Daemonn Adima wrote:That's natural dichotomy. Every game always has that and always will. Some players are inherently better than others. Except we don't balance games around that concept, we try and normalize what the players have access to so that the better players, even when stacked don't near instant kill people.
Two players with the same gear, one sucks and one wrecks - the bad player needs to take efforts to improve his game. This is FAIR. Two players in different gear who both wreck, and one loses 9/10 times because of an hp and damage advantage, isn't fair.
Can't balance someone's skill, but we can balance the way you gain advantages over other players through equipment.
Pretty much nailed it. Which is why I am as passionate about the in-game economy as I am. I dislike that players have enormous wealths of ISK and I feel that a lot of problems stem from passive generation (PC farming, Warbarge modules) and exempted generation (BPOs, APEX BPOs).
A lot of the time I hear these arguments that skill > gear but no-one ever mentions what happens when you have skill AND gear or when a player has low skill and low gear. How do you balance that? IMO, tiercide is something we desperately need even still but something we can never get because of past sins. There shouldn't be this whole MLT/STD/ADV/Proto/Officer thing... but because we offered players BPOs and APEXs, we're screwed into having it. We can't get away from it without basically invalidating the real-life money players have spent. We also can't strip players of their enormous ISK wallets.
And because of that players will -always- have some form of mechanical advantage over others. Either because they paid real money and now never have to spend ISK again or because they were around for PC ISK farming and will never be able to spend all of what they have. They'll always be exempted from having to pay ISK and can use the ISK they save en masse to fund powerful gear. It's frustrating as hell. A new player coming into this game has neither of these advantages and must rely -EXCLUSIVELY- on their own player skill in order to just scrape by and survive.
I feel like there's nothing we can do about it because people want to retain their real money investments and want to keep the isk they -coughs- "earned". What's worse is that when we port - if we port - we'll likely have to carry these sins over and introduce them to a whole new player base. It's going to leave a pretty bitter first impression and I don't think it's going to go over well in the reviews and feedback.
But yanno. People want their "I Win" button. Game health be damned.