Should ED have dedicated PVP weapons?

[stumblingdrunk]

I have been playing for some time and there is a regular question on the forums asking why PVErs dont join open and I obviously cant speak for everybody, but from my point of view it is the huge disparity between a PVE and PVP ship:

DEFENCE
A PVE ship may have a fuel scoop, cargo space, limpets and other modules - if they dont have atleast one of these they are likely making their PVE activities harder.
A PVP ship potentially does not require any of these so they can be replaced with Shield cells, HRPs and MRPs - which means they have several thousand more shields or boosted hull defence

This seems fair enough, although this would obviously give an edge to the PVP ship

OFFENCE
A PVE ship will likely have weapons without ammo mixed with high ammo weapons. Clearly this isnt going to be the same for everyone, but from the builds I have seen on the forum and flying around it is fairly standard. These will likely have some mods to support CZ combat.
A PVP ship can, and likely will, have ammo based weapons and can focus on weapons and mods to kill players, such as: Plasma accelerators (ignore shield resists), Reverberating torpedos (remove shield generator), FSD reboot missiles, rail guns (for new high hitting against hulls), feedback cascade (to stop SCBs from working) etc (sadly the list goes on and on)

When elite was being developmed their plan was surely to have most players playing together in one universe and going back to my question I cant understand why we have a situation where in every situation a PVP ship has a huge advantage over a PVE ship before an engagement even begins. I assume they were there to make PVP vs PVP fights more interesting, but as people just change builds with the new meta, is that the case? (a genuine question as a non-PVPer I dont know). I read a post from a PVE player who decided to switch to a PVP focus a while back and I remember the comments on what setup they should use to beat other players. Is that the game that is going to encourage more player interaction? I honestly dont think so, as it splits the game into two where one does not work with the other. Anyway thats just some thoughts, you are welcome to call me a noob and LTP etc, but some actual feedback would be appreciated as well. I have created this post to get the views from players on what they think about having dedicated weapons and if they would prefer a more level playing field for weapons, but weaker overall defences to encourage a game based on skill not ship build?

It is never going to be a completely level playing field due to engineers, but atleast most of non-special effect improvements from this are applicable to PVP and PVE players

TLDR: PVP dedicated weapons give a PVP player a huge (likely insurmountable) advantage over any PVE ship and discourages player interaction, does that benefit the game?

 

[JosiahD]

Personally I feel any thoughts of mixing both PvE and PvP in the one mode and expecting to able to balance both was doomed from the start. Then add Engineers, Wings and now multicrew - you're correct when you say it's never going to be a level playing field. That said, open doesn't need to be a level playing field (it's supposed to be cutthroat), but the popularity of Mobius for a PvE-only experience says a lot in my opinion.....

 

[NeilF]

Surely a more logical approach might be to reduce/rein in unwanted PvP, and the game orchestrate/offer more "concensual" PvP.

Let a Crime and Punishment system penalise habitual "illegal" destruction, and for the game then to offer plenty of easy to access PvP via PvP scenarios/task and CGs and such.

 

[Earth Ultimatum IV.]

What you're saying is not a question of PVE vs PVP, it's a question of engagement types.

PVE is about killing hordes and hordes of braindead AI. Thus, it makes sense that you use builds made for long sessions like lasers.

PVP is all about the quality of the kill. You very rarely get to have more than four players around, and the difficulty of PVE is just not a match for PVP, so naturally you focus on quality over quantity.



For example, equipment you mentioned as "PVP" equipment has also great use for PVE assassination missions, as those are different from CZ/RES farming.

 

[Alex Brentnall]

What you're saying is not a question of PVE vs PVP, it's a question of engagement types.

PVE is about killing hordes and hordes of braindead AI. Thus, it makes sense that you use builds made for long sessions like lasers.

PVP is all about the quality of the kill. You very rarely get to have more than four players around, and the difficulty of PVE is just not a match for PVP, so naturally you focus on quality over quantity.



For example, equipment you mentioned as "PVP" equipment has also great use for PVE assassination missions, as those are different from CZ/RES farming.

This

Low ammo high damage vs infinite ammo low damage.
I actually made an incredibly awesome rare trading Asp Explorer and (pre-engineers) almost blasted a pirates face off by firing my entire load of frag cannons, railguns and torpedoes in one salvo before escaping. He made the mistake of being in front of me for the negotiations without realising I was packing an immense alpha damage loadout. Knocked his shield and 10% of his hull out.
These days I'd consider mines but would be tempted to load up on engineered missiles & torpedoes and get a multicrew gunner to fire them whilst I escape. Sadly due to the defence mods and the time it takes to engineer these weapons it's a significant effort for a Hail-Mary defence that the enemy may be able to shrug off anyway..

 

[AutoMechancal]

The only point I agree with in this thread is that engineers has blown out any chance of balancing the game at all.

Clearly a ship that is not built for the purpose of combat can not complete with a ship that is built for the purpose of combat. Also the reason for a PvE combat ship not being able to complete against a PvP combat ship is because the skill ceiling of PvE is so much lower. There's also a the argument of quantity vs quality, but if both play styles had equal skill requirements this argument would become mute.

 

[Crank Larson]

All ships should conform to the same rules, whether NPC or human player. If you load up your ship for combat (max weapons, shields, etc.) then that is a valid game choice.

Mobius is popular because a lot of people aren't interested in PvP very much (I'm one of them). Also, CQC is purely PvP so that is another option if you just want to dogfight.

I agree with NeilF that the best approach is to concentrate on honing the crime and punishment system. I like the fact now that when you are attacked in a high security system, the local security force respond quite quickly. I find this very helpful when interdicted by Anacondas... Combat is not one of my strong points, so I just give the enemy the runaround until the backup arrives.

 

[Darkfyre99]

The main problem is that Elite: Dangerous is (supposedly) a game where combat isn't the sole focus of the game. Thus it attracts players who aren't interested in combat. You have explorers, traders, miners, couriers, and BGS players in the game, as well as combat oriented PvPers, PvEers, and player-killers.

And then Frontier decides not to implement the second (PvP) tier of their Crime&Punishment system, fails to implement any kind of karma system to flag chronic ne'er do wells, and doesn't create an outlet for HEALTHY PvP, where both sides enjoy themselves, and are rewarded according to how much of an underdog you are. Is it any wonder that open has such a PK problem that most players have fled it for greener pastures?

Game developers have known about the effect that player-killing has on game populations for almost 30 years now, and probably much longer than that. Why do game developers keep making the same mistake?

 

[Truesilver]

When elite was being developmed their plan was surely to have most players playing together in one universe and going back to my question I cant understand why we have a situation where in every situation a PVP ship has a huge advantage over a PVE ship before an engagement even begins. I assume they were there to make PVP vs PVP fights more interesting, but as people just change builds with the new meta, is that the case? (a genuine question as a non-PVPer I dont know).

Concerning your question above about what the purpose of introducing the specials was, I don't think anybody else knows either.

You will not find one single post from a PvP-er on either forum before 2.1 asking for the specials. Quite literally the only two modest requests made were for dial-backs on the effectiveness of (a) SCB stacking; and (b) silent running + stacked rail guns.

Frontier's only comment on the subject ever was that they thought the specials would be "interesting". They didn't even originally plan for them to deliberately orchestrated into builds (without a forcing mechanic it would have been impossible to set up a build tactically, unless someone was willing to do potentially thousands of g5 rolls).

A huge part of the current balance problems, including PvP v PvE but also just straight up PvP, come from the fact that there does not appear to have been any clear objective in mind for how 2.1 combat was supposed to look once everyone was fully RNGineered.

Although speaking not of objectives but outcomes, I think we can see quite clearly that 2.1 took an intricate but not overly-complex, reasonably well-balanced combat system, akin to a watch mechanism, and turned it into about the most complex, imbalanced, unpredictable and widely criticised combat system that could be imagined.

Hence, every single Beta now features some form of trying to rebalance a patch that was released almost a year ago. We are still in Beta 2.1.

 

[Arindor]

RNGineers was FD's way of saying, "We don't know how to balance combat, so do it yourselves".

 

[Hooplah]

This sense of a widening gap between PvP and PvE ships is a good thing. Why? Because trying to balance the two with all the updates and additions doesn't work. Nerf the Python because PvP had difficulties taking them out. Meanwhile PvE traders lost a fast and maneuverable ship more susceptible to damage. There was a huge uproar on this one with many threads posted but PvP won out as is usually the case. Thanks to the Engineers that Python can be flown again. Nerf the shields and SCBs, nerf/enhance weapons/hulls, NPCs with better skills and high ranking ones with engineered weapons all have the same cause and effect replies depending upon your style of game play...and most of them dedicated to PvP play. Changing one type of game play for the positive will always have negatives for the other types.

The Engineers was in my opinion the one solution that works for everyone and probably Frontier's realization that balancing PvP vrs PvE with everyone liking the results will never happen. Still I think Frontier went a little too far with specific FSD, shield, module disabling weapons but that's for another thread. A PvP player can now design their ship without some general update effecting the payability of a PvE ship and vice versa. That may not be the perfect solution but it works for everyone. We now have Open for everything goes PvP. We have Mobius and many private groups from non-combat Meet 'n' Greet to serious wings/jousting matches. Add in Solo for those who never wanted to play with others in the first place and all the bases are covered.

There are just too many conflicting play styles that will never be compatible in a singular utopian Open mode where all of them work. Some styles will lose out as in PvP build pirates interdicting PvE build traders foolish enough to play in Open. Community Goals per delivering cargo (fly Solo) versus blockading these deliveries (fly Open) are also effected.

Ed Lewis in the live streams often gets killed by some trigger happy player simply demonstrating a ship/game feature, running races around a station in Eagles, time trials landing in a station (had to go to Solo for that one at PAX East) etc. Until human nature is fixed this is how it is. Maybe the good news is that the more people who go to war in a computer game will be less likely to start one for real...then again maybe they are just perfecting their kill skills...

 

[Mendaharin Tusca]

Yep that pretty much summed it up, a pve player has to balance power, practicality and efficiency, and the area that tend to receive the lowest priority for obvious reasons is the ability to fight other players. Meanwhile a pvp player can tailor his ship for a single task, making very low number of hard fast kills, using weapons whose ammo and energy requirements simply isn't practical for a trade or for sustained combat. And engineering has made the disparity between these two styles far larger than ever before, in reality David would never stand a chance with his little sling against a Goliath in a suit of armour. And yet, many claim to do it "for the challenge"

 

[stumblingdrunk]

What you're saying is not a question of PVE vs PVP, it's a question of engagement types.

PVE is about killing hordes and hordes of braindead AI. Thus, it makes sense that you use builds made for long sessions like lasers.

PVP is all about the quality of the kill. You very rarely get to have more than four players around, and the difficulty of PVE is just not a match for PVP, so naturally you focus on quality over quantity.
For example, equipment you mentioned as "PVP" equipment has also great use for PVE assassination missions, as those are different from CZ/RES farming.

Funnily enough after I wrote this I realised that the issue actually is that NPCs are just so feeble that I dont need specialised equipment to take them down. I am still against the special effect nonsense we have at the moment, but if FD added high skill NPCs with player equivalent skills this could be rectified as I (and other PVErs) would need dedicated weapons. I would happily have areas which have elite and deadly NPCs that were really hard to take out if they paid sufficient bounty. Im pretty sure I would have more fun doing this too than sitting in a hazres with a hold full of engineering cargo trying to find enough stuff to kill.

Concerning your question above about what the purpose of introducing the specials was, I don't think anybody else knows either.

You will not find one single post from a PvP-er on either forum before 2.1 asking for the specials. Quite literally the only two modest requests made were for dial-backs on the effectiveness of (a) SCB stacking; and (b) silent running + stacked rail guns.

Frontier's only comment on the subject ever was that they thought the specials would be "interesting". They didn't even originally plan for them to deliberately orchestrated into builds (without a forcing mechanic it would have been impossible to set up a build tactically, unless someone was willing to do potentially thousands of g5 rolls).

A huge part of the current balance problems, including PvP v PvE but also just straight up PvP, come from the fact that there does not appear to have been any clear objective in mind for how 2.1 combat was supposed to look once everyone was fully RNGineered.

Although speaking not of objectives but outcomes, I think we can see quite clearly that 2.1 took an intricate but not overly-complex, reasonably well-balanced combat system, akin to a watch mechanism, and turned it into about the most complex, imbalanced, unpredictable and widely criticised combat system that could be imagined.

Hence, every single Beta now features some form of trying to rebalance a patch that was released almost a year ago. We are still in Beta 2.1.

I agree, and its this fact which makes me not play the game as much anymore, there seems to be so much uncertainty around what will need to be changed next. Its sad as ED is truly the most enjoyable game I have ever played.

 

[Arindor]

The Engineers was in my opinion the one solution that works for everyone and probably Frontier's realization that balancing PvP vrs PvE with everyone liking the results will never happen.

Mmm, not sure those with the base game will agree with that. If you need the Engineers add-on to survive, then Engineers could be regarded as P2W.

 

[Han_Zen]

Mmm, not sure those with the base game will agree with that. If you need the Engineers add-on to survive, then Engineers could be regarded as P2W.

There has been tonnes of debating on the beta thread on balancing. It's not simple.

I have some simple suggestions that might help.

- All defencive values should have a hard cap. This hard cap should be possible to reach without engineers.

Expample: Shield MJ hard cap for a specific ship is set to standard A class shield + plus a number of standard A class boosters. If you engineer, you can reduce or eliminate the number of booster and still hit the cap. You are left with more available slots and significantly lower recharge time, but the MJ stays the same.

The same could be implemented for resistance values, hull hit points and module integrity.

A system like that would lead to much more variation in the builds, while keeping the capabilities similar. A PvE player could grind their top combat ship to have room for SRV, fule scoop and SFL without losing out on raw stats. A lazy PvPer could smack together a relatively competitive build, without even hitting the engineers.

Do this, let all good NPCs also hit the cap and remove special effects weapons completely --> good game.

Disclaimer: I do understand that some ships may be affected unfairly by this and would need re balancing of their base stats.

 

[CmdMarty]

Mmm, not sure those with the base game will agree with that. If you need the Engineers add-on to survive, then Engineers could be regarded as P2W.

So true and so quickly after season 1 base game owners lost the ability to pvp and be nerfed in every other field as well! Fdev spend a lot of time now trying to balance the mess 2.1 imposed. Hard not to feel the game maybe misguided.

 

[o2thaZ]

They should stop the whole balancing act with the pew pew crowd.
Allready to many resources spend on one mode.
As far as iam concerned..pvp can go the graveyard sooner than later.

 

[verminstar]

Because I ignore the one armed bandit luck concept that is rngeers, open is simply a place one does not venture into, as without them, one is nothing but the rabbit or the hare, constantly running away. I dont consider running away all the time to be very engaging gameplay, therefore its the solo or pg life fer me. As regard the topic, pvp players can have whatever they like because they dont play the same game as I do, and because they arent my problem anymore, I literally dont care what they start demanding anymore. So I support them absolutely 100% ^

 

[BL1P]

Why should Ed Lewis get his own .... Oh wait a sec..

 

[Pyrotiger]

Nah.

Nope.