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Now that APEX suits can be edited lets make the leap....

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Celus Ivara DUST University Ivy League 363	Posted - 2015.05.08 15:57:00 - [1] - Quote KEROSIINI-TERO wrote: Indianna Pwns wrote: ... and implement dropsuit tieracide. Lets give give all suits proto slot layouts and use CPU/PG/meta level to control suit power. The precedent has now been set with with the ability to edit APEX suits. No, as the proto suits would still be infinitely better than ADV suits, which in turn are infinitely better than STD. Now what is needed is a battlefield drawback, some sort of sacrifice in using higher tier. And no, isk is not it. There's no isk on the battlefield. This simple posts hits a lot of really complex issues right on the head. One is that "tiericide" is a word that means different things to different people, and that many people don't know the abstract of it other than it's "that thing that should obviously be added to the game to make it better". The concept of tiericide started on EVE as a response to the realization of "ship A is always better than ship B, which is always better than ship C, etc" is actually super unfun, because it removes choice from vets and makes non-vets near useless until they've grinded to the end-game. Tiericide is about killing the idea of ship tiers. Instead give each ship a purpose in the game. Ship A is still a bad-ass mo'fo. But that's only useful when you need a bad-ass mo'fo. Sometime you need something nimble, tackley, stealthy, fast, healy, cap-wary, EWARy, et'all. (For example: I have a 5-1/2 year-old, highly skilled character, and I spend the vast majority of my time in a shuttle! It's the tiniest ship in the game, but it's fantastic for managing market-hub industry.) So two things come from the above: First is that if we are going to talk about tiericide, let's at least make sure we are actually suggesting killing tiers. The suggestion of making STD/ADV/PTO balanced by only making them better by CPU/PG size still has Proto being a better suit than the other two. The tiers still exist. Second, is that we might not need tiericide as bad as EVE needed it. Yes, Proto suits are always better than STD/ADV suits. And yes, Basic suits are always worse than Specialized suits. But the five suit specializations with four race variations gives us 20 different equally viable suits to bring to a fight. And the weapons and equipment are quite different; you can't objectively say an assault rifle is better than a sniper rifle. So vets do have a lot of variety. Now with that out of the way, we do need to segue into the acknowledgement that tiers DO exist, and there are scenarios where that is borderline game-breaking; Proto-bears grinding on new-bros was never a good situation. An interesting aspect here is that the higher tiers are gated by SP and access to ISK, and this is by design. - SP is the progression in the game, so "of course" you get better with more SP. - ISK is the balancing factor, better gear costs more money, and hypothetically leads to an engaging risk/reward scenario. Now, while this is intentional, it does cause problems in certain situations. All else equal, a Proto-fit player fighting a Standard-fit player is fundamentally unbalanced and thus un-fun. In the early days of Dust this was omnipresent (and is a big part of what sunk the game. As an aside, I'm passionately looking forward to the launch of Dust 2.0 where we have this fixed ahead of time.). With the introduction of Academy, Team-Balancer, and Matchmaking, we've largely eliminated this. Now-a-days in pubs, when Proto-fits fight Standard, it's because the Standard player is a talented bad-ass who can slaughter with Basic gear. Everything is great! ....in pubs. In FW and PC there is no external balancing. Therefore: - Low SP players can't compete. - Players with ISK faucets running are brokenly OP. The first one is a little bit of an issue, but I don't think it's too bad. Not too many people complain about day 1 WOW players not being able to Raid, or little league players not being able to engage in MLB. Still though, it is unique content they can't experience. If we could figure out a way for new players to meaningfully engage with this content, that would be ideal (coughDistrict Raidingcough ). The ISK-faucet thing though, I think is a real issue. A player with the backing of a rich corp (like in the early/mid Nyan-san days) or "paying to win" (heavy quotes, but still) by buying AURUM Proto gear / trading AURUM items for ISK to then trade for officer, can field extremely powerful gear without cost. This brings us to the core issue here: - The power level of gear is determined by what it can do in battle. - Powerful gear is balanced by carrying higher costs of in-battle and/or out-of-battle resources. - If a player has an abundance of an out-of-battle resource, they are fundamentally unbalanced in battle. It's worth clarifying the main culprit is Proto suits; Proto weapons/mods consume more of the in-battle resource of available CPU/PG. Suits have no such in-battle power check. [1 of 2]
Celus Ivara DUST University Ivy League 363	Posted - 2015.05.08 15:58:00 - [2] - Quote [2 of 2] So how do we fix this? We could figure out a way to make everyone bear the same burden for lost ISK (which to my knowledge only has solutions we hate, like giving everyone a daily ration of ISK, or removing ISK from the game completely.). Or we could remove suit tiers completely. Or, we could figure out a way for high-end gear to be balanced by an in-game cost. For example, spawning in a Proto suit costs 5 clones while spawning in Basic costs 1. Or say, dieing in a Proto suit increases your spawn timer. An idea has been kicked around for a while where if you kill a suit of a higher meta-level than yours, you get more WP; likewise killing weaker suits nets less WP. Ultimately though, Dust mercs will always be unbalanced against each other. You can't nerf player skill, and teamwork is always OP. But the more we counter-balance the power disparities we can access, the more evenly matched, and thus fun, the battles and game becomes.
Celus Ivara DUST University Ivy League 363	Posted - 2015.05.08 16:00:00 - [3] - Quote TL;DR Celus Ivara wrote: KEROSIINI-TERO wrote: Indianna Pwns wrote: ... and implement dropsuit tieracide. Lets give give all suits proto slot layouts and use CPU/PG/meta level to control suit power. The precedent has now been set with with the ability to edit APEX suits. No, as the proto suits would still be infinitely better than ADV suits, which in turn are infinitely better than STD. Now what is needed is a battlefield drawback, some sort of sacrifice in using higher tier. And no, isk is not it. There's no isk on the battlefield. ^This. ...maybe I should have just typed those six characters and saved everybody a bunch of time. I write way too much.

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