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Stop focusing development on space pvp.


Charlotte

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Now that your reading this. here are my reasons:

the current state of the game, and the space only CvC cant be properly tested and balanced due to desync and the fact that the majority population vastly does not pvp (we just warp around it, or go outside of the pipe). 

as it stands, pvp is just sit for hours and wait for something to come to you. basically fishing. then you have to hope you can catch it, or get in range to shoot it a bunch. hard to do when its in warp, or at max speed.

so my recommendation, is to focus on the non pvp aspects of development. putting pvp on the back burner, much like thoramine.

-OR-

Address the core issues of space pvp, which is lacking.
1) the ability to properly engage in fights
2) reducing the cost to defend yourself

3) allowing for a entry level of rudimentary weapons a lone player can use/craft.
4) the ability to catch people.

Here is what I am proposing:
1) allow for a tier 5 item called a 'gravity field generator' to be deployed only on a space core. fueled by warpcells ( or something similar, basically its warping space to generate gravity ). this forces a 3G gravity effect over 10 SU to pull in things within 5SU of the gravity field generator. think of it as a sphere effect with a nullified sphere effect inside. basically a trap. this affects all players and orgs. you can escape it by applying more then 3g's of force to get out of the field. or shoot the space core that contains the gravity field generator.
2) with this change, we need to limit G forces on combat ships in some way. so my second proposal is a new type of voxel called 'armor.' this voxel material has significantly more hp and weight over honeycomb (its denser, because its armor). since ships are basically trapped inside of a gravity well arena, you cant always just zoom zoom, out of range of everything to regenerate shields. you also need to be able to defend a static space core holding the field together. this will slow down ships, and help fix the rubber banding/desync issues due to high velocity combat. this is where armor comes in nicely. since its super heavy and has a high amount of hp. people cant just cube meta it. otherwise they will not have enough thrust to move around. so a balance of hull armor and mobility is created. currently mobility is king because of shield venting by running away. but in a arena small area, with a point to defend while attacking, a mix of fortification from slow ships and space station vs fast interceptor type ships is created. 
3) rewarding players for risk. currently, pvp is not profitable, and people just delete their cargo as they are dying. a new proposal is a questionable one, insurance. people do not like to lose things they worked hard on in a videogame, and since the nature of the game is very slow paced and over a long period of time, my recommendation is a insurance premium a player can put on their ships. this is a 1 time fee for a few hours of insurance type of thing. essentially, you pick up some cargo, then insure your ship for about 60-70% of what the elements and cargo is worth for about 5% of the premium. when insured, anything that is not fuel or ammo is locked, and cant be moved or deleted until the insurance policy is canceled. you also cant edit your ship by adding or removing elements. this solves the issue of deleting profitable things from the people engaging in pvp, while also dulling the pain of losing a ship and cargo. as I said before, the duration of the insurance is short, lasting a few hours or until canceled by the ship owner. the only way to insure a ship is if its within 2 SU of a market (this can change in the future to something else. but the idea is you have to be close to a insurance agency place. ) to balance the economy, a insured ship has a chance to have some elements deleted when cored ( lets say about 50% of the elements for a ballpark amount. ) however containers are a exception to deletion.
4) currently weapons are balanced horridly, so here is what I think needs to change. weapon range, all sizes of weapons should have the same range. the only difference should be tracking and damage application. XS being better at tracking and hitting a target, but have low damage output. and L being worse at tracking and hitting fast targets, but hit very hard. range should be tied to the type of weapon, lasers being short ranged with bonus's to tracking, cannons in the middle, and railguns being long range, with lower tracking, but more damage. all turrets should have a omni directional firing arc. it does not make sense why they don't. this is where I have to add, a new proposed weapon type, dorsal (or fixed) weapons their firing angle is very limited (like 2 degrees, and deal big damage, have long reload times (shoots 1 shot every 30 seconds or so) and have to be mounted on a M or L core. the purpose is a siege type of weapon. as for missile changes, this is where things get interesting. it does not make sense that missiles function how they do. so the proposed change is to make missiles the weapon system that is the widely used for those being chased or to attack static/slow targets. each missile pod has a fixed container you have to manually load. each missile is then buffed in volume, and has to be loaded like fuel. making this weapon a preloaded weapon system (about 24 shots before needing to reload it.) the size will determine the damage, but will also increase the volume and material cost of the ammo. missiles have access to all 4 damage types, and is loaded similarly to fuel where only 1 type can be loaded per launcher. how it will change to work, is if the difference in velocity of the shooter and target is less then 3000 kph in the forward direction of reference (basically, shooting someone following you or slower then you), it will hit. and deal big damage. similar to a rail gun. however its shots are limited until reloaded and the range is just under railgun range. due to this, you can only attach 1 missile launcher to 1 control/gunner seat. the idea is a weapon to use against a target with limited shots. meaning its not likely to kill a target if its properly defended but allows for a entry level weapon system to be attached to most ships that a single pilot can use. the new changes would make missile launchers a tier 2 crafted item, turrets a tier 3-5, and dorsal weapons a tier 5 item.

Most of the above changes would make considerable leaps towards a more balanced pvp system with more fun for all parties. as with anything, this is what I believe needs to be done, or at least the general spirit of things that need to change for space pvp. since it cant hurt to propose it, I did. it cant be dumber then the current state of pvp where people exceed the g forces that would kill a human 3 times over, or the 'fishing' for conflict that exists.

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18 minutes ago, Charlotte said:

...
1) allow for a tier 5 item called a 'gravity field generator' to be deployed only on a space core. fueled by warpcells ( or something similar, basically its warping space to generate gravity ). this forces a 3G gravity effect over 10 SU to pull in things within 5SU of the gravity field generator. think of it as a sphere effect with a nullified sphere effect inside. basically a trap. this affects all players and orgs. you can escape it by applying more then 3g's of force to get out of the field. or shoot the space core that contains the gravity field generator.

...

 

"Interdiction" is somewhere on NQ's to do list, I'd like them to hurry up with it a bit. If we were to stack your gravity arena on top of it then that would be interesting, It will however require some manner of limitation, such as the inability to have multiple such units overlapping their fields of effect, lest we end up with player-made black holes that just crush everything against a space-core in their center with an armed core nearby to blast anything caught.

 

19 minutes ago, Charlotte said:

...

2) with this change, we need to limit G forces on combat ships in some way. so my second proposal is a new type of voxel called 'armor.' ...

 

...

4) currently weapons are balanced horridly, so here is what I think needs to change. ...

 

I like the idea of armor, and am quite aware of the issues with the game's current replica of eve's nano-tank. Unfortunately I do also very well remember the cube-meta, and how in the past battles between even small numbers of ships would drag on quite often until one side ran out of repair material/ammo/fuel. On top of that, cubes didn't need to move and keep up, they could get in to position and just sit because tracking was relative to the attacking ship's orientation, so all they needed to do was rotate enough to keep their target from having too much relative angular velocity, and let attackers come to them to try and wear through the armor. Finally, even if there was something to force movement as a part of combat, NQ has to my knowledge not yet dealt with other current movement-related exploits like fuel scripts and clang-drives that make some of the current absurdity even more viable than it already should be. CCS and tiny ammo-cans were implemented to stop cubes, hence the super-fast paper-armored SNES cartridges that are the current meta, trying to push it back to an armor-meta wont solve it.

 

Having had a lot of time to look and consider how everything goes and is affected, and how continued tweaks to combat-related systems have proven relatively ineffective at substantially fixing and balancing things, it has become apparent that rebalancing weapons and armor/shields wont fix the underlying problem. To put it simply, combat isn't complex enough, there are so few variables that players can still do the math and work out a mathematical "best" to which the only counter is more of itself. We need things like power and heat-management, e-war, and elements that modify weapon and shield output at the cost of some other part of the attached ship's function.

 

6 hours ago, Charlotte said:

...
3) rewarding players for risk. currently, pvp is not profitable, and people just delete their cargo as they are dying. a new proposal is a questionable one, insurance. people do not like to lose things they worked hard on in a videogame, and since the nature of the game is very slow paced and over a long period of time, my recommendation is a insurance premium a player can put on their ships. this is a 1 time fee for a few hours of insurance type of thing. essentially, you pick up some cargo, then insure your ship for about 60-70% of what the elements and cargo is worth for about 5% of the premium. when insured, anything that is not fuel or ammo is locked, and cant be moved or deleted until the insurance policy is canceled. you also cant edit your ship by adding or removing elements. this solves the issue of deleting profitable things from the people engaging in pvp, while also dulling the pain of losing a ship and cargo. as I said before, the duration of the insurance is short, lasting a few hours or until canceled by the ship owner. the only way to insure a ship is if its within 2 SU of a market (this can change in the future to something else. but the idea is you have to be close to a insurance agency place. ) to balance the economy, a insured ship has a chance to have some elements deleted when cored ( lets say about 50% of the elements for a ballpark amount. ) however containers are a exception to deletion.

...

 

This is a good idea, though I might propose a few modifications:
-There needs to be some manner of exception in the cargo-lock for things like fuel, ammo, and scrap, as large multi-crewed ships tend to find they need to be able to reload the ammo magazines, refuel the tanks, and patch up damaged components to keep them going just that little bit longer during a shootout.

-Random element deletion doesn't need to happen. In my experience elements with lives missing tend to end up in either the trophy case or the scrap bin. If we need to encourage greater element loss in combat then it would perhaps be more viable to just add elements to the ccs math so that a few more shots are fired and take out more elements before the ship's core breaks. All but the largest elements tend to lack the hp to survive even a single direct hit from the smallest gun, and larger weapons often can clear clusters of elements at a time if they aren't all completely buried under thick voxel armor.

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the idea for the armor is mainly for stations, or more resilient ships that defend these stations. the idea is, that you bring in your enemy into a rumble arena that is walled off by gravity. it lets people counter it if they are alert, but the heavy ships will have a hard time. the wide area is like net fishing, rather then RnR fishing. the concept is more to allow for faster ships to be lightly armored like today. while the slower ships, like haulers can add more armor under their shields, making them last longer while being intercepted. its not to bring back cube meta, but to bring back voxel armor as a option for additional layering for survivability under the shields for ships designed to normally be non-combatant. think shooting a unarmed meat shield, vs the nimble escort that shoots back. 

like you said, we need more complexity, to make things less predictable. 

Edited by Charlotte
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Could just add a whole other system that modifies base stats of items that doesn't require placement skills. Such as an item slot setup *cough* like eve, but rather than offering up raw stats, it creates multipliers that work on the construct itself. Said object would be placed into the Core *New UI*? Alot of things could be done along these lines for multiple instances of the game. Even making modifier parts that wear and tear that are attachable to engines. You can go on and on with the system, the fun part is balancing it out.

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Dear initial poster, I fully agree with you, and so do many, many other players who are not part of the very organized PVP lobby. Virtually everyoe I talk to ingame, or in one of the Facebook DU groups, has the sme view. And we all do not like that the well-organized and well-coordinated PVP lobby argues so much louder than we normal players who are the vast majority.

I sign to your posting and statement. Fully. 100%. And so do many others.

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2 hours ago, Hirnsausen said:

Dear initial poster, I fully agree with you, and so do many, many other players who are not part of the very organized PVP lobby. Virtually everyoe I talk to ingame, or in one of the Facebook DU groups, has the sme view. And we all do not like that the well-organized and well-coordinated PVP lobby argues so much louder than we normal players who are the vast majority.

I sign to your posting and statement. Fully. 100%. And so do many others.

 

I think you may want to try reading the whole post there Mr. Quixote, you most definitely missed a few important bits there charging your giants. :) 

 

 

17 hours ago, Charlotte said:

the idea for the armor is mainly for stations, or more resilient ships that defend these stations. the idea is, that you bring in your enemy into a rumble arena that is walled off by gravity. it lets people counter it if they are alert, but the heavy ships will have a hard time. the wide area is like net fishing, rather then RnR fishing. the concept is more to allow for faster ships to be lightly armored like today. while the slower ships, like haulers can add more armor under their shields, making them last longer while being intercepted. its not to bring back cube meta, but to bring back voxel armor as a option for additional layering for survivability under the shields for ships designed to normally be non-combatant. think shooting a unarmed meat shield, vs the nimble escort that shoots back. 

like you said, we need more complexity, to make things less predictable. 

 

I muchly appreciate the intent, but you must remember that everyone will be able to use the items in question. The reason we don't have a lot of cubes right now is because CCS ensures that heavy armor runs in to vastly diminishing returns defensively, and because they still have a much harder time catching anything than something that is just a strait element-ship with a thin veneer of a hull. People still do the math and make ships that have significant armor, they just aren't generally efficient enough to use often in piracy and have too much trouble landing a killing blow against faster pvp foes that can just run away.

 

In the case of the gravity net, an interceptor wouldn't need to be fast, because the hauler wouldn't be able to escape the net, you could pirate in a nearly glacier-slow battle-brick just as long as it could control range in the net by pulling a half-g more than the cargo-laden hauler you are trying to catch. Most haulers I've seen also don't tend to go for heavy armor. They can, but they usually come up with some reason to not use it.

 

No mistaking, I like the idea of having an armor-type material that is actually relevant, and the net, but we wont find the complexity we need in just supplanting gold voxel's spot with an even heavier voxel. We need considerations other than just speed, damage, and hp.

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On 1/10/2022 at 1:43 PM, Charlotte said:

 leaps towards a more balanced pvp system with more fun for all parties.

Hmmmm, are you sure that it is fun for a ship owner to be attacked and losing everything or a lot? ?

I agree with you, the game needs a lot of error-removal and some more features in its general part, and crash prevention, so for now it seems ineed a god idea to put aside the PVP for a while and get the game a bit more stable. That is why I applauded you with my first posting, and still do of course.

Insurances we know from Eve Online. I cannot say at the moment if I agree or disagree on such a feature, much depends on how it would be implemented, if ever (in a not so close future it may).

Your 3G device that easily retrieves all loot for you reminds me in its easiness a lot for my self-destruction device, not in a way of similarity, but because they two have a certain impact to the balancing of the game. Yours would be a device used mostly by pirates, looters, while my device would be used on the side of unarmed ships.

Armor: does steel and gold not go into the direction of armor, at least to some extend? Your idea is interesting, though, but let's hear the feedback of other players.

For now, however, I want that the causes of crashes can be traced down and fixed, and bug removal. This would add a lot to the gameplay.
And then, when that is done, let's see what feedback other gamers have added by then to this thread. I will follow this thread.

Edited by Hirnsausen
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7 hours ago, Hirnsausen said:

Hmmmm, are you sure that it is fun for a ship owner to be attacked and losing everything or a lot? ?

I agree with you, the game needs a lot of error-removal and some more features in its general part, and crash prevention, so for now it seems ineed a god idea to put aside the PVP for a while and get the game a bit more stable. That is why I applauded you with my first posting, and still do of course.

Insurances we know from Eve Online. I cannot say at the moment if I agree or disagree on such a feature, much depends on how it would be implemented, if ever (in a not so close future it may).

Your 3G device that easily retrieves all loot for you reminds me in its easiness a lot for my self-destruction device, not in a way of similarity, but because they two have a certain impact to the balancing of the game. Yours would be a device used mostly by pirates, looters, while my device would be used on the side of unarmed ships.

Armor: does steel and gold not go into the direction of armor, at least to some extend? Your idea is interesting, though, but let's hear the feedback of other players.

For now, however, I want that the causes of crashes can be traced down and fixed, and bug removal. This would add a lot to the gameplay.
And then, when that is done, let's see what feedback other gamers have added by then to this thread. I will follow this thread.

Thank you for your post.

I'll expand on my armor idea to maybe get a better understanding across for people. first off, the idea of voxel armor was a core idea for the game. what i am proposing is a set of voxels that take the inverse approach of voxels, in the sense of honeycomb. normally, honeycomb is a material with structural strength with minimum materials used for its structure. the armor voxels will work on a inverse of this principle. making the voxel a highly dense (nearly perfect lattice structure) for a given material. the idea is this material has higher HP/kg then all honeycomb materials, significantly more mass, cost a lot of materials to construct in mass, and buffed resistances (around 20-30% for a low end, and 40% for the high end.) its a voxel purpose designed to withstand the riggers of combat.


a example for Pure Iron armor stats is: 7,873 kg/m³ for a total of 125,968 hp/m³ with 15-20% resistances across the board.

the mass it adds makes 16 voxels add 7.8 tons of mass onto a ship, granted, it has a ton of hp. this paired with shield venting, will bring rise to 2 different classes of ships, the more nimble and less armored fast attack type of ships, who can engage and disengage from combat to regen their shields. or the slow, and tough ships, that cant regenerate their shields, but focus on the heavy armor. this paired with the gravity field net means that these armor ships will have a problem leaving unless they deal with the net itself. where as the small nimble ships can get out easy. allowing for a resupply ship to be parked outside the net so more ammo can be gotten. if people go cube meta with this armor, they will be so slow, they wont even be able to move in space. and if they get too close to a planet, they fall down, because they cant put enough engines/brakes to keep them from falling. so a balance will need to be made for 'cube' ships where they can only put as much armor to survive, and the new minimum thrust would be 3.1+g's loaded. with this new armor, it will be hard to cover all elements with it, and get to that amount. unless your looking at M or L core ships.

so the concern with cube meta returning from this armor, is mostly nullified. it wont remove the nano meta, but it will bring in ships that are tougher to deal with. 

however, with the one post about modules and fixed stats, sure, that can work. but a better solution will be to change how to determine the stats of a ships shields, armor, and hull (going to touch on this). we all know shield are based on size, its fine, but the issue is uniformity. if every ship has the same shield hp, then its all about learning to get in and out of combat to manage it. thus the need for shield augmentations (think of it similar to engine tiers and variations) where some have bigger hp pools, lower resistance pools, and lower vent rate, or lower hp pools, higher resistances and higher vent rates. or any combo of those, as well as changing the mass numbers for each. this will spice up the shield area. as for armor, this can be solely calculated using voxel hp counts. to make it easier on builders fearing losing a good looking ship, just remove voxel deforming/deletion until after the core is destroyed, then afterword's just delete areas around destroyed elements. as for hull, it should be based on a combination of volume of voxels and element hp. all the hp values for voxels, shields, and elements will need to be scrapped to make this work. but it brings the combat from semi realistic to more arcade style, adjustments to a ships 'signature' would need to be made based on core size and volume of elements/voxel material. weapons hit chance depending on its tracking precision. Basically, it would scrap the current combat system, and bring in eve online's combat system, where rather then a fitting window and pre-generated ship hulls. its all player created and the stats of the ship raise and fall depending on elements, voxels, and core size. 

however, this would eat so much development time. I would not recommend doing something like this at all. remember, we have to think realistically. you cant expect a company to dedicate a huge amount of development resources towards changing the core of combat, when the main focus should be on getting the rest of the game developed. they still need to work on atmospheric and player combat. which is going to be the real meat and potato's of pvp in the long run of the game. there is no territory in space, just space cores. so think of space pvp currently as a distraction from development from the real purpose of this game, which is rebuilding a civilization. we need the ability to make cities, markets, claim and lose territory, hold wars over resources. there is so much they need to do, and this space pvp, is just a means to disrupt transportation of goods, and thus not the core of the focus of the game. 

Thank you for reading!

Edited by Charlotte
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12 hours ago, Taelessael said:

 

 

I think you may want to try reading the whole post there Mr. Quixote, you most definitely missed a few important bits there charging your giants. :) 

 

 

 

I muchly appreciate the intent, but you must remember that everyone will be able to use the items in question. The reason we don't have a lot of cubes right now is because CCS ensures that heavy armor runs in to vastly diminishing returns defensively, and because they still have a much harder time catching anything than something that is just a strait element-ship with a thin veneer of a hull. People still do the math and make ships that have significant armor, they just aren't generally efficient enough to use often in piracy and have too much trouble landing a killing blow against faster pvp foes that can just run away.

 

In the case of the gravity net, an interceptor wouldn't need to be fast, because the hauler wouldn't be able to escape the net, you could pirate in a nearly glacier-slow battle-brick just as long as it could control range in the net by pulling a half-g more than the cargo-laden hauler you are trying to catch. Most haulers I've seen also don't tend to go for heavy armor. They can, but they usually come up with some reason to not use it.

 

No mistaking, I like the idea of having an armor-type material that is actually relevant, and the net, but we wont find the complexity we need in just supplanting gold voxel's spot with an even heavier voxel. We need considerations other than just speed, damage, and hp.

 
I agree, adding armor alone wont fix it. same with the net. however, space combat should be focused around trade disruption. not so much as fighting wars. this is why I argue that they need to shift gears and focus on planet based combat. its not even given to us, and remember, you cant fight for territory in space (there is none), but the ground is full of territory, we just need more ways to allow for empire building, and wars as well as claiming territory. this is not eve online where you can own sov for a solar system, so we should not be focusing on space combat until it can hold more meaning to the core gameplay, other then trade and travel disruption.

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8 hours ago, Charlotte said:

... this is why I argue that they need to shift gears and focus on planet based combat...

 

Agreed, though again we need something more complex than just hp/damage, lest we find the top dogs in every battle just being the ones that can field most optimally-sized anti-grav death-bricks. We'd also need some better resources (or something else of value, such as no tax) on pvp-tiles to make them worth fighting over, lest people not bother due to the greater safety and identical rewards of of non-pvp tiles.

 

6 hours ago, Charlotte said:

...

a example for Pure Iron armor stats is: 7,873 kg/m³ for a total of 125,968 hp/m³ with 15-20% resistances across the board.
...

 

An easily understood concept, although personally I'd suggest dialing back mass a bit there (for iron pure armor) as you exceeded the mass of a solid block pure iron almost 600kg ago.

 

6 hours ago, Charlotte said:

... with this new armor, it will be hard to cover all elements with it, and get to that amount. unless your looking at M or L core ships.


so the concern with cube meta returning from this armor, is mostly nullified. ...

 

You underestimate what absurdity players are willing to get in to. Cubes of the past were xs because radar lock ranges were all relative to target core size, and because weapons could be mounted to any size core. Solid gold cubes were a thing, they weren't fast, and gold was still rare-ish so they weren't common, but they'd drive almost everything else from the field easily enough.

 

The current SNES meta is all large cores because of the core-weapon-size cap, but the ones I've seen are still all built roughly to s-core dimensions. With the armor you are talking about adding, someone would work out how its math works in to ccs, and we'd see a bunch of L core bricks/spheres at approximately the size where ccs-math says optimal is used in areas where they didn't need to be the fastest, such as with the gravity-net, or in atmo where they'd stay afloat with anti-grav and worry less about top speed because everything has a speed-cap there resulting from air-resistance/atmo-heating.

 

9 hours ago, Charlotte said:

... we should not be focusing on space combat until it can hold more meaning to the core gameplay, other then trade and travel disruption.

 

You do make a solid point there, though as planetary combat is to be a thing for when NQ finally adds another solar-system (last I heard, quite a ways off), I might advise their next focus involve additions relevant to all players, such as power or heat management.

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2 hours ago, Taelessael said:

 

 

Agreed, though again we need something more complex than just hp/damage, lest we find the top dogs in every battle just being the ones that can field most optimally-sized anti-grav death-bricks. We'd also need some better resources (or something else of value, such as no tax) on pvp-tiles to make them worth fighting over, lest people not bother due to the greater safety and identical rewards of of non-pvp tiles.

 

 

An easily understood concept, although personally I'd suggest dialing back mass a bit there (for iron pure armor) as you exceeded the mass of a solid block pure iron almost 600kg ago.

 

 

You underestimate what absurdity players are willing to get in to. Cubes of the past were xs because radar lock ranges were all relative to target core size, and because weapons could be mounted to any size core. Solid gold cubes were a thing, they weren't fast, and gold was still rare-ish so they weren't common, but they'd drive almost everything else from the field easily enough.

 

The current SNES meta is all large cores because of the core-weapon-size cap, but the ones I've seen are still all built roughly to s-core dimensions. With the armor you are talking about adding, someone would work out how its math works in to ccs, and we'd see a bunch of L core bricks/spheres at approximately the size where ccs-math says optimal is used in areas where they didn't need to be the fastest, such as with the gravity-net, or in atmo where they'd stay afloat with anti-grav and worry less about top speed because everything has a speed-cap there resulting from air-resistance/atmo-heating.

 

 

You do make a solid point there, though as planetary combat is to be a thing for when NQ finally adds another solar-system (last I heard, quite a ways off), I might advise their next focus involve additions relevant to all players, such as power or heat management.

this is true, when you have a game with variables, people tend to find the best with plugging in numbers. the issue is as you state, the lack of complexity. the issue itself is originally rooted in mining resources and industry.

things are produced too quickly, and too cheap. that paired with the fact that MU's generate unlimited resources at a hourly rate, basically means that no one has to work for anything. you just have to wait a little bit, pick up the ores, throw it into a factory and print out ships. unlike real life, where you have to figure out where to get the materials, do you have the materials to make the things, do you have enough fuel reserves. all these things are key factors of war that are not present. most orgs can just lose ships all day and it does nothing, since they just print new ones without a care. 

in all, they need to significantly nerf production rates, nerf ore extraction rates, and make fighting a meaningful decision to dedicate resources towards. yes, it is a game, but this does not mean that everyone should be getting unlimited free stuff all the time. it should reward people who take the time to focus on locating and extracting resources. it should reward industrial players who focus on producing a specific item. in all, they need to make it harder for a single person to do everything. including a org making a gigga factory. they should nerf factories to limit the amount of industry that can be placed on each static core. they need to get people more active, doing more logistics. otherwise, there wont be a real market for things. 

lets look at eve online a little, it takes many players to produce modules, ships, components. all these things take time to do. its not like they can make a gigga factory to print everything they need. they need people to acquire resources, and the resources they acquire automatically, is limited to PI, which is for limited products, or sub components for bigger constructions. all of this requires people to work together to do. all tied together with a market. this is why the market of eve is so unique. if too many players mine ore, the ore prices go down. too little, and prices go up. same for production. the only reason there is demand for these product is from ship loss's. these are from activities that a player risks their ship on, but receives money when completed. DU has none of this. there is no real demand of elements, ore is produced infinitely and mostly afk, 1 player can build a gigga factory to make everything, so they never need to go to the market. so all the issues are tied to basically all the core mechanics of the game currently. 

i could go on with my rant, but basically, the problem is way more complex then 'pvp is broken'. there are a ton of areas that need to be improved and adjusted. focusing on pvp is not going to fix it.

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5 hours ago, Charlotte said:

...
things are produced too quickly, and too cheap. that paired with the fact that MU's generate unlimited resources at a hourly rate, basically means that no one has to work for anything. you just have to wait a little bit, pick up the ores, throw it into a factory and print out ships. unlike real life, where you have to figure out where to get the materials, do you have the materials to make the things, do you have enough fuel reserves. all these things are key factors of war that are not present. most orgs can just lose ships all day and it does nothing, since they just print new ones without a care. 

in all, they need to significantly nerf production rates, nerf ore extraction rates, and make fighting a meaningful decision to dedicate resources towards. yes, it is a game, but this does not mean that everyone should be getting unlimited free stuff all the time. it should reward people who take the time to focus on locating and extracting resources. it should reward industrial players who focus on producing a specific item. in all, they need to make it harder for a single person to do everything. including a org making a gigga factory. they should nerf factories to limit the amount of industry that can be placed on each static core. they need to get people more active, doing more logistics. otherwise, there wont be a real market for things. 
...

 

You are perhaps over emphasizing both the output of MU, and the role of giga-factories as they are now. 

 

Mining units do most definitely make things easier, but their relative output is quite small. I'm not an industry player, so I cant translate directly from ore to ships in value, but if I recall the approximate value of my ships correctly and the general value of decent t1 tiles, it requires around 2 tile-weeks worth of t1 output (after taxes) to afford the parts for 1 "disposable" xs fighter. It isn't much, and one player could manage a few a week under ideal circumstances, but those aren't the current meta. PvP ships of the current meta use a lot of the most expensive hardware on the market, easily valued at well over 100 tile-weeks worth of parts, meaning that without a very sizeable group working together it would take months to amass the wealth for a single ship.

 

As for giga-factories, they are a rather substantial investment now, requiring people to gather up exceptionally expensive schematics if they aren't just making basic stuff, and often needing ore well beyond what a single player or small group of players can effectively access now that MU have replaced conventional planetary mining. Quite often asteroid mining or market-purchases are needed to obtain the high-tier ores that, while not needed in enormous quantities, are still required for many of the higher-tier items.

 

As far as other stuff goes, we are short on complexity everywhere.

-Miners should have more asteroids that spawn at smaller intervals, that aren't just visible to the whole universe (ya should explore to find 'em, not just pick 'em off your list) and are found with something more complicated than a "follow the waypoints" game.

-Explorers need more interesting environments they can travel, and possibly rare treasures to find.
-Mission-Runners need more randomized mission lists that change things up so they aren't just running the same 2/4/6-mission loops.

-PvP players need more to balance than just hp, damage, and speed.

-And a lot of other players need a lot of other stuff, but it is late and I don't feel like pulling an Uncle and adding a dozen or more "one more thing" to this post.

 

So, I'm going to say the first thing on NQ's to do list should be fixing stacking-detection, because that keeps going off inconsistently and on elements that are well clear of even touching anything, But after that where would you think they should work next? My vote is (again) heat or power management.

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