Delenne Arran
Ivory Hounds
4
   |
Posted - 2013.06.15 04:49:00 -
[1] - Quote
I'm against any further respecs unless there's a major change to the game. I could maybe be swayed toward one-time skill transfers when the remaining racial variants on stuff comes out, allowing people who want to do, say, Minmatar vehicles to transfer over 100% of their Caldari vehicle skills to that tree.
As for your idea- Still not thought out enough. One respec per month is far too frequent for this game, especially since I'm pretty sure it's only supposed to get patches every 2-3 months. That's enough time to swap into what's supposed to be overpowered this patch, decide you don't like it and go back to your old fit, before doing it all again next patch.
One respec per month could only maybe work if you only got to keep like 10% of your SP. And at that point, it's not so much a respec as it is making an entirely new character. |
Delenne Arran
Ivory Hounds
4
|
Posted - 2013.06.16 03:18:00 -
[2] - Quote
dday3six wrote:
Transfers would mean skill trees need to be developed to fit one another to avoid one tree having more or less SP then another. That would add a lot of restrictions to the process.
As near as I can tell, all the Vehicle Command skills have identical SP requirements, unless you get a racial discount?
Quote:We don't know how often new content is going to be released. We know CCP has great plans for Dust, but we also now these plans are going to take a great amount of time to implement. I believe that having the option to respec, under limited circumstances will help to players to get more out of the game in the meantime. As it stands players need to sink weeks and in some cases months into trying something new. That's a lot of time to get discourged with the game. Especially when a player realizes that it's going to take several millions in SP to maximize just one build.
There's a difference between "trying something new" and "being good enough to do Planetary Conquest with a new build." Wanting to try something new is what Militia gear is for. Will you still get killed by blokes in Prototype gear who're doing instant battles for whatever reason? Sure. Can you at least get a feel for what you're doing to see if it's something you want to get better at? Yes.
Quote:At a 2-3 months timeframe, players might not even have chance to touch all the content before the next release. I feel a constant seemingly never-ending grind is not the best carrot on a stick. Fun gameplay should be factored in as well. However in many cases fun for Dust is tied to your SP, because who lives and who dies is often decided by who has better gear.
If you look at it as a grind, no it's not. If you look at it as "getting better" it's fine. While it's never fun to get massacred because some dude's wearing full prototype gear in an Instant Battle Domination, it also doesn't take much to kill people at the same gear level as you are. Gear can decide the winner, but actual player skill factors in as well and playing with inferior gear teaches you better tactics. As for players not being able to use everything between releases-- Individuals probably won't, but it's not like that stuff's going anywhere. This isn't like World of Warcraft where if you don't get to enjoy your level 80 gear before the next expansion pack comes out, too bad it's useless now.
Quote:Furthermore the ability to respec also allows players to adapt to weapons or strategies that may come off as dominate. This gives a better gauge as to whether a particular weapons or set up is really OP, and in need of balancing.
It's a double edged sword, but I believe it's better not to have respecs. Not more frequently than once a year, if that, at any rate. At one respec per month, you might as well not even have skill points. |
Delenne Arran
Ivory Hounds
7
|
Posted - 2013.06.17 02:36:00 -
[3] - Quote
dday3six wrote:
I was referring mostly to skilltrees that have yet to be developed and/or released. They would all need to add up to the same SP value and that is limiting from a design stand point.
I may not have been clear when I suggested transfers-- I was only referring to transferring skills from existing racial variants on suits and vehicles to the missing ones. It would be a one-time thing, and only because someone who wants to, say, play a Heavy has no choice but to go Amarr. Any other trees that came out would have to be skilled into normally, so when those "Commando" suits come out, people will just have to put in the time to get them, rather than transfer their Logistics suit skill over.
Quote:There aren't Militia or AUR for that matter, equivalents to all items. Some items, the HGM for example, take quite a few skill points to even try. I rarely see a lobby were at least someone isn't run around in Proto. Most of the time it's squads of them. And the fact is every SP a person sinks into trying something new, is more time before they'll be on a gear level close to players in all, or nearly all Proto, who have the SP to completely maximize one or more builds.
It's true that there are some missing Militia variants on stuff, but that's a problem that can be solved by adding militia variants to more stuff, rather than giving respecs. And Heavy Weapons notwithstanding, it appears most equipment and weapons only take between 12 and 32 hours worth of passive SP to unlock. Even for the more expensive stuff that requires higher skills to unlock, it's pretty likely that you've already put a few points into its prerequisite skills.
Quote:Dust might have reasonably fun gameplay, but the harsh reality of months to remotely level playing field against squads of PUG roaming Protos, only to find out that your plan is less effective then you thought, was changed by an update somehow is, or might just not be overly fun, it hard to call anything but a grind.
As for the roving gangs of prototype wearers- I'll run into a squad or two occasionally, but for the most part, it seems to be one or two individuals, in my experience. Even so, getting hit by an update happens. All you can do is roll with the punches and keep a cache of SP open, to be used on whatever. I find it unlikely that someone can wear a suit long enough to get it to prototype level and not realize their fit kinda sucks or isn't fun. I'm sure it's more common than I'd think, but it didn't take me level 5 Mass Driver skill to realize I didn't like mass drivers.
Quote:True the new content released with expansion is not going away most likely. However I have trouble getting excited about the notion of it being weeks or months before I could try it at even moderate potential.
Like I said in the preceding paragraph- If you want to try new stuff the first day it comes out, keep a few hundred thousand SP open. I don't have any L5 skills, but I've got about 750k SP just sitting around for whatever. Does that mean that I can't do Planetary Conquest? Sure, but I'm pretty sure being in a corp with all of 5 people has that same effect. It also means that if a new suit or gun came out tomorrow, I could skill it up to Advanced level without even trying it out first. If you want to lessen the 'grind', keep keep your options open. If you wanna be the very best at whatever you want to do, having to wait to use new stuff is the price you have to pay.
Quote:Game Players and Game Designers/Developers often think differently, and while in-house testing is great, it only gives so much of a window into how the playerbase will use the content given to them. It also has a hard time mimicking the actual player side gaming conditions, as it's normally run on a LAN type setup, and is often done with Dev accounts which have access to everything from the start. With the time to get into new gear in the weeks or even months, and the potential for new content to be released before the general playerbase even gets into the last round of new content. That means most balancing is either going to have to wait for playerbase to catch up, or is going to be done using almost exclusively the data collected from in-house testing. I feel that not only hinders the balancing process, but also can misguide it.
This is a concern, but not one I find being able to respec at will is likely to fix. Being able to do anything at any one time leads to most people (certainly the ones running around in prototype gear in pubs) going straight for whatever's "best" at the time, rather than true balance. More or less forcing people to stick with what they have allows new tactics and counters for seemingly broken setups to arise organically and highlights the ones that are truly broken (as it's clear it's ridiculously effective on a wide variety of builds rather than just the three or four everyone is using at the time.)
And all of this is a moot point, anyway, as CCP has pretty much stated "No more respecs for the foreseeable future." |