So 2.2 should apprently be HUGE. And I am quite confident that atleast 50% of our wishes will somewhat come true. What's with the other 50%, tho?
To save a wall o' text (it will be a wall o' text) I'll just list stuff that I feel urgently needs to be looked at.
Starting with!
1. Engineer modifications
I know, Frontier, you have stated that you don't have much experience regarding multiplayer and you are doing a great job proving that with a bad netcoding and phases with incredibly unbalanced gameplay such as the old dumbfires or SCB stacking. While you are still managing to balance all the stuff it usually takes you ages even though you just tweak some numbers here and there. Do you spend 99% of the time discussing stuff or what? How big is your "balancing team"? 100 people? I don't even need to be a game designer to quickly recognize that ...
- Thermal Cascade is the gamebreaker of all combat
Oh what a surprise. It has been mentioned and agreed on, gonna save some text here except this for a calculation. According to another player a quad-dumbfire salvo from a FDL on another FDL with Thermal Cascade generates from 0% heat insteantly ~ 150% heat. A single Dumbfire launcher can load a total of 60 missiles. 150*60=9000 ... so a Fer-de-Dumbfire can add 9000% in total additionally to what is already generated via engines, weapons or whatnot.
If it would be only viable against shields everyone would use stealth ships but remember these are missiles and one- or two-shot your exterior modules to 0% upon hull impacts.
Yeah ... doesn't sound like overkill at all.
Anyways, there is another thing I'd like to mention:
- Feedback Cascade
This is by far not overpowered, nor underpowered. It is good where it stands now but it is often 'abused' by just taking a single C1 rail to a ship that has a small hardpoint as it does the exact same damage to SCB as a C2 Rail Cascade. What I am saying is that there is no point in using a C2 Rail Cascade as the C1 has the exact same impact. Either slightly reduce the effectiveness of the C1 Rail or increase the effectiveness of the C2 Rail. That's all. The same should apply for ...
- Corrosive Shell
Basically the same as above. There is no reason to use anything larger than a turreted C1 multicannon on any large ship. Perma-rosion due to some hits for a 9mm calibre multicannon. How about we decrease the effectiveness for smaller seizes and increase the effectiveness for larger ones? It just makes sense.
Another mod I'd like to touch is ...
- Incendiary rounds
It is not only that they convert the damage type to thermal (and not fully so it is basically a rapid fire Plasma Accelerator without all its tradeoffs), no, they also add a damn-load of damage on top. They are the best damage dealer weapon for all-round purpose ... and don't get me with frags. THIS is hilarious just as it is ridiculous. It feels like shield resistences are not present so much damage do they deal. Good thing is they are not really a burst weapon which means you certainly win almost every fight due to utterly high DPS but never kill something as your target can still high-wake fast enough due to the lack of burst damage.
If you are converting kinetic weaponary to thermal then add the perks of thermal weapons to them as well which are: Increased heat generation and distributor draw.
Multicannons/Frags have been the best DPE weapon ever since kinetic weaponary got buffed against shields but now with even more damage their DPE is better than before with even more DPS than any other weapon (yes, even railguns and plasmas), increased DPE king standings WITHOUT the tardeoffs of any thermal or non-kinetic weapon.
The only reason this mod is not overpowered right now is because we have thermal cascade which is even more overpowered to this always incredibly powerful modification.
- Other modifications ...
... are underwhelming or not useful at all. Sensor debuff? Okay, good against silent ships but which silent ship uses a plasma today as heat is multiplied by 10 or whatnot? I'll get to SR later. Smart munitions ... only for those who aren't that smart ha-ha. Thermal condit and vent are so underwhelming that at first I thought the modification was bugged as I couldn't tell the difference to an unmodded weapon of the same class. Especially when it comes to silent running, thermal vent which sounds like a good choice for stealth ships is just a modification that decreases the heat multiplier by 0.1 ... so to 9.9. And how hot do I have to be to get a 50% damage increase- oh, is it hard caped, to 15% maximum damage increase? I'm ready to go to 1000% heat if I get a 300% damage buff for that.
Anyways ... so far to modifications but there is more!
2. Material Farming
This is another pain. God simply doesn't want us to have fun ... RNG. No, the weapon blueprint RNGs are perfectly fine, they add variation and so more depth but I mean this kind of RNG:
- USS
- Prospecting
- Mining
- Missions Logging
- Ship (NPC) Farming
- Surface Data Points
- (Extra Exclusive Point) Modular Terminals
Whatever I want to do is determined by the mood of the RNG. If I don't find what I need in less than an hour (Usually some G5 stuff from missions or USS) I log out, play another game and check tomorrow. Eventually finding a single Focus Crystal o' Exquis I have a single roll and if this results in a bad one I have to repeat.
As others have already suggested (and to sum all the stuff up here) there should be a possibility to target specific commodities and materials we need. Some dude had 72 Modfied Embedded Firmware (G5) and deleted them due to data storage limitations. I believe at some point he needs them again and good luck grinding with the RNG, matey. Let us scan for certain USSs so they appear when we need them. Ofcourse add some challenge to that so we don't just press a button to magically 'summon' materials. And interdiction mini game for signal source findings, how about that?
But to conclude: Get rid of the RNG whe gathering materials. It is a Netflix simulator for a reason as of now.
3. NPCs
It starts to get annoying for me as well, Frontier, but do-something. The Elite Federal Gunship easily loses to my C4F Pulse Laser and my C2S Missiles. I have D drives unmodded and around 1000 MJs shields and fight against an Elite FGS that is just hungry for this SINGLE Micro Controller in my cargo hold worth around a thousand credits maybe. Heck, even the fuel costs would be higher.
I think we all agree here, all the community plus you, Frontier, that Elite: Dangerous's NPCs have major flaws. You prove yourself fro mtime to time that you are indeed actually reading the forums so I save some text here to list all the flaws. There are countless threads (10% being my fault) about this topic.
4. Netcoding
There was a time where even with P2P it would work but as it stands now the netcoding is bad. Not extremely terrible but we all got used to desynchs and parallel instances and vanishing players and and and. Even NPCs are starting to combot log on me now (no jokes, this happened). Whatever it takes to provide a multiplayer that is capable of staying stable atleast 99% of the time (so one desynch or player/NPC vanish every 100 encounters ... this is not too much to ask for) ... do it, take it, make this come true. Here, take all my logs and settings and install 100% data-claws on my system but care for a good netcoding.
Last words: 2.1 has major flaws. Additionally, ancient problems haven't been fixed yet and the appeal to actually improve existing content rather than adding more has ... gone silent. This is in my eyes an larming sign of losing hope. I for exampel stopped caring about the newsletters and not-existing dev updates and have no hope that they will come back. It has been requested, a developer even said he will show this request the team but that was months ago. At this point I doubt we will get dev updates anymore and here is my appeal:
Also weren't we supposed to name our ships? This is not even a major investion of time and resources. On the other hand, we got the cockpit-clock which has been requested several times.
So why are you using your RNG to select what stuff you will be working on and what not?
Also one warning I'd like to point out but which has already been pointed out before: Even though neither NMS nor SC or ED want to compete with eachother ... they will. No matter what Chris, Sean or David will be doing. That is not up to them but to the customers. I for one don't need three space games at once. I need a single once and that's it. SC is getting close to its release, when the beta starts there will be alot of attention for SC and look at NMS. Due to the failure of NMS Elite has experience a good amount of new player influence. The same *could* happe nto Elite with Star Citizen. (Yes call me a doomsayer, go ahead) Obviously Star Citizen could fail just as NMS but the likeleyhood is quite lower. SC has the biggest of all three financial resources and therefore the best opportunities, however, it all comes down to the team. What do millions of dollars or pounds use if the team is as talented as a hobby game writer? Wasted resources.
The deadline is Star Citizen's release. Until then, I really do hope that Elite is a sustainable product capable of being a worthy alternative to SC.
And to you, dear reader? What does this whole wall o' text help you? You can help improving the game by spreading this .. or your word. FD have stated that they will listen to what is 'hot' so for example if alot of palyers report the same bug, it has a high priority. Yeah, it sucks that the actual important bugs like crashes have a lower prioriy if it only happens to a few of us but that's FD's way. It is just like with voting. Go vote! Be happy we live in a democracy. And so be happy that you have two hands, a keyboard and an internet connection. Write your opinion and spread it. The more opinions we have (I obviously hope many people agree with atleast some of my points) the higher the priority will be for FD to touch certain points. Do you feel that engineers mods are unbalanced? Say so! Do you think they are balanced? Well, say so! Do you think NPCs or the netcodings are bad? Guess what, say-so! With your initiative to raise your voice and be an example of an active community member I certainly hope FD will take an example and also become active.
Bring back dev updates.
Thank you for your attention ... or thank you not if you have skipped major parts
PS: Sorry for typos and/or grammar mistakes as usual.
To save a wall o' text (it will be a wall o' text) I'll just list stuff that I feel urgently needs to be looked at.
Starting with!
1. Engineer modifications
I know, Frontier, you have stated that you don't have much experience regarding multiplayer and you are doing a great job proving that with a bad netcoding and phases with incredibly unbalanced gameplay such as the old dumbfires or SCB stacking. While you are still managing to balance all the stuff it usually takes you ages even though you just tweak some numbers here and there. Do you spend 99% of the time discussing stuff or what? How big is your "balancing team"? 100 people? I don't even need to be a game designer to quickly recognize that ...
- Thermal Cascade is the gamebreaker of all combat
Oh what a surprise. It has been mentioned and agreed on, gonna save some text here except this for a calculation. According to another player a quad-dumbfire salvo from a FDL on another FDL with Thermal Cascade generates from 0% heat insteantly ~ 150% heat. A single Dumbfire launcher can load a total of 60 missiles. 150*60=9000 ... so a Fer-de-Dumbfire can add 9000% in total additionally to what is already generated via engines, weapons or whatnot.
If it would be only viable against shields everyone would use stealth ships but remember these are missiles and one- or two-shot your exterior modules to 0% upon hull impacts.
Yeah ... doesn't sound like overkill at all.
Anyways, there is another thing I'd like to mention:
- Feedback Cascade
This is by far not overpowered, nor underpowered. It is good where it stands now but it is often 'abused' by just taking a single C1 rail to a ship that has a small hardpoint as it does the exact same damage to SCB as a C2 Rail Cascade. What I am saying is that there is no point in using a C2 Rail Cascade as the C1 has the exact same impact. Either slightly reduce the effectiveness of the C1 Rail or increase the effectiveness of the C2 Rail. That's all. The same should apply for ...
- Corrosive Shell
Basically the same as above. There is no reason to use anything larger than a turreted C1 multicannon on any large ship. Perma-rosion due to some hits for a 9mm calibre multicannon. How about we decrease the effectiveness for smaller seizes and increase the effectiveness for larger ones? It just makes sense.
Another mod I'd like to touch is ...
- Incendiary rounds
It is not only that they convert the damage type to thermal (and not fully so it is basically a rapid fire Plasma Accelerator without all its tradeoffs), no, they also add a damn-load of damage on top. They are the best damage dealer weapon for all-round purpose ... and don't get me with frags. THIS is hilarious just as it is ridiculous. It feels like shield resistences are not present so much damage do they deal. Good thing is they are not really a burst weapon which means you certainly win almost every fight due to utterly high DPS but never kill something as your target can still high-wake fast enough due to the lack of burst damage.
If you are converting kinetic weaponary to thermal then add the perks of thermal weapons to them as well which are: Increased heat generation and distributor draw.
Multicannons/Frags have been the best DPE weapon ever since kinetic weaponary got buffed against shields but now with even more damage their DPE is better than before with even more DPS than any other weapon (yes, even railguns and plasmas), increased DPE king standings WITHOUT the tardeoffs of any thermal or non-kinetic weapon.
The only reason this mod is not overpowered right now is because we have thermal cascade which is even more overpowered to this always incredibly powerful modification.
- Other modifications ...
... are underwhelming or not useful at all. Sensor debuff? Okay, good against silent ships but which silent ship uses a plasma today as heat is multiplied by 10 or whatnot? I'll get to SR later. Smart munitions ... only for those who aren't that smart ha-ha. Thermal condit and vent are so underwhelming that at first I thought the modification was bugged as I couldn't tell the difference to an unmodded weapon of the same class. Especially when it comes to silent running, thermal vent which sounds like a good choice for stealth ships is just a modification that decreases the heat multiplier by 0.1 ... so to 9.9. And how hot do I have to be to get a 50% damage increase- oh, is it hard caped, to 15% maximum damage increase? I'm ready to go to 1000% heat if I get a 300% damage buff for that.
Anyways ... so far to modifications but there is more!
2. Material Farming
This is another pain. God simply doesn't want us to have fun ... RNG. No, the weapon blueprint RNGs are perfectly fine, they add variation and so more depth but I mean this kind of RNG:
- USS
- Prospecting
- Mining
- Missions Logging
- Ship (NPC) Farming
- Surface Data Points
- (Extra Exclusive Point) Modular Terminals
Whatever I want to do is determined by the mood of the RNG. If I don't find what I need in less than an hour (Usually some G5 stuff from missions or USS) I log out, play another game and check tomorrow. Eventually finding a single Focus Crystal o' Exquis I have a single roll and if this results in a bad one I have to repeat.
As others have already suggested (and to sum all the stuff up here) there should be a possibility to target specific commodities and materials we need. Some dude had 72 Modfied Embedded Firmware (G5) and deleted them due to data storage limitations. I believe at some point he needs them again and good luck grinding with the RNG, matey. Let us scan for certain USSs so they appear when we need them. Ofcourse add some challenge to that so we don't just press a button to magically 'summon' materials. And interdiction mini game for signal source findings, how about that?
But to conclude: Get rid of the RNG whe gathering materials. It is a Netflix simulator for a reason as of now.
3. NPCs
It starts to get annoying for me as well, Frontier, but do-something. The Elite Federal Gunship easily loses to my C4F Pulse Laser and my C2S Missiles. I have D drives unmodded and around 1000 MJs shields and fight against an Elite FGS that is just hungry for this SINGLE Micro Controller in my cargo hold worth around a thousand credits maybe. Heck, even the fuel costs would be higher.
I think we all agree here, all the community plus you, Frontier, that Elite: Dangerous's NPCs have major flaws. You prove yourself fro mtime to time that you are indeed actually reading the forums so I save some text here to list all the flaws. There are countless threads (10% being my fault) about this topic.
4. Netcoding
There was a time where even with P2P it would work but as it stands now the netcoding is bad. Not extremely terrible but we all got used to desynchs and parallel instances and vanishing players and and and. Even NPCs are starting to combot log on me now (no jokes, this happened). Whatever it takes to provide a multiplayer that is capable of staying stable atleast 99% of the time (so one desynch or player/NPC vanish every 100 encounters ... this is not too much to ask for) ... do it, take it, make this come true. Here, take all my logs and settings and install 100% data-claws on my system but care for a good netcoding.
Last words: 2.1 has major flaws. Additionally, ancient problems haven't been fixed yet and the appeal to actually improve existing content rather than adding more has ... gone silent. This is in my eyes an larming sign of losing hope. I for exampel stopped caring about the newsletters and not-existing dev updates and have no hope that they will come back. It has been requested, a developer even said he will show this request the team but that was months ago. At this point I doubt we will get dev updates anymore and here is my appeal:
!!Listen to the community!!
And don't only listen, do what the community says .. atleast to some degree.
How many games have died because the devs have done what they want or what they don't want due to investors and/or NDAs? There is a PvP focus group which should help with balancing weapons, there are beta testers which are supposed to test stuff durign a beta and provide feedback and there is the community that should give feedback in general over time and then there are developers who should make this feedback come true and adjust the game. You even asked about what we undertsnad about depth. Okay this was only a few days ago but another thing wasn't: The Combat Logging update. In this you said that you are taking this seriously and are working on a way to prevent this or atleast auto-detect this behavior (and ultimately applying appropiate warings and/or other consequences). What do we have today? Nothing! The combat logging situation has been just as bad as it ever was and the frequency remains high. And don't only listen, do what the community says .. atleast to some degree.
Also weren't we supposed to name our ships? This is not even a major investion of time and resources. On the other hand, we got the cockpit-clock which has been requested several times.
So why are you using your RNG to select what stuff you will be working on and what not?
Also one warning I'd like to point out but which has already been pointed out before: Even though neither NMS nor SC or ED want to compete with eachother ... they will. No matter what Chris, Sean or David will be doing. That is not up to them but to the customers. I for one don't need three space games at once. I need a single once and that's it. SC is getting close to its release, when the beta starts there will be alot of attention for SC and look at NMS. Due to the failure of NMS Elite has experience a good amount of new player influence. The same *could* happe nto Elite with Star Citizen. (Yes call me a doomsayer, go ahead) Obviously Star Citizen could fail just as NMS but the likeleyhood is quite lower. SC has the biggest of all three financial resources and therefore the best opportunities, however, it all comes down to the team. What do millions of dollars or pounds use if the team is as talented as a hobby game writer? Wasted resources.
The deadline is Star Citizen's release. Until then, I really do hope that Elite is a sustainable product capable of being a worthy alternative to SC.
And to you, dear reader? What does this whole wall o' text help you? You can help improving the game by spreading this .. or your word. FD have stated that they will listen to what is 'hot' so for example if alot of palyers report the same bug, it has a high priority. Yeah, it sucks that the actual important bugs like crashes have a lower prioriy if it only happens to a few of us but that's FD's way. It is just like with voting. Go vote! Be happy we live in a democracy. And so be happy that you have two hands, a keyboard and an internet connection. Write your opinion and spread it. The more opinions we have (I obviously hope many people agree with atleast some of my points) the higher the priority will be for FD to touch certain points. Do you feel that engineers mods are unbalanced? Say so! Do you think they are balanced? Well, say so! Do you think NPCs or the netcodings are bad? Guess what, say-so! With your initiative to raise your voice and be an example of an active community member I certainly hope FD will take an example and also become active.
Bring back dev updates.
Thank you for your attention ... or thank you not if you have skipped major parts
PS: Sorry for typos and/or grammar mistakes as usual.
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