Nova Knife
Seituoda Taskforce Command
Caldari State
853
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Posted - 2013.04.21 17:22:00 -
[1] - Quote
In the same line of thought as the OP, we've had endless debates on the forums and in IRC over the last year or so about this same topic. I wrote a post a few months back saying the same stuff :) Link here.
As far as tanks go in your first two links, Credit to Tiel Syysch for easily the best "HAV Balance" proposal I have seen to date. This post is a reference to a pretty awesome and detailed email he sent to CCP (I asked Tiel to send me a copy too) which he should totally repost as a google doc as the forum thread does not do the proposal justice as he paraphrased and cut a lot out.
I tend to agree, they've been balancing the game around giving brand new players a chance in instant battles against dudes rocking prototype gear... Which is kind of a mistake. A year or so ago, suit HP went up a fair chunk based on tiers. Without any modules a proto suit would have a tad more HP than a standard suit loaded with HP mods.
Even with this health advantage, a good player in trash gear still easily won against a bad player in good gear. To that respect, I honestly don't think it matters all that much how they balance the game when it comes down to noobs vs 'pros'. In the FPS genre, player skill usually trumps all. If they really don't want vets stomping brand new players in better gear... The gear is not where they should focus their attention.
Putting measures so that brand new players have a separate matchmaking queue (Limited by SP, Character Age, or amount of kills, etc) would be a good step, so long as a 'vet' making a new alt could opt out of that to play 'real' matches. There is also a framework for gear limitations already in the system. We used to have it but it was taken out. Basically, there was battles that were labelled like "Planet X - District 12 // SI Name [MILITIA]" and in matches like that, a player would not be able to spawn a fit that had anything higher than militia level. That included weapons, modules, equipment, and dropsuits. Adding Queue options for that in instant battle wouldn't be amiss, I think.
I do think that gameplay at the high level should be more interesting than the low level, and the flattened tiers of both recent and past nerfs kind of take away from that. But the tiericide was only a small problem with balance. Balance as a whole has been well... Terrible. Throughout the entire beta, it's been bad and only really gotten worse.
A month (maybe two months? I don't remember) or so ago I started an effort to help remedy that. A player balance initiative, where anyone willing could weigh in on the balance of specfic things, which would've been submitted to CCP in the hope they'd use it to drastically improve (Or at least break in other ways :P) the balance of Dust. This was put on hold while still in the early stages, after I heard that pretty much everything is going to be changing in Uprising. It didn't seem like the right time for the project. I'm giving CCP the benefit of the doubt as I don't know exactly what's being changed. Though, after the build comes out if things are still horribad I'll likely start this project anew, calling for glorious spreadsheet warriors to help. |
Nova Knife
Seituoda Taskforce Command
Caldari State
853
|
Posted - 2013.04.21 19:52:00 -
[2] - Quote
Aighun wrote:Nova Knife wrote: We used to have it but it was taken out. Basically, there was battles that were labelled like "Planet X - District 12 // SI Name [MILITIA]" and in matches like that, a player would not be able to spawn a fit that had anything higher than militia level. That included weapons, modules, equipment, and dropsuits. It was on the honor system. This was never enforced by the game. You could choose a "militia" match no matter what sort of gear you had. CCPs answer to the question of how does this system work? was basically that it was up to us and what sort of player would run prototype gear in a match with a "militia" sign on the door, anyway?
I'm pretty sure that while you could get into those games, all of your fits that were higher than the level indicated in the browser, would just be invalid and you'd be unable to spawn with them. |