DUST Search - The removal of tiers

J-Lewis wrote:

Wow, it only took a year to realize.

How to go about such a change is difficult. You can't just remove ADV and PRO; that's slashing content. And in a content starved game, that's a good way to get players to leave.

However, we can do some interesting things to retain the previous depth and feeling of investment, while crafting a system that keeps everything useful.

I'm going to run through a little case scenario to show what I mean.

Here's a skill tree I cooked up for a the Skill Tree Think Tank thread.

Looking at the tree, you'll find that I've marked Standard equipment to be unlocked by the basic operation skill. Case example: Hybrid Weapon Operation unlocks standard "tech 1" versions of the Nova Knive; Assault Rifle; Shotgun; Plasma Cannon; Sniper Rifle and Forge Gun. There's also a proficiency skill for each weapon, and a bunch of Weapon Upgrade skills.

So here's where things start to get a bit wild; proficiency unlocks the ability to use ADV and PRO gear, so what do we do?

We can turn ADV weapons into "tech 2" modular weapons which can fit various upgrade modules unlocked by the Weapon Upgrades branch.

By default, the ADV weapons are nothing more but STD weapons in terms of stats, but their modularity allows you to specialize them a la mass effect 3 weapons bench (in other words, you slap a 4x scope on your rifle, you lose hip fire accuracy in exchange). Each ADV weapon has various amounts of slots depending on the weapon in question and is fitted just like any suit or vehicle.

We turn PRO weapons into faction, pirate, and officer weapons. They become semi-rare to very rare loot drops and their performance varies from "straight upgrade from STD but worse than ADV" faction, to "straight upgrade from STD, about as good as ADV" pirate, to "better than ADV" officer.

This solves the current power creep problem.
STD becomes baseline equipment. They scale exceptionally well with your support skills, and have great bang for buck.
ADV becomes a more expensive, but customizable STD weapon where increasing one trait diminishes another.
PRO becomes a high risk reward option that is rarely seen in anything but the most serious fights (adjust drop rates as nessesary).


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gbghg L.O.T.I.S. RISE of LEGION 2793	Posted - 2013.07.25 02:03:00 - [1] - Quote So here's something that's been bugging me for a while, and which I've put a bit of thought into, "why does Dust have tiers, when it's older sibling went through something called tiercide? Tiercide (from what I've gathered, I don't play eve) aimed to completely rebalance pretty much everything so that no ship was fundamentally better than another ship, just better at a given role. This approach meant tier 1 ships (the racial basic suit in dust) were the general ships that could be used in various roles, while the tech 2 ships (the specialised variants, assault, logi etc) were very good at one role but not so much at others. This means that every ship has a place, and none are simply rendered obsolete by moving up a skill level. This is a very good idea, it means that everything has the potential to be used and nothing should be ignored because the next ship in line is better in every way. We need the same thing in dust. It is my personal belief that the current existence of proto and advanced gear is killing this game, in two main ways. The first is in the matter of game balance, the fact that players are running around with such hugely different EHP is ridiculous, it's one thing giving different health levels to different classes, they come with their own sets of advantages and disadvantages (movement speed, type of weapon, heavies, scouts ect), that's fine, done right it adds diversity to the battlefield, makes it more a TF2 than a COD, we all agree its a good thing. When you can get a HP difference of 400-500 within the same class something is just messed up. As things stand this sort of thing happens a lot. "Bob is a decently skilled FPS'er, played his share of games and has just left the academy, since bob has done his research he's come out of the academy with a basic suit and some basic modules and weapons, he has just under 300HP. Now on his first match bob runs into a big bad proto player, this guy is has over 300HP before he he even puts any mods on, now our big bad proto player isn't very good at FPS's, he's an EVE player who is utterly hopeless at twitch shooters but who in the hope he can get better has diligently grinded away at the game till he got his proto suit and modules. Now bob our decently skilled FPS'er tries his best but the damage of the big bad proto's weapon combined with his huge HP advantage is insurmountable, throughout the rest of the game bob tries and tries but he just can't win." Tell me, how many times have you had this happen to you? A lot I'm guessing if you don't spend all your time running advanced or proto gear. This is fundamentally broken, it's one thing to have something like that in a MMORPG, they normally give you a range of options to deal with the problem or simply avoid it, dust doesn't, it's a lobby shooter, sure there's gear based matchmaking but there's a whole load of good arguments against that, just as there are some very good reasons for it. Proto gear is somewhat like titans when you look at it, the only effective counter is to field proto gear yourself, and their stats are out of proportion compared to everything else, and given the sheer number of people around running proto, soon it's going to be proto and nothing else, it already is in PC if you actually want to win the battle, and you'll run into at least 1 proto player in any given pub match. What do you think it will be like for new players a year down the line, when a large proportion of the player base is running proto gear? Would you want to play a game where you die repeatedly over and over because the other guy has simply put more time (or money) into the game? No one will want to play that, the game will truly be dead. And that's what I meant by player retention problems, having people running around who have vast amounts more HP than you simply because they played the game longer is unbalanced and poor game design, it's simply incompetence, or part of your business model but we'll get to that later. Lets look at the 2 big titles in console FPS gaming, and the two benchmarks dust will always be compared against, COD whatever sequel idiots are still buying and battlefield 3/4. Neither of those 2 games allow players to increase their health, they can take less damage from things like grenades etc, but they don't have people who can absorb more bullets than someone else, this allows skill, not HP level to be the main factor in who wins the firefight. Dust needs to be brought in line with this. Now I just want to say that the fitting system is probably my favourite thing about dust, and I love being able to tinker with my fits to get as much HP out of them as possible, I'm not advocating that we remove the EHP modules but just that the ridiculous discrepancy we see between standard and proto gear is gone for good. Fits should provide an advantage that augments your play style, not make you invincible to anyone who isn't carrying the same meta as you. And to those who use the argument that the ISK cost is the reason for these advantages, well they found out the hard way with titans that balancing by ISK doesn't work. Now I propose we go about settling this in one of two ways, the first is a major EHP nerf, bring them down so they offer an advantage, but one a standard weapon could still take down reasonably quickly, the same goes for weapons. But the root problem remains, a large segment of gear still remains worthless once you reach a certain point, and spending the most ISK gives you an inherent advantage. The second way and one I prefer is to remove proto (and adv, you aren't forgotten) from the game entirely, this levels the playing field and allows player skill to become the most important factor, followed shortly by fitting choices. Alongside the removal you would have to make sure the bonuses on the variants become worth it and ensure that a suit is best utilized in its intended role, so the basic suits become the tier 1 equivalent.
gbghg L.O.T.I.S. RISE of LEGION 2793	Posted - 2013.07.25 02:04:00 - [2] - Quote The second way and one I prefer is to remove proto (and adv, you aren't forgotten) from the game entirely, this levels the playing field and allows player skill to become the most important factor, followed shortly by fitting choices. Alongside the removal you would have to make sure the bonuses on the variants become worth it and ensure that a suit is best utilized in its intended role, so the basic suits become the tier 1 equivalent, able to perform the logi or assault role with equal effectiveness (using the current variants). Allowing the logi and assault suits to become the best in their given role, hopefully avoiding another caldari logi fiasco. As to the question I began my post with the only answer I can think of is that it's CCP business model, by throwing such huge tier advantages out there it encourages you to splurge on aurum gear and boosters to stay competitive, which is just bad game design. tl;dr I think proto is killing the game and that dust should go through its own tiercide, placing a greater importance on the variant of the item rather than the meta level. GD version: https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=97101&find=unread
gbghg L.O.T.I.S. RISE of LEGION 2809	Posted - 2013.07.25 17:06:00 - [3] - Quote Ku Shala wrote: why remove teirs limit the amount of isk you can spend in a match, make an isk value for blueprint items on dropsuits and have different value teirs to play in! This would also make it possible to win a match by costing the team too much isk. Example first teir match have an isk limit of 80 000 isk per player including vehicles. and so on and the final teir has an unlimited wallet for vet players. then have the different teirs pay different amounts of isk based on the teir level increasing as the value of the battles go up. if you run out of your limited cost you can no longer spawn in and your team get a disadvantage.idk If an ISK solution is needed, I personally think that providing a lower reward for proto players would be best, the bigger your advantage the lesser your pay check is.
gbghg L.O.T.I.S. RISE of LEGION 2810	Posted - 2013.07.25 17:20:00 - [4] - Quote DiGreatDestroyer wrote: Vulcanus Lightbringer wrote: Trey Hardin wrote: DiGreatDestroyer wrote: I think that you cant just go and remove proto or advanced, because people haver earned them with their time and/or resources, so its not fair. I think that the dust team should make standard only playlists, STD and advanced playlists, and whatever playlists for instant batlles. Thats THE solution thats going to make everyone happy Your right I have spent 3-4 hours a night for the last 3 months to get my advanced level gear. I know that if the proto and adv gear is taken out me and a majority of my corp will leave the game for good. I believe that the changes that were offered in the original post would kill dust because a majority of the current players would quit May I ask why? Because we are going to lose EVERYTHING we have achieved since we are playing this game, thats why. Im with you in this, something needs to be done, but removing or nerfing the protos and advenced gears is not the solution I am currently using an advanced fit, and i can face almost any protos i come across, cause even if they have the money, they dont have the skill I think we should all make a gentlements agrement right now to only use advanced tiers in instant batles, so new players dont get proto stomped. Gentleman's agreements are a joke, because they acknowledge that something is wrong by their very existence. And you wouldn't lose everything, you would simply be on a level playing field with everyone else, sp could be used to passively improve the gear you have or get new bonus's, but it wouldn't provide an arbitrary DPS/HP increase.
gbghg L.O.T.I.S. RISE of LEGION 2811	Posted - 2013.07.25 18:56:00 - [5] - Quote J-Lewis wrote: Wow, it only took a year to realize. How to go about such a change is difficult. You can't just remove ADV and PRO; that's slashing content. And in a content starved game, that's a good way to get players to leave. However, we can do some interesting things to retain the previous depth and feeling of investment, while crafting a system that keeps everything useful. I'm going to run through a little case scenario to show what I mean. Here's a skill tree I cooked up for a the Skill Tree Think Tank thread. Looking at the tree, you'll find that I've marked Standard equipment to be unlocked by the basic operation skill. Case example: Hybrid Weapon Operation unlocks standard "tech 1" versions of the Nova Knive; Assault Rifle; Shotgun; Plasma Cannon; Sniper Rifle and Forge Gun. There's also a proficiency skill for each weapon, and a bunch of Weapon Upgrade skills. So here's where things start to get a bit wild; proficiency unlocks the ability to use ADV and PRO gear, so what do we do? We can turn ADV weapons into "tech 2" modular weapons which can fit various upgrade modules unlocked by the Weapon Upgrades branch. By default, the ADV weapons are nothing more but STD weapons in terms of stats, but their modularity allows you to specialize them a la mass effect 3 weapons bench (in other words, you slap a 4x scope on your rifle, you lose hip fire accuracy in exchange). Each ADV weapon has various amounts of slots depending on the weapon in question and is fitted just like any suit or vehicle. We turn PRO weapons into faction, pirate, and officer weapons. They become semi-rare to very rare loot drops and their performance varies from "straight upgrade from STD but worse than ADV" faction, to "straight upgrade from STD, about as good as ADV" pirate, to "better than ADV" officer. This solves the current power creep problem. STD becomes baseline equipment. They scale exceptionally well with your support skills, and have great bang for buck. ADV becomes a more expensive, but customizable STD weapon where increasing one trait diminishes another. PRO becomes a high risk reward option that is rarely seen in anything but the most serious fights (adjust drop rates as nessesary). Good ****, I'm open to anything that solves the ridiculousl and unbalanced gaps between tiers we have right now.
gbghg L.O.T.I.S. RISE of LEGION 2831	Posted - 2013.07.26 17:01:00 - [6] - Quote Ku Shala wrote: lets just remove skillz then too! oh and adjust the autoaim system to only get head shots so that the less skilled players have a chance too I take it you missed this bit Quote: The second way and one I prefer is to remove proto (and adv, you aren't forgotten) from the game entirely, this levels the playing field and allows player skill to become the most important factor, followed shortly by fitting choices. This would actually make player skill the most important factor, the only people who would suffer are the people who aren't as good who would their crutch taken away.
gbghg L.O.T.I.S. RISE of LEGION 2835	Posted - 2013.07.26 21:23:00 - [7] - Quote Mobius Wyvern wrote: Meta levels on gear is fine, because it allows you to downgrade to fit other equipment if you want, and adds more depth to suit customization. Meta levels on suits don't work for this game for the same reason they don't work for EVE, and are actively being designed out of it. Cat_Merc made a proposal thread that he posted on the first page of this one that addresses this issue, and suggests a means of adding back in the Type suits we used to have in the form of Basic Frame suits that allow even a new player to be competetive, and gain capability via skill-based bonuses such that you don't have to toss out suits to get better. Yeah cat merc, showed me his first google doc on it about 20 minutes after I first posted the thread, it's good stuff.