I don't always rant, but when I do, I want to do it precisely and properly, hope I can do that because I have a lot of critisim about the way the design goes.
Personally, I bought my way into ED when I thought (except exploring the galaxy thing) twitch skills are the major deciding factor of your success, and game could offer fun and engaging organic encounters against players when flying your ship out of the blue, while the difference between player and npc ships didnt matter too much. That kind of a game offered experience that is rather realistic in itself close to simulation minded games. I don't know why or by whos idea did that happen, but somewhere along the line game steered into some cheesy korean mmo route, while not being able to completely achieve mmo concept either.
Starting with that very very amateurish addition of (I have stronger words but) silly engineering monstrosity and the way it is introduced which is supposed to be a fun crafting system that every other game has along with the module stacking issue shook the very foundations of the game and anything it had in the name of balance, and also nullified the description I've used for the game.
Now again, that amateur practice of just putting in as many various modules in the game as possible and hoping for the best which have caused the issue of people being able to freely fill their ships to the brim with modules that are solely "combat benefit only" aka SCB or HRPs etc. which I believe to be a major issue that allowed people to create extremely specialisied ships that can do one and only one job alone. This issue got overlooked because as far as I can see it is considered to be game design that supposedly brings a lot of variation and freedom to the player to play around with, possibly the same variation in the game for the player to play with intended to be achieved when riddiculus, magical and unnecessary engineering experimental effects were added for no real purpose other than that. Ofcourse, considering you can also benefit from scaling the riddiculusly large % raw numbers of engineering additions (and +25% raw damage premium ammo? Really mate? If you absolutely had to add that, couldnt you at least just make it +5%?), this became a major threat to all balance there was. If we put the most fragile trading ship build at 0cm on a ruler, we could put the toughest combat ship on the 10cm and that would be healthy. With the specilisation of ships, the toughest has moved on to 150cm while all players got scattered in between, meaning its quiet unlikely you'll encounter someship of your own caliber in an organical way and most encouters will probably end up with one side having all the advantage and overpoweredness.
And then the unignorable mess of balance was tried to be fixed how? By attempting to fix the symptoms, like, limiting usage of SCBs at the same time, like for example trying to handle stacking astronomic amounts of SCB stacking with feedback rails, or inpenetrable big shields with magical torpedos, or heat weapons (remember cooking people behind their shields with cannons?) with thermal vent (which ofcourse didnt work so they nerfed that out completely) or other silly space wizardry that took the situation to new heights, creating an even worse situation of extremely specialised rock-paper-scissors gameplay. What I see from this is designers just want all this variety to somehow get along but It became such a mess, people are putting in their own rules in their pockets of play areas to properly enjoy the game to cover the games lack of enforcement of balance rules. Like for example people making organised matches under certain rules (like vanilla non-engineered ship duels tournaments or stuff like that) to balance the situation themselves.
As the title originally states, there is indeed a terrible rift between PvE and PvP which I believe to be, well, agreeable on some games but completely unacceptable for a game like this.
A very simple aproach, tell me why should someone lock himself out of 99.9% of the games contend just so they can become capable of doing PvP? Just don't come at me with that video of avoiding a ganker in a stockish trade ship, that's not PvP. Though there shouldnt be much traditional PvPing against a combat ship with a trader, a non-pvp combat ship doesn't fare any different against a full-pvp combat ship either (sure, if you have godly skills it can, but you should keep the game design in mind to fit the average joe, as they are the most numerous of a playerbase). So if I go ahead and optimise a PvP boat just so I can PvP on an equal footing, or defend myself if I receive such an attack out of nowhere while I'm doing my daily whoop-di-doo stuff, I find out that I can do nothing but cruise around waiting for PvP to happen because my ship can barely do anything else, which results in that guy who made his PvP capable ship, intercepting whatever hollow square he can find on the radar so he can now start playing with his ship but ofcourse in that scenario the interceptor has the advantage of being fully prepared and it leads to the intercepted to most often get roflstomped which creates frusturation on that end due the feeling of massive unfairness on their side, which often shows itself as neverending rant posts on the forums, namecallings, chest poundings, mentions of MobiusPvE and sharing of that how to run away video. On the flipside, there are a lot of people just comfortably sitting behind their unyielding shields and massacring unfathomable amounts of ships free of charge as if again this is some korean mmorpg.
Sheesh.
Have you peeps played incursion scenarios any recently? I often switch over there to practice my skills getting dulled by the safety of the normal game. Taking out 5 ships in that scenario feels like an accomplishment and it's actually engaging (or might be thrilling too if you got comfortable with invincible shields as you'll one way or another have to dip into your hull once or twice). I invite everyone to take a shot at those (last two incursions) and see how much better it is when you don't have the problems stated above. As a solution to these plaguing problems, I think game design should be steered towards that kind of a gameplay. In my humble opinion, it would bring benefit to both PvP play and PvE play as we have to bring them closer together instead of widening the gap in between. I'd suggest the game designed in such a way that, talk between two friends looks like this;
"Hey whats up man"
"Hey man, been playing for a couple hours now, popped 10 ships! 4 of them were Condas!"
"Nice, I see you've been busy"
And at the same time, I would want to make that to be engaging. For that to happen I would do something like this;
1- Buff up the scale of bounty and materials earned per ship. Elite Anaconda bounty should go from 300k~ to 1,5m~. (also combat bonds etc. balanced with faction influences in mind, though I think that would solve itself since people just pop one ship and jump out to turn that bond in for maximum bgs effect)
2- Limit the amount of SCB, SB, HRP, MRP that can be fitted in a ship properly.
>limit s.boosters so 8xslot large ships dont inflate shields and them and all other ships get to field all those other utilities, as currently most are completely ignored due not being as efficient as a s.booster can benefit.
>Let every ship (that has the module count) easily and preferably field 2 of 3 defense modules (scb, hrp, mrp). Ships with military slots gains an advantage over others, but not too much that it can't be overridden with skill.
3- Nerf the numbers of engineering modifications for shields and armor to sanely balanced values. The massive gap of defense/hitpoint/etc difference of a ship on combat steroids and a fragile one is reduced.
4- Nerf the numbers of dps of weapons accordingly so they don't roflstomp the nerfed shields and defences. Nerfed dps of weapons now also cannot roflstomp non reinforced ship like its a piece of paper. Now ships original armor etc. values are more relevant.
5- Nerf ammo synthesis to the ground. Current numbers are riddiculus. I believe theres a misunderstanding from the designers that, if they went with something like 4% instead of 25%, no one would bother getting it since the original damage of a weapon is already small and such a tiny percentage value wont add much. Well, never witnessed such an ignorance from players of any game. Let me remind you that there are people downgrading their FSD to get 3-5ton of difference that translates as 0.01 or something degrees difference in pitch rates as an advantage.
6- Remove/nerf most experimentals. Unnecessary effects added in just for the sake of variation that requires other effects to counter creating unnecessary confussion, creating cheesy mmorpg theme, threatening lore and immersion, causing unnecessary balance issues and sucking up development resources to fix it unnecessarily, creating rock-paper-scissors mechanics and hard counters.
Results: Trader ships doesnt pop up in nanoseconds. Multipurpose ships can stand their ground in PvP. The sharply distinct of PvP-ship and PvE-ship concept is gone, they look similar. Pirate ship are not illogically weak now (carrying cargo rack, limpet, scanners etc.) they can now stand their ground in a fight. People don't get very frusturated due getting popped so fast in what feels to be completely unfair fights. Concept of PvP-ship is gone (at least, softened) so people who arent running PvP-prepped ships won't have much reason to shy away from open play. Combat is engaging, not brain numbing for example one man now can't massacre an entire armada without breaking a sweat (have i said cheesy mmorpg?) but still gets rewarded. One kill means something. Harder/impossible to accidentally pop a non-wanted npc. No more perfect bunch of m.e.t.a. ships running around as difference between such ships is negligible and can be countered by skill. People who want to "emergently engage people in organic PvP combat" are not limited to extremely specialised ship that is locked out of all contend of the game.
I would attempt to make the game so when you take up a mission to kill something, or when you are deploying hardpoints, you don't just feel comfortable, knowing that they can't even dent your shields, or if they come close to it, you can just jump out. When you took that assasination mission or when you deployed those hardpoints in a CZ, you know that your opponent, flying the same ship (or better) as yours, will dip into your hull at some point and theres the risk and excitement of loosing a critical module or canopy by luck and trying to counter that issue. You are now afraid of NPCs packing and shooting missiles, similarly theres more incentive to pack missiles yourself. Since you havent capitalized on your shields and filled yourself with SB and SBCs because they are limited in number, you also have fitted armor in that allows you to carry on with that kind of gameplay. Now your ship will get rugged after a fight or two and result in spending $ and time for repairs. You wouldnt be able to stay in a CZ forever and fall asleep but you would only be able to get a couple of bonds, maybe 10 before your hull can take it so far, and you'll have to return back to station for repairs, meaning you also have incentive to switch from using infinite lasers to using low ammo weapons as you can also rearm them at the station, meanwhile your income stays relatively the same due buffed up gains. No more complains about beefy inpenetrable shields, shields now only serve as a buffer to delay the time when you are going to start dipping into the hullvshull combat. All those fancy malfunction etc mechanics and variations are back in the game. Meanwhile PvE'ers who have grown fat and comfortable blasting things for hours without moving won't complain about their massive nerf in shields (in their eyes) because their incomes are the same or even better now, topped with removal of dullness of combat. Fighting an elite npc in a same ship could mean you're guaranteed to loose shields (even with using all your SCBs) and a chance to maybe loose the fight completely if you make a major mistake or two, while a very skilled pilot might manage to barely hold onto shields, thus 1- giving content for very skilled pilots 2- Giving room of improvement for average/above avrg. pilots, meanwhile you could offer lower ranked npcs for the lower skilled players for their enjoyment untill the time they are ready to go up to higher ranks.
Reality: As far as I could make out whoever that are designing the game shown they have a different vision, a vision I've mentioned above, like "rock-paper-scissors" gameplay being considered variety, impenetrable and stress free shield combat, plowing through mindless zombies of NPC ships that throw themselves all over your face to die and so on, so I dont see something like I mentioned happening at all. For that reason, personally as a guy with a massive list of games played, conquered and billions hours spent in games PvPing (I often avoid games that are purely PvE) I believe the balance (and design of relevant concepts like engineers) in ED shows it has hands that are unexperienced in balancing online games behind it, and it was created with a mindset fitting to a softcore solo game. Personally I usually avoid PvPing in open, instead I casually enjoy a couple elite combat missions with friends, drive SRVs, go on exploration and try to PvP in CQC(which i cant seem to find much people to do) and test myself in incursion scenarios from time to time, but it only goes so far and I constantly fade in and out of the game whereas I could have been completely hooked here, if some stuff was different.
/end of a long rant
[haha]
![[VR] Dr Gentech](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/175/175740.jpg?1623198898){kind=avatar}
