(11-23-2013, 01:06 AM)Jack_Henderson Wrote: To make me content: long enough to allow me to write a line like "Julia: Oh my God, what is this?" and start spinning my ship to avoid being an easy target. That would be about 30 seconds.
Personally I consider 10-15 seconds a good match, that is between message by nomad and awaiting response (though actively thrusting away, engaging cruise engine and such would obviously break the countdown). Add up approximately from 5-10 or sometimes more from decloaking to making nom message, as you don't have to wait for nomad to drop engagement notice before making any reaction of your own. Summing it up overall seems close enough. More than 30 would just be giving time to alt-tab into skype, call emergency, drop back and await cavalry while nomad has to patiently await, had seen plenty of this stalling before. Once nomads location exposed the time is usually never on their side, especially when targeting active factions who can have reinforcements respond fast and hard, you know that yourself - x-comIMG had been quite good about that I'd say.
(11-23-2013, 01:06 AM)Jack_Henderson Wrote: It's a different way they are used that doesn't really facilitate that problem.
Cloaky snubs cannot sneak up. Their cloaking times are too short.
Cloaky ships are normally are warships and logged in massive cap battles. In pure pvp, people do not really care about quick-uncloak and kills, I think. In pvp you expect to die and not get much rp.
I suppose you're right that majority of really big cap brawls don't see much use of cloaks. But I did see an interesting group of two-three hit'n'run valors with cloaks sometime ago in leeds/nb/magellan. Basically they would go into an area where they know a battle is going already or enemies are sitting, and then they'd do a surprise attack. Seem knew what they were doing based on my observation. That well-coordinated use of cloaks did impress me.
(11-23-2013, 01:06 AM)Jack_Henderson Wrote: The use of cloaks on nomads/wilde ships is kind of different. They frequently target non-pvp ships. And these are ofc much more prone to attacks, do not expect them, and the attacks take place in a non-pvp environment. I guess that's why the same action is judged completely differently.
Sure they do target civilian category (transports and miners) frequently, but I'd say it's still military craft (snubs and caps) being targeted the most with a particular fondness for lonely house and zoner caps without escorts. Big caps provide better targets because they can be dispatched quicker than smaller and faster ships. This mostly due to fact that snub fights still can take a lot of time while caps typically go down much quicker. A good counter against nomad cloak ambush is to have an escort snub with CD - it might not save the cap or transport from being destroyed, but little fighter can stall nomads and cancel cloaks until reinforcements arrive and then bandwagon will continue to pile up as it usually goes.
On a sidenote it would be interesting if some bases had sort of a detector for cloaked ships, forcing cloaked ships to decloak when they enter within certain radius. I think that might be possible to do. Also there is an idea going about Order-specific weapon that when fired would decloak ships within a certain radius. Sort of EMP mine thing I suppose but one that would decloak ships. Hopefully that'll be possible to implement too.
(11-23-2013, 01:06 AM)Jack_Henderson Wrote: I am not entirely sure whether I got my point across
For most of the part I think you did. Although I'm not sure I did get that strange distinction you're having about non-pvp and pvp environment (which seem to relate to ship types?). Not sure what you meant about that one.
I'm not entirely sure why special factions that consistently prove that they will exploit anything to get an edge: see, 1. Wilde GB used by Keepers (now K'hara) before it got nerfed, 2. Wilde saying they will not use more than 50% nomad guns then going back on it whenever they want. At least one of these were changed, presumably because it was obviously much stronger than the options available to non-nomad factions. Both were used to increase PvP prowess, which is fine on its own, but not when 1. Nomads are flying robot ships when they have their own and 2. Commitments were made not to abuse something.
I absolutely agree infinite cloaks should be a part of nomad associated factions since they possess inRP the natural ability to do this. However, the human players responsible for the conduct of these factions prove they don't deserve it, through past actions alone. Why give them another tool to do this on the basis of trust when said trust has already proven to be worthless?
(11-24-2013, 10:37 AM)McNeo Wrote: I'm not entirely sure why special factions that consistently prove that they will exploit anything to get an edge: see, 1. Wilde GB used by Keepers (now K'hara) before it got nerfed, 2. Wilde saying they will not use more than 50% nomad guns then going back on it whenever they want. At least one of these were changed, presumably because it was obviously much stronger than the options available to non-nomad factions. Both were used to increase PvP prowess, which is fine on its own, but not when 1. Nomads are flying robot ships when they have their own and 2. Commitments were made not to abuse something.
I absolutely agree infinite cloaks should be a part of nomad associated factions since they possess inRP the natural ability to do this. However, the human players responsible for the conduct of these factions prove they don't deserve it, through past actions alone. Why give them another tool to do this on the basis of trust when said trust has already proven to be worthless?
Connor raises an interesting point I'd like to go into as well. It's about gentlemen's agreements and self-control.
Nomad cloaks should be infinite and that's something I agree with. However, it's clearly a very powerful toy and one that needs to be used in a responsible manner. Suggestions like the ones Jack gave to give a powercore drain on nomad cloaks work, but wouldn't it be a great deal simpler if the K'Hara faction just decided to...y'know, use them responsibly?
Oh, I have no doubt there are situations where a surprise engagement is required. I've been both on the receiving and giving end of those, and it's a genuine "WTF" moment when a Marduk just decloaks out of nowhere, wrecks stuff and goes away afterwards, which benefits the nomad RP a great deal. But if the K'Hara faction at any rate agreed publically (like Fran is doing with the Iseijin) to not drop in on people and engage them pretty much instantly...that'd be useful.
Although it's probably not going to happen so Jack's suggestion is what I'll be backing up.
Right, since Connor decides to bring up scorpion gunboat debacle into the picture I'll explain it as it happened from the other side. Gentleman agreement apparently was with Das Wilde, but not Keepers since I never heard of that 50% tech agreement at all back then.Scorpion gunboat was never limited just to Das Wilde to begin with, it was used as a standard gunboat back by Keepers in .84 due to nomad gunboat being broken. Granted it used standard outfit with back-then cerb turrets, wasn't any nomad turrets then. Sometime later I dust off my scorpion gunboat from the shelf, put full nomad loadout curious to see how it does. After a bit of practice turns out that it can perform rather well and effective against bombers, essentially an anti-bomber gunboat. Sure it was quite powerful but not too OP as some exaggerated it to be, they never flew one themselves - how'd they know? It had been killed plenty of times by a well-coordinated pair-trio bombers just as well. Killed by other gunboats in 1-on-1 too. Plus due to short range of turrets it was worthless against capital ships, especially anything outfitted with solaris turrets as you'd simply just get torn to shreds if you'd try to get close to be able to shoot. But after venturing into Taus and barely making it out alive from a sortie with three GMS bombers there pops a post on developers board (!) by a player who flew one of those bombers claiming how insanely OP it is and so on and so forth. It is only then I learn there was a gentleman agreement, but to find out it was made with Das Wilde, which is a different faction, agreement of which I did not know, and nobody told me or anyone else in Keepers about it, so I learned about it after a fact. Weeks later I gave away that scorpion gunboat with cau8 freely to Das Wilde and myself was done about that subject. What there really was is a big miscommunication between people who said "okay, it should be only 50% nomad equipment" and people who also had access to that gear.
The big difference here between that and now is that we actually have a discussion of which everyone involved is being aware, rather than a decision made by a group of devs between themselves and failing to notify everyone affected by that decision. Overall agreement is there, it's just figuring out the devils in details right now.
Treewyrm at your place I would rather leave the skeletons in the closet but since you put it like this...
The things that you typed about the old Scorp with Nom guns indicate 1 of 2 things.
First thing is that your PvP skills are rather bad and and you have not much understanding how stuff works around- I hope that this is the truth. There are many old players that are great RPers but cannot PvP or understand how PvP work- np with that.
Second thing is very bad- you typed a bunch of well polished lies that purpose is to brush out the image of the "innocent gentleman agreement" abusers.
I wont go in detail again about small agile gb with broken hitbox that does not indicate direct hits and 8 cruiser guns- even the people that play in the server since 1-2 months can image what kind of nightmare ship is this to fight against.
The simple proof of that is the heavy nerfs that the said equipment got.
(10-09-2013, 10:51 AM)Knjaz Wrote: 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.)
I didn't accuse the Keepers of breaking that agreement, because it only concerned Das Wilde. I separated the two accusations, and the names of the factions respectively, in order to make this clear. Sorry if it wasn't clear enough, perhaps I should have been more specific. The leader of the Wilde who made that pledge was, in my view, simply dishonest about it. Worse is that on the same dev forum where he made that pledge, he later asked for a buff to the previous scorpion by upgrading the power plant from medium to heavy, because a full 8 nomad turret loadout drained the core too fast. That was truly crazy.
If you want to get into details, the problem with the Wilde Gunboat with 8 nomad guns is that the 2.00 refire combined with the, if I remember correctly, superior damage per second compared to the older 4.00s, as well as faster muzzle speed, allowed it to effectively combat a more varied force. The 8 forward/back guns could convert the energy in the power core into damage output much faster than regular gunboat guns, meaning you could close in on a target, use your entire power plant in a burst, then retreat out and kite until you were ready to go again, thus its effectiveness against cruisers. In fact, the power of these ships became disproportionate once three or more were deployed in the same location, and consequently, wolfpacks of these ships were pretty common as nomad/wilde ships go. One would have to deploy significantly more numerical force to deal with such a task force, more than is really reasonable for all but the largest player factions.
As for the statement that you used it as the standard Keeper gunboat because the nomad gunboat was broken, I remember when an ancient Molly faction (Union of Gold - UoG if I remember correctly) used Corsair shield busters on their Taiidan bombers because "debs just weren't good enough". This is when the only shield busters that existed outside of the Corsair line were level 8 advanced debs. The point here isn't that Mollys were/are enemies of the Corsairs, but that they shouldn't have access to them but used them anyway for exclusively gameplay reasons. Given the maturity of the RP environment over the many years since that time, it's disappointing to see the same attitude from an exclusive invite only faction. However, I've searched for this example for a good long while and haven't come across it, so I understand if that's not convincing enough of an argument without an evidence base.
I don't deny that the Nomad Gunboat was "broken" insomuch as it was substandard for PvP - a problem that the nomad gunboat guns were designed to address. However, bear in mind that my primary faction at the time, the Corsairs, were sanctioned for utilising the Tiger Shark light fighter as a replacement for the actually broken Arwing that possessed, before its removal, a bug that randomly prevented ammunition weapons such as disruptors, mines and missiles from firing. Given that at the time, the Tiger Shark was civilian, I have a lingering sense of mistrust when it comes to similar examples that receive different treatment.
The use of the wilde gunboat in the state it was in by the Keepers is not something I have a problem with on its own - people PvP, and the point of competition is to win. The problem I have with it is why nomads use something robotic when they clearly have the Wilde for that? The Wilde which made and broke an agreement to use no more than 50% nomad guns on them. The RP justification for it is farcical - other factions have to deal with substandard equipment and they have no alternatives. They may campaign for alternatives, but they have to deal with it until they get them. Combine that with the fact that Keepers are an invite only faction, from which more is expected (and when factions dont live up to those expectations, they die like the Phantoms). There's actually no answer to their usage except "its better". Added to this was that gunboat's ability to give cruisers a challenge that other gunboats in similar numbers could not achieve. Some factions have better equipment than others, that's an unfortunate fact of discovery. Those who are particularly unlucky have no alternatives, even contrived ones, to fall back on.
The past is the past, but that doesn't mean it should be forgotten or trivialised in any way.
It's been a while Das Wildes and Nomads haven't made any danger,due to their activity,and if this new stuff makes them much active.I suggest there is no need to scaried about this new stuff. Let them try it out, and everything will be told in the near future. If you get killed once, you'll be careful next time when you see a Wilde or a Nomad in the same system.
And Jack told the most useful idea, draining their energy while they are cloacked is the best solution.
The past is the past, indeed. Nobody "trivialised" it, Connor, but time moves on, people move on, they come and go, some change and some don't. I have no intention to dwell in that old past. I want to see what's ahead and what can be done, what can be experimented with and so on, rather than being held as some sort of a guilt hostage for years and years, that's not productive.
I don't remember molly thing at all, honestly, so I can't comment on that situation at all. In case of old nomad gunboat however it wasn't "not good enough", it was just plain broken thing because of hardpoints aligned and oriented incorrectly and it was a technical issue. Fixes came but then rebalances came and it was just a one big mess with things left behind, outdated and so on. Anyway, this is really old stuff now and rummaging through it - I don't see the point of doing that. And bringing in Phantoms now? Are you feeling nostalgic or it's just grave digging?
p.s. Uh, Connor... You do know I disbanded Keepers when I quit disco two years ago, right? This one ain't invite-only, runs public recruitment and has indies even.
![[Image: cdSeFev.png]](http://i.imgur.com/cdSeFev.png)
