People shouldn't be punished because they don't want to go to Dav's Hope and log off/on 100 times. You are no longer playing a game at that point or having fun.
The Problem with Game Balance
- Thread starter deleteduser
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People shouldn't be punished because they don't want to go to Dav's Hope and log off/on 100 times. You are no longer playing a game at that point or having fun.
This issue has been discussed so many times over the years. With or without engineers, outfitting and ship choice is enough to create a gap.
The win/win solution is to create incentives in very limited places in open. As a mobius carebear for life, i happily go to open, expecting pvp if there was enough incentive to do it. Fully consensual target.
But nope. I've even taken to playing only in solo now for network performance given you can't board hop anymore.
That's not the real problem though. 2 weeks into that the pvpers are gonna whine about something else, its too easy to escape interdiction and they need more tools or would require more player skill to get out of it. Some carebear will write a forum post about the minimum shield outfitting to last a pvp attack and its all over again.
The win/win solution is to create incentives in very limited places in open. As a mobius carebear for life, i happily go to open, expecting pvp if there was enough incentive to do it. Fully consensual target.
But nope. I've even taken to playing only in solo now for network performance given you can't board hop anymore.
That's not the real problem though. 2 weeks into that the pvpers are gonna whine about something else, its too easy to escape interdiction and they need more tools or would require more player skill to get out of it. Some carebear will write a forum post about the minimum shield outfitting to last a pvp attack and its all over again.
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why would a time limited player not engineer? that makes no sense. i keep hearing this argument. but it makes absolutely no sense.
This.
The only 'balanced' part of ED is CQC but that's exactly as it should be. The trick imo is to make the best of what you've got, if you're a trader being a good escape artist, if you're hunting traders beating them to the exit. A Sidewinder vs Anaconda should expect to get smoked because sorry, you're a little fish and he's a bigger one. It is though still theoretically possible for an ace pilot in a small ship to take it to a guy with all the gear and no idea, just as it's possible to get Sagg A without a fuel scoop. Not everyone's going to want to do it, not everybody could but then again no one body is everybody and neither is anyone else.
Assymmetry is what gives the game interest, not the other way around because that's Arcade. A lot of people might play ED as if it is an arcade game but in my opinion it's never been one, Strategy AND Tactics is really how to git gud imo.
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If you can't be bothered to collect mats in the fastest and cheapest way possible (and it doesn't take nearly as many as 100 relogs), no amount of engineering is going to help you win a fight against a decent opponent. Whether you are both in stock ships or engineered ships doesn't matter, if someone invests more time in the game they will beat you 99 times out of 100.
If we were to level the playing field in terms of ship upgrades, you will instead have people complaining about how some people have too much time on their hands and to truly level the playing field some more, ask for buffs to turrets and gimbals. This has happened in other games, it's a trend of players wanting more by doing less, it's why skill based games are rarely very popular.
I think standard ships should be a bit tankier. Ideally medium-high ships (particularity the T-series) should be losing modules and cargo then limping away, rather than just popping.
Balance? There's already balance. You got balance when engineering started applying cookie cutter stats. No longer can engineering make one ship better than another ship with the same engineering. So there's your balance. Now you're asking that lazy players enjoy the same benefits of those who put in the work to gather and engineer. The gap between weakest and strongest ship should be big in regards to non-eng vs eng. Just like real life. A kia should not perform like a ferrari. A Ford Focus should nto be able to carry as much cargo as a F350. Why would you want to fly ships in this game if they were all the same? This game would die quickly if all the ships were the same. Thing is, even if you got your "balance" wish of cookie cutter shps with the same dps, armour, shields, no engineering, these so called players who don't have time for Engineering, would still get rekt in PVP. Then what? Cry for more balance? it's unfair that Pilot A is better than Pilot B? The requests for handicaps will never end from your type because you simply refuse to practice or work to be better at something.
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Just face the fact, that this game was not made for PvP kids. Those just tag along, complaining that something is wrong, and this game should be "Open only" or something like that.
It was made in such a way, so people could play in shared galaxy, and if they wish, meet eachother. PvP comes along this idea naturally, but all precautions were made to make sure people could avoid playstyles they don't enjoy.
Idea to make this game into two separate games is simply ridiculous.
It was made in such a way, so people could play in shared galaxy, and if they wish, meet eachother. PvP comes along this idea naturally, but all precautions were made to make sure people could avoid playstyles they don't enjoy.
Idea to make this game into two separate games is simply ridiculous.
Then why do I need to PVE to make real money or participate in PP?
Because PvE is the game.
DeletedUser191218
D
Yep. Ideally, for me, CQC would be my PvP experience and open pve - with the option of duels, should both players accept. But it won't happen. If said PvP players began losing ships and credits to gankers at a rate that actually constitutes genuine risk to them, i suspect they would change their tune. It's easy to tell people to accept the risk when you've got 1bn credits in the bank so rebuy offers no sense of risk to you.
Blackcompany
Banned
Exactly. Let's not pretend the RNGIneer grind is remotely fun.
There aren't many incentives for players that play in the more civilian roles to ever to join PvP. PvP players inviting pve players: PvP: hey you want to play a game with me? Pve: sure, what's the game? PvP: well you've seen mobster movies right? Ok so I'll be the mobster coming to the store to collect protection money while I make lewd comments at the store owners daughter, while the store owner just have to keep his mouth shut and take it or else? Pve: uhm, yea, but what would be my role? PvP: ah you'll be the store owner. Now enjoy it!
With all the grinding needed for elite it's not only not enjoyable, it also eats into my real life time. Spending a few hours mining void opals and then someone pirates me, is not an wanted gaming experience. It's a large speed bump on the road. I'd rather have my ship destroyed than even giving a single bit of cargo or give someone the satisfaction of "pirating". Besides it serves no in-game purpose as that pirate would be better of mining his own opals.
Thing is if I as a trader could hire special forces NPC's and get some proper escort I might be up for it. That is what you would do if you were transporting alot of valuables right? Getting players to help is too time consuming and being on guard duty eats into your own grind if that is your role. The grind for credits and other stuff makes people max/min most roles. If you use a combat ready trader this will eat into your progress. So you maximize for cargo. At a certain point in the game you have plenty of money and huge ships. Still as a miner or trader you are forced to go up against other players in combat focused ships alone. You take the hit when interdicted and treat it as a necessary cost, but it's rarely an enjoyable experience.
For this to work you would have to create scenarios where everyone has an incentive to join. Its gamey and you would probably need to have some kind of schedule to get good participation, but that at least would be balancable.
With all the grinding needed for elite it's not only not enjoyable, it also eats into my real life time. Spending a few hours mining void opals and then someone pirates me, is not an wanted gaming experience. It's a large speed bump on the road. I'd rather have my ship destroyed than even giving a single bit of cargo or give someone the satisfaction of "pirating". Besides it serves no in-game purpose as that pirate would be better of mining his own opals.
Thing is if I as a trader could hire special forces NPC's and get some proper escort I might be up for it. That is what you would do if you were transporting alot of valuables right? Getting players to help is too time consuming and being on guard duty eats into your own grind if that is your role. The grind for credits and other stuff makes people max/min most roles. If you use a combat ready trader this will eat into your progress. So you maximize for cargo. At a certain point in the game you have plenty of money and huge ships. Still as a miner or trader you are forced to go up against other players in combat focused ships alone. You take the hit when interdicted and treat it as a necessary cost, but it's rarely an enjoyable experience.
For this to work you would have to create scenarios where everyone has an incentive to join. Its gamey and you would probably need to have some kind of schedule to get good participation, but that at least would be balancable.
It isn't necessary to use Dav's Hope relogs, or other favoured exploits to engineer in a reasonable time frame. I've spent the last week engineering an FdL from scratch with 'legitimate' gameplay, mostly Assassination missions.
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i don't understand this mentality. its self defeating. it assumes PvP has only one narrow Call of Duty definition where one player shoots and kills another player, thereby creating the notion that PvP is not wanted by the vast majority of players who prefer to play in a public setting. resulting in the non shooting player thinking and believing they are always the victim forced into being someone else's content.
what a skewed and depressing perception of reality. there are several levels of PvP in this game. the bgs is a PvP element because i can pit my understanding of the background sim against another players understanding. same with power play.
a player trying to chase me down is another PvP element without me ever firing back a shot. i grew up watching sci movies and tv shows. some of my favorites are han solo in his modified light transport, luke in his nimble fighter, the crew of the Serenity, the Raza from Dark Matter (newer but such a promising show), the matrix and star trek. what did all of the ships and their captains have in coming?
running.
lots and lots of running away from aggressive ships and aggressive pilots who wanted to do nothing more than shoot you and kill you. some of the most iconic scenes in sci fi history are of pilots in their ships running. its the classic car chase scene. the best fun was watching how they escaped making their would be ganker look foolish as they bounced off an asteroid or over committed the chase letting their prey escape or over estimated their ability exposing a glaring weakness. constantly being outwitted by the crafty, underwhelming good guy who was one heck of a pilot in a crappy but capable ship.
i welcome any over aggressive pilot to be MY content as they waste there time trying to prevent me from exploring, trading or doing whatever i want to do. sometimes they catch me, most times they don't. and its a blast either way. besides, i can't stand circling an enemy ship for 10 minutes if i don't have to. i'll test your shields and if they're tanky i'm out. i got better stuff to do.
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NPCs like spec ops are the first PvE stirrings of an ongoing powercreep problem that's been plaguing the game for years as a direct result of the basic unchecked modularity in outfitting + engineering. This has been complained about by PvP players for years, while PvE-only players tend to go "shut up about PvP, it's not our problem, it's just ganking, leave us alone." Actually, it's kind of everyone's problem...
In CZs now you can observe the unfun HP bloat from the safety of solo play, see that it's no longer viable to take something cool and fun like a kinetic DBS to a CZ, not because you're in danger of dying but if you engage spec ops the bloat is such that you will straight-up run out of ammunition before you can win. This is the PvE game slowly getting up to speed with engineering and producing the same kind of untenable discrepancy between optimised and poorly built ships that PvP has always done. In the specific case of spec ops you can argue they only come in groups of 4 and it's supposed to be a boss fight, but just being required to empty an entire DBS' worth of ammo into an FDL isn't synonymous with challenge... it is however just the tip of the iceberg, betraying a game where modularity is so unchecked that a min-maxed Sidewinder can have more HP than a vanilla Cutter. True 'emergent' and inclusive play in the Open sandpit simply cannot occur in this environment.
Ironically players who dismiss PvP balance as unimportant, conflating it with ganking and wanting to just be left alone to scan things or truck around, or co-op bounty hunt with their friends (which they can and should be able to do, for sure), aren't acknowledging how this balance is having a knock-on effect on their quality of life too. It's directly related to the ganking they complain about, as well as also being a massive spanner in the works of balancing NPCs in the long run. You can't expect to engage with a min-maxed player in any entertaining way (even for a few seconds) if you yourself are casually equipped or semi-engineered... hell, even fully engineered but with the wrong mods is enough to seal your fate.
It's a shame that there's so much animosity between camps, because genuinely approaching it in a holistic manner would be best for everyone. As it is you still get people in the suggestions subforum going "hey Fdev, remove restricted slots" or "hey just add a few more utilities to X ship" without seeming to consider how even a size 2 module slot is another potential 360 HP or a utility is 20 - 74% more shielding for whichever person interdicts them next with murder in their heart. "Oh but I just want to carry an extra limpet controller without sacrificing cargo space".
Some negative results of Elite's modularity and engineer-creep might be forgivable if it genuinely promoted good and interesting choices at the top end, but really... it doesn't even do that, let's be honest. Anyone who's taken an interest in PvP or even just spent a bit of time in the ship building sites knows that there's pretty much a Best In Class mod for everything, with very few exceptions. The modularity creates less choice rather than more, in fact once you know what you're doing it's essentially binary: do I fit my ship a) well, or b) make an enormous sacrifice to survivability in order to achieve [pve task].
TL;DR, it's a shame.
Edit: Post only tangentially related to discussion. Apologies, mainly wanted to rant verbosely.
In CZs now you can observe the unfun HP bloat from the safety of solo play, see that it's no longer viable to take something cool and fun like a kinetic DBS to a CZ, not because you're in danger of dying but if you engage spec ops the bloat is such that you will straight-up run out of ammunition before you can win. This is the PvE game slowly getting up to speed with engineering and producing the same kind of untenable discrepancy between optimised and poorly built ships that PvP has always done. In the specific case of spec ops you can argue they only come in groups of 4 and it's supposed to be a boss fight, but just being required to empty an entire DBS' worth of ammo into an FDL isn't synonymous with challenge... it is however just the tip of the iceberg, betraying a game where modularity is so unchecked that a min-maxed Sidewinder can have more HP than a vanilla Cutter. True 'emergent' and inclusive play in the Open sandpit simply cannot occur in this environment.
Ironically players who dismiss PvP balance as unimportant, conflating it with ganking and wanting to just be left alone to scan things or truck around, or co-op bounty hunt with their friends (which they can and should be able to do, for sure), aren't acknowledging how this balance is having a knock-on effect on their quality of life too. It's directly related to the ganking they complain about, as well as also being a massive spanner in the works of balancing NPCs in the long run. You can't expect to engage with a min-maxed player in any entertaining way (even for a few seconds) if you yourself are casually equipped or semi-engineered... hell, even fully engineered but with the wrong mods is enough to seal your fate.
It's a shame that there's so much animosity between camps, because genuinely approaching it in a holistic manner would be best for everyone. As it is you still get people in the suggestions subforum going "hey Fdev, remove restricted slots" or "hey just add a few more utilities to X ship" without seeming to consider how even a size 2 module slot is another potential 360 HP or a utility is 20 - 74% more shielding for whichever person interdicts them next with murder in their heart. "Oh but I just want to carry an extra limpet controller without sacrificing cargo space".
Some negative results of Elite's modularity and engineer-creep might be forgivable if it genuinely promoted good and interesting choices at the top end, but really... it doesn't even do that, let's be honest. Anyone who's taken an interest in PvP or even just spent a bit of time in the ship building sites knows that there's pretty much a Best In Class mod for everything, with very few exceptions. The modularity creates less choice rather than more, in fact once you know what you're doing it's essentially binary: do I fit my ship a) well, or b) make an enormous sacrifice to survivability in order to achieve [pve task].
TL;DR, it's a shame.
Edit: Post only tangentially related to discussion. Apologies, mainly wanted to rant verbosely.
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I am unsure if the CZs are fake HP or are true stats based on Engineering and Outfitting.
If its Fake, that is bad.
If its true stats, I am all for it.
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It's 'true' and still significantly less than what a minmaxing player could achieve.
This is an absolutely ridiculous take. I'd rather pirate an NPC's diamonds than mine my own diamonds. I use NPC's here because I've never pirated a human. But the point is made and the idea that it serves no purpose is just hilarious. Pirating has been around for centuries, yet you speak as if the notion of pirating in a video game is absurd, when the idea that a pirate should mine their own void opals is the real absurdity. And if you don't want to learn how to flee a human player (and it's not hard, but you choose to be a martyr for a ridiculous cause) then fly in solo. That's why it's there. This notion that the game needs to change because a few care bears refuse to use 2 viable modes to avoid human interaction is just mind boggling. Your definition of balance doesn't exist, because it just comes down to you refusing to adapt and overcome the obstacle the game provides. You want to change the game to fit your definition. You are in the minority. This game is clearly not for you.