Matchmaking is a fantasy.

Balancing on player performace (WP, KDR, etc) will put logis, dedicated av, and dropship pilots all in the same games while ar's, snipers, and tankers will end up in the same games. doesnt work bc gear and role affects a player's performance. alos, putting tanks against proto av is not fair and without a buff, is stupid to do. unless you can find a better way to be fair to make protos, noobs, and tanks happy, don't only give reason why it is bad.

Honestly, gear isn't as much of a factor in being good as a lot of people seem to think.

I mean, I'm terrible at shooters in general, but I have a friend of mine who's quite good, and she runs a Raven suit with Exile and Toxin. She doesn't have any issues taking down suits with far better gear than her's.

The point is that the way the game is now, your skill as a player is just as much a factor as your gear, and somewhat moreso, because having a full Complex fit on your Prototype suit isn't going to stop you from getting killed if you're not a good player.

Matchmaking is a fantasy.

I want to believe it mobius... but I can't.

My proto suit has a minimum of twice the EHP of a standard suit and my gun does 20% more damage + a slew of core skills.

There is a huge huge power gap between 16m with proto gear and 1m with standard gear. Not to mention im more familiar with the game mechanics too.

You make a rather convincing argument dell, one problem that occurred to me though is that vehicle play would be more or less nonexistent at higher tiers, right now for the simple fact that we don't have the vehicles, and later on because the price we can expect to pay for them and their likely usefulness and survivability (based on current vehicles and past trends) will either be so OP that it gets nerfed into the ground or will be so UP as to be way too expensive a coffin.

Instead matchmaking with gear it should be done with total SP instead.

We have to remember that, while the absolute difference especially between STD and PRO is huge, twice the eHP means about a second more fire for ARs and often no difference for weapons like FGs or SRs.

Most of the time when i manage to kill protos it's because i got a critical flank at which point i often wipe out half a squad of shiny stuff before they even get to react properly. It's the same the other way around. Any lone wolf that is not a speed tanked shotgunner will do jack to my vigilant STD/ADV squad even if he's running full on PRO gear. 300 more eHP might sound like much but in the end it's one flaylock hit, two MD hits or about .10 seconds of accurate AR fire until this difference is overcome.

I think Pubstomping is really more about the player behind that suit than the suit itself

Balancing on player performace (WP, KDR, etc) will put logis, dedicated av, and dropship pilots all in the same games while ar's, snipers, and tankers will end up in the same games. doesnt work bc gear and role affects a player's performance. alos, putting tanks against proto av is not fair and without a buff, is stupid to do. unless you can find a better way to be fair to make protos, noobs, and tanks happy, don't only give reason why it is bad.

Well, it will likely be my last non-troll for a couple months so I thought I'd make it a good one.
Anyhow, on that note, I think the LLAV should only be allowed in higher tiers bc without 3 dudes having proto swarms (forges wont cut it), you will not be able to take it down without a tank or another llav with a scattered ion cannon, and that is the definition of OP.

Right now, it is a faster fix than buffing tanks, and it would allow for tanks to be competitive. However, it still wouldn't fix their usefulness in PC. That needs the addition of ADV and PRO tanks. At least with putting tanks only against STD and ADV gear, tankers can make money in pubs without redline sniping. (im against redline sniping). Now, we could wait for better tanks and not complain as much on the forums bc the balance is there to keep us away from gear that 2hk's us.

Personally I'm in favour of just scrapping the tiers entirely and balancing everything off the standard numbers, and then provide some real bonuses and downsides to the specialising's for each set of suits and vehicles, of course for that to work we would need the full complement of racial variants and the introduction of various features such as EWAR. I doubt it would ever happen but the game would probably be better for it, it would bring it more in line with EVE which went through something similar and came out the better for it.

This proposal does nothing to counter going into a matchmade battle with a full squad of 6 people you've been playing with for months all using Starter fits.

The only thing this proposal could be is a possible solution to pubstomping, which is impossible to prevent unless you base your system on player performance metrics and not gear.

I mean, do you really think you'll have a better chance against someone like Regnum Dei if he's in a starter fit?

I don't expect it to happen but i agree. These tiers are poison for NPE and the game in general as all it does is make the next last tier irrelevant if you want to be competitive. It artificially inflates the inventory with "passing by" stuff that no one really wants to use and most can't even affort to use because they need to have constant high performance in their environment.

I can't fathom why CCP went with these stupid tiers in dust while they are right effin' now working hard on removing this braindead concept from EVE.