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PVP Changes, Hi NQ its me again :)


Anderson Williams

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So its launch, some of us have played since beta, since even Alpha and the Meta has changed extensively over time. However as the meta changes sometimes it gets better and it gets worse. So far the changes has gotten better and better but there are some glaring issues right now that kinda ruin any kind of variety. 

1. Cannons are just beyond the best, there is almost no reason to use any other weapon in the game. We have tried Railguns, Lasers are meh and missiles have no point. With no ability to truely hold a ship in place, cannon boats can just orbit a target (with alittle help from a script :p) and kill you. 

2. Cross Section tanking is not broken, but needs a counter. There is nothing currently that allows you to truly cross section tank, like just doesn't exist. Stasis is supposed to be the counter, but by stopping 'max speed' vs 'overall speed', you can just fly away. It doesn't effect the sig ships as much as it should. Its a good start, but it really needs to effect overall speed, not the max.

3. How to fix?
 -  The Rock paper scissors concept, which like Eve, is awesome, but only if a counter can actually be utilized and presently it cant. Cannons and Cross section are basically the only viable pvp option, which is painful. There should be variation, Cannons don't need a nerf persay, but some way to level the playing field.

a. Change stasis to impact either just overall movement, it can apply more and more overtime, and it needs longer range. 25km in a game where we can fight at almost 400km is absurd. So increase range, and allow the stasis to impact overall speed. 
b. Add a Target Painter, taken right from eve its an element that would not use ammo, would have a cycle time and a cooldown. This element, limit 1 per ship, would inflate the cross section of a ship a percentage. Nothing crazy but enough to give a ship a chance to rock paper scissor... anyone can use this, even cannon boats obviously, but it would go on a seat just like stasis. Range should be limiting factor, so the farther from the ship the less it inflates the crossection as the painter 'fades' strength. This prevents it from being overpowered, but allows it to give other weapon systems a change. 


Just some ideas, that NQ isn't going to read XD. Cause even if they did we would never know. <-- now slogan until one of you do read me dangit. 

 

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The only thing that works for now are swarms of S core ships with cannons.

Go larger will only slow you down and will cost you much more for worse results even in a Multicrew M or L core ship.

The only use for a large ship is a static defense situation.

 

No Alien cores atm and if there was a defense situation you still need to get that heavy ship over there at 20k max speed its not funny and if you are to be found that L core is a sitting duck. S cores attacking that L core need just to go out of its range vent and come back.

 

I like big ships but in the current situation not worth it to take them out.

 

How to counter section tanking? Increase even more voxel tanking benefits Iand increase tracking on guns all around other weapons need urgently better tracking like Laser and Railguns

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For now the speed change completely killed M and L core ships, considering the cost of those ships it is not interested to even risk bringing them in pvp space. In my opinion most of the changes made pre launch were mistakes ( speed change and schematics) they did not make the gameplay bether but worst 

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50 minutes ago, Bachiir said:

For now the speed change completely killed M and L core ships, considering the cost of those ships it is not interested to even risk bringing them in pvp space. In my opinion most of the changes made pre launch were mistakes ( speed change and schematics) they did not make the gameplay bether but worst 

I dont agree with speed change and schematics, these big ships shouldnt shouldnt perform at the same level. But truthfully there is only one truely likely viable meta and that has to be changed.

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1 hour ago, Shredder said:

I’ve spent the past 6 weeks trying to find pvp, there’s virtually none to be had, am I missing something? 
 

I don’t care about balance if there’s no encounters.

Just fly to any rare or exotic roid by chance you will find someone. Every day after 16:00 utc seen people camping Jago pipe. But everyone with shields down can just run to safe zone there.

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17 hours ago, Anderson Williams said:

I dont agree with speed change and schematics, these big ships shouldnt shouldnt perform at the same level. But truthfully there is only one truely likely viable meta and that has to be changed.

I get it to make them slow. But that should bring the benefit of a tank against smaller ships only to be able to be taken out by M or L Weapons

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25 minutes ago, Walter said:

Just fly to any rare or exotic roid by chance you will find someone. Every day after 16:00 utc seen people camping Jago pipe. But everyone with shields down can just run to safe zone there.

Fighting people at the edge of the safe zone is pointless, no one can loose.

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Making voxels useless in PvE and PvP is really a game design concept that I find disastrous.

But hey, there is a professional game designer and pay for it, who is certainly much more competent than me to make his judgment.

And he seems to think the best thing for the game is to force players not to use voxels.

Meh

 

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I don't think NQ even reads those posts here on forums, but anyways, if any NQ is reading this, please go back and fix the honeycomb masses, so they correlate to their component's masses again. I know most people in the PvP community will dislike it because dumbing down the whole thing made the game better for them, but hey, we also want things to feel realistic again. There's a reason planes are made out of Aluminum in real life instead of concrete.

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3 hours ago, Knight-Sevy said:

Making voxels useless in PvE and PvP is really a game design concept that I find disastrous.

But hey, there is a professional game designer and pay for it, who is certainly much more competent than me to make his judgment.

And he seems to think the best thing for the game is to force players not to use voxels.

Meh

 

 

It's particularly puzzling when one of the "USP"s of the game is its sophisticated voxel handling (compared to other MMO space 4X games). You have all these tools to make stunning looking ships, but making them look good gimps them...

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In my oppionion, cross-section should be removed from the pvp hit-chance equation and instead go explore the option for a mass based hit-chance.

The higher the mass, the higher the hit chance. This could also factor in locally on your shipdesign, in which areas with the highest mass, will draw the greatest number of hits in pvp fight.

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1 hour ago, Vizeroy said:

In my oppionion, cross-section should be removed from the pvp hit-chance equation and instead go explore the option for a mass based hit-chance.

The higher the mass, the higher the hit chance. This could also factor in locally on your shipdesign, in which areas with the highest mass, will draw the greatest number of hits in pvp fight.

That makes as much sense as having CSA be part of the speed limit calculation in a vacuum (to whit: none).

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2 hours ago, Kezzle said:

That makes as much sense as having CSA be part of the speed limit calculation in a vacuum (to whit: none).

I dont quite follow your comparison, but i gather your that you disagree. Fair enough. Do you have another suggestion or are you infact happy with the current system?

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8 minutes ago, Vizeroy said:

I dont quite follow your comparison, but i gather your that you disagree. Fair enough. Do you have another suggestion or are you infact happy with the current system?

The size (as in "area presented to the shooter" of the target "ought" to have something to do with how hard it is to hit (along with its maneuverability, and loads of other factors).

 

I have a suggestion, several, but let's start with one. I didn't originate it, but it seems reasonable: shield leakage. As it stands, ships don't need voxels, because they have shields. If shields didn't stop all the damage, you'd have to put some voxels in your design to give yourself at least some core combat strength, otherwise the first point of damage leaking past the shields would pop your core, leaving an eminently salvageable, hardly damaged wreck. It doesn't have to be much. One percent leakage would do. You could have larger shields have a "threshold" so that some (smaller) ammo doesn't cause leakage. Forcing combat design to have some voxel to have any durability in combat opens the door for design decisions: more voxel slows you down, but lets you stay under the guns for longer. So you can choose where on the spectrum you want your design to sit. You'd probably want to limit Shield size to core size in the same way as weapons are, too.

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23 hours ago, Kezzle said:

The size (as in "area presented to the shooter" of the target "ought" to have something to do with how hard it is to hit (along with its maneuverability, and loads of other factors).

 

I have a suggestion, several, but let's start with one. I didn't originate it, but it seems reasonable: shield leakage. As it stands, ships don't need voxels, because they have shields. If shields didn't stop all the damage, you'd have to put some voxels in your design to give yourself at least some core combat strength, otherwise the first point of damage leaking past the shields would pop your core, leaving an eminently salvageable, hardly damaged wreck. It doesn't have to be much. One percent leakage would do. You could have larger shields have a "threshold" so that some (smaller) ammo doesn't cause leakage. Forcing combat design to have some voxel to have any durability in combat opens the door for design decisions: more voxel slows you down, but lets you stay under the guns for longer. So you can choose where on the spectrum you want your design to sit. You'd probably want to limit Shield size to core size in the same way as weapons are, too.

Shield leakage would be a good idea, despite shields as they get low more and more damage may flow through

 

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5 minutes ago, Anderson Williams said:

Shield leakage would be a good idea, despite shields as they get low more and more damage may flow through

 

Yeah, you can add all sorts of wrinkles. Especially if you have an energy management system to back it up. Some shields might leak more of different types of damage, others might not leak any of a particular damage type. If you have the concept of a threshold individual hit damage below which nothing leaks, that could be different for different damage types or shield types. You could have thresholds for degrees of leakage: if a small shield gets hit with a big shot, maybe it leaks 5% instead of 1%. Maybe some shield types don't do this.

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Cannons have the highest DPS by far, but very short range.  They have a good firing arc but require specific layout so guns can support each other.

Lasers have 64% the DPS that cannons do. Have very good range, Good frontal firing arc with many layouts available. 

Missiles have half the DPS that cannons do. Have poor range.  the best firing arc lets you place them in allot of supporting locations. 

Railguns have a quarter the DPS that cannons do. Have the best range.  Poor firing arc requires specific layout to guns can support each other. 

Should also note L is 2x damage of M, M is 2x Damage of S, S is 2x damage of xs Should also note the difference between max skills and no skills is about 250% (and really it higher then that with capacity handling). IE a max skilled S pilot will destroy a no skilled M pilot with same setup. 

 

Before I go on lets talk about defense. weight kills.  IE the more armor you put on the slower you go. IE no armor generally means your faster and thus you can go in and out of combat. Thus shield only combat really stands out. More on this later. 

 

So we know that cannons do the most damage by far. With everything being equal cannons should win every time. However the main downfall to cannons is the limited range.  You can offset this downfall with speed. If you can get inside firing range fast enough and outside you being hit back fast enough the low range of cannons does not matter. However this means that you need to keep a good speed. Thus S ship classes are favored here since you keep a light ship for good speeds. However a M class laser boat should beat a S class cannon boat with same skills so long as the M class is setup properly. And I think thats where allot of combat goes awry, So many ships are setup to look cool instead of function best.  And because that M class ship is going to be able to field such a heavier shield. its going to be hard for that S class to spend enough time to take out a proper M laser boat. And thats where L cores are needed to take out these M class ships.

 

Now we go back to that whole defense thing. Because speed is so crucial. you end up with shield boats. And you can only have 1 shield per ship. So instead of having 1 ship with 2 gunner seats, your better off with 2 ships with 1 gunner seat each.  Thus you doubled your defense for the same firepower.  Its why I am a huge proponent of tying shield HP to armor HP. IE your shield HP is a multiple of your armor HP. It would solve this issue. 

 

So I feel there is a rock paper scissors in DU. Its just flawed by the current shield system. Although the current Speed to mass changes have made S cores actually viable in combat now, and is probably one of the best changes for PVP since I can remember. 

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3 hours ago, Yoarii said:

No. And you can shoot through asteroids. Line of Sight is not a concept in PvP afaik.

So PvP hit chance is based on cross-section which directly implies a "visual" on a scope but you can ignore other real, interactable objects entirely even when the object is many dozens of times larger and blocks LoS several times over?  Why do we even have PvP anymore? Is there any fun value in it (beyond being the cog in the economy that removes elements and ships from the world when they cross an imaginary line)?

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3 minutes ago, Wyndle said:

So PvP hit chance is based on cross-section which directly implies a "visual" on a scope but you can ignore other real, interactable objects entirely even when the object is many dozens of times larger and blocks LoS several times over?  Why do we even have PvP anymore? Is there any fun value in it (beyond being the cog in the economy that removes elements and ships from the world when they cross an imaginary line)?

I don't know, I don't engage in that part of the game and won't until something changes to make it fun.

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Today I would like to highlight the issue related to section calculations on ships with a highlighting of the various topics that talk about it.
 

The community has been raising this issue for many months or years.
 

Despite the consensus that some things need to be done: Nothing has been done.
 

We have long been in a gloomy silence.
 

I don't mean to insult the NQ devs, I know they work hard.
We have only one culprit on the head within this studio who seems to deliberately block this subject with his only approval and let it be said: he has nothing to do with PvP.
 

We are in a voxel construction game!
 

WE NEED TO USE VOXELS ON OUR SHIPS.
 

Is it that hard to understand ?!

IMG_20221109_225435.png

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It's a good thing NQ takes player feedback with a grain of salt and carefully considers what the best course might be. Because most of you guys have a shaky assessment of the meta.

S-core cannon boats are good, yes. But only when piloted well(which most players seem unable to do), and only in small scale fights. Believe it or not, they are not the ultimate meta ship. I'm not going to tell you what is though. I'll show you later.

Railguns are the best weapon in the game. Players just aren't using them right. Every rail pilot I've fought has done nothing to try to stay away from my cannons. They just blindly point at me and fire until I'm right in their face. Rails take twice as long to kill a target, yes. But they have the incredible advantage of range, which can't be overvalued - especially in high-speed S-core fights. You have to be patient and set up good situations to fire out of effective cannon range. Get more accel. Use it properly.

The range of rails also allows them to focus fire better. The more ships you have, the more potent rails become. Rails are and always will be the king of fleet fights.

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