[EDIT] This topic is not about ship range any more. Now it's about should leaders have Leader ID, with exclusive access to all ships. And instead of nerf, they'd have NEGATIVE nerf (110% of core). Like heroes. Like boss.
I feel faction leaders are not having fun like before. Duties are too hard, rewards to tiny. And some ships are very unpopular, so I guess changes are coming soon. Lemme ask... what would happen if ALL factions would just have (sorted by speed):
1. LF
2. VHF and SHF (SHF modified to serve faction's RP* easier: war, OR piracy, OR escort, OR mining)
3. light boomer and heavy boomer
4. light transport (capable for an advanced RP*)
5. gunship and gunboat
6. heavy transport (companies ONLY)
And for ones with caps access:
7. destroyer and cruiser (slower than transport, pleeeeaaaaaseeee!)
8. BS and dread
9. death-star (Power house, but with barge dissadvatages. Just one per faction leader PERSONALLY!)
That RP* thing would be like:
- army: war is teamwork
- companies: VIP shuttle or exotic base materials transporting, depending of company's RP
- miners: mining/hauling ops
- mercs and hunters: prison mini-liner, for nice events with pirates liberating their friends. Nice for entry level NPC harvesting too.
- FL civilians: independent trade. Little bit of everything.
- criminals: quick base supply duties, smuggling and solo pirating
a) I hope this will prevent "independent" 5k traders working (supplying) for certain parties in very ooRP fashion. This way companies will engage in supplying enemy of their enemy.
b) This way I hope more fun for good old leaders, too.
c) This way players would join factions because they actually fit there, not because of their ship choice superiority.
New ships modeling is not needed, except death-star class, or civil gunship. Use existing ships, just alter their size and power a little. Delete ships that you see left after all this and nobody used them in previous mods.
leading a faction is voluntary, - the reason to lead ( or join ) a faction is to lead or join a faction alone. - to become part of a group of likeminded players.
if you require more motivation than that, you are looking for all the wrong reasons i believe.
when a faction leader doesn t want to lead anymore, he can look for a successor or close the faction. if leading becomes a chore and there is no one around to step up it is best to simply close the faction and take a breath.
it is likely that a faction has run its cause or is long past the sell date. clinging to a status just to keep a status isn t really beneficial for anyone. little rewards like flagships or similar won t do much, they will / might make a leader to cling to a rank even more without any other reason than not to loose something.
imo - the lifespan of most factions is roughly half a year. - beyond that - things become routine... and then possibly boring.
(10-04-2012, 01:02 PM)Jinx Wrote: imo - the lifespan of most factions is roughly half a year. - beyond that - things become routine... and then possibly boring.
No, that is wrong. The lifespan of a faction is PURELY dependant on the leader.
The more fun and cool a leader is, the more popular and lively the faction gets, and even if said leader withdraws for some time, it will still take weeks or maybe months before his withdrawal really hurt the faction.
It is when the leader cling for his position, yet does not promote actions or fun that the faction dies. I could list a few examples, but that would be counterproductive to this threads topic.
(10-04-2012, 12:41 PM)Pepe Wrote: I feel faction leaders are not having fun like before. Duties are too hard, rewards to tiny. And some ships are very unpopular, so I guess changes are coming soon.
There is a reason, and it lies with the devteam and the mentality of development within Discovery.
At some point, the devteam was given free reign to do what they wanted. No-one put the brakes on, and that lead to insane OP shiplines, like kusari, RM, Order/Corsair, Outcast and 4.85 gallia. Then thankfully things was straightened out, someone with the balls to put their foot on the brakes stepped up and things got better. However the damage was done.
In an effort to straighten the errors up, and make the game fair, a buff/nerf campaign started, slowly... Most notably was the turret split, which was one of the better ideas. It made previously super OP ships about as "op" as any other ship of the same class...
But things still arent perfectly fair. Some gets nerfed, some get buffed. And when the whining starts, the changes that should have been subtle were made much more noticable and further made people whine. This endless cycle of whining and nerfing of "your" shipline and the enemy usually crying of "buff my ships" at the same time lead to further extremities in "unfairness". This was again corrected to some degree by the "tech nerf" system.
Problem is, by the time things straighten out, the "stable and faithful" disco players had had enough and left/started to fade out for better games or RL.... In retroperspective one can say that the old system was bloody unfair, but people was generally more active non-the less. And personally, i dont believe those 2 years of stagnant 4.85 had so much to do with it, rather when what i'm getting at.
The situation within the "lore" department is "worse"... it has always been, and still largely is, ran on the mentality that "we (devs) write the book, you (players) write the spin-offs". And untill Friday was elected as "lore-master" things havent changed much... Then, now faction leaders are facing a new problem... their will to change stuff is most likely ruin their "comfort zone".
Let me give you an example; Althought every damn nation and law-enforcement agency knows about bretonians dealing with outcasts from time to time, it is still a largely hearsay base rumor ingame. we players, and our chars obviously knows this, and this "nod-nod wink-wink" diplomacy has been around for many years now. However, althought [LN], [RM], LPI, [KNF] and others know of this, the majority of NPC factions dont. And one can imagine what would happen if such RP was fully introduced as a "truth".... Powergaming, "rage gaming" (were haters go FU on a faction cuz suddenly they can do so through disco lore) and metagaming will follow the storyline as it progresses. OORP hatred can twist the situation badly, and in the end both the Outcast and Bretonian factions would have to face the truth that admitting the existence means there is no way back...
Now, personally i spent countless hours in bretonia, i undocked my dread into prisoner exchanges between BPA and LPI, i've fought alongside BAF, BIS, BPA, [LN] and QCP against the RM invasion. In a way, there should be no problems because official factions know this, hell it was even talked about in the LPI or LN MD at some point in time.
However, these ingame dealings, these ingame actions that we do, they carry great weight behind them.
If bretonia rumors said "we are supporting hessians", then you can imagine how the RM would feel, and a parade of turtles rolling into New London would be nothing short of the kind of retaliation we expect from such dealings.
Or perhaps if BHG Core REALLY disclosed their MO behind the "nomad hunt" and war against The Order... Trust me, things would get nasty
And last but not least, we got traditions. Some traditions CANNOT be broken. And although it IS a reality among leaders to reunite Corsairs and Outcasts, we also realize that this dream will forever be a dream because some things are so iconic to this mod that things won't change.
So, if you want to have a fun faction, make you're leader get his ass off his chair and play the damn game. Or, you read up the RP and join a new faction, OR, you actually try to do MORE within a faction then originally intended. Create small events, cut some deals with unusual people. Just dont cross the border between being a member and a leader.
Good Idea but not even a chance with the incredulous skypefriendship made balance and the OP stuff provided to some factions only.
Without proper open rules and guidelines for balancing and ship submissions made like the server rules without loopholes you would always have some that are close to the people that decide and they always would have better stuff.
Prysin is also completely wrong- none cares about your RP or what you done in-game-obviously the people with the power to decide how the ships would function does not play the game or log really rare-this is also first of the two main reasons why they does not understand the problems around the place.
Balance team determinates how the game will be played and have the most important role in the whole mod- when they are not doing their job the mod wont be enjoyable for faction leaders with mega nerfed and useless faction ships and not only for them- none likes to be the underdog. When you point out that one ship that is obviously OP is OP they start to troll you or to put stupid non-existent excuses-this is the second reason-denying that obviously broken stuff that is easy to fix is not broken.
Balance team needs people like Ursus to lead it-People that does not deny the facts, people that face and solve the problems instead of ignoring it and OPing even more their friends- you can check his topic about ship sub-classing. With clear guidelines about balancing and ship submissions and huge testing (we have a lot of good PvP people and I bet some of them would be willing to help) Discovery issues are rather easy to solve- but there is no will to solve it from the people that have the power to do it. It is our responsibility as players to cry out laud and showing the problems- some were indeed fixed like Werewolf and Sabre for example when at the same time new ones like Bottlenose appeared. Balance team is not bad by itself because they have the skill to fix the stuff the problem however is with liberty to do whatever they want and the lack of clear guidelines that does not allow them to abuse this liberty. It is hypocritical to to claim that they work to satisfy the community needs and improve the mod when they ignore all of the community feedback.
(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.)
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You are right Govedo, the balance team has been fixing the balance problems. They also nerfed the bottlenose with the cargo so it can't mount a CAU4. There isn't any OPing of friends though, most of the stuff is pretty well balanced. You need to stop acting as if the devs/balance team are evil though. It is getting annoying.
I can't say anything new (or clever) about OP ships, metagaming, sleeky diplomacy... Is there any sport with no fouls? But I've heard recently how many messages leaders must read every day. They read a hell out them, so members don't have to. They forumlance, so no one would forget about The Rules. They do diplomacy to make things easier. But... do they? And...
WHEN THEY FLY?
Most of stuff that leaders read was written by other leaders. Like nuclear chain reaction. They overwhelm each other with words. And there is no time to fly... no time to have fun. Of course they get washed-out too soon. We lost too many of our best men already.
Death: OUR RELIABLE COMMUNITY MEMBER was put out of action by TOO MUCH TEXT TO READ (need to reply to all that)
Would devs/admins/leaders read/write less if they fly/lead more? How about back to the roots, dudes? Have fun with us again. Do stupid things, like we do. Get ganked or killed by some OP ship on the end, like we are. And then try not to write hundreds of words about it, but log in and lead us to next system. Please? I’m sure it’s fun to do it with shipline I suggested, if it’s not now.
Here your beloved Bottlenose: [img=http://s7.postimage.org/yaydkyl1j/Meh.jpg] [img=http://s10.postimage.org/9oppnq5x1/meh2.jpg]
You cannot simply give SHF GB guns shield and core brutal strafing then reduce its armour a bit and get away with it because good pilots does not even need armour on bottlenose- they does not lose their shield.
If you cannot understand the problem you does not understand PvP Basics or you are just trolling.
It is just not fun to be faction leader- you have to deal with ton of stuff and it is not rewarding at all, each time when you are not around for 1-2 weeks because you have normal life you find mess when you come back. Sadly the old topics are not easy to find but I made several topics about it- the official factions have no real advantages compared to indies- faction flagship with better capability or better bases or anything better- discovery would be wonderful and a way more active place if all factions had 2 ID system like SCRA.
(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.)
Here your beloved Bottlenose: [img=http://s7.postimage.org/yaydkyl1j/Meh.jpg] [img=http://s10.postimage.org/9oppnq5x1/meh2.jpg]
You cannot simply give SHF GB guns shield and core brutal strafing then reduce its armour a bit and get away with it because good pilots does not even need armour on bottlenose- they does not lose their shield.
If you cannot understand the problem you does not understand PvP Basics or you are just trolling.
It is just not fun to be faction leader- you have to deal with ton of stuff and it is not rewarding at all, each time when you are not around for 1-2 weeks because you have normal life you find mess when you come back. Sadly the old topics are not easy to find but I made several topics about it- the official factions have no real advantages compared to indies- faction flagship with better capability or better bases or anything better- discovery would be wonderful and a way more active place if all factions had 2 ID system like SCRA.
Govedo, I hope your pictures will help get leaders back to game. I'd give all my OP ships for more leaders in-game. I can't use them well anyway. I can have tons of fun with any ship, if leaded well.
The problem is that leadership takes a lot of time and there are no system that gives the leaders any bonus for doing it. Try to come up with proper way to award the leaders for their time- one free SRP per faction for example or any unique ships/features- then more people would like to lead.
Second problem is that the good leader could be the active one.
I tried and found out that it is not possible to solve all faction issues if I does not spend at least 3-4 hours per week for this, even good organised factions where the decisions are not taken by single individual but made in leadership body are time consuming without any bonus for the ones that do it.
Also there are leaders that keep the position without being active and helping the faction because they like to have the position of power- this is the bad thing as well.
(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.)
And I presume you'll be modelling, texturing, coding, balancing AND checking all the ships that still need to be made, Pepe? I'm not quite sure if you realise just how much work goes in -one- ship, not to mention making dozens in one haul. Your plan would, if the entire devteam worked on it instead of the actual gaming world, take roughly a year I wager. If people wouldn't lose motivation.
So frankly, no thanks. It is far too much work for the returns.
[Edit] Ps Govedo, before you start questioning the competence of others, work on your own.
Wide awake in a world that sleeps, enduring thoughts, enduring scenes. The knowledge of what is yet to come.
From a time when all seems lost, from a dead man to a world, without restraint, unafraid and free.
Mostly retired Discovery member. May still visit from time to time.
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