(12-01-2024, 02:08 PM)Chuba Wrote: I will write exactly what I told Haste earlier today.
I believe that currently the game is easier than it has maybe ever been in terms of getting into pvp and actually achieving something - you no longer have people that can't be deshielded, you no longer have ships with holes in their hitboxes that'll let shots go through. There are no more instakills that Haste, Wesker, Pillow, I or literally anyone good can abuse.
The gap between "aces" and the "bad" players was unsurmountable most of the time. People like Haste just did not get deshielded by 99% of the playerbase.
The true unfortunate matter of the fact for people that aren't good currently: You would be so much worse in the old pvp system. If you think it's hard to kill someone good now, please properly remember how it was.
I hope one day the developer team can somehow host a day / couple days of .85/86 server so people lose the rose tinted glasses of delusion.
To compound Chuba’s and Haste’s point, there are multiple players who are at the top of the pile willing and looking for new people to teach snub pvp. Multiple OFs have players who are more or less “tasked” to help teach newer players.
Becoming an ace is difficult, sure, but I was able to rise into the top 10% in less than 6 months. Maybe I’m an exception, but there are people and places people can seek if they truly want to get better. Becoming serviceable in groupfights is relatively simple as far as snubs are concerned, and for 99% of the player base that is more than enough.
I’m happy to provide any and all guidance to what players want to know about snubs, and I know there are other players willing to teach just like I have.
(12-01-2024, 01:33 PM)Haste Wrote: it simply means that you can ignore the vast majority of micro mechanics and focus entirely on good positional and tactical play
This is a take that, funnily enough, hasn't occurred yet to the monkey at the back of my head. You're not at all wrong in saying that, I really do suffer from focusing on all the minor details and forgetting about the really important things, and I do agree that this is a triumph of the current system, after all.
I should also note that I had completely erased STS and blindfire from my memory, and damn does remembering those things make me realize how stupid my post looks. I am so glad that they're gone and simply being reminded that they existed as mechanics makes me appreciate 5.0+ capship balance even more than what I already do.
Regarding support roles, FoeHammer's ideas are very solid.
I don't think the direction of a repair ship is something the community likes, neither do I think it's worth it to spend the time and effort to properly balance the current repair ship that's in the game as a remodel is likely mandatory. My take on the matter is to double down on weaponry that heals.
Think about how every class has access to specific weaponry in order to damage a POB; I'd argue it'll be an interesting mechanic to approach the matter in a similar way when it comes to healing, and I disagree with it needing to be a snub-only thing.
Why not give the ability for cruisers, battlecruisers and even battleships to swap out damaging turrets for healing turrets?
Of course, said healing turrets would need to be strong enough to even warrant using them as you're effectively giving yourself a handicap in any 1v1 scenario imaginable while at the same time screaming at an enemy fleet to focus you down first during any fleet engagement.
I think it's a fun idea to experiment with.
Of course, we can't mention support ships without mentioning missiles. Looking at you, Fab.
As much as I'm not exactly known to be a missile abuser (never really was, never really will be?) I can't deny that the idea of a battlecruiser that has all sorts of torpedoes on it that the mind can imagine is very inviting. Between missile silos, burst-fire missiles and even launchers that fire more than one missile per mouseclick I dare say there can be some very funny loadout options, at least thinking about the matter as a battlecruiser player.
And last but not least, I also can't speak about battlecruiser loadouts without mentioning primary slots; a matter that I've brought up in the playtesting chat as well, but I don't see why it shouldn't be posted here either.
I am very much not a fan of how severely limited player options are regarding battlecruiser prim mounts. What do we really have as options?
Anti-shield:
Pulse
Pulse Repeater
PPAC
The repeater is a very successful attempt at a codename that truly is just a variant version of the generic weapon it replaces. There is nothing different stat-wise between the two weapons that have virtually the same efficiency, same speeds and ranges. A perfect example of a balanced codename.
The PPAC, funnily enough, is more of a basic replacement rather than a pulse replacement. It functions amazingly against snubcraft, and I'm not even saying that while looking at everyone that swapped to PPACs since the basic weapon reworks as I've been a PPAC user since the day 5.0 released - and I was a PPAC user even up to one year before 5.0 released during the playtesting period for it. The PPACs always excelled at fighting off snubs and in my opinion where better than basics because they did energy damage whereas basics did not, back then. The PPACs also had virtually the same anti-torp effectiveness as basics, and they did all of that while also serving as completely fine anti-shield weaponry, especially against smaller ships that you couldn't land pulse hits on.
Anti-hull:
Basics
Melters
Unfortunately, that is all. I won't get into details on the Melters as I'll be honest I've never used them, but looking at them stat-wise they appear to be what the Pulse Repeater is to the Pulse; an effective replacement and another fine example of a balanced codename.
So what is the problem, then? Lack of options.
In the main battery and heavy department battlecruisers have more options than their slots would ever allow them to fit on, and yet in the primary department they have basics and codename basics. Aside from giving us a burst-fire, a multi-fire and a regular missile as prims, why not give us even more options?
Solaris gatling/dual gatling laser, BC prim edition
A battleship ion blaster equivalent with reduced effectiveness and damage, and maybe more range than the pulses we already have.
The equivalent of a shotgun like the already existing revenant/volley cannon/shard but as a prim.
Anyway I've spent like thirty minutes on this post and with how it looks so far it reminds me of that other entity I share part of my name with so I think it's smart to call it here. It's also probably getting long enough for people to actually read it.
I'll leave a very short final note to simply address the snub-part of Haste's response and say that I fully agree with all the points being made. My own personal experience from flying snubs in the current patch has shown that they're indeed a lot easier to fly and not be completely dominated in. I'm way happier with how they are now compared to what they were four years ago.
(12-01-2024, 01:33 PM)Haste Wrote: I randomly began writing some incoherent thoughts on this. Quick disclaimer: I'm keeping up with this thread, and I don't want this post to come across as dismissing players' criticisms, as that's very much not the intent.
On Snubs:
The notion that fighters have somehow changed to cater more to veterans, in my opinion, is incompatible with reality. Almost every major change we've made to the class was done explicitly to close the gap:
- Standardized, vanilla-sized shield hitboxes to help weaker aimers get through shields so they can chip away at hull.
- Several passes on missiles designed to encourage their use, reduce the degree to which they are stigmatized, and generally integrate them properly into the snub landscape.
- Loads of individual ship balance passes. The reality is that outliers in power level are usually found by the best players, and then also exploited by the best players. A more even playing field benefits the average player more than the ace.
- Near removal of Nanobots and Shield Batteries dropping on death, which was a mechanic exclusively used by aces punching down to refill their supplies and fight ridiculous odds -- or at the very least to abuse the fact that Jimmy The Newbie came to help his friends and instead accidentally ended up helping Wesker -- on the enemy "team".
- Most recently, the changes to Class 1 fighter guns, normalizing 800+ m/s velocity guns. I have seen many players with weaker aim literally double their effective outgoing DPS by using them. Their hybrid nature also benefits players that hit less, as getting through shields is often a challenge for them, while aces can trivially deshield without a single dedicated anti-shield weapon.
- And yes, the removal of various types of instakill loadouts, whether they're SNACs or Mini Razor shotguns that could one-tap ships up to a certain armor threshold. Of course, aces were intimately familiar with these thresholds, while that fresh-faced LN ID fighter might not have realized that the Guardian's 11,000 was in fact well below it (while the Lynx' 12,400 was not).
The notion that weaker players could snatch a win from the jaws of defeat using things like SNACs is, to me, a seemingly very severe case of nostalgia glasses. For many years, I myself wouldn't lose shields in the vast majority of fights I took. Shield hitboxes were miniscule, strafe forces were absurd, and microscopic, insanely responsive ships were available if you knew where to look for them. In the rare case that anyone managed to deshield me, the odds of them also landing a SNAC on a small, barely-functional hitbox moving extremely evasively rounded down to zero percent. Instead, I remember cases where the SNAC allowed me or other bomber abusers to take on a literal dozen players at once, and by refilling my regens over and over, come out victorious. I wouldn't describe that as a friendlier PvP environment for the casual player.
On Capital Ships:
I'm very surprised to hear claims of increased keyboard-fu being a necessity for Battleships, of all things. I still have most of my old Battleship keybinds as they occupy a part of the keyboard I don't really use: I have five keys dedicated to firing weapons 1-5 manually. You absolutely needed six weapon groups as you needed to dedicate several groups to various kinds of blindfire, including a completely empty group for blindfire without convergence. Nowadays, I can both make do with one less weapon group and those manual fire keys are just entirely obsolete and are instead replaced by an infinitely more intuitive "toggle snap" key. Add to that a key to toggle shields, and if you're really sweaty, a set of subtargeting keys. In theory you could make do with one (or none, if you mostly participate in fleet fights), but let's say you want two to really minmax. You're still down net keys. Top it all off with a manual reload key -- the most luxury of luxuries, in my opinion -- and you've almost arrived back where we were ten years ago. Except for toggle reticle snap, all of these are also more optional than those blindfire keys ever were. You'd literally never drop the shields of anything smaller than a Bismarck without them, back then. By comparison, you get small incremental gains to your efficacy from mastering each of these mechanics now, and if you don't find yourself getting into duels often you can make do without half of them (or more).
Similarly, we deliberately moved away from STS in Gunboats, Cruisers and Battlecruisers because of the carpal-tunnel-inducing nature of the mechanic. That, and the fact that you could fairly easily macro it without anyone ever finding out, getting a massive advantage for automating a chunk of the game. I personally swapped four keys out that I used to strafe with for two that I use to roll -- and in many fights in many capital ship classes I don't really bother to use them. So, sure, we've added keys that can potentially increase your effectiveness in combat, but we've also removed some highly APM-intensive button mashing to make up for it.
I have to just assume that players who claim there are so many more keybinds required these days chose to use neither STS nor blindfire. But then that means they were heavily gimping themselves. How exactly is that different from playing today's Discovery with half of the newly-added keybinds not bound -- except for the fact that you're probably losing less power doing that nowadays? Not blindfiring in the low-mass-high-response capital ship era or not STSing in an era where that casually doubled your ability to dodge fire was a huge loss.
In my opinion, all of the mechanics we added create a nice gradual curve to climb when it comes to skill expression, as each only really adds a small, incremental advantage once mastered. That's always been the goal we set out with, and I feel like it's one we achieved.
(11-30-2024, 11:54 PM)Tenshi Wrote: In my experience since 5.0 released (I've probably been in three (?) fleet fights ever since) anything above a 3v3, maybe a 4v4, gets so complicated with how many things you need to keep in mind that at this point it's just better to not bother with it.
In my humble (and quite possibly wrong) opinion, the fact that it's virtually impossible to keep up with all the mechanics in a fleet fight is a triumph of the system, as it simply means that you can ignore the vast majority of micro mechanics and focus entirely on good positional and tactical play, only choosing to subtarget in the most niche of situations. The advantage of crazy-high-APM, absolutely optimal play in fleet fights compared to simply not doing so is very small, in my opinion, and unless you're doing a line of coke or something I don't think it's worth the loss in focus elsewhere.
I do agree, wholeheartedly, with the notion that some of the more explosive moments of old Discovery -- no matter how rare they were in reality -- lent themselves better to "Youtube Highlight Reels", and I also understand that that's something people miss. I'm all for suggestions on how to add some of it back. I just don't think instakilling SNACs are the way -- largely because I genuinely don't know how to balance such a weapon in modern-day Discovery with much, much higher hitrates in snub land, mostly by virtue of upscales and actually functional hitboxes. Any stats even remotely similar to the old ones would result in five-second fights at high skill levels -- especially, of course, punching down.
As for support roles: fire away with suggestions. It's something I'm definitely interested in implementing, and if we somehow managed to make support tools much less skill-testing than conventional weapons, that'd be even better.
You've raised some very salient points, and you're correct in the fact that a lot of people are simply forgetting how things were a long time ago, or more accurately before 5.0 rebalanced things. You're also very correct that intra-class balance is more than likely currently the best it has ever been across the board, but the larger issue is inter-class balance. By rebalancing things so that any ship can theoretically kill any other ship with a minimal numbers and/or skill advantage, you've effectively taken the impact out of flying larger ships, as balance currently stands, a handful of snubs can effectively neuter an entire fleet and make bringing any sort of mixed cap force entirely pointless.
You rightfully wanted to do away with the rock-paper-scissors mechanics, because that led to boring gameplay such as five Cougars just spamming Novas at clueless battleships that had no way of countering them. That is absolutely a good thing, having hard counters in PvP is not an enjoyable gameplay experience for anyone involved. One issue is we also don't have soft counters as of current balance. Let's use a relatively small group of VHFs, let's say three of them, and say they're engaging a single gunboat with everyone having a similar skill level. As balance currently stands, unless one of those fighters makes a rather large mistake and eats a gunboat mine, they are going to whittle down that gunboat every single time and the gunboat has no tools to counter this happening to it. There are no tools (let's be honest here this is almost exclusively weapons) that the gunboat can choose to take that make it more viable as an anti-snub platform. Gunboats are by far the most viable ship to engage snubs with currently too, and would be realistically the most capable of actually engaging this group of fighters.
Take that same group of fighters and put it up against a cruiser and the cruiser is going to struggle to even deal with those fighters, as the current hilariously inefficient weapons cruisers have to deal with smaller craft are so useless as to not even be on the ship. This is the part where Haste is going to bring up flaks being a thing again, and this is the part where I offer my entirely anecdotal evidence (yes I know you hate that) and say that flaks are effectively an annoyance at best, and are completely incapable of preventing a motivated enemy from flying in and doing damage to you. That's actually probably about where they should be as far as weapons go, but if that's the balance we're looking for on flaks, then we need to consider that we need weapons that can actually force an enemy away by doing actual appreciable damage to them, which current cruiser prims are simply not. From looking at the actual numbers, you're trying to make cruiser prims only be effective at close range against enemy snubs, so why not simply limit their range severely, but make them extremely capable within that range. From a casual overview of current weapon stats, the best range you would get out of a non-seeking fighter weapon is 575m. So instead of having grossly inaccurate prims that have 1750m range, why not remove the dispersion entirely, shorten the range down so they're an entirely point defense weapon (no more than 600m) and reducing the weapon velocity to no more than 1000m/s (probably closer to 800m/s). This would achieve all the same goals we have for the weapon, while allowing them to be more intuitive to use. If there is concern about these weapons not being viable against larger targets like gunboats because of the range difference, then simply offer an alternative weapon that goes in the same slot with increased range at a lower fire rate.
This brings me to the other major issue with the current cruiser and battlecruiser prims, and that is how the player behind the ship feels when using them. I understand that this is not something that can be properly balanced with statistics, but it still influences how people play, and impacts their satisfaction with the game. As it stands, the weapons feel weak and ineffective, and as if they have no impact. This is again, entirely anecdotal, but still an important aspect of gameplay. You can make a game mechanic as efficient as you want, but if it is simply unenjoyable to use, then the people playing the game will simply not use it. There is no way to balance around this, unfortunately, and the current sentiments are directly a result of making the game overall more balanced.
I feel we may be going to far with this. Excluding the top 10% or realistically the top 1% of the playerbase, there is effectively no difference between ships within the various snub classes, making them all feel incredibly bland to use. This is even more pronounced with bombers, which for most of the playerbase are currently just less maneuverable VHFs with no distinct advantage over them in dealing with caps, because the one weapon that bombers have that allows them to deal with caps at range is extremely limited by the availability of ammo. This also affects HFs, which while they are currently in the best state as far as balance goes in probably the entire Disco balance timeline, are so similar to VHFs as to at a glance be entirely indistinguishable. I feel that the best way to alleviate these issues would be to make the various snubs play more towards a "role" within snub balance, but going into the details on that here are outside of the scope of the current discussion, and also I feel require more time put into them before I'm comfortable putting forward the idea fully.
With that said, I believe we're due for a patch very soon, so a lot of what I suggest here may have either already been implemented or been made irrelevant due to other changes.
On the topic of support ships and 'healing turrets'.
What of a dedicated vessel or turret that would enable a ship to transfer a portion of it's own shield to another vessel?
Is that within the realm of possibility?
When contending with a monster, you'd be wise to give the devil his due.
I dont have experience when it comes to anything above a BC which is why I kept it within the realm of my own scope. So I'm looking at ways that a support weapon/gun can fit into the current way things are set up.
So I want to address what would be the tradeoffs for these and how to prevent support weapons being an "I win" Button
I really wouldnt want these to become "If my fleet has these We instawin" Ideally it would be to add a playstyle to add variety that the impact of these support weapons are dependent on Proper teamplay and coordination.
The reason I opened up with snubs being a candidate is mainly thats what I had most experience in PVP wise. 1v1 and Fleet. Second being Gunboats, BC 3rd.
A couple Ideas that pop into my head for Cap Support weapons would be something that is ammunition based (UNTRADE/TRACTORABLE) using the current Missile based weapon systems as a base.
Please keep this within realm of gameplay and not turn it into debates of wether or not it
I would like to see if these ever are implemented to be in the generic tech tree and purchasable for anyone to be able to use these.
Any hull healing mechanic is assumed to have the target ship deshielded
Anything marked with an * is something I think would require more expansion on balancing
BC/Cruisers:
Nanite Drone Carrier Launcher Deployer Infocard:
Launches 4 drones that carries an, ablative armor plating nanite payload that scans its target ship for highest priority hull breaches to reinforce damaged sections immediately sealing them.
Ammunition 60/120
Max Speed 120-170 (Forces Recipient to slow down to receive it, Opening then up for more DPS if done mid firefight)
1-1.2km Arming Distance (to allow time for interception)
Repairs 15.300 Hull per successful hit 61.200 Total (arbitrary amount, I just used 4 Breacher hits as a baseline)
Splash Radius of 100m (If intercepted/flakked nothing happens)*
*Allows friendly snubs to follow it in an heal off it themselves and any OPFOR will have to make a decision of either intercepting it and destroying it, Or risk following it in to heal off it themselves opening them up to getting shot
I think a really good candidate that could fill a "Support" role Class would be Gunboats
Something like maybe adding a feature to or creating a new GB mine entirely but I use the Riposte as a base
Powerposte mine
Same mechanics as a regular riposte mine,
PC to fire 121250 (half PC of a Lib GB)
PC given 100000 (2 seconds worth of a LABC PC regen)
If it hits hull it reduces reduces shield cooldown timer by idk 2-3 seconds?
If shields are up It gives that powercore to the Recipient but doesnt go into shields
I would like to keep shield regenning at minimal at best but would wanna entertain the idea of powercore giving. ANd what cap wouldnt like to receive Powercore?
And using Vandal as a base for Hull Healing like the Cruiser version or something.
(12-01-2024, 01:33 PM)Haste Wrote: On Capital Ships:
I'm very surprised to hear claims of increased keyboard-fu being a necessity for Battleships, of all things. I still have most of my old Battleship keybinds as they occupy a part of the keyboard I don't really use: I have five keys dedicated to firing weapons 1-5 manually. You absolutely needed six weapon groups as you needed to dedicate several groups to various kinds of blindfire, including a completely empty group for blindfire without convergence. Nowadays, I can both make do with one less weapon group and those manual fire keys are just entirely obsolete and are instead replaced by an infinitely more intuitive "toggle snap" key. Add to that a key to toggle shields, and if you're really sweaty, a set of subtargeting keys. In theory you could make do with one (or none, if you mostly participate in fleet fights), but let's say you want two to really minmax. You're still down net keys. Top it all off with a manual reload key -- the most luxury of luxuries, in my opinion -- and you've almost arrived back where we were ten years ago. Except for toggle reticle snap, all of these are also more optional than those blindfire keys ever were. You'd literally never drop the shields of anything smaller than a Bismarck without them, back then. By comparison, you get small incremental gains to your efficacy from mastering each of these mechanics now, and if you don't find yourself getting into duels often you can make do without half of them (or more).
My experience with capital ships started in the edge of 4.91, and my approach did not change until 5.0, where I seldom play them anymore. To contribute to a fleet fight and not be a detriment to my team, all I needed to do was bind my secondaries to one weapongroup, and in the case of the Marduk my hellbores and prims into another one, and simply turret steer and shoot. Not only was this enough to contribute to a fleet fight positively, adding strafe keys let me have a fighting chance in most duels I engaged in. The same thing applied to the Irra and LABC, where cerbs and prims on one group and secondaries on another was enough to fight. The KuDessie, Siris, and LSC required more groups for respective heavies, but I was able to cut down on those when Saronsen missiles showed up. Being good at capital ships required a vast amount of effort, but contributing required minimal. I've tried cruiser combat several times. I realized I had to add roll keys if I wanted to use the LM on the Siris or KuDessie. I realized that I had to add reticle snap and shield toggle keys to use any cruiser. I realized that I needed a separate weapongroup for each heavy on the KuDessie. I realized that I have to have a manual reload for my desolators on the KuDessie, or else I'll spend 80% of the time I should be firing reloading. Recently, I fought an already very weak BCR, dry and severely damaged from NPC battlezone, and not only did I barely do damage and lose with relative ease, I also used more than half of the keyboard in the process. I took more than a few minutes to stop and ask myself if I should redownload the APM/eAPM tracker I had from my days of Starcraft just to see how many unique button presses I was putting out in a minute. And even with all of that, it was laughably inconsequential.
My experience in battlecruisers and battleships was significantly worse, in that on top of trying and for the most part failing to keep my weapons at firing angles, even when I did fire, they were easily dodged by players who were significantly more skilled at the movement mechanics, or they hit and simply were inconsequential. Missiles ended up with roughly the same outcome, with the additional punishment of Nomads not having Harpoons and everyone else did, so even the simplest strategy regarding capital ships was not available to the one battlecruiser I had remaining. The option remaining was to die colorfully and pad someone's killstreak.
(12-01-2024, 01:33 PM)Haste Wrote: On Snubs:
The notion that fighters have somehow changed to cater more to veterans, in my opinion, is incompatible with reality. Almost every major change we've made to the class was done explicitly to close the gap:
- Standardized, vanilla-sized shield hitboxes to help weaker aimers get through shields so they can chip away at hull.
- Several passes on missiles designed to encourage their use, reduce the degree to which they are stigmatized, and generally integrate them properly into the snub landscape.
- Loads of individual ship balance passes. The reality is that outliers in power level are usually found by the best players, and then also exploited by the best players. A more even playing field benefits the average player more than the ace.
- Near removal of Nanobots and Shield Batteries dropping on death, which was a mechanic exclusively used by aces punching down to refill their supplies and fight ridiculous odds -- or at the very least to abuse the fact that Jimmy The Newbie came to help his friends and instead accidentally ended up helping Wesker -- on the enemy "team".
- Most recently, the changes to Class 1 fighter guns, normalizing 800+ m/s velocity guns. I have seen many players with weaker aim literally double their effective outgoing DPS by using them. Their hybrid nature also benefits players that hit less, as getting through shields is often a challenge for them, while aces can trivially deshield without a single dedicated anti-shield weapon.
- And yes, the removal of various types of instakill loadouts, whether they're SNACs or Mini Razor shotguns that could one-tap ships up to a certain armor threshold. Of course, aces were intimately familiar with these thresholds, while that fresh-faced LN ID fighter might not have realized that the Guardian's 11,000 was in fact well below it (while the Lynx' 12,400 was not).
Again, my experience with this is simply the opposite. My main signal that someone is new to the game is if I win against them in PvP. If they're even marginally higher skill tier, regardless of ship mismatches, I will do barely any damage to them. The last kill I've landed on a player that wasn't brand new to the game was when the player got tired of pvping me and just stopped and let me kill him to get an event point. In contrast, in 4.9 I fought some veteran names, and while I wasn't close to winning, I wasn't close to losing either. The reason why I (poorly) copied Rax's fighting style is that by mimicking what he was doing, I could land damage onto him, and I spent 2021 and 2022 in Conn for almost every moment I wasn't pvping in the RP environment in an effort to scratch something usable out of that style. Now, I'm wholly ineffective, regardless of loadout, except against new players. I had some barely competitive moments with a Delusion-Moonblast Defender, and in a NomProto-Railgun DEagle because I got lucky many times in a row against players who, realistically, would have beat me with ease. Across a variety of loadouts, including bugged/unintended ones, I provide no competition to anyone so much as slightly above my skill level, and there really isn't a way forward for me, even if I didn't have a job or sleep schedule. I don't even have meme, one-off strats like the two-wardog minesitting that I used to beat Werdi, as those have also been removed. The option remaining to me is to charge in valiantly and be a statistic in a killstreak, which is acceptable in that I can still provide RP to the story environment, but isn't particularly fun from a gameplay perspective.
I'll do something about my superiority complex when I cease to be superior.
"Whatever happened to catchin' a good old-fashioned passionate ass-whoopin and gettin' your shoes, coat, and your hat tooken?"
I won't offer you any suggestions as I haven't played for a while but I can offer you feedback of a person who quit shortly after 5.0.
I was a Kusari main, I didn't play anything outside of the house. KuDessie was my main ship for RP purposes and while I wasn't a PvP ace, I enjoyed playing it greatly. I never had an intention of being a PvP god and mostly played for the RP and sometimes just flying the ship and doing PvE missions and PVP whenever I could find it in my weird timezone. Things were ok even if RP was stagnant at times.
After 5.0 the "fun" of even simply flying a cruiser and even doing silly missions was gone. The system was more polished, more mechanically complex, and objectively superior to the one we had had before, but it was less fun. And I play the game for fun, not appreciating a new system's complexity. Not to be a hypocrite, I tested it, I learnt it and got decent with it but the "fun" never returned.
Similarly, the uniqueness of factions was never there. Like Godslayer pointed out, there ought to be some "oomph" to the factions both RP-wise and gameplay-wise. After a while, it just gets boring that everything is roughly the same, so save for RP fleur, all factions are the same. I still remember playing Coalition battlecruiser back in the day, it was the ship that got me playing disco in the first place and starting SCEC many years ago just for that purpose. Now it's just another bland BCR with 4 appendages that serve no purpose.
I recently returned to fly my old ships for a bit, testing the changes and seeing the RP. Upon logging in and flying for a bit, I came to the same conclusion I had when I quit — it simply was not fun, so even tho I am technically still within the KuGov and there is an ongoing Kusari-related event, I simply have no incentive to log because gameplay is not fun, and the lack of desire to do any RP follows.
I am not here to bash the balance team which I think did a monumental task introducing so many details to the equation. However, I do want the team to also think about the opinion of some people above, particularly new players, that also mirrors mine, that despite the new system being flashed out and complex, it is simply boring and not enticing. In Russian language there is a term related to gamedev called "vasyanstvo" referring to the tendency of devs (including mod devs) to overcomplicate a simple gameplay with details either on the basis of introducing "realism" or "to make things deeper" to improve the gameplay. However, the term has a strongly negative connotation because such games become too tedious/boring/complex/all of the aforementioned to play. There needs to be a balance.
I apologise for not bringing any suggestions but I do hope that a feedback from a person who quit over the rework can provide you with extra input on your further work. Who knows, maybe one day I will log in again to test the changes and will love them. For now, I would rather not spend my time on something that is simply not fun.
The bottom line to all this discussion is that the top devs (mainly Haste) has fine tuned everything to be within their own skill set for use- maximising their own chances within PvP encounters & providing elaborate reasons why when in reality, the base unspoken reason is for his enjoyment with zero consideration to actual balance or role play.
Look at every single change- it boost’s their own playstyles and nobody else’s. It just sucks the fun out of everything.
I recently had a haste only sided conversation about guns my char only had access to. They were role played as ‘high shield damage, slow refire, low speed & range guns which consume massive amounts of power to fire’ -
I pointed out how there are multiple other codes now which not only do more shield damage per shot fired/hit but also do huge hull damage, thus making the Defiler’s intended use a null and void point.
Haste went on about how it’s an excellent gun, that the RP which one of the dev team has deleted is irrelevant, how the ‘dps is higher’ and the ‘energy drain is less’ making it fair balance- and the guns work great on his Bastet loadouts he’s tailor made to work to his skill sets and over all I just need to get better at the game.
Ignore my personal situation here- that’s the mentality of the head developer Haste. Fine tune everything to his own hideously unbalanced view, suck any fun from anyone else then gaslight the player saying it’s a skill issue..
Besides all infocards of weapons are completely useless and tell you nothing about how the gun is supposed to be used or how it should perform.
Lets not speak about shields and mines and their functions that are even less transparent.
Edit: Speaking about the text and not the random number generator that is the dozens of lines of things no new player will understand (looking at you missiles as well)
It's high time all the newly added mechanics are actually explained ingame somewhere and not old patch notes.
idem goes for new commands added to the game that are yet to be added to /help.
The same for the new mining function, can I figure it out ingame without needing to look up a manual on the forums?
A lot of the grumpy nature of the community to balance is a lack of explanation of newly added mechanics.
Is there any explanation about how the fuze works ingame?
Freelancer was fun because it was easy to grasp.
Hell, I can't even chill and casually fly information anymore because of the cruise speed differences
Everything has to be micromanaged now...
/rant
Edit: And yes, I know manuals take a whole lot of effort and are pain to keep updated but if you (devs) want the support of this community for changed made to the mod, you're going to have to explain further than just patch notes and occasional feedback threads. Adding simple "we changed it to encourage... etc" would be useful too.
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