Prior to the announcement, things looked pretty bleak. Massive Thargoid invasion well beyond our capacity, heavy losses inevitable, but it was a fighting retreat. Slightly blunting the invasion in the hopes that we'd be able to turn the tides later on, maybe. It was really cool.
Now, it turns out that there is no long-term effort. Systems will take multiple weeks to fall, but unless the countereffort can be completed in a single week, it didn't happen. Zero progress. Any time spent by players that did not clear a system within a single week is wasted time, objectively. Nothing the playerbase did this week counted for anything.
Gimballed multicannons aren't going to solve this. This is an issue completely seperate from the difficulty or size of the response needed. Before the announcement, players were fighting in a near hopeless situation in the hopes that their efforts would change that eventually. We were gonna take losses but surely it'd be better than nothing, right? Resetting the timers means that's not true.
It's really bad game design. I'm sure it was intended to encourage people to coordinate on a few specific systems, but that's what people were doing. Even if the numbers are adjusted, the resetting timers mean that the penalty for suboptimal tactics is 100%. That's a bit harsh. There's no chance of specific playergroups slowly making progress in regions they care about, the entire Thargoid War may as well not matter outside of the one specific system that AXI picks. And there's no guarantee that your efforts would matter even then, and now it's a vicious cycle.
If the timers don't reset weekly, then our efforts to engage with this new content will matter. A player puts in an hour of time, progress is made, slowly or quickly with or without other players. If the timers do reset weekly, then no matter what number tweaks are applied to the targets, it's extremely likely that players are repeatedly going to have their progress deleted, which is incredibly unintuitive and demoralising. It's the difference between the war going badly because we're facing an extremely powerful and angry foe that we brought on ourselves, and the war going badly because the playerbase almost hitting a weekly target is equal to the playerbase not logging in at all.
Zero progress in the first week, like not even a single person showed up. Something is very wrong.
Now, it turns out that there is no long-term effort. Systems will take multiple weeks to fall, but unless the countereffort can be completed in a single week, it didn't happen. Zero progress. Any time spent by players that did not clear a system within a single week is wasted time, objectively. Nothing the playerbase did this week counted for anything.
Gimballed multicannons aren't going to solve this. This is an issue completely seperate from the difficulty or size of the response needed. Before the announcement, players were fighting in a near hopeless situation in the hopes that their efforts would change that eventually. We were gonna take losses but surely it'd be better than nothing, right? Resetting the timers means that's not true.
It's really bad game design. I'm sure it was intended to encourage people to coordinate on a few specific systems, but that's what people were doing. Even if the numbers are adjusted, the resetting timers mean that the penalty for suboptimal tactics is 100%. That's a bit harsh. There's no chance of specific playergroups slowly making progress in regions they care about, the entire Thargoid War may as well not matter outside of the one specific system that AXI picks. And there's no guarantee that your efforts would matter even then, and now it's a vicious cycle.
If the timers don't reset weekly, then our efforts to engage with this new content will matter. A player puts in an hour of time, progress is made, slowly or quickly with or without other players. If the timers do reset weekly, then no matter what number tweaks are applied to the targets, it's extremely likely that players are repeatedly going to have their progress deleted, which is incredibly unintuitive and demoralising. It's the difference between the war going badly because we're facing an extremely powerful and angry foe that we brought on ourselves, and the war going badly because the playerbase almost hitting a weekly target is equal to the playerbase not logging in at all.
Zero progress in the first week, like not even a single person showed up. Something is very wrong.
