Here's a quick sloppy chart I did up to highlight the issue (as I see it).
One of my accounts has a Competent combat rank (almost Expert) and has no issues in combat, interdictions or RES/CZ. The second account has just made it to Dangerous rank a month ago and I have severe issues killing a Dangerous or Elite opponent. It's only happened once (I had 25% hull left after doing so), I've died repeated times and am still at 0% rank. Obviously, this means my ability in combat lays between these two points and given the location on the chart, it makes me "average". I suspect most players are in or near this range. If you are currently not having problems, your rank may not be high enough yet.
The "Git Gud" crowd claim they have no issues and some say they actually want combat to be even harder. So how do we reconcile this disparity? The skill level of each player reading this will be at a different point on the above scale. A selector for easy, medium or hard AI is problematic and can probably be misused. There should only be one level for all, but obviously if this were done, the Git Gud perfect twitch combat pilots would moan it was too easy and the debate would go on and on.
There's been suggestions from some players (assuming they actually own the game and and not trolling) that those having issues write support and dial-back their combat rating which only offsets the problem. Not to mention, a reduction in rank also equates to a reduction in mission income, etc. which I would actually consider a punishment caused by onerous game mechanics. People are seriously saying the game is too hard for you to advance, so manually tweak your combat rating down to keep playing. How many games do you own where a manual override from support is needed? I have 224 games on Steam and Elite is the only one.
Elite is a game where the higher your rank, the higher the reward. It's worked that way since the game came out and until 2.1 I had no issues with that. The only way I see that AI combat level will work for everyone is to set it at a reasonable standard so that average players, like myself, can still advance, but have an optional check box that adds additional difficulty for the 1% of players who are infused with Red Bull and want harder combats.
There's other issues as well. Railguns and Engineer module mods should be removed from NPC ships until the AI is balanced to a reasonable point, then we can add them back one at a time and see what sort of impact that has on the game.
That's my $0.02. What's yours?
The "Git Gud" crowd claim they have no issues and some say they actually want combat to be even harder. So how do we reconcile this disparity? The skill level of each player reading this will be at a different point on the above scale. A selector for easy, medium or hard AI is problematic and can probably be misused. There should only be one level for all, but obviously if this were done, the Git Gud perfect twitch combat pilots would moan it was too easy and the debate would go on and on.
There's been suggestions from some players (assuming they actually own the game and and not trolling) that those having issues write support and dial-back their combat rating which only offsets the problem. Not to mention, a reduction in rank also equates to a reduction in mission income, etc. which I would actually consider a punishment caused by onerous game mechanics. People are seriously saying the game is too hard for you to advance, so manually tweak your combat rating down to keep playing. How many games do you own where a manual override from support is needed? I have 224 games on Steam and Elite is the only one.
Elite is a game where the higher your rank, the higher the reward. It's worked that way since the game came out and until 2.1 I had no issues with that. The only way I see that AI combat level will work for everyone is to set it at a reasonable standard so that average players, like myself, can still advance, but have an optional check box that adds additional difficulty for the 1% of players who are infused with Red Bull and want harder combats.
There's other issues as well. Railguns and Engineer module mods should be removed from NPC ships until the AI is balanced to a reasonable point, then we can add them back one at a time and see what sort of impact that has on the game.
That's my $0.02. What's yours?
Outside of missions, difficulty should be strictly based on your region, and rank difference:
