This season has had a lot of fun gameplay. Lately there has been a lot of PVP, and the fights are a lot of fun. What is not fun, the way these fights conclude. Between warping and Stargates 9/10 of battles in space end with the loser escaping with everything. Even after losing a Warp drive and all of their weapons, a well built ship can tank 40 minutes of fire ($$$ in ammo) and limp back to the Stargates and warp to PVE. If your don’t target the Warp Drive first then the enemy will simply warp out at the first sign of real danger. This is incredibly frustrating, as both sides have spent a ton of resources and time for… well other than the experience (And the fights are fun) they get nothing. No kill for the leaderboard (All I want), no resources to mitigate the lost ammo and time, no ship to try and salvage (Or reclaim if you have reinforcements).
What about the 1/10 where you do get lucky and disable the ship? Oh boy, there are issues there too:
Combat Logging = No Kill, best loot is gone. If they destroy the ship you get nothing.
Destroyme = No Kill, best loot is gone (On Gohome). If they destroy the ship you get nothing.
Food/Heat/Air = You destroy airtightness on the cockpit area of the enemy ship, they die to the elements while you drill through the ship. No kill.
Inside POI = You catch someone deep in a POI, they die to the spawners/turrets. No kill.
For me the leaderboards are a solid driving reason to look for PVP. At this point I feel like doing any kind of PVP outside of hunting noobs and miners in low class ships is going to be a waste of resources.
My suggestion is to have “Warp only” zones and “Stargate only” zones, like Jupidor/Sathon/Titan, having that many escape routes hurts PVP, in my opinion.
What the game really needs is agression timers.
There is no way to solve the current problem beyond that.
However, even if agression timers would help that could add another layer of unfairness.
Some games have an agression only between involved people, if someone runs away into pve he’d stay on agression with the involved party but no others could join in.
I think eve online also had something like that.
Can’t see that being implemented in any time soon by Eleon.
This also solves the kill problem btw. The player who makes the most damage could get the kill.
So if someone dies to turrets in a POI but you attacked him, it’s still you kill. Same with destroyme.
But all these things are game mechanics beyond what could be fixed serverside.
Are you serious? Try using Pulse lasers, they seem to ignore armor and destroy cores and warp cores in minutes. Seasoned Vet’s are being shot out of cockpits and CV’s are dying to SV’s.
Limit CV to class 2 in PvP zones so that they can be disabled easier. Only have a single warp destination in each zone, with other destinations possible by supergates, but each supergate only goes to a single destination. This would make it much easier to follow a fleeing enemy.
If you don’t like the idea of limiting the class size of CVs, find a way to limit the speed and maneuverability of CVs. Increase mass of armor blocks/shutters/windows 800%. Decrease thruster power 50%, increase thruster mass 200%, decrease RCS power 75% as a starting point. Make CVs big battleships that can and “MUST” soak up hits rather than dodging everything. My idea of an ideal situation would be SVs travel 30-50% faster than CV top speeds, and are far more maneuverable. Currently a class 7CV is faster and more maneuverable than an SV.
Of course CV armor must be very resistant to SV weapons with these kind of changes otherwise a CV would be a sitting duck to a wing of SV attackers. Make CV weapons harder to dodge for SVs as well, but not completely overpowering, so SVs still can have a role in disabling a CV’s turrets to allow another CV to take it out more easily. I would also suggest disabling the ability of CV turrets to target other CV turrets, to allow the ships to pound the crap out of each other instead of just stripping the weapons off and ending in a stalemate.
If the sg were removed, the black hole as it currently is would serve as a useful place to trial such things. It only has one warp-out into HW space. @RexXxuS - maybe worth a temporary try-out? Keep same config just remove sg and limit to class2?
Excluding the many feedback about Eleon core issues there is only a suggestion of migrating the egs:recycle enemy detection to Supergates.
So if an enemy is near you, you can’t use the Supergates.
But this needs very good feedback before.
All the other things like cb:gohome etc. hmm, make suggestions please.
Remember though: what you call fun and thrill to hunt for, others don’t. Think of both shoes.
I have to spoiler though: the Event Manager is released in its full potential soon. With First Person Shooter Events. Kills are coming sooner or later.
It’s not an issue of what’s fun or the thrill of the hunt for some people. If a person does not want to PvP or is outnumbered/outmatched they can warp or flee toward the gate at the start of battle and escape before taking much damage. This is part of the reason I would think hard about limiting the ability to use supergates with enemies nearby before deciding to implement such a change. There does need to be a way for people to run from combat, it just shouldn’t be so easy as it is now. The problem is that even after a 20+ minute long battle, where both sides are actively fighting each other, not fleeing, one can simply push a magic button and instantly be gone from the battle and safe. It makes a true victory very hard to achieve, and even if you manage to disable a CV there are the issues of the enemy deleting the ship, killing their self and so forth to cheat you of your hard earned loot, killboard, etc. My hope would be with smaller or slower moving/less maneuverable CVs that actually take hits consistently, after the first few minutes of battle the warp option will be destroyed. The only escape option at that point would be fly to a supergate before becoming disabled. If your ship has taken too much damage and has lost thrusters or generators and isn’t fast enough to stay ahead of the enemy, they will probably overtake and kill you before reaching the gate. I don’t see a problem with this. If you stood and fought and lost, you should have a high chance of losing your ship in battle. If you get attacked and decide to flee immediately, you should have a high chance of escaping mostly intact.
Most CV battles in my experience expend copious amounts of ammunition and end in disappointment, with nothing to show for it, so much that this season even though I spend most of my time in PvP, I have not yet built a combat CV.
I think mayb in PvP to have lower class size CV, class 3 or 4 is ok still can hav decently sized ship, i been in 6v1 and 4v1 with my CV for like 30 to 40min and still warp away loling.
Get ur mates in CV’s mayb small ones but more numbers, i one person on CV can tank 6 enemy CV and warp after 40min is fun i dont care about ammo or time i jus wanna tank to tank imo but i see other side too
I think it’s a bad idea to mess with cb gohome. I see it as a way to deal with a buggy home spawn point. And turning someone guilty for using it would be unfairly burdensome and will lead to a lot more combat logging.
Add in the fact it can only be used after you die to begin with. That person is no good for rep or killboard counts past that point anyway.
Maybe a cap on max turn speed and a cap on max thrust. Rebel Galaxy had a feature that if enemies where within X meters your FTL turned off. I wouldn’t mess with weights and thrust amounts due to side effects, such as garage ships and new players spawning in a ship and saying ‘WTF? why won’t my ship work’ and rage quitting.
I wouldn’t disable supergate if enemy is nearby just for that reason. Adding anti grief to prevent building around the gate creates more problems like dead ships cluttering the area and nobody can salvage them. I think you should be able to run to the supergate and escape but that choice has to be made early in the battle. Essentially the battles shouldn’t take an hour just to kill one ship. 3 options to achieve faster paced CV combat: smaller ships, slower ships, or more accurate weapons. I advocate for slower ships because of the dynamic it could create between CV and SV.
I’m not sure if you can configure a global max speed for ships, that’s probably an Eleon thing. But you can alter the mass of blocks. I’m assuming you can alter the thrust provided by a thruster though I haven’t delved that far into the config file. Either way top speed isn’t the only problem, maneuverability is a bigger problem than straight line speed. Reducing the effectiveness of thrusters and RCS either directly or by adding mass to ships will slow your acceleration and turning so you can’t change direction as quickly, making it harder to evade projectiles, even if you can still run 115+m/s in a straight line.
I’d like to suggest making the stargates capturable. For example, similar to capture the flag where one group of allies must stay in one area for a certain amount of time to capture it. So if one side is able to hold that area without running or dying the flag turns to their ownership until the numbers favor the other side. In my opinion this type of modal would make for very lucrative pvp action.
I don’t know if @RexXxuS or @Jascha can code something like this in game but i’d like to know their opinion.
It sounds like an interesting idea. After so many “warning ticks” while the area is occupied the gate becomes accessible only to the faction that is occupying it, sort of like how the server warns about over limit on ships and can switch their faction. I don’t know how it would work with a supergate since you don’t want people building onto it or dismantling it but something to think about.
Maybe easier to allow people to simply disable or sabotage a gate temporarily. Like have a buddy go to the gate and have to get out of his ship to flip some switches in a particular order to shut down the gate for 10 minutes. Only make the switches accessible 20 minutes after the gate comes back online so you can only keep a gate down for 10 out of every 30 minutes. Of course make the saboteur very exposed so if caught in the process of trying to disable a gate it’s pretty much a death sentence.
In regard to the kill denial, maybe only start the 5 minute “No Kill” timer on death by player, instead of death by anything. I am not sure if that is possible or not, just an idea. I got a pair of players in a 15 minute fight last night, one died to oxygen loss when I took out the airtightness, and the other player did not register on the leaderboard (Not sure why, could have died to an explosion instead of my manual fire). So I got two players, but nothing on the leaderboard.
I would be strongly in favor of reduced CV class in the pvp areas. I feel like class 5 would be a good starting point, but anything class 3-5 would certainly make pvp more exciting. At class 7 I don’t have to make any sacrifices when building a ship. Its a tank, fast, maneuverable, and even is set up to mine or go on planet. With reduced class sizes it would be difficult to build a ship that excels at everything. Class 2 and under would certainly make for fast battles, but I feel like that would be too restrictive.
Turning the gates into an objective, that sounds like a lot of fun. And it’s not like controlling the HW gate would lock anyone out of their faction planets/space, you can always take the Ecc gate.
You can, if you know the line of code that it is on. You change the max value from 92.x to 59.x, on the RCS turning I don’t think it is that easy. I do not know which end the code for max speed is on though as I am not a programmer, Eleon just changed max speeds on planets. Also some weapons (Eleon would need to do this) change from Pulse to ‘Beam’. Lots of things we would all love to see changed but the game is still in Alpha, gotta wait.
In terms of class reduction i wouldn’t mind if it went down to 4 or 5. But i think some people may be missing the point of a larger capital vessel ship and their role, and their risk when taking such a large ship into battle.
Risks and Benefits of Larger Ships
A class 7 capital vessel risks more in resources then a class 3 or 4 which means that yes they can tank more but when they fall its a bigger lose.
Capital vessels are like our navy ships today. And each major navy has a flag ship which are usually larger and more powerful but less mobile then the smaller ones. In this respect it should be kept in mind that how small do you we want our most powerful and tanky flagship to be? These roles are a dynamic to the game. Should it be removed? What happens if the class size is reduced too much? Will it then be like fighting in a small vessel rather then a capital vessel? Then wouldn’t this remove the dynamic of a capital vessel fight altogether? I leave these thoughts for you to ponder on.
Possible Fixes and Ideas
A possible fix would be to limit class 5 to 7 ships from using Stargates. This means that the objective of the smaller cv’s is clear: take out the warp drive. Once this is done that ship can’t warp or use the stargate to escape. Mission accomplished!
Or in a somewhat reverse. If the capture the flag stargate modal is adopted only the group that controls the stargate can have their class 7 capital vessels warp in or out of that space. Which adds another pvp dynamic.
Or perhaps create a restriction where class 5 to 7 cv’s can’t use their warpdrives to warp out because there are no wormholes big enough for a large ship of their size to maneuver in safely. And they can only use the stargates to get out. Or maybe they cannot use the stargates either and have to wait for a bigger wormhole that is scheduled to spawn and that is big enough for a class 5/7 capital vessel to maneuver in safely.
