Was Frontier right to change this?

[Noddie]

When Elite launched (beta) a big ship was an expensive thing to have. Fuel wasn't cheap and neither were repairs. In fact getting your ship badly beaten up often meant it was cheaper just to scrap it. Big ships were capable, but also expensive to operate. Now days the fuel is at nominal cost and repairs are unlikely to trouble any commander who can afford the vessel. It also took quite a lot of effort for a pirate to destroy a ship, although they could inflict quite a lot of expensive damage before the target escaped. The threat wasn't the destruction of the ship, it was the cost of repair.

Now days a decent grief ship can destroy a trader completely in - literally - a couple of seconds. Maybe if FD has stuck to plan a with ships being hard to destroy but expensive to repair the problem of ganking and griefing would be more of an annoyance?

Maybe they should go back to that?

 

[hems303]

Yeah.. agree. The insta-kill that is so prevalent today is THE big game buster on careful thought and reflection on how it used to be. If you have time to respond to incoming damage it makes the game more playable, more worthwhile as it were. Rep+1.... sorry 'LIKE' +1...whatever

 

[Fake Newts]

As I frequently moan in other threads the biggest problem Elite currently has (apart from instancing) - is the massive discrepancy in ship builds allowed by the modular system and amplified to an absurd degree by engineering.

Consider that in this game you can rightly complain about bigships being instagibbed, and simultaneously about the same ships built differently taking upwards of 20+ minutes and several ammo synths to kill.

You can't increase the survivability of big ships at a base level without capping the defensive potential granted by HRPs, SCBs, MRPs and engineering. A trade cutter fit likely has something in the region of 2000 - 2500% less HP than a minmaxed cutter, for example.

I have been playing this game for a long time now and I should've gotten over my surprise at the powercreep and imbalance issues by now, but honestly it constantly baffles me how Fdev thinks they can have a healthy game, particularly one that sells us on a multiplayer environment, where this kind of absurd discrepancy can exist.

One player can die so fast they won't even have had time to target the ship that attacked them, while another could be AFK for 5 minutes in the same hull and not lose shields. And it gets worse roughly every patch.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Now days a decent grief ship can destroy a trader completely in - literally - a couple of seconds. Maybe if FD has stuck to plan a with ships being hard to destroy but expensive to repair the problem of ganking and griefing would be more of an annoyance?

Maybe they should go back to that?

I think the first problem was well-embedded once frag cannons and pacifiers were introduced in version 1.3. They're a well-balanced weapon against a reasonably outfitted target, but versus a soft, slow, large target they're deadly. Though, that said, one of the main reasons that PvP hostiles weren't as big a deal in 1.0 is there were just far fewer pilots about in total - probably less than a tenth of the total sales - so people just met them less often. CGs-as-hotspots didn't really get going as a thing until long after Powerplay had broken down, Engineers-as-hotspots wouldn't exist until 2.1, and too few had the Shinrarta permit yet for it to be a really busy system either.

Engineering has actually made things better for the trader - if they choose to make use of it - by allowing them to get ridiculous defensive levels with minimal compromise to trading ability, so they can basically escape with ease. But, they don't have to make use of it, and enough of them don't that there's a supply of targets.

High repair costs isn't going to help, though.
1) Once repair costs get above 5% of value, you can just self-destruct to get them done cheaper, which is what people were doing in 1.0 before they brought the costs down. But 5% isn't a major expense on most ships compared with what those ships can earn. (And making the base rebuys more expensive would have its own issues!)
2) The majority of health on a modern ship is shielding - which means your repair cost for escaping is usually zero anyway.

Consider that in this game you can rightly complain about bigships being instagibbed, and simultaneously about the same ships built differently taking upwards of 20+ minutes and several ammo synths to kill.

Yes. There's too many different types of matchup possible to balance this well. At the moment the toughness is reasonably good for a 4v4 wing-fight, but 1v1s can last forever (literally, in some cases) - but bring the toughness down so that a 1v1 is reasonably quick, and a 4v4 will be over very quickly too.

Similarly with escape times - make it possible for an underequipped trader to escape, and there's no point whatsoever in trying to PvP bounty hunt a ship that actually has decent shields. Make it possible for that PvP bounty hunter to succeed and even a prepared and engineered trader will be in serious trouble.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

Big ships are incredibly tough to destroy though.

Engineering has increased defence by about 1000%, while only increasing damage by about 100%.

The main issue is, people aren't using he tools they're given. Lol

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

When Elite launched (beta) a big ship was an expensive thing to have. Fuel wasn't cheap and neither were repairs. In fact getting your ship badly beaten up often meant it was cheaper just to scrap it. Big ships were capable, but also expensive to operate. Now days the fuel is at nominal cost and repairs are unlikely to trouble any commander who can afford the vessel. It also took quite a lot of effort for a pirate to destroy a ship, although they could inflict quite a lot of expensive damage before the target escaped. The threat wasn't the destruction of the ship, it was the cost of repair.

Now days a decent grief ship can destroy a trader completely in - literally - a couple of seconds. Maybe if FD has stuck to plan a with ships being hard to destroy but expensive to repair the problem of ganking and griefing would be more of an annoyance?

Maybe they should go back to that?

I wonder if the creep in hitpoints with engineered shields etc have been their way to try and counteract this, however a max DPS "hunter" will still slaughter a ship that is set up for trade/missions etc. Even more so as the "hunter" will also be benefiting from the defense boosts, and probably more so than the "prey". They did attepmt to counter this about 2.3 with a beta reducing the cumulative effect of shield boosters, but they didn't implement those changes into live game.