PVP balance - problem(s) and solution(s)?

[Czechmate]

Seeing KDA on a ship or even player list somewhere would be pretty neat for example

I guarantee you this will make every problem cited in this thread infinitely worse. Nothing will make a mildly above average pvper go out of their way to dunk on people RPing, or /1 /2ing random traders or whatever, faster than an ego boost for a bigger KDA number.

Hmm I guess you're right

[diamond1]

Seeing KDA on a ship or even player list somewhere would be pretty neat for example

absolutely not. this will accelerate problems a lot.

* increased frequency of targeting
* spite to ruin the kda (kinda the same as the first point)
* players deliberately avoiding individuals because they know who it is/how it's going to end up once they figure out who it is. even renames won't matter. ( half of this sentence already kinda happens anyways, but it'll make the issue more apparent. )
* more toxicity.

a scoreboard for individuals has never really worked well in fps games without some kind of argument, it won't work here in an already strained enviroment around pvp scenarios. i'm fine with scoreboards for events, but individual would not go well.

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[Reddy]

Back in the day people used to have ships in most factions so when a fight happened they could swap around to balance

This is still the case. What has truly, fundamentally changed between "now" and "then" is that people, especially shot-callers in groupfights, were expected to keep an eye on the progression of a groupfight and adjust their side's "participants" as needed. Is the opposing group struggling to even chip away a few bots while your own side's shredding 5 nanobots from the main target every second? Everyone can easily extrapolate that that'll quickly get out of hand and result in a steamroll. So, you've got options, like:

• Replace your strongest players with a weaker player sitting around. Pull out "Wesker", put in your fresh recruit and let him get some experience.
  
• Simply fight outnumbered. Wesker can stay in, but you're giving the weaker side numerical overweight.
  

In addition, if your side takes out a ship, it used to be "proper etiquette" to take a player on your own side out of the fight. If you're only winning by a little, this is an opportunity to actually bench someone a bit weaker, if needed. You'd get - justifiably - chewed out in your faction feedback thread if you were found lacking in the fair play department. Nowadays I often hear people talk about the snowballing effect of brawls where taking out a single ship quickly lopsides it and results in the fight taking a decisive turn and ending soon thereafter. Guess what? That was always the case, people just intentionally prevented it from happening.

As someone who was quite often benched in this way in the past, I know that it's not particularly exciting to show up to a fight only to sit there twiddling your thumbs. I honestly still show up to fights rather frequently only to realize that whichever side I'd join would become slightly too favored for it to be a net improvement to the fun of the participants, so I just sort of bide my time until the fight resolves or until one side gets enough of an advantage for me to be able to join the other. Nowadays we've all got jobs taking up much of our free time, so I do get that people just log in and want to shoot shit, not watch other people shoot shit. Still, for the purposes of good PvP I don't really think there's any better solution.

And yeah. If you're asking someone to disengage but they don't, here's the solution: sit out yourself. You might not be able to control others, but you can control yourself. Hopefully.

Yes the target callers would balance out the fight during the gathering stage, @Thunderer would make some on us would sit it out or join in depending on the situation. i really didn't mind watching as it was a good show. The goal was not to win or lose but to make both sides have a bit of fun. that concept of fun is being lost these days.

It is as you say, if you can't control the indies then it's best to disengage from the fight. i've done that many times.

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[Antonio]

the classic debate of sportsmanship - its straightforward.

1. do not gank
   
2. do not restock (carrier is ok)
   
3. do not combatdock (unless ganked)
   
4. do not acestack - you know who you are
   
5. do not wait for more enemies, take the initiative and switch sides
   
6. do not engage in a fair fight - sit it out until your side starts losing. alternatively, engage the opposite side's reinforcements
   

feel free to add more onto my list

most importantly, DO NOT CONTINUE THE GANKCYCLE, sometimes shit happens, we cant control indies, if you see that a rowdy bunch of them are not listening, take the initiative and disengage yourself, let them take the heat. THE COMMUNITY HAS TO SELF-REGULATE, if it doesn't then it will downspiral to some of theawful engagements the event had.

oh, and don't be afraid to get blued, its just a VIDEO GAME.

Spot on, as jammi pointed out rarely does the very first reply convey the right message when it comes to finding root causes of the issue.

That is only the first step however. On top of what you, Haste and jammi wrote, which I agree with, what comes next is putting all the "theory" into practice. One of the biggest issues why very little changes every time that a discussion such as this arises is because not enough people are there to put in the effort into improving the status quo. It's sadly easier to dig your head in the sand and go back to the never-ending gank cycle. Two reasons stand out for me:

1. Lack of care for the opposing side.

Everyone wants to have fun playing videogames. When you don't enjoy a particular game anymore chances are you should step back, take a break and find some other hobby to entertain you and bring you joy. In today's day and age it is effortless to find another source of entertainment; by continuing to spend valuable free time on something that isn't even enjoyable you are only doing yourself a disservice. In a multiplayer PvP environment fun can come at the expense of the person you're playing up against. Professional games solve this via matchmaking, but since Discovery doesn't have any it is forced to self-regulate on the matter in order to provide at least somewhat of a fun experience to the opposing side. The simple rule of thumb is this: when you are mid-fight that is likely to start snowballing one way, put yourself into the point of view of one of the players on the receiving end. Would you have fun playing this fight out? If the answer is no, you should ask your group leader to start pulling people out or pull out yourself, as indies cannot be controlled. If enough people start having this mentality I have no doubt the PvP etiquette would change rather fast. That brings me up to the second point.

2. Lack of responsibility.

In order to enforce any kind of a self-regulating environment, someone has to take responsibility on themselves to do it. In the past these were official factions, who put their hard-earned reputation on the line and upheld a higher standard of both roleplay and PvP etiquette. If you weren't behaving, your feedback thread, PMs and Skype/Discord would be on fire quite fast. People were far more willing to talk it out and try to make the experience fun for both sides. Was it perfect? Far from it. But it worked. The problem nowadays is that most activity comes from noname indies. And I don't mean just indies, I mean indies with zero roleplay background or paper trail regarding the character or the player behind the characters. If some indie had twenty roleplay threads behind their char and it was well known, they'd have that char's reputation on the line when repeatedly engaging in poor PvP behavior.

When official factions are in the minority, and indies don't have any responsibility, it is very difficult to get the critical mass to make a change even when you personally are willing to do it. People are taking the easy route of logging a random indie, quickly ganking someone to death, getting their adrenaline spike and logging off knowing nobody can do anything about it. When there is an official faction and players transparently talking about PvP etiquette it's an entirely different story, as you have someone vouching for the whole faction. Official factions are at their lowest point they have ever been, and it's not only their fault for it. They barely get any advantages over indies, with all the paperwork and responsibility regarding upholding a reputation, roleplaying, having minimum active time, etc. which naturally means many players simply have no incentive to join OFs. I don't have a magical solution for this, but I'm confident that official factions are the ones who can spearhead self-regulation coming back to Discovery. It worked fine for years and years in the past, it can work again. This deserves a dedicated thread on how to make official factions more appealing as well as increasing the general effort one puts into their character so I won't go too much off topic, but some ways OFs can be made more appealing are unique perks (buffed tlagsnet for police, /nodock for law enforcement bases on law enforcement IDs, 5.2k transport for official corporate factions), better ID lines (larger ZoI, better engagement rights) or unique commodities and ships.

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SNAC Montage Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Thruster SNAC

[darkwind]

...
So my question for you is - is PvP balance a problem? And if it is, how do we solve the problem?

From my outdated gameplay, i enjoyed fighting any battle in caps. For the reason of even if u are going to have a loss in the battle, you are still going to make considerable damage to ship. Making win closer.
My effort mattered. Even if i was not winning.

With snubs, i had issue that... basically people could evade all my shots, and even if hit, they would replenish their nanobots and batteries from some other fallen ships.
With removal of power from all newbie friendly guns like missiles for snubs (as well as heavily nerfing at the time of my gameplay super armored fighters), there were no really option to fight against professional fighters and making "ANY" impact that would show my effort mattered.
I could as well just do suicide for that matter against death wall result would be very much the same.

So tldr in my opinion: make events with caps.
And if u wish making sub fighters more friendly, try to shift them to more armored/battery state with easier to landing a hit to enemy ships for newbies.
give an option somehow if not winning, but at least damaging enemies (and making hits themselves).
super armored superfighters and freighters worked very friendly before, if they are still usable and could be engaged in some suicidal dangerous battle against professional players, then it is fun not really up to date with current balancing.
Events often had limitations against usage of such ships though

Some also funny note: It was really cool to have ability with some luck winning against professional players, if i managed to combine correctly ramming with rockets and mines together. Suicidal, but fun and with chance to win But as far as i remember mines were nerfed against this gameplay i think too at some point. Together with nerfs to superfighters, it made considerably harder to go for tactic i think.
Everything was leading towards forcing to use guns only, and with aim problems against professionals... we go back to issue of potentially landing not even a single hit, or professionals replenshing their nanobots/batteries from somewhere and going back to full capacity like it is nothing. (P.S. may be to make nanobots/batteries not lootable too?)

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[darkwind]

[*]do not restock (carrier is ok)

If nanobots / batteries are still lootable. I would suggest making them not lootable / not droppable from other player destroyed ships Or in general not possible to tractor beam in
Then there would be at least some chance to make lasting damage against professional players.
Otherwise they will just replenish their health and continue killing spree in snubs

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[Czechmate]

...
So my question for you is - is PvP balance a problem? And if it is, how do we solve the problem?

From my outdated gameplay, i enjoyed fighting any battle in caps. For the reason of even if u are going to have a loss in the battle, you are still going to make considerable damage to ship. Making win closer.
My effort mattered. Even if i was not winning.

With snubs, i had issue that... basically people could evade all my shots, and even if hit, they would replenish their nanobots and batteries from some other fallen ships.
With removal of power from all newbie friendly guns like missiles for snubs (as well as heavily nerfing at the time of my gameplay super armored fighters), there were no really option to fight against professional fighters and making "ANY" impact that would show my effort mattered.
I could as well just do suicide for that matter against death wall result would be very much the same.

So tldr in my opinion: make events with caps.
And if u wish making sub fighters more friendly, try to shift them to more armored/battery state with easier to landing a hit to enemy ships for newbies.
give an option somehow if not winning, but at least damaging enemies (and making hits themselves).
super armored superfighters and freighters worked very friendly before, if they are still usable and could be engaged in some suicidal dangerous battle against professional players, then it is fun not really up to date with current balancing.
Events often had limitations against usage of such ships though

Some also funny note: It was really cool to have ability with some luck winning against professional players, if i managed to combine correctly ramming with rockets and mines together. Suicidal, but fun and with chance to win But as far as i remember mines were nerfed against this gameplay i think too at some point. Together with nerfs to superfighters, it made considerably harder to go for tactic i think.
Everything was leading towards forcing to use guns only, and with aim problems against professionals... we go back to issue of potentially landing not even a single hit, or professionals replenshing their nanobots/batteries from somewhere and going back to full capacity like it is nothing. (P.S. may be to make nanobots/batteries not lootable too?)

nanos were fixed, full don't drop.

Chip Damage is the meta now, you can even regen if you die - I personally stopped playing snubs altogether because of that chip damage stuff, removal of nova kills- you just have A>B, no chance for the weaker guy to get lucky, it does seem snub fights have more or less died off on the server, this might be one of the reasons

[darkwind]

Chip Damage is the meta now, you can even regen if you die - I personally stopped playing snubs altogether because of that chip damage stuff, removal of novas - you just have A>B, no chance for the weaker guy to get lucky, it does seem snub fights have more or less died off on the server, this might be one of the reasons

What's a Chip Damage? And how were novas affected? Are they no longer mountable to superfighters or not making area of damage effect or smth?

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[Czechmate]

Chip Damage is the meta now, you can even regen if you die - I personally stopped playing snubs altogether because of that chip damage stuff, removal of novas - you just have A>B, no chance for the weaker guy to get lucky, it does seem snub fights have more or less died off on the server, this might be one of the reasons

What's a Chip Damage? And how were novas affected? Are they no longer mountable to superfighters or not making area of damage effect or smth?

nah just super hard to hit, you can fire only one at a time, people can regen anyway (often without guns, but people just F1 in space to avoid giving a blue)

The new disco balance approach is slow drawn-out fights where you grind your opponents down, rather than big hits - we had 1.5hr cap battles etc.

[darkwind]

nah just super hard to hit, you can fire only one at a time, people can regen anyway (often without guns, but people just F1 in space to avoid giving a blue)

The new disco balance approach is slow drawn-out fights where you grind your opponents down, rather than big hits - we had 1.5hr cap battles etc.

Yeah.. got it. Superfighters apperently can't fire Novas any longer. Apperently insufficient powercore today, thus removing exhaust your enemy strategy.
And bombers can fire only one instead of two. Thus removing one lucky hit strategy.
That removes plausability of nova fighting suicial tactic almost completely.
Ergh... minus two newbie friendly ways to fight in snubs (are there any left?). Balancing somehow always happens towards professional snub-fighters, as if gap was not big enough :/

Anyway... easy solution to all those problems
Lets just to Caps events instead of snubs. Bless having an alternative As long as capitals remain protected against snubs, we can enjoy fights in snub-free environment.

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