Shion Typhon
Intara Direct Action
Caldari State
270
   |
Posted - 2013.09.26 08:09:00 -
[1] - Quote
OK, disclosure first, I NEVER drive a tank, ever, I barely drive LAVs. I'm also not very AV, I have Adv Swarms, no forge and no high end vehicle AV grenades so you could say I'm one of the least qualified to make any judgements about HAVs in Dust.
However, I have played just about every PVP game out there (including vehicle/AV roles or equivalent roles where vehicles don't exist) and many of the problems with Dust vehicles are by no means confined to this game. The same issues come up again and again across games. PS2 is Dust's closest cousin and it is still struggling with this problem.
My basic position is "Dust tanks (HAVs) are underpowered and have a broken risk/reward model".
However, the way CCP is going about fixing it, and the community is encouraging them down this path, is completely the wrong way to go about it and will lead to even more problems in the future.
Firstly 3 principles:
1) You can't balance around ISK for two reasons:
a) In a highly variable economy you will have parties for whom no amount of ISK is a penalty and hence they can afford only the best at all times, regardless. If you price for these people then the rest simply can't afford to participate at all, creating an ultra-capitalist elitism. It also creates the vehicle-lobbyist problem where the main aim is to prevent the loss of a vehicle at all costs.
b) in a closed lobby shooter match compared to an open world, all balancing needs to be done around that match. In EVE you can have frigates vs titans because the open world allows numbers to be brought to bear, in a 16v16 closed match this isn't an option. This is why you see money in MMOs but not in FPSs, there's a reason for that, its because its bad game design, not revolutionary. At the silliest extreme you make a vehicle so expensive that to make up for that it has to be powerful enough to solo the whole enemy team.
Tl;dr : ISK balancing = bad.
2) Mobility as a balancing variable is VERY VERY BAD, AS BAD AS ISK.
For armoured vehicles like tanks mobility is the number one game crushing force multiplier. No other factor more quickly moves your vehicle from wildly underpowered to wildly overpowered in such a short span. For a practical example go observe the Magrider in Planetside 2. It's a grav hover tank that can side strafe in a world of tread/wheeled-based vehicles. In its original form it was completely and utterly broken, no other vehicle need enter the field, it didn't matter if it had the worst armour and weapons because you just couldn't hit it, even with guided missiles, it would just dance around shooting at you until you died then run off to kill your 5 buddies one at a time.
You also see the same problem in other PVP games where one "class" can run much faster than the others, giving them the ability to define at all times based on class choice rather than skill when combat occurs (ie on their terms, never yours). Guild Wars 2 and many other fantasy MMOs/PVP games suffer from this (exacerbated by the melee vs ranged angle).
Tl;dr: Mobility is a balancing factor but it is so crushingly powerful that it is almost impossible to use in a balanced way.
3) Vehicle balancing needs to be scalable across every situation and avoid binary results(this is my major point).
Vehicles need to be balanced when they appear in the lowliest pub match and also balanced in the most insane inferno of organised competitive play. This isn't impossible.
OK, so far CCP are ballsing up principles 1 & 3 and hopefully they don't try 2. So what is the fundamental problem?
The problem is that Dust uses EVE model for tanking where the tanking outcome is mostly a binary decision, either you are invulnerable to the forces facing you or you pop like a soap bubble, no scale.
An example of a similar issue in the MMO world was a PVP game where the defining stat for all combat was magic resistance. The binary nature was that everyone simply stacked nothing but magic resistance or its opposite, magic accuracy. depending on who stacked higher you were either immune to 95% of all skills or it had no effect and you popped. Bad design.
Planetside 2 suffers from a similar problem because they have set their equivalent of repairing tools rate far far far too high. This means a tank with no engineer is a free kill and a tank with 2 engineers is completely and utterly unkillable.
Invisibility in games is a similar binary problem, you can either be seen and die screaming or can't be seen and are unkillable, similarly bad design (next time someone wants to put invisibility in their game they should try the shadow clones/displacer method instead hint hint CCP).
The problem with a binary decision is that it actually ends up disadvantaging everyone, there is no winner, its simply worst of all choices. Lets look at some game play issues at a theorycrafting level but ignore tiers of AV gear and vehicles because tiers just make the problem even worse, not better.
Lets say you have the situation where one AV guy can kill one tanker with a few shots, clearly not ideal because the infantryman has a mobility advantage orders of magnitudes higher than the tank. So CCP's first choice is to increase the tank-stable capacity of the vehicle so that one guy can't kill that HAV. The first ramification of this decision is you have made a single AV player a non-factor, nothing he does by himself matters, unless he is coordinated and most likely comm'd with a fellow AV team mate he may as well put down his swarm and go kill infantry. |
Shion Typhon
Intara Direct Action
Caldari State
270
|
Posted - 2013.09.26 08:10:00 -
[2] - Quote
So now we have two AV guys ready and willing. If they focus fire they can crack that tank in a few shots and kill it, so the result for the tanker is he is back in the same position of losing his vehicle and has gone nowhere from his perspective. Now that team of guys can find themselves a vantage point and because they can crack one tank they can crack any tank, so now the battlefield is a no go zone for every tank. No matter how many tanks are spawned these two guys can crack each one as they roll off the nanite production line. In organised matches this problem skyrockets because you end up with the AV nest problem where X AVers are supported by 1-2 "refuelers" who can keep them rolling all day and denying the entire battlefield to vehicles permanently.
So now CCP increases the tank-stable level again so it takes 3 guys ... I'm sure you can see where this arms race is going. Eventually you get to needing 15/16 guys to crack a tank but he still cracks so the tanker is no better off and all you have done is break the infantry side of the game. When you use a tank-stable crack/no crack binary model the tanker never gets ahead and the infantry just get more and more annoyed, no one wins.
This new model that CCP is proposing is simply an extended, worse version of the same above problem. Their "surge" model suggests a situation where a vehicle is even more uncrackable followed by a period of higher weakness. This just creates windows where AV infantry get to feel useless, punctuated by periods where tankers get to feel bored and frustrated because they have no choice but to retreat from the field until the next period of godmode. It also reduces the feeling of skill either the tanker or AVer have because battles normally only take place during godmode where you either brought enough people to crack CCP's attempt at balance or you didn't. Bad design.
So what do you do?
You need a system that is less binary and rewards players for good play, not just having an unbeatable/worthless fit and runs across the whole match.
Ideally you want a completely scalable solution where a bad tanker loses his tank slowly to a small, bad AV team and quickly/instantly to a large, good AV team. A mid range tanker loses his tank slowly to an average AV team but quickly to a good large AV team and so on until at the final point the game's best tanker is in a see-saw position of managing to keep his tank vs a large good AV team to the end of a match.
This means looking at the vehicle tanking/repairing paradigm and also the AV model at the same time.
What are the main issues? CCP needs to:
1) Change to a HP based tanking model
2) Introduce between-match repairs and scale back (somewhat) in game repairs
3) Radically overhaul (scale back) the ammunition model for AV weapons
1) A HP based model means you get that "wearing down" model of game play. It avoids the windows of win/no-win prevalent in the surge/godmode model. You can "go aggressive" any time you want at your choice but that choice comes with a consequences of likely getting stripped down faster than if you played conservatvely. Lets say for the sake of your team you decide you absolutely need to stay and fight and keep this point and are prepared to sacrifice yourself to do so. It means a highly geared, high skill tanker can sustain an "all-in" fight for much longer than the bad newbie but even the newbie can survive for a while in the same environment.
You might ask "how does this fix the 15/16 people going AV problem?" It doesn't completely fix it, 15 people will still destroy a high HP HAV but it makes the choice/tradeoff much more fair and much more linear/scalable. For each person on the enemy team who joins the AV side, the quicker the enemy tanks will wear down but it doesn't result in either no kills vs insta-kills
How much HP is enough? I'm not sure, but if its 5x current HP then that isn't something to be scared of, you simply need to make that decision first then balance the AV damage/ammo availability around it.
A HP model also reduces the problem of tiers because being high tiered simply means more durability and substantially extended lifespan rather than being completely unkillable vs a lower tier.
2) If you are going to have a HP based model which gives massive survivability against alpha/co-ordinated strikes you can't then turn around and rebreak it by giving it excessive repair.
I would suggest hand held reppers no longer repair HAVs, you need a chain of handheld reppers repair LAVs, logi-LAVs repair HAVs. Then you need to make a leap of faith, ignore EVE and lore and accept that both armour and shields do not naturally self repair, or only do so very slowly (ie 10 mins to rep a HAVs full HP load). Also, being hit by "new damage" stops the regen process for some period of time (PS2's nanite regen module is actually a VERY good system, being hit by any AV damage stops regen for around 10-15 seconds before the regen restarts, quite balanced).
You could still have in game repair by supply modules or the area directly under the MCC, it means someone who has ****** luck or is massively outgunned can at least make the choice of completely withdrawing from combat for a substantial tme period to regen. You would have to be careful how you balanced this.
You also need to have between match repair combined with a major drop in vehicle costs to remove the binary cost horror currently in place. A super tanker who plays like a tard still suffers ISK cost at the same level a newbie who completely lost his tank does. This way the ISK cost is directly related to your in match performance. It also discourages the whole "recall" problem because once you've taken 99% damage you don't get a free ticket out of being a failure by recalling the vehicle. If you recall at 50% HP, that's your call. |
Shion Typhon
Intara Direct Action
Caldari State
270
|
Posted - 2013.09.26 08:11:00 -
[3] - Quote
3) The one downside to a HP model is the easy accessibility to ammo for AV. If you have infinite ammo you can just pour it on until he dies. You need to revamp ammo completely to make it much harder to come by so the AV guy needs to be consider how he uses his ammo in the same way the tanker needs to consider whether to go in hard or hang back.
This probably translates to no AV ammo from nanohives, only from supply depots, or 1 missile/forge load completely consumes a hive so they only get used in emergencies not as endless fuel for AV nests. It also means no unreachable rooftop gunners because they run out of ammo quickly. The general position should be "an equivalently equipped AV user should be able to do X% of a HAVs total HP before needing to back off into reload mode and 2X% before he needs to make his way to a supply depot. A HP+ammo model also allows a n AV user to choose how he spreads his ammo pool's worth of dmg (some damage across a couple of targets vs all dmg on one target).
You could also introduce a small ISK cost so that the cost to buy missiles/forge cartridges is some portion of the ISK it costs a tanker to repair the damage it does (would also discourage forge gunners using shots on infantry) (yes I know this is balancing by ISK but its probably a semi-appropriate area to do it in)
I am aware there are many other issues in vehicle land (passengers, render range etc) which I haven't touched on but you need to get this part right first. |