Yesterday I was quite disappointed to find out the people in charge of the player faction decided to just remove their faction write-up in a rage fit against the recent balance changes regarding their own ship. It was quite childish move and only showed how spoiled you were with the amount of equipment you were given access to over the past months. Frankly I'd consider the fact you were ready to throw away the faction as a sign you don't even care for it that much in the first place. But let's say you do, would that still justify demanding overpowered gear and complaining when a patch note doesn't really suit you? Maybe @Sici should delete all Core lore until Marlin actually gets the same buffs that the Manta got?
Yes, Arbeiter isn't the easiest to use ship. It's fairly big, but it's quite fast and the 15K powercore combined with the 7 guns it has allow brutal amounts of damage to be done upon the target. Not to mentions it has upper tier armor and a ton of nanobots/shield batteries. It kind of reminds me of the Eagle, another ship which is quite fast, but requires a lot of effort to dodge incoming fire efficiently. Obviously for a beginner pilot this ship would obviously offer a lot of challenges that need overcoming, but the EXACT SAME could be said for any ship that isn't a jack of all trades that suits any flight style. If you think having this ship is bad consider how newbies who don't know how to turn do in a 5 gun Wraith VHF, the only ship the Rheinland Military players are expected to fly in terms of a snub fighter. That ship performs quite sub-par unless you understand it's strengths and weaknesses and can use the speed to your advantage. Have you also considered how the BAF playerbase must feel considering they have one of the slowest VHFs that also has less powercore than the Arbeiter? These very same people also had to go against people like Wesker flying an Odin in Omega-3 and Cambridge so I doubt the argument of having less skilled opponents really counts here. Or perhaps the Gaians flying their huge Anaconda that just baits to soak up all that damage? It's a ship quite like yours, but guess what - it doesn't even have 7 guns to begin with, nor a 15K powercore.
Seeing all this drama yesterday night pissed me off enough to actually bother to spend some pocket change and make a new character using a budget of 5 million (1.2 million weren't even used) to create an armorless Arbeiter VHF with a class 10 shield + enh. thruster and only guns (no CD/torpedo slot, no nuke) to test the ship in Connecticut. I originally planned to put Heavy Armor Upgrade 1, but due to funds shortage I was forced to fly it armorless. This means the ship had 2.5 times less hull. Instead of having 31K hull I had the mere 12.4K. For reference that is less than some light fighter hulls with the AU8.
Your ship is perfectly usable. It's not the best of it's kind, but it would hold on par with all of it's opponents if you put the effort to practice rather than rely on threatening to delete your own faction over nerfs.
Vasko, that's because you are a person who has eaten teeth on PVP. Majority of UN| isn't like that. They do not belong to the group of players who can screw up anyone he or she desire in an armorless CSV.
This is not the argument.
Myself I cannot improve, because the fact I barely have 30-45 FPS using my ancient-old PC in fights against people who have 120 FPS on their daddy money's $1000 rigs is a huge setback. I had been training snub PVP for three years. I just die less often and simply ditched any further attempts to even try caring about it.
After I got killed in-game as a snub way too many times. Again. And again. And again. This is not definition of what I would ever call 'having fun'. It's not.
Look, everyone knows that once you start taking steroids, you don't want to stop. Muscle-mass gain is addictive, yet 'roids can lead to anger due to secondary hormonal changes which increase anxiety and depression. This isn't helped when you're being beat up by all the featherweights in the room. But you have to keep taking more because people are going to beat the crap out of you because you appear to be big.
The same applies to spaceships. And factions.
Now here's your problem - all - of my members are newer players, or older players who either have ping issues (me), due to unavoidable factors like global location, or simply having toaster hardware. These newer players are essentially the Arbeiter's only consistent playerbase apart from the Connecticut crowd who pull a no-RP con-only Arbeiter out of their behinds, mostly to handshake each other about how powerful the ship is, and meme about how undeserving we all are.
Newer players cannot appropriately use its strengths. A fighter like the wraith or guardian, on the other hand, is pretty easy for newer players to pick up. I'm averse to everyone flying eagles as that's a fairly flavourless thing to do - besides, the Eagle is a Libertonian design, and thus doesn't need to be overrepresented by Unioners flying them for obvious lore reasons, despite the Unioners having a stockpile of the craft. Eagles are bland.
Now a noob can pick up a Guardian or an Odin and thrash an Arbeiter in anything other than a 1v1 joust. With the removal of the extra gun, this just became a bigger problem.
I do not care what the 0.1% of snub pilots can make the Arbeiter do, as that fact is irrelevant in regards to who actually plays the ship. If the creme of PVPers played the Arbeiter, that would be a concern. They do not.
Therefore, nerfing the experience for less capable snub pilots only motivates people to play caps instead. And I refuse to turn Unioners into an all-caps faction.
In addition my actions were largely supported by Unioners, with one exception whose advice I did take, and reposted the document once the file was back. It had the intended effect - attention was brought to the issue, which is the purpose of a protest. I do not particularly mind how people regard me - I care about the happiness of my member base, and the happiness of people who have ingame encounters with my member base.
@Durandal put it best. There is an overarching issue that factions at large are immediately hounded when they log in. This is okay if you have the capability, organisation, and will, to spin fifty plates at once whilst playing a strategic Napoleon and maximising equipment meta as hard as you can splash credits at it, but most of us do not have the time.
When I took the reigns over of the Unioners, I did so with an agenda. I wanted to prove that an under-loved ID for an NPC faction that was regarded in the community as dead-in-the-water could be made survivable and that vanilla unlawful factions other than Outcasts, Corsairs, Rogues, Hessians, Blood Dragons, could have some life, in much the same way that Mollys and Gaians have done so in Bretonia. That there was some love in the little guys. I also wanted to create relatively fun piracy and bring a similar aesthetic to what Liberty Rogues have done for Liberty, to Rheinland, as that's always healthy. We haven't succeeded in everything we wanted to do, but we've done pretty well. Six months from now, Unioners will still be official, more likely than not.
I will always prioritize the interests of less experience players than veterans. Not only because they're my member base, but because veterans (like you and me) can look after ourselves, are loud, outspoken in our opinions.
I do listen to feedback, Blacko. I agree I could have handled it better. I still maintain that the Arbeiter nerf was injudicious - not especially because I want broken equipment, but because I want to conserve what was already occurring: a more-or-less even PVP situation between lawfuls and Unioners - which is good and healthy. You might go to conn and do well in it for all I know - you're a good snub pilot. You can figure out its strengths and weaknesses in a matter of hours whilst somebody who plays the ship tagged might take months to figure its nuances. Consider that. I also have to motivate people to play snubs before we turn into a community where everyone less skilled flies caps and only some kind of illuminati of hyper-wiz kids flies around in fighters.
As is universally recognised, even by you, the Arbeiter is a bad fighter in the hands of noobs, but great in the hands of pros. This was the case even when it had eight guns. It's still good for pros, but now it's a lot worse for noobs.
It rewards learning to PVP properly in a way its stats don't immediately make obvious. And I try to make UN somewhere where learning is meant to be fun. Where people who arn't into PVP, or arn't into smuggling, or into more intense RP, can be gently nudged into learning. And I know I am banging my head against a wall here and I can't convince you. But I will not abandon my position to people who do not fly the ship on the real server. Make a different unioner group and fly it for a year and then come back to me.
We should not all be held to the smallest denominator: PVP supermen. And every time PVP supermen go and complain to the balance devs the gameplay of the actual, less-skilled player-base gets shafted. Over and over. This was what the eight guns were originally implemented to fix; Haste recognised this.
Edit: It may surprise people, but I do not like stirring forum debates. It doesn't benefit me or Unioners. However I will always challenge groupthink when I believe it's dangerous to the wellbeing of the server as a whole.
(10-30-2017, 07:43 PM)Toris Wrote: Myself I cannot improve, because the fact I barely have 30-45 FPS using my ancient-old PC in fights against people who have 120 FPS on their daddy money's $1000 rigs is a huge setback.
I've been playing on an unstable 40FPS for 4 years now @ 800x600 or 1024x768 (rez is a huge factor for me). When I care enough about being consistent I can hold up against a majority of the server. And don't give me the "but I don't have time to waste in conn" bs because my XTF ships don't have more than a total of 50 hours of training on them, and that's spread across 2 years.
(10-30-2017, 07:43 PM)Toris Wrote: Myself I cannot improve, because the fact I barely have 30-45 FPS using my ancient-old PC in fights against people who have 120 FPS on their daddy money's $1000 rigs is a huge setback.
I've been playing on an unstable 40FPS for 4 years now @ 800x600 or 1024x768 (rez is a huge factor for me). When I care enough about being consistent I can hold up against a majority of the server. And don't give me the "but I don't have time to waste in conn" bs because my XTF ships don't have more than a total of 50 hours of training on them, and that's spread across 2 years.
Being killed after three years of efforts in snub PVP isn't fun, if you are killed way too many times. Again and again.
Dying over and over and over is just a part of the learning process. It takes a minimal amount of brain power and basic game knowledge to start figuring out what you're doing wrong and what you'r killers are doing better. If you can't even handle that, then you don't deserve to become decent ngl.
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