A wildly unpopular one, too, if I had to guess...but allow me to explain what I mean by 'nerf engineers'.
I almost exclusively fly in Open and, being a visitor of the forums, it won't come as a surprise I'm familiar with PvP, ganking, the 'open only' debate and so on. I personally feel PvP in Elite is pretty lackluster. I'd say there is a balance issue, but that isn't quite accurate. What is accurate is that there is a by-the-ship balance issue. Allow me to use some examples:
Some Examples...
1) You're flying your stock T-9 to a CG, you get interdicted by a FDL built for PvP - maybe G3 mods or better - and of course, die very rapidly. Your ship, being stock, simply lacks the defensive capability to withstand this killing machine. In my personal experience (which I draw this example from), I was dead before I could even open contacts to see what (and who) had even interdicted me.
2) You're cruising around in your PvP Corvette that you've been working on. You're G3 or G4 on most of your modules, and thus quite dangerous. That said, when you encounter another 'Big 3' ship attempting to interdict you, you choose to run or combat-log. You reason that nobody would risk their Big 3 ship against a similar target unless it was G5 across the board...a significant improvement over your current loadout.
3) You love to pick fights and interdict players every chance you get - but most just combat log or run off, and rarely fight! Trying a change of tactics...you build out a Diamondback Explorer for PvP. Resuming your interdiction shenanigans, you discover more targets willing to fight back! (Also drawn from experience) Why is this?
The Performance Disparity Gap
I'm not a numbers research guru, but it doesn't take one to know that if you were to match a stock ship against an A-Rated ship, there's a fair difference in performance. That said, it's generally accepted nobody keeps E-rated modules...so what about D-rated vs A-rated? Well, that could be a fight if the D-rated ship is in the hands of a swell pilot.
Put another way, before we take engineering into consideration we know that the 'balance' of a ship matched against itself is fairly narrow in terms of performance game-side. Instead, skill of the commander is the primary determining factor. Now, D-Rated vs. A-Rated might make that a 60/40 mix (Skill/Loadout)...but skill still matters more. This is balanced (and that's good) but why that balance matters is the meat of my topic:
'It's Just a Game' is a common utterance on both sides of the PvP / PvE fence. And they're all correct: it's just a game. As such, you're not forced into a life or death 'you must stay logged in' scenario as in real life. You just log into solo or PG, or combat-log. Vice versa, you stop interdicting fair targets and interdict anything that moves because finding a fair fight is about as common as a luxury Adder. But why avoid the fights? 'They're never fair' - and that is also true. 'You're all gankers' isn't true, but when you start interdicting everything...well, yeah, that kinda happens.
See, the vast majority of players (not just Elite players - any players!) size up PvP based on risk/reward: not risk vs credits, mind you, but risk vs winning (be that honor points, credits, rep, bragging, killboards, or just a good time). Players will take risks (it's a game after all), but only if the rate of winning is enough to warrant it. Most players won't take a risk if the ratio of loss to win is somewhere below 5 to 1. That just means you'll lose a lot...and that's not fun.
What's more, if those losses are fast - like I can't-check-my-contacts-I'm-already-dead fast - then the incentive to fight is further reduced. This is why TTK (time to kill) matters a lot in PvP-only games (like the battle royales of Fortnite or the old shooters of Counterstrike). Low TTK significantly reduces player satisfaction (winning AND losing) because the player can't perceive their skill's value in the match. If my skill has little to no bearing on survival...it's not a game, it's a gamble.
"But SandKid...what does this have to do with engineers?"
If the typical player doesn't have G3 mods or higher on their combat ship (assuming they are even flying a combat ship!), they already know that their chance of success in a PvP encounter is very likely quite low when interdicted. They assume (correctly and incorrectly) that their assailant is going to be stronger because they had the gumption to interdict them. Essentially, most players buy into the fallacy (like bad economic advisors) that an attacker won't be stupid enough to take on fights they might lose. Again, this is a false assumption - but they don't know that.
What they do know is that their ship doesn't stand a chance against another engineered ship if it is a higher grade. Pretty much guaranteed loss, unless you think yourself a hotshot commander. And there are such commanders, but they often fail to understand how few and far between they are. Most players do not have the 'can do' attitude of a true PvP-er - and that's ok, it's just human psychology.
You see, engineering scales with the grades. Grade 1 to Grade 2 is a minor improvement, but Grade 4 to Grade 5 is quite large! From an RPG perspective, this makes great sense - we want to feel stronger and more powerful as we invest time and resources into our play experience in any game. But in Elite, this is a two-edged sword: engineers vastly expand the performance disparity gap. This gap is important because, as already explained, it fuels the player's risk vs reward calculation. Bigger gaps drive the win/loss ratio further down (as in more losses to wins) and thus convince more players to simply skip out on PvP altogether.
We see this in the unwillingness of Power Play to really 'be' legal PvP, or the fact solo is heavily utilized for CGs, Power Play, or just visiting ShenDez. Engineering is intended to allow further customization and investment in our favorite ships - but it also paves the statistical facts in our minds that unless we are at our best, the likelihood we will lose is quite high.
The Suggestion - Nerf Engineers
Imagine if a stock Type-9 took more than a minute to bring down with a Corvette. You'd probably think the 'vette pilot a fool - but what if it was just balanced this way? If we were to wave the magical FDev wand and remove engineers (I'm not suggesting that, mind you), TTK would dramatically increase across the board for all PvP encounters - consensual and not - just because the performance disparity gap would significantly thin.
I often like to reference another popular space MMO, EVE Online, which is often accused by the ignorant of being 'impossible for new players' because of the skillpoint gap between a veteran and a rookie. Interestingly, EVE Online has almost every ship in the game redundant - four versions, one for each race, but largely identical in performance with minor differences in how they play or fly. Despite these differences, if you take four ships of the same class but different races (and therefore very different loadouts and weapons) - a frigate for example - you'll find their performance nearly identical, despite being very different ships after loadout. Skill of the pilot will be the real determining factor in a battle.
In Elite, it's no secret that if you take a stock Fer-De-Lance and a stock Asp Explorer, the FDL is going to win an excessive number of times. Elite, though, isn't built with ship classes in narrow bands of performance...the FDL costs a lot more than the Asp, for starters, and is of course more well-appointed for combat in its internals and hardpoints! But strangely, if we were to remove engineering, a combat fit Asp Explorer might be willing to take on a FDL - if only because the perception of the performance gap is so much smaller. Any veteran PvP-er will tell you that if a ship is properly built for combat, it will perform at least satisfactorily within its same size class. An FDL still ought win out over an Asp...but pilot skill has more say, before engineers.
This is the heart of the suggestion: bring the performance gap back into check by nerfing engineer performance gains. Rather than giving performance gains that double the power of a given module, they should instead be limited to performance gains closer to 25% at grade 5. This sounds tiny! compared to now - but that's the price of putting the genie back in the bottle. I genuinely think PvP combat would greatly benefit from the reduction of engineer effectiveness in the game.
Elite will never have 'ship class balance' as it isn't designed with this in mind - but it can have a stronger ship-loadout balance where pilot skill plays a much greater role in the effectiveness of a ship. As it stands, only elite (no pun intended) PvP sees this play out. Anyone (which is most of us) who doesn't think themselves a crack pilot will largely avoid PvP confrontations because 'we know' (rightly or wrongly) our attacker is probably going to kill us before we even have a chance to get oriented. That just isn't very much fun. It's not a 'git gud' problem when the ability to even be gud isn't present.
There's my two credits (and a lot of words) - keep in mind my opinion is worth about that much, too, so try not to get too worked up if the notion hits close to home for you.
Fly dangerous! o7
I almost exclusively fly in Open and, being a visitor of the forums, it won't come as a surprise I'm familiar with PvP, ganking, the 'open only' debate and so on. I personally feel PvP in Elite is pretty lackluster. I'd say there is a balance issue, but that isn't quite accurate. What is accurate is that there is a by-the-ship balance issue. Allow me to use some examples:
Some Examples...
1) You're flying your stock T-9 to a CG, you get interdicted by a FDL built for PvP - maybe G3 mods or better - and of course, die very rapidly. Your ship, being stock, simply lacks the defensive capability to withstand this killing machine. In my personal experience (which I draw this example from), I was dead before I could even open contacts to see what (and who) had even interdicted me.
2) You're cruising around in your PvP Corvette that you've been working on. You're G3 or G4 on most of your modules, and thus quite dangerous. That said, when you encounter another 'Big 3' ship attempting to interdict you, you choose to run or combat-log. You reason that nobody would risk their Big 3 ship against a similar target unless it was G5 across the board...a significant improvement over your current loadout.
3) You love to pick fights and interdict players every chance you get - but most just combat log or run off, and rarely fight! Trying a change of tactics...you build out a Diamondback Explorer for PvP. Resuming your interdiction shenanigans, you discover more targets willing to fight back! (Also drawn from experience) Why is this?
The Performance Disparity Gap
I'm not a numbers research guru, but it doesn't take one to know that if you were to match a stock ship against an A-Rated ship, there's a fair difference in performance. That said, it's generally accepted nobody keeps E-rated modules...so what about D-rated vs A-rated? Well, that could be a fight if the D-rated ship is in the hands of a swell pilot.
Put another way, before we take engineering into consideration we know that the 'balance' of a ship matched against itself is fairly narrow in terms of performance game-side. Instead, skill of the commander is the primary determining factor. Now, D-Rated vs. A-Rated might make that a 60/40 mix (Skill/Loadout)...but skill still matters more. This is balanced (and that's good) but why that balance matters is the meat of my topic:
'It's Just a Game' is a common utterance on both sides of the PvP / PvE fence. And they're all correct: it's just a game. As such, you're not forced into a life or death 'you must stay logged in' scenario as in real life. You just log into solo or PG, or combat-log. Vice versa, you stop interdicting fair targets and interdict anything that moves because finding a fair fight is about as common as a luxury Adder. But why avoid the fights? 'They're never fair' - and that is also true. 'You're all gankers' isn't true, but when you start interdicting everything...well, yeah, that kinda happens.
See, the vast majority of players (not just Elite players - any players!) size up PvP based on risk/reward: not risk vs credits, mind you, but risk vs winning (be that honor points, credits, rep, bragging, killboards, or just a good time). Players will take risks (it's a game after all), but only if the rate of winning is enough to warrant it. Most players won't take a risk if the ratio of loss to win is somewhere below 5 to 1. That just means you'll lose a lot...and that's not fun.
What's more, if those losses are fast - like I can't-check-my-contacts-I'm-already-dead fast - then the incentive to fight is further reduced. This is why TTK (time to kill) matters a lot in PvP-only games (like the battle royales of Fortnite or the old shooters of Counterstrike). Low TTK significantly reduces player satisfaction (winning AND losing) because the player can't perceive their skill's value in the match. If my skill has little to no bearing on survival...it's not a game, it's a gamble.
"But SandKid...what does this have to do with engineers?"
If the typical player doesn't have G3 mods or higher on their combat ship (assuming they are even flying a combat ship!), they already know that their chance of success in a PvP encounter is very likely quite low when interdicted. They assume (correctly and incorrectly) that their assailant is going to be stronger because they had the gumption to interdict them. Essentially, most players buy into the fallacy (like bad economic advisors) that an attacker won't be stupid enough to take on fights they might lose. Again, this is a false assumption - but they don't know that.
What they do know is that their ship doesn't stand a chance against another engineered ship if it is a higher grade. Pretty much guaranteed loss, unless you think yourself a hotshot commander. And there are such commanders, but they often fail to understand how few and far between they are. Most players do not have the 'can do' attitude of a true PvP-er - and that's ok, it's just human psychology.
You see, engineering scales with the grades. Grade 1 to Grade 2 is a minor improvement, but Grade 4 to Grade 5 is quite large! From an RPG perspective, this makes great sense - we want to feel stronger and more powerful as we invest time and resources into our play experience in any game. But in Elite, this is a two-edged sword: engineers vastly expand the performance disparity gap. This gap is important because, as already explained, it fuels the player's risk vs reward calculation. Bigger gaps drive the win/loss ratio further down (as in more losses to wins) and thus convince more players to simply skip out on PvP altogether.
We see this in the unwillingness of Power Play to really 'be' legal PvP, or the fact solo is heavily utilized for CGs, Power Play, or just visiting ShenDez. Engineering is intended to allow further customization and investment in our favorite ships - but it also paves the statistical facts in our minds that unless we are at our best, the likelihood we will lose is quite high.
The Suggestion - Nerf Engineers
Imagine if a stock Type-9 took more than a minute to bring down with a Corvette. You'd probably think the 'vette pilot a fool - but what if it was just balanced this way? If we were to wave the magical FDev wand and remove engineers (I'm not suggesting that, mind you), TTK would dramatically increase across the board for all PvP encounters - consensual and not - just because the performance disparity gap would significantly thin.
I often like to reference another popular space MMO, EVE Online, which is often accused by the ignorant of being 'impossible for new players' because of the skillpoint gap between a veteran and a rookie. Interestingly, EVE Online has almost every ship in the game redundant - four versions, one for each race, but largely identical in performance with minor differences in how they play or fly. Despite these differences, if you take four ships of the same class but different races (and therefore very different loadouts and weapons) - a frigate for example - you'll find their performance nearly identical, despite being very different ships after loadout. Skill of the pilot will be the real determining factor in a battle.
In Elite, it's no secret that if you take a stock Fer-De-Lance and a stock Asp Explorer, the FDL is going to win an excessive number of times. Elite, though, isn't built with ship classes in narrow bands of performance...the FDL costs a lot more than the Asp, for starters, and is of course more well-appointed for combat in its internals and hardpoints! But strangely, if we were to remove engineering, a combat fit Asp Explorer might be willing to take on a FDL - if only because the perception of the performance gap is so much smaller. Any veteran PvP-er will tell you that if a ship is properly built for combat, it will perform at least satisfactorily within its same size class. An FDL still ought win out over an Asp...but pilot skill has more say, before engineers.
This is the heart of the suggestion: bring the performance gap back into check by nerfing engineer performance gains. Rather than giving performance gains that double the power of a given module, they should instead be limited to performance gains closer to 25% at grade 5. This sounds tiny! compared to now - but that's the price of putting the genie back in the bottle. I genuinely think PvP combat would greatly benefit from the reduction of engineer effectiveness in the game.
Elite will never have 'ship class balance' as it isn't designed with this in mind - but it can have a stronger ship-loadout balance where pilot skill plays a much greater role in the effectiveness of a ship. As it stands, only elite (no pun intended) PvP sees this play out. Anyone (which is most of us) who doesn't think themselves a crack pilot will largely avoid PvP confrontations because 'we know' (rightly or wrongly) our attacker is probably going to kill us before we even have a chance to get oriented. That just isn't very much fun. It's not a 'git gud' problem when the ability to even be gud isn't present.
There's my two credits (and a lot of words) - keep in mind my opinion is worth about that much, too, so try not to get too worked up if the notion hits close to home for you.
Fly dangerous! o7
![[VR] M4st0d0n](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/182/182772.jpg?1569064854){kind=avatar}
