Bah! Mega catch up two...
There isn't anything wrong with pricing of the scoops - there is, however, something wrong with people being able to do basic math, and apply that to how the game works.
With the exception of the Beluga, using the 6,7,or 8A scoops is a near-zero ROI, which literally makes them a waste of credits.
Also, while I don't necessarily agree with the OP's assessment, I would say that picking on the builds is missing the forest for the trees.
Get better soon, Susanna
Riôt
Thanks for the get better soon wishes.
I do disagree with you on the use of A rated scoops, I still think they have a place. Albeit, since the change to having to fly around a star on your route has made A rated scoops less value for money. What is annoying is that their cost hasn't been scaled back with their reduced effectiveness, resulting in A rated scoops being waaay over priced for the small benefit they now provide and effectively reducing the range of scoops that are available to being B and lower. imo, the cost of A rated scoops should be reduced.
A lot of experts on the front page shooting down OP with detailed examples.
I'm going to suggest that most players aren't experts.
I get told off for having A rated everything on my T-9.
I don't have the patience to juggle millijoules vs whatever you measure a power distributed in.
A-Rated life support has saved my bacon so that's how I roll.
And there's also a lot of folks shooting down the "big fuel scoop" trade ships.
But there's a definite use case: I had a big scoop when I was running goods out to that station on the edge of the bubble for the SMAC Alliance CG.
It's not just noobs who run sub-optimal builds.
Big trade ships are expensive.
And if you've solved your money problem - there is a real tendency to gold plate them.
So they're even more expensive.
Susanna has a point.
I must admit I do (probably needlessly) gold plate my ships. With Bn's, there is little incentive not to... I can afford an A rated scoop if I fancy one, even if it is now usually overkill. As you pointed out, LS is another module that may get A rated when an A rated LS is now pretty much redundant with synthesis buying you 7:30 chunks for common materials. It's having unnecessary weight on your ship costing you jump range...
Perhaps such modules need to have a balance pass so that their cost that was set way back in V1.0 (correct me if I'm wrong) is better framed with the game mechanics now in place.
Sure, but
1) I don't think the purpose of the rule is to apply scientifically every time. It's just to discourage people from using really big ships to prey on really small ones.
2) An attacker can't generally tell anyway. Is that Asp running a 6C scoop or a 6A scoop? (>1 million difference in rebuy) - is it mostly D-rated or mostly A-rated? (600k difference in rebuy) - no way to know. So within a size class it's not like it would help.
3) As defensive measures increase your rebuy cost, you don't really want a situation where shooting at shielded trade ships consistently attracts no extra penalty, but shooting at unshielded ones does. That puts exactly the wrong incentives.
Rebuy's not a particularly good measure of capability, because how much a ship costs is a poor measure of its capabilities - a stock E-rated Cutter fresh off the factory floor and useless at basically anything has a rebuy almost twice that of a full battle FAS and somewhat higher than a combat-fit FDL - but on the other hand anyone flying a stock E-rated Cutter certainly has the resources to fly something more survivable instead.
So your argument is "there's nothing wrong with the pricing, they're just too expensive to be worth using". Then why are they that expensive? I can accept "trap for people who insist on gold plating their ships" as a possible reason but it hardly seems to be Frontier's design style.
(Back before they updated the hyperspace exit to be in direction of travel, there was a definite advantage to using 6A scoops on a long exploration trip, because you might be taking much shorter arcs around the stars a lot of the time. Since then, sure, the 6C is generally sufficient. But it was still ridiculously expensive even when it had a point...)
That's technically possible, but if you actually have the precision to both take a critical module down to 0% health *and* take their hull percentage so low that the reboot/repair cycle will destroy it so they can't do that *and* stop any of their friends getting through with repair limpets when under police (and possibly ATR) fire ... to be honest I think you deserve to get away with it at that point just for style.
Sure, in a few circumstances you might be able to leave them there for the NPCs, but you still have to combine
- dead enough that they won't be able to escape the NPCs
- alive enough that the NPC won't kill them until your last hit has timed out
- positioned so that the NPC won't get distracted by anything else
1. Agreed
2. Agreed
3. In this context, the current formula is counter productive!
I agree with you, the cost of a ship does not correlate well with that ships survivability. When I bought my first conda, money was tight! Only a few of the modules were better than D rated for a long time. Owning a conda in this state is actually a big handicap! Yet, Many players make the mistake of moving up to this ship before they can A rate it in one hit and still have at least a few hundred million in their account. I lost a number of those sub par built condas... Yet, this C&P formula would likely let the attacker off the hook because their rebuy is likely to be less than the Conda.
This is all stuff which I find quietly disturbing.
Play your own way. Blaize your own trail.
But if you're going to be a Trader, do it in a Rinzler-spec ship, fit powerful weapons, carry an SLF and don't use A-rated modules.
And yet, as a Trader, there's still no actual way to gain the upper-hand over a combat pilot.
All you can do is either reduce the likelihood of becoming debris or ensure the game knows you're the "victim".
Combat pilots spend their time optimising their ships for pew-pew.
Traders spend their time optimising their earnings.
There should really be ways for a player to take advantage of both of these things.
A number of measures have been introduced to try and offset the relentless empowering of combat builds over trader builds. Take mines for example... These are, by and large, fairly useless at stopping a pursuing combat ship. Yet weapons like super penetrator rail guns and Reverberating Cascade Torpedoes can knock out a shield generator and destroy a FSD in very short order. If you look at the special effects of mines for example, you would be right in thinking it looks more like an offensive weapon type than a defensive type! Traders have had the raw end of the deal when it comes to engineering and special effects...
The short of it is that traders are ever more at risk of being stopped dead in their tracks with a dead shield and a dead FSD, followed very shortly by the rebuy screen.
Exactly.
I'm not saying I have the answers but I'm also not sure that FDev has them either.
They seem to have just created a variety of arbitrary conditions to recognise specific scenarios rather than coming up with a cohesive framework that governs everything.
When I said they should "concentrate" on combat stuff, I suppose what I really meant was just to ignore the stuff that doesn't factor into the equality of a combat situation.
Again, I don't have all the answers but I would have thought it'd be possible to give all weapons some kind of "kill factor" whereby, for example, weapons might start off with a number based on their DPS and then have some kind of "multiplier" applied based on stuff like the type of engineering done to them, their range, their ease of use etc, in order to come up with a final "kill factor" which accurately represents their usefulness.
Take that "kill factor", do some more math's which considers things like experience (combat rank & time played), ship design (specifically, armour, shields, SBs, SCBs, PDs, chaff, ECM etc) and it should be possible to come up with a fairly accurate measure of two player's relative capabilities in combat.
Stuff like whether you've got a spendy fuel-scoop shouldn't really factor into that equation at all.
Also, while I'm at it, it occurs to me that there might be potential for co-op play to screw up the way this is all supposed to work.
If I'm flying, say, an unarmed ExploraConda, I could get interdicted by a Viper who's accompanied by another player in a Cutter who could ensure I remain mass-locked while the Viper rips my ship apart.
If the game only "sees" an Anaconda vs a Viper then it's probably not going to think that's an unfair fight.
FDev do not seem to be keen to develop such overarching strategies... And as a consequence, balancing is typically half - baked at best. This C&P formula is one such example. It doesn't feel like it's rigorous enough. Fdev may have just intended to curb the worst excesses of seal clubbing, but it really only creates a loophole for griefers to utilise when it's in this half baked form.
As for building in situational awareness like the example you cite, I wouldn't hold your breath!
Optimizing a trading ship like the T-7 only increases the re-buy cost without increasing survivability to a level where the increased re-buy cost makes sense and at the same time cripples an already crippled trader even more.
It's a lost cause.
Ship design is completely imbalanced, engineering made that even more pronounced and 3.0 engineering is the cherry on top with it's "god roll"-mods for all.
Since 1.0 FDev is trying to balance combat and the only result is that combat got completely broken. SCBs, SBs, HRPs, MRPs, engineering, military slots - all things designed to help combat ships fight better against other combat ships at the cost of making any ship not designed for combat less and less usable.
The only thing that could help would be a complete restart of the ship balance - something we will never get.
At the same time FDev still thinks that harsh bans are not the answer, while they are courting player groups that openly promote toxic behavior. Adding useless C&P stuff to the game that will just create more toxicity.
I agree with you. Repped. Ship build and engineering has pushed the combat build and trader builds in opposition directions to the point that you have to be very experienced and lucky to be able to avoid a Ganking these days.
Back in 2.0 I could see that if you were experienced, you could escape a combat ship. It was a matter of having your escape routine down pat. But the PvP crowd hated this; their pray kept getting away! Now I don't believe that is the case with weapon special effects designed to immobiliser a ship.
The PvP lobby is as powerful within ED as the gun lobby is within the USA. The odds of getting guns under control in the USA is deminishingly small, and the same is true of any balance between combat and trader/Explorer builds within ED.
With life support synthesis, an inconvenience only.
217 MJ of base shield, plus 4 pips to systems is a bit over 500 MJ effective shield, which should be enough to escape most attacks. With a bit of engineering and a couple of boosters for extra resistance, that could be doubled to 1000 MJ even versus absolute damage and more than that versus thermal or kinetic, which makes it even easier. Skip the HRPs and Military armour at that stage, and you can transport 240t of cargo while being basically invincible and having 15.49 laden range (well over 20 engineered). It's certainly not going to be winning any fights, but it won't have any trouble running away from them.
And this is the T-7, one of the weakest ships defensively, and one arguably not designed for delivering cargo into really dangerous areas in the first place!
(Also, at a rebuy of only about 2 million, anything that does have the firepower to get through 1000 MJ of shield in the 25 seconds available is going to be facing a big bounty as a result)
I have to disagree with you. A 1000MJ shield might protect you but if you get hit by a weapon with a special effect like reverberating cascade that damages or reboots your shield generator... Your toast.
D-rated life support gives you 7:30 base time, which is generally plenty of time to get to some sort of safety if the rest of your modules are intact.
2 iron and 1 nickel will give you a further 7:30 on top of that - they're ultra-common materials already. When in 3.0 people can stockpile 300 of each without compromise ... well, most people won't have that many, of course, but anyone who does even a little SRV driving or mining is going to have at least a few life support refills.
(Checking now, I throw out most low-grade materials and just keep a few back for SRV repairs - and I currently have 15 life support refills on 2.4 stock rules)
Again, it's not impossible ... but you're not going to reliably get people this way.
Anything other than a D rated module becomes redundant.
You seem to be missing the point.
In the scenario I suggested, a Viper vs an ExploraConda probably wouldn't be considered seal-clubbing.
If, however, the game fails to consider the roles played by other ships then the whole C&P/karma thing might not work as intended.
Situational awareness is something ED is light years away from... Just look at the recent Scramming hassles around stations. It doesn’t bod well for any future karma system that is enforced up us, extensibility for our benefit.
The wrong point. The system isn't meant to protect expensive trading vessels piloted by experienced players. It's meant to dissuade ganking new players in utterly defenseless vessels with no idea of how to react.
If you can pimp out a trading vessel to be worth as much or more than a medium sized fighting vessel with adjusted engineering value, congratulations. You are no longer a new player. At that point, whether or not you survive an interdiction is largely on your own shoulders and ship loadout choices. Hint- put some defenses on there, submit to interdctions, and high wake out. You'll be fine.
While I agree that may class you as no longer a newbie, it does not mean that you have any more survivability that a two day old kitten in a high speed blender...
As to platitudes that 'you'll be fine', please. Don't. Just.... Don't. It's utter tummy rot. The first Ganking I had in Open my conda lasted less than 10 seconds. That was before engineering made it a mine field (literally!). I may be over selling the abilities of your average griefer, but I feel that is probably the safer bet.
That sounds like an interesting idea.
However, it may cut both ways. Even anonymized, the pirate (or whatever) suddenly finding themselves at the tender attention of a hit squad might have a good idea (if they keep a diary, at least) who might be behind the ordered hit.
I can see a few things problematic with that, though:
- at the usualy competence of the average (even high level) NPC, the higher end players will treat this basically as some welcome target practice
- if you could hire ATR equivalents, these would have to be on the scale of a whole system's economy. A single player shouldn't usually be able to afford them (unless we're talking about Bill Gates rich levels)
- payback is a female dog. Murder hobos tend to be rich, too.
But we're shifting from "get away" to "get even". Is this intended?
What we need is 'make it even' not 'get even' so that 'getting away' is a realistic proposition, as it was back in 2.0.
May be (about the point).
The points I was trying to make were:
1) I wouldn't even consider a PvP Cutter vs. an Exploraconda to be seal clubbing. Unfair and essentially boring, sure. But if you fly an Exploraconda in open, you (should, admittedly) know what you're doing.
2) It may not work as you think it should, but could work as I think it might be intended. Including the emergence of new (ok, any...) tactics for murder hobos.
These changes make life harder for murder hobos, and I think that's all the intention behind it. FD never said that they wanted to make psychotic murder sprees impossible. In the discussion about the KWS, Sandro (IIRC) even stated that one of the intentions behind the idea of limiting the KWS to the topmost bounty (currently under review) was to prevent that serial killers would find themselves suddenly bankrupt when being faced with the prospect of having to pay off all of their bounties at once. Not something I would agree with (if you do the crime, you should lovingly well do the time), but I'm willing to give the new system as it stands now a few months of trial.
The words "emergent gameplay" have been abused regularly here, but you will never know what major changes in gameplay will emerge from minor changes in the rules.
That may be the only intent behind it, but it's wooly thinking like this that creates unfairness in the game. It is far from cogent thinking with well defined parameters and situational control of outcomes.
