Is Cobra mk5 op?

[CMDR X]

Nice, when I saw the AFMU on the build I actually kicked myself for being dumb in the past and giving up on power hungry (hot) rail builds due to mod damage on the rails getting annoying on longer assassination mission stacking outings, could have just thrown in an AFMU and repaired in SC between targets and somehow never thought of it, thanks!

NP CMDR. This 5xRail Cobra replaced my 4xRail Viper MKIV. That was a fun ship too but could run much cooler at 0.26 for some reason.

 

[DjVortex]

What I find baffling is how quickly the new monetisation model has become accepted and even celebrated by the player/customer base.

I haven't seen anybody "celebrate" it. What I have found is that most players understand that given the worrying news that were being hinted at especially last year that Frontier was downsizing, perhaps even cutting back on ED development, who knows, maybe even having to abandon it altogether, signals that weren't exactly helped by the fact of how infrequently and slowly any new features and events were being added to the game, all of this indicating that the company and the ED team have probably been in dire need of more revenue, that they have found a way to get more of that revenue in a manner that's perfectly acceptable (eg. the new ships aren't behind a paywall, only 3-or-so months early access is behind a paywall, which you can wait or pay as you wish).

In other words, would most players have preferred that eg. the new ships had been available immediately for credits rather than ARX? Probably. Does this early-access-paywall scheme bother them too much, given the context described above? Not really. Most understand and are ok with it.

I find absolutely nothing "baffling" about that, and do not understand why some do. It looks perfectly reasonable to me.

(Another thing that I do find genuinely baffling is those long-time players, including some twitch streamers I have seen first-hand, who outright brag about not having spent a dime on the game, and how they will never do, as if that were some kind of personal accomplishment and source of pride. I'm not even making that up. And this about a game that they love and have been playing for almost a decade. That is truly baffling.)

 

[IstvaanDCIV]

The radically improved yaw is annoying though, to me it's an essential part of Elite lore that a Cmdr has to use aerobatic-like banked turns to get anywhere. I like how the Mk III and the Python really do feel like you're turning on the gyros when you use yaw. Would have been fun to have a new Settlement-hopper that was almost spherical with incredible yaw and laterals but terrible hardpoints.

My perspective on this as a relative newcomer to Elite, is that the difference in yaw vs pitch speed never made any sense. Most of the time we're in space where there is no up or down, no sensible engineer would design a spacecraft to operate in a three-dimensional environment and also limit its ability to turn on one axis.

I don't think having equal yaw and pitch speeds takes away too much from the "dogfighting in space" feel of the flight model that's clearly inspired by popular science fiction media.

 

[Knuttin Atoll]

Spoiler: My responses to various posters to avoid a massive wall of text

I was an original kickstarter backer, backing for much more than the full-price cost of the released games. I strongly support the new Arx strategy and (personally) a subscription would also be fine by me. I trust Frontier, and I want the game to continue. I understand that this means I will need to keep funding the game.

I would rather pay for the game than have it be “free” i.e. funded by ads or unsustainable. This (Arx) is a great way to achieve that.

All I can say to this that we have fundamentally different views on spending on the game. For me it's purely transactional - company offers a product I like, at a reasonable price (which is subjective of course), and I will pay accordingly. But if your approach works for you, I won't begrudge you.

I agree, the finish differs between versions - I was considering that for a while after EDO launch the finish was totally broken (block colours, no changes)

But, at least they are better now, and look very good. The lighting in EDO was changed from that in Legacy, for better or worse...


Subs would kil the game... Look how much resistance there is to spending a tenner for each of 4 ships there has been, actually paying to play would bring tears to many, judging by the reaction from some forum members over the years to such an outrageous idea. (and I'm one of the ones who would not pay to play, did that with WoW foor 2 years, never again)

For free, the servers are about as good as it gets, maybe?

On the paints - if you were to go back and check 3.8 as I did, it might come as a shock how much more vibrant and shiny the skins are there. Only skins that were developed post 4.0 release look better in 4.0. It's weird that Frontier didn't manage to port some pretty basic skins over between their very own engines. The only silver lining for me is it put me off spending a lot of money on cosmetic items like I used to in Elite.

On subs - I refer to the post right above you but yes, I would stop playing also because I don't believe in subs for games, and don't play games that have them. Still, would be interesting to see how Frontier would fare. Probably similar to most of the rest of their IP in all honesty.

We have had ships that were behind a DLC paywall from about eight years ago, the wall was removed when Base and Horizons were merged but lasted for years not months.

Difference being that back then all you had to do is buy Horizons, and you had access straightaway. As it should be really (imo - I know many of you seem to disagree on this).

I bought the game, initially, on Dec. 17th 2014. After I pre-ordered all of the expansions plus some Beta access along the way. I have tons of ship kits and paint-jobs for a variety of ships, from the Vulture to the iChief, that have become obsolete with the advent of the SCO ready ships. None of that has been wasted. I have enjoyed exactly 64w 10h 44m (That's more than a year actually in-game), I find it a fair trade.

I have spent hundreds on game controls, flightsticks, throttles ect. Way more than I have on the game itself, but do you think I wouldn't buy VKB stick because I already paid for a Thrustmaster stick? Na, if it's better and I can afford it, I do it. Same with the game. If I like something enough I'll buy it. I never bought an Anaconda though, I don't like large ships.

Why would you have to pay for a second movie ticket, if you've already paid to see it once? Should that one ticket be a lifetime pass? I'm sure you know the answer to that. Gaming is entertainment, not an investment.

That's a crazy amount of time to play the game (and not buy an Anaconda??! even to try it out?). I'm at around 4.5k hours (stopped counting). From a Euro per hour perspective for sure good value, but I don't really measure it that way, because many, many of those hours weren't really fun at all (SC trips, grinding for whatever, etc.) - I tend to just look at the actual cost and then work out whether it was worth it or not; in hindsight, I do regret buying maybe half if not 3/4 of the cosmetic items for Elite, especially given how they ended up in 4.0. But I understand some people, like yourself, do use such metric to justify the expense. If that works for you then great.

I haven't seen anybody "celebrate" it. What I have found is that most players understand that given the worrying news that were being hinted at especially last year that Frontier was downsizing, perhaps even cutting back on ED development, who knows, maybe even having to abandon it altogether, signals that weren't exactly helped by the fact of how infrequently and slowly any new features and events were being added to the game, all of this indicating that the company and the ED team have probably been in dire need of more revenue, that they have found a way to get more of that revenue in a manner that's perfectly acceptable (eg. the new ships aren't behind a paywall, only 3-or-so months early access is behind a paywall, which you can wait or pay as you wish).

In other words, would most players have preferred that eg. the new ships had been available immediately for credits rather than ARX? Probably. Does this early-access-paywall scheme bother them too much, given the context described above? Not really. Most understand and are ok with it.

I find absolutely nothing "baffling" about that, and do not understand why some do. It looks perfectly reasonable to me.

(Another thing that I do find genuinely baffling is those long-time players, including some twitch streamers I have seen first-hand, who outright brag about not having spent a dime on the game, and how they will never do, as if that were some kind of personal accomplishment and source of pride. I'm not even making that up. And this about a game that they love and have been playing for almost a decade. That is truly baffling.)

All I will say is, if Frontier have a revenue, cost, or cashflow problem, that really isn't the fault of the customer. If people think their Arx purchases and what not are going to pull Frontier out of whatever finacial trouble they may find themselves in, then good luck with that. I've bought plenty of Arx in the past, begrudgingly so, because I know full well that it's anti-consumer (e.g., price obfuscation, no receipts, etc.).

But to think that those revenues go directly into the development of Elite - which I have to assume is what those people who "support" Frontier with their purchases must believe - while the developer has plenty of other IPs in their portfolio (most failing really) that requires funding also, that's just a little naive imo.

My replies to those who care. Don't want to derail the thread any further so will bow out after this.

 

[S0rkvild]

Exactly, we just need to wait for the next one... the definitive long range hauling flying fortress... agile like a Vulture but with 800t cargo, 15k mj shields, 560m/s boost and 40ly jump laden.

You just told FD how to make good money Panther Clipper.

Seriously that arcade handling of a ship will ruin what's amazing int his game - unique feeling of each ship with all quirks they come. Direction where all ships no matter of their size, weight, limit handle and fly super is wrong.

 

[nanothargon]

My replies to those who care. Don't want to derail the thread any further so will bow out after this.

Well expressed, and - genuinely - thanks for keeping it civil. I think my spending on Elite is partly coming from a place of nostalgia and partly from simply enjoying the universe, finding my (disfunctional, hostile, cynical, hilarious) tribe and frankly not having the time to play more than one game. If I live long enough, I will be here to interdict and gank the second-to-last commander before they rage quit.

 

[Brieus]

Finally, once you load up your existing modules, and get out there, how often do you see a re-buy? I really decide when I loose a ship, so free-rebuys aren't so free, and hardly useful to a PvE guy.

In the last 50-60 hours or so of play time. Twice. For ~7 million a pop.
But that was because I was trying to get my Titan Kickers Participation Award and didn't have my setup quite right.
I did make ~10 million from rescue missions before that so I'm only down 4 million.
Well, not counting the ~75 million spent on outfitting my Python and Python Mk II.

In other words, would most players have preferred that eg. the new ships had been available immediately for credits rather than ARX? Probably. Does this early-access-paywall scheme bother them too much, given the context described above? Not really. Most understand and are ok with it.

I find absolutely nothing "baffling" about that, and do not understand why some do. It looks perfectly reasonable to me.

I wouldn't call it a paywall. More of a pay door.

 

[zeta]

Yep, baffling indeed. You don't see things the way I see them. Maybe you will one day, maybe you won't.

No, it is a paywall, and Frontier's version of that is "Arx". A patience wall would mean not having to do anything other than wait, and while yes a version of the Cobra mkV will be available for in-game credits if people just wait, it still won't be the same (or arguably as good) as the version you could get for real money. It is still pay-to-skip and pay-to-get-an-advantage (because the paid-for ships have a zero cost rebuy). It is a sad state of affairs that a) too many of you don't see this and b) too many of you forget too quickly as evidenced by replies to my comments, which I admit could have been worded better but still convey a point.

Talking of which ....



Some people ^^^^ miss that point.

I've been playing the game since 2014 with over 20000 hours of gameplay. I have over 25B in assets, but not hundreds of billions, that I could have easily gathered had I picked trading and then exobiology. But I did a lot of bounty hunting in small ships.

My point is, credits are raining and the rebuy of a ship is dominated(!!) by the sum of the cost of the armor and the modules, not the cost of the ship.

To give you an example, a stock krait phantom costs 37.5M with a rebuy of 1.87M. A g5 phantom costs 225M with a rebuy of 11.2M.

Since I paid arx for the standard pmk2, not the stellar version, the vast majority of my rebuy cost is made up of cost other than what I paid for by arx, arx that I did not pay for but collected thru playing the game.

And that doesn't include 'advantage' players get by playing other game loops.

I am fine supporting the game so it stays alive, and I don't think having to wait a few months disadvantages players in any meaningful sense of the term. After that, they may have to pay slightly more, but money is raining so it is a non-issue.

I understand your argument on a theoretical bases and I can respect it. So I probably spend a little money on arx for others so we can all enjoy, and debate our first world problems (like today my starbucks coffee had a little less half & half than what I am use to, ed me off so bad I had to go to the dying titan and dropped a cargo full of limpets on it).

 

[zeta]

Is the Cobra 5 overpowered?

Well I have only flown the stock version with no changes whatsoever and the handling felt fine and boosting it into a planet with no shields caused a satisfactory explosion rather than an invulnerable bounce, it is fast and accelerates well but as bought from a shipyard doesn’t seem overpowered.

So no.

The fully engineered version is seriously overpowered imo, I virtually can't get hit in pve. There is talk among pvp wing organizers to ban it from wing fights (not that most commanders care or should care about that).

Fully engineered cobra mk5 will also close the gap between flying it faoff vs faon for the most part, except for top 0.1% of CMDRs. Arcade.

 

[Markov Chaney]

Most of the time we're in space where there is no up or down, no sensible engineer would design a spacecraft to operate in a three-dimensional environment and also limit its ability to turn on one axis.

But again, the spacecraft are not the right shape and do not have the thruster placement to end up with equal rates across all three axes.

I'm not going to say the Elite craft have "sensible engineers" because there's all sorts of things that look great but make no sense. BUT, unless your sensible engineer designs a sphere with six pairs of equal-sized attitude thrusters placed in opposition it will not have the same turn rate in all directions.

One thing that is consistent with ship design so far is none of the ships have major thrusters that would help with yaw, so again, if you're going with logic based on classical physics and what is in the game, those ships should have crappy yaw rates.

There is no up and down relative to any gravitational body, sure, but that is completely irrelevant to turn rates of a body that is indeed floating in space with six degrees of freedom. What matters is where you apply thrust and for how long and in what vectored direction and what the polar moment of that axis might be.

Edit to add: On reflection, Istvaan's point that a spacegame ought to be designed around 6DOF from the get-go possibly speaks to my point. Elite: Dangerous deliberately was not designed this way. Now there's one ship, which does have near-equal turn rates on three axes, but not quite, yet somehow still looks pretty much the same as the others physically. Giving the V these abilities goes against resisting that in 40 other ships so far. So it's neither a 6DOF ship nor a ship that has "Eliteness." Worst of both worlds...

 

[Inscydeus]

So it's neither a 6DOF ship nor a ship that has "Eliteness." Worst of both worlds...

So... it's clear that in answer to the thread; no the Mk5 is not OP, it needs a buff right now.

 

[Narfiam]

The power creep is something usual in long term online games. If the new stuff is early access and sold for real money it is expected to be better than the old content. I'm not saying it is ok, but it would be weird if the new ships were just as good as the old ones, in that case the new ships would only be bought by people who really love its visual design. The """""problem""""" of the Cobra MKV is that it will be too cheap when released for credits, making it "unrealistic". I read somewhere (I don't remember where, maybe the dev streams idk) that it will cost only 800k credits. It makes no sense that a new designed ship (lore wise I mean) is cheaper than several centuries old ships of the same category. In my opinion it should cost around 5-6 millions. ¯\(ツ)/¯

 

[Nekozji]

do we want new ships to go in the direction where they're super easy easy to control and literally have no flaws

Honestly, no.

Because it means running out of design space real fast. The only upgrade on the Cobra V is a Cobra VI which is 10% faster and has one extra internal compartment.

The T8 kind of annoys me because it is the go-to choice for many things now. It could have been the medium ship with the most internal spaces, and that was niche enough. It could have been a slow, lumbering beast on thrusters, but behaved well with SCO. It would still have had a niche. At least it is not the best medium combat ship, but it may well be the best medium everything else.

I mean, I love the fold up wings of the Cobra V ship kit to make it fit in the docking bay. That is amazing. But it only needed to be the best on one of several axes to find it's place and be valuable. It seems to be best on all, and now it's hard to top.

 

[Kamiyoda]

An "Eagle MkII Turbo, a "DBXX", and a "Keelback Vector" wouldn't go amiss.
Not new ships, just slightly upgraded versions.

Carbon Nanotube Explorer?

Managed Democracy Corvette?

 

[Hank]

I really like my C MkV and have it out on a continuation of a Nebula jumping expedition. I started this project with my Phantom, then the Mandalay and now the Cobra has taken over (for a while). The first stop was the Iris Nebula and it was a very nice trip. I have a 5A scoop on it (no extra fuel cans) and I never worried about fuel.

I was looking at ships last night and it dawned on me the Vulture is quite a bit more expensive than the C MkV. I have a Vulture and its my go to armored small mission runner. (I won't be selling it any time soon).

huff said

 

[kofeyh]

But again, the spacecraft are not the right shape and do not have the thruster placement to end up with equal rates across all three axes.

It's okay to say "I don't like the ship". That's fine. It's okay to not really understand how modern flight computers work. They're do very complex things, but cope with differential thrust (at least to a certain point) just fine. They had solved basic thruster control by Mercury, and the guidance computers were able to position a lander very close to the moon by the start of the Apollo program. This was in the 1960's!

The authority over what constitutes an acceptable flight model, is really on the developer to decide. And they have recently decided to add ships with (effectively) normalised control inputs, where one particular plane isn't (strongly) less favoured over any other. Cobra Mk V still has a slight yaw damper in effect, but it is minimal.

I absolutely commend Frontier for breathing new life into medium and small ships; I hope this trend continues, and I hope the existing ships can benefit in one way or another, to make them more compelling to fly.

I have no real interest in changing your opinion, but supposition and pseudoscience explanation for "bad handling is good actually" doesn't really align with the fact that we solved complex thruster movement in space a long time ago, and now it's basically routine to send vehicles (moderate length metal tubes and not perfect squares) to the ISS. It's so routine that the failure rate is exceptionally low.

I can't actually even comprehend what we might achieve in another hundred years, let alone a thousand. And I strongly doubt "my yaw is a bit squishy because I likes it" is going to be a driving factor, to be fair.

 

[Brieus]

The power creep is something usual in long term online games. If the new stuff is early access and sold for real money it is expected to be better than the old content. I'm not saying it is ok, but it would be weird if the new ships were just as good as the old ones, in that case the new ships would only be bought by people who really love its visual design. The """""problem""""" of the Cobra MKV is that it will be too cheap when released for credits, making it "unrealistic". I read somewhere (I don't remember where, maybe the dev streams idk) that it will cost only 800k credits. It makes no sense that a new designed ship (lore wise I mean) is cheaper than several centuries old ships of the same category. In my opinion it should cost around 5-6 millions. ¯\(ツ)/¯

No, a base model Mk V costs 1.9 million.
Once you buy one with ARX you can buy as many more as you want. The FSD SCO is a lot more than a regular FSD. A 5A SCO alone is 5.9 million.

 

[Narfiam]

No, a base model Mk V costs 1.9 million.
Once you buy one with ARX you can buy as many more as you want. The FSD SCO is a lot more than a regular FSD. A 5A SCO alone is 5.9 million.

I was wrong then. But it is still too cheap, it should be more expensive than Courier and Vulture.

 

[kofeyh]

I was wrong then. But it is still too cheap, it should be more expensive than Courier and Vulture.

Imperial courier, is about half a million difference in price and has higher top speed potential due to being able to use the pre-engineered thrusters. All the imperial ships are expensive, as is the way, luxury costs.

The Vulture has two large hardpoints, which makes it very strong for its class, larger distributor, higher hull health, two size 5 optional, one of which is a dedicated for HRM or MRP, all of which means it's able to take on large targets with little concern.

Cobra Mk V was under a million in the test instance and went up to basically twice the price for release, so Frontier had already increased its cost. Mandalay is 17 million, for context. Which is almost as fast, almost as agile and has stupendous jump range and utility. So you're just making the decision for people, rather than giving them options.

The current pricing is fine (perhaps adding a million would not be terrible, but I am not really sure what that achieves, to be fair). Again, all the new ships do, is highlight the gap that is now present with the legacy ships (that has existed since the introduction of native SCO) which gives Frontier a remarkable and excellent opportunity to bridge the gap by offering options to improve the existing fleet, which is far more constructive.

Frontier has already hinted at such things, so I think that's where the positive changes can be achieved. It would not surprise me if early in the new year, as the 'goid story progresses, we see some new modules/ changes that improve the value of all of the legacy ships. imho seems a greater deal that clubbing a single ship.

 

[Lee Archer]

The cost in gameplay/ grind earning time has changed but it seems the smaller cheaper ships give you what you pay for in performance and versatility.
That said I really like the VR experience in a small ship cockpit- Eagles and Courier. Like to seem some further earnable thrusters enhancement to give them more drag race straight line speed.