to be raised with the balance folks.
EDIT: Laser cannons/photon blasters could really do with getting balanced and tuned. Some are great, some are utterly crap. I think this would go a long way to appeasing the freelancers.
I was tempted to respond at length last night, but there ain't no point. As said, we'll see how this plays out.
Maelstom's pretentiousness and unfounded faith in abstract attempts at equality enforcement aside, to say nothing of their offensive belief in unilateral slapping-down-of-all to control a personal-sensibility-offending minority, it should be amusing.
I honestly don't care, beyond the fact that my primary-freighter-piloting-character's-roleplay may be fudged. I'll upgrade to a gunboat with pulse, cerbs and missile and play out the typical 2milordai pirate, if my diplomatic attempts at "gaining an edge" (against transports and self/pilfered or honestly acquired cargo defense is concerned) for my freighter jockeying cargo pirate are going to be auto-nerfed. That what ya want from this? That's what you're gonna get. Fine with me.
Yeah, I'm miffed, drunk, and I'm posting again, with a question.
Have you folks ever considered the fact that perhaps this will kill the desire in certain individuals to roleplay? At least, the desire of certain individuals to roleplay a certain type of character? A character that enriches the roleplay environment?
Has it even occurred to you pricks, the characters and roleplay that will be trodden upon because of your personal grudges? I'm not talking about the Hellfire Legion or SCRA here. I'm talkin' about the little guy.
I'm the little guy, and I have yet to glean from any threads or posts any actual positive effect the implementation of this system will have.
I keep saying you're done, and random people keep convincing me to give you one more chance to save yourselves.
' Wrote:Plus, the whole "stamp out individualism" is something I dont agree with at all.
This is the best thing I've seen on these forums in ages except for...
' Wrote:It is called "Freelancer", after all. Not Starlancer. It's not frackin' Wing Commander, it's Privateer. It's Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, not Call of Duty.
That's the whole bloody point of the game. It's not Red vs. Blue.
But we'll see how it plays out in the update.
That.
' Wrote:From what I have seen, most people who disagree with the new system listen up to a point and then get stuck on one aspect of the change. Once the understanding of this aspect enters thier brain, all thoughts of other implications are forgotten or simply ignored.
1) The new system is impartial. The computer cannot be swayed into allowing or disallowing changes to the rules for "special" people. In the new system we are all equal.
Equality vs. Freedom. Equality isn't a virtue. Besides, we aren't all equal; you'd never say that if you knew anything about balance. And we won't all be equal, ever, until the day we're all flying Civilian-ID'd Starfliers with no guns and aren't allowed to talk or move, just sit still in space above Manhattan. We must all be sitting in the exact same spot, and we can't look at different things; we must always look at the same thing. That's equality. Sounds fun, right?
2) The new system allows for greater role play opportunities. It removes many of the limitations on tech that the old system enforced. It does this at a price, the efficiency of some weapons, but that is not an exhorbant price for role players.
Which manages to totally ignore the problems of both the old and new systems. See my response to Xoria's post below, and Tycho's response to yours above.
3) The new system allows Administrators and Developers to spend more time working on making new and exciting content because they will not have to spend so much time on sanctions for tech infractions. Each hour spent on sorting he said, she said, I can haz? posts, and They can't haz reports is another hour they can't spend on updates and bugs.
Uh, admins aren't developers. And they don't actually typically do tech chart sanctions. Tell you what, you find any one week when there are more than five separate, unrelated tech chart sanctions, or any one month with more than ten of the same, and I'll admit that there's actually a large workload under the current system. Which, of course, is irrelevant, because the current system is also broken.
For those still not listening. You are not special. The word is equality, and there is no reason that you should be beyond it's scope simply because you have played the game longer than others. Your role play will not be hurt in the least by this change. You do not have to get rid of any current tech mixes and more mixes will be opened up to you.
Oooh, yeah, how dare we try to be special? I forgot we're all playing NPCs here. How about we go ahead and dictate what the ship and loadout of every member of every faction must be, remove all non-faction IDs, and create a character creation system where all characters must be based on a set admin-designed template with some slight allowably modifications. I can see it now:
Bundshuh:
Options:
The Demoman: Nationalist Rheinlandic Freedom Fighter; heavy accent, always drinks lots of alcohol, born on Stuttgart.
The Pyro: Crazy terrorist/freedom fighter who loves to blow stuff up. Always talks hysterically. Born on Planet Hamburg.
The Scout: Orphaned as a child, blames the government. Joined in a prison in <insert local district here>, New Berlin, and started working in space when he got out.
The Spy: Agent for the Bundschuh who was caught. Now mostly spends his time shooting people over Planet New Berlin. Always wears a pinstriped suit, and chain smokes <insert tobacco product here>.
Oh...I see. You loose the edge in combat that your favorite tech mixes gave you before. Well, if that was the reason for all your vaunted roleplay.....then I couldn't care less. You are one of the people this is meant to slap down.
Yeah, how dare we actually expect not to get punished during our character's more violent reactions to things for roleplaying differently, huh? Us awful people. Really.
' Wrote:You're missing the point. The new system is being implemented in order to entirely replace the old system which required assessment and implementation by the Admin team. The purpose is to remove as many rules as possible and replace them with material disincentives that nobody needs to manually police.
Witness: old sanctions against continuous docking with a jump gate to evade destruction is replaced with a cool down timer; old sanctions for docking on enemy bases replaced with FL Hook disallowing docking if your rep is not good enough. Etc.
Can we get some telescreens now? Thanks!
Joking aside, automating things is good, but that's not the issue at hand. I've reiterated it time and again, and no one has responded yet. Problem isn't the new system. The old system was bad too. Problem is the whole philosophy behind the systems: the idea that people need to be controlled - not even stopped from using force! - for no other reason than "you think they might not roleplay well", whatever "roleplaying well" means. Our roleplay - our art - is forced to change, suddenly, repeated, drastically, against plan, not due to in-game events - which would make it dynamic art, which is good - but due to outside force. This force yanks it around at the end of a chain and changes it from a product of the mind into a product of force, and, thus, not art. Basically, you're taking our roleplay and making it not-roleplay by forcibly changing what should be the product of our minds into a product of your force. That's not okay.
Let's say for a moment you don't care. Let's say you honestly do not care whether what you're doing is right or wrong, or you don't believe me when I tell you it's harming roleplay.
' Wrote:Have you folks ever considered the fact that perhaps this will kill the desire in certain individuals to roleplay? At least, the desire of certain individuals to roleplay a certain type of character? A character that enriches the roleplay environment?
What about that? Where will your precious control be when Discovery is gone? I have no desire what-so-ever to play Discovery anymore. It's not 'cause I'm a Legionnaire; I hardly played that anymore. Let me tell you a little story of how control affects Disco, and why I'm sick of dealing with it. It's not about this policy specifically, because I'm only arguing against this policy as an extension of my larger argument against control.
My main character is Yoko Mori. She was supposed to be a technical pacifist who did intel work for people against Kusari, since she had a bit of a grudge against them. This worked well for a long while. I played her as she would be, in-roleplay; closed-economy, poor, can't just go out and buy a ship whenever she wants. She had an old Charon she picked up second-hand - again, entirely built closed-economy with money from her work and other random ways she picked up cash. In this case, someone gave it to her out of pity. However, have you ever flown a Charon? They're rather large. Yoko, of course, noticed this, and since her job primarily consisted of not getting hit for long periods of time while she scanned things, she asked one of her employers - the Blood Dragons - for another ship. She ended up getting a Tanto. Now, due to Tech Chart restrictions, you can only use a Tanto on a Merc ID, not a Freelancer one, which she did. While she's not a merc, people of course started treating her like one. Kusarians called her a "dirty merc" and refused to chatter with her like before, instead opting for more pewpew sooner. This changed her roleplay to a lot less talking - and me showing off her as a character, as I do really like her personality -and a lot more dodging.
As the character evolved, all this shooting did change her perceptions, and pushed her much more quickly to drop the whole pacifist thing. She was only ever going to be self- or friends-defense, bar a few exceptions for people she really hated, but there was a problem with that. See, no ID allows you to actually shoot what your character would shoot in-roleplay. You have to shoot what the ID says to shoot. For Freelancer and Merc IDs, that means no shooting except against bountied ships. Thus, if she ever wanted to shoot someone she really hated - say, she caught Evangaline McDowell molesting a close friend of hers and reacted murderously, which should would - she'd have to claim the bounty on that person, despite the fact that money was not at all her motivation. As a precaution, I registered for a number of bounty boards that covered likely targets. Whenever she shot a target down, I had to claim it.
Of course, that led to even more merc-calling, not unjustifiably of course. Slowly, because people reacted to her as if she was a bounty hunter, because the rules required her to be such in order to be true to her character, she slowly became more and more of one. Her personality has now changed dramatically; she's much less forgiving, much more money-focused, much more "kill the baddies and earn a living off it" rather than "help my friends and do odd jobs to try to scrape by". She'd've never changed like that if it hadn't been for this very same philosophy of control. If she'd changed based on in-game things, so be it. That's dynamism. This isn't. This is force.
This is only one example. This is the one I know, because it is the one I experienced. There are many, many others like it. I will not accept this any longer; I have stopped playing Discovery, and remain on the forums only to fight it on behalf of the sane people who are still left, and in hopes that I might eventually be able to return and roleplay again. There are some people like me left, but our numbers are dwindling rapidly. We're the roleplayers; we're the people who think, who come to create art and are driven away by the rules around how we must create our art.
I am not the little guy. I am not the big guy. Certainly, I'm a long-stander respected in a few circles, but only a few, mostly made up of disgusted roleplayers who are leaving at ever-increasing rates. I don't bother with politics, for the most part. This hurts Michael, this hurts the big guys, and this hurts me. The old system hurts him, the old system hurts the big guys, the old system hurts me. Stop trying to make this about equality, about being special, about long-stander versus the little guy. That's a false dichotemy. This is force versus thought, conformism versus art, ruleplay versus roleplay, and control versus freedom. Discovery will stand or fall on its principles, or lack thereof. Discovery must become principled or be destroyed. Really isn't much else to it. Freedom to roleplay, or control, ever-decreasing roleplay - true roleplay, not indulgent Mary Sue-ism and perverseness for its own sake, that'll only increase as control goes on - and eventual destruction. Doesn't make a whole lot of difference to me at this point, but it is a choice you have to make or you'll go with force by default.
Quote:Equality vs. Freedom. Equality isn't a virtue. Besides, we aren't all equal; you'd never say that if you knew anything about balance. And we won't all be equal, ever, until the day we're all flying Civilian-ID'd Starfliers with no guns and aren't allowed to talk or move, just sit still in space above Manhattan. We must all be sitting in the exact same spot, and we can't look at different things; we must always look at the same thing. That's equality. Sounds fun, right?
Jaded
Equality is everyone having equal access to everything they're entitled to. Seeing how this is a game, that means everything. You can have everything, but it comes at a price. -people- abuse freedom and therefore it must be limited.
Quote:Oooh, yeah, how dare we try to be special? I forgot we're all playing NPCs here. How about we go ahead and dictate what the ship and loadout of every member of every faction must be, remove all non-faction IDs, and create a character creation system where all characters must be based on a set admin-designed template with some slight allowably modifications. I can see it now:
Nothing is dictated. PvP advantages as a result of RPing weapons normally not availible to you is being taken away.
Your argument has been addressed in the previous thread by Ench, but you chose to ignore it. Suffice to say, your philosophy is not one shared by everybody, as is evidenced by the introduction of this system in the first place. In fact, I summarised the difference in this thread, though it obviously cant answer every facet of your argument simply due to its diminuitive size. Philosophical differences are pretty much unreconcilable with each other.
Firstly, this method of changing things is often used in disco. You've been here long enough to have seen it before, yet I do not remember hearing your voice quite as loud any time before as it is now. If anything, you should've attempted to stop it sooner, before it gained momentum as a practice and affected you and your interests directly. If anything though, it is a method of action justified by history and past trends.
"Equality isn't a virtue, and we aren't all equal." Great, I can understand the underlying beliefs of that, but this also means that you are vehemently against equality legislation such as the human rights act, if you're an EU person, or whatever equivalents of equal pay/conditions at work/freedom of expression/constitution you have over there in your country. If people are not equal, they are not equal on any level (equal is term used to describe an absolute) and should therefore lack a basic floor of rights, rights that you and I have been accustomed too. This is because, as people are not equal, their needs cannot be adequately addressed by a floor, which may not be applicable to some or overbearing on others. In fact, if this is truly your belief, your calling lies against the laws of the land in which you live rather than the laws of a cyberspace community that wouldn't exist if somebody swept the right hard drive over with a magnet. Chaos is the logical destination of freedom just as sterility, as you pointed out, is the logical destination of equality. Which would you rather? Chaos I suppose, since that fits your agenda, but notice how the world in which you live is governed by rules that work against chaos and wonder what your life would be like if you werent afforded the protection of the law as a citizen of your country. In fact, all you have to do is look at Somalia to see what it's like without an attempt at law and order and equality.
The argument that this precludes a certain type of character beneficial to the roleplay environment is one that is based purely on opinion, which is a concept and totally fluid from person to person. However, even if I were to take this at face value, this has been the argument against every change to the rules so far. This was the argument against IFFs being used to denote and enforce faction alliegance back in the day, and it was used against IDs as well. More IDs were formed, such as the researcher ID, but then there were gaps in that too. And importantly, there still are.
But people are still here. A lot don't even remember a time before IDs, so they don't know what kind of shinannegans they missed. What balance of control and freedom is right for you? Is that right for other people? Probably not, as both control and freedom are concepts, whose understanding is again, totally fluid.
As for your experiences with Yoko Mori, a lot of that is unfortunate, but you analyse the impact of the rules and regulations of the server only from your own narrow viewpoint with respect to your character. Even though you've been here a long time, you seem to have forgotten why those rules were introduced in the first place, which was namely to stop people finding a cheap excuse to shoot anything they wanted with minimal reason or RP backing. Even if they were told to create one, it ended up being something incredibly cliche like "insane, lol". Now, unless you love the concept of micromanagement, there's simply not time to deal with this. Human understanding is based upon generalisations and steriotypes rather than specific knowledge, and the implementation of that knowledge into actions, such as the action of control is no different. You do it, I do it, the admins do it, and everyone's the worse for it. Yet you have no way of knowing that, for all the restrictions your character experienced because of the laws, what would have been had those laws not existed. Yes, you would have had the freedom to do all the things that the rules stopped you from doing, but would you have encountered those situations in the first place? The Outcast tagged Kusari battleships roaming around, or some random dude with no actual justification for having a KNF Odin? You have absolutely no way of knowing what may have been, and you can think all you like that it would've been rosier and greener on the other side had the rules not been in place, but the reality is, in another dimension, more likely something else. Why? Because of balance. There is balance in all things. Happiness and sadness, good and evil, yin and yang. Tricking yourself into believing that one path is better than the other is awefully naive.
I wont pretend to you that my characters havent been impacted by the rules here like your characters have. Of course I've seen and experienced the effects first hand. I do whenever I play on the server, which is unfortunately nothing since September this year. It affects the development of my characters ingame, what actions they can and cannot perform regardless of what they would do in a certain situation. But I do not feel cheated or hard-done by because of this. Everybody abides by the same rules, so the playing field is even. In fact, this argument is much like the equipment balance argument. Why is the Guardian not significantly better than the Eagle, when the former belongs to a military that spends an inordinate of resources on research and development and the latter is a ship thats on the civilian market and free to purchase? Because of balance. Here you argue, at least according to the philosophical underpinnings that you choose to use, against this balance. Because a military is a military, it should automatically have better stuff than a pirate organisation like the Liberty Rogues, for example? This is the RP of a military, but it is the rules and the stats of the ship, rather than the RP behind the group, that is the main influence on how I have to treat my character and the organisations as a whole. I guess the question here is, are your values consistent? Would you apply the same philosophy to equipment balancing if you were balance lead? But then, if you wouldn't because it would be too unfair against certain groups and not fun, but would apply those concepts to RP for the same reason, you would also be against consistency. If consistency is against your philosophy as well, then you truly are an advocate of chaos.
That's all very convoluted and fairly deep philosophy for an internet forum, but I hope it rings a few logic bells with the people that choose to read it.
And Dane, you read my words but didnt comprehend their meaning. My understanding of the new system is that you will have the choice of one additional tech line if you have a generic ID, but you'll have to get their tag. For example, Odin with Natters? FL ID but Hessian tag. I did like your sarcasm but honestly, save it for when you're actually right.
' Wrote:Nothing is dictated. PvP advantages as a result of RPing weapons normally not availible to you is being taken away.
Thank you;)
People should stop complaining, fights will be more based on skill now then who has the most tech. And this coming from me, Mr. Generic ID User/Generic Faction Leader.
Lets all just chillax and wait to see what .86 REALLY has and how much it will effect us, and adapt accordingly. Remember, you're lucky there is even a mod to play. If you start making to much demands from a free service you'll just start to look like a lil punk.
If technology is free for all, everyone flies the same ship and uses the same guns. That is how it is on the servers that allow free choice. Almost everyone uses nomads guns there.
If technology is special request, there will be favoritism and unfairness. If that happens in a game, the game is no longer fun for people who dont receive favors, and for those who believe in fair play.
In the new system you can be as individual as you like in your role play, you just wont get a pvp advantage from it.
The change with nerfed mixed technology in version 4.86 is good.
But how will the player who uses mixed technology know that his guns are less efficient?
Will the infobox have a dynamic entry that changes, which shows the real efficiency and not the optimal one?
Or will the player only notice it through the effects that his shots have?
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