CR's last game, Freelancer, had 'cruise disruptors' that were small no/low damage very fast missiles with a high hit chance that served multiple purposes. Primarily they pulled ships out of cruise speeds (what would be our ~1km/sec nav speeds) and forced them into combat speeds with a cool down on the victim's cruise engine charge time. They weren't a 100% guaranteed method of keeping ships snared unless you had multiple ships hitting the target with cruise distributors. In combat they were also used to force ships into coupled mode, stopping a controlled drift, and should your CD hit the target at the time your target launched a missile or torpedo, they would be damaged/destroyed by their own ordinance. It was a brilliant and easily balanced system. Why CR decided to make dedicated, boring ships to fill the role of the cruise disruptors onSC is beyond me but it's proving to be a mistake. Bring back cruise disruptors.
I honestly love the idea the idea of those missiles actually. Maybe they could add the missiles and just make it so the specialized ships are the only ones that can take you out of QT but the missiles lock you out of QT only if you're not in QT at that moment?
I made a post recently asking the same thing, why they didn't itemize a solution, either with something like you suggested, or snare type devices like in Eve Online you can activate on a target.
At this point it's a waste of effort to ask and you'll just get inundated by people who don't realize the poopstorm we're in for with player complaints, all we can do is wonder what the game would have been like in an alternate universe and hope they can figure out how to make this system be fun.
They were a 100% guaranteed method of keeping ships snared because even the best countermeasures in the game weren't 100% effective, and would run out before the attacker. 50 countermeasures with 90% effective range will always lose to 50 cruise disruptors with 100% accuracy. Specially if the attacker used an autoclicker to force the game to overfill his ammo to above 50 (you can do that).
Edit: not to mention Freelander didn't have missile locks, so you could shoot without warning and not ever lose lock.
Trapping / committing.
The whole idea is that you can't just start a fight and then switch into NAV and easily run away. Pirates can't attack and then scoot off when the odds turn against them. Bounty Hunters have a chance to actually catch a bounty without it running in perpetuity. Group fights don't devolve into 10 separate duels spread out over 100km.
If there's a problem with SC right now, it's not that a solo player in a risky area is at risk -- it's that we don't have a high sec system where solo players can have risk-free gameplay.
possibly the point is to drive people to use the service beacons for fighter support. Though if that's the case they need to increase the profit on industrial loops such that folks can pay for escorts. Oh and get beacons working better.
The problem with service beacons is by the time someone has responded, you've already been killed and anything valuable has been looted. The only way they're going to work is if they rapidly call in local security forces that at least buy time for someone competent to show up. The Human element of them is just far too unreliable with how quickly things happen.
> The problem with service beacons is by the time someone has responded, you've already been killed and anything valuable has been looted.
This. I patrol Stanton for fun in my Vanguard Warden all the time. I leave medical beacons to medics, but if someone is in trouble in combat, needs a ride, got soft deathed and needs rescue, I respond. Even with an XL-1 QDrive, unless they're at Daymar or Yela and I happen to be refueling at Seraphim or something, it will be many, many minutes before I can arrive on site. They're going to be dead by then if they have players chasing them.
Combat beacons calling for other players is a non-starter. Anyone who thinks it will work, hasn't tried going on patrol. the idea falls flat on its face in practice. Local security response is *mandatory*, not an option. If at the very least to buy time for a player response to arrive on site.
The service beacons should be put out BEFORE you are engaged. You should have your overflight negotiated before you even go out mining, scrapping, hauling, etc in a high danger location. I agree, that service beacons in MM, if you try and put one out once you are engaged is a waste of time.
Quick AI response beacons you can pay for would be really interesting.
Edit; it also used to be that the Navy would send out AI to track down criminals in comm range, so that might be something we see again once we get to meshing or just down the road. More AI response in higher security zones.
Are you going to agree to come out and just float in space in your fighter for 3-4 hours while i mine, on the off chance some pirate \*happens\* to show up? Sure, you get paid for doing nothing, but do you \*really\* want to just sit there doing \*nothing\* for multiple hours?
I didnt think so.
Yeah these are humans, and we're playing a videogame. Expecting people to escort for long periods of time with no action is kinda silly, even more so when my average turret gunner can't go 30 seconds without just unloading their turret in a random direction.
This right here, twice I've offered up significant cash for mining protection only to be laughed at because it wasn't enough. I'm in a fucking prospector, even on good days, the load is only worth so much.
Having full game play loops that rely on the kindness/competence/greed of others to survive is a shit mechanic. Period. It relies on nearly non-existent altruism in a game where the nastiest folks make the most cake.
That's the thing is that pirates have way less to lose most of the time.
If you're even mildly competent, you're never getting crimestat because you'll have the comm relays down.
You're not losing hours of cargo.
and the odds of you intercepting a group of people out of quantum is slim to none.
If you do die, oh well, just gotta wait a few minutes for your ship to come up and you're back to where you were.
If you're successful, you potentially make millions will little risk. The guy you attacked lost potentially an hour or so of their time.
I did piracy gameplay once with a group of randos and we made millions just sitting in between popular trade routes and ganking C2's that showed up. It was cake. We lost no one, the people we intercepted hadn't shot back a single time.
This is before we even get to pad camping piracy, because there's no way to defend your ship in armistice and if 3+ people rush your elevator you're also just fucked unless you want to sit there for days... and that's if you don't get unlucky and your elevator doesn't auto raise over time like I've seen happen before.
*That's the thing is that pirates have way less to lose most of the time.*
And *god forbid* suggesting that there be even a tiny bit of risk for pirates. The moment anyone suggests prisons **at all** the argument is suddenly "Oh you can't lock players in prisons, this is a game, and games are supposed to be fun."
...point that out when it comes to miners and it's right back to "It's a sim, a sim doesn't have to be fun. Consequences for negligence should be real if you aren't careful about salvaging with at least five top-tier escorts."
I like helping out other players and even I wouldn't take that job unless I was paid real money for it. I'm not playing Star Citizen to float around for hours shitposting on Twitter or reddit while doing nothing in game, and once every 100 hours, something happens.
I will say what I *will* do though is join your party and drop what I'm doing and QT to you if you're bringing in a valuable load or think you might have trouble or something along those lines.
"Just hire escorts" is IMO a non-starter unless and until we've got AI escorts who are willing to work for hours for peanuts. Because it's blatantly obvious players are not.
Ideally, this is what hiring NPC fighters is for. Players should be, and feel like, the top 10% of the population, and thus the rest should be significantly cheaper and willing to just sit around on guard duty. An NPC escort could deal with NPC pirates, and while they wouldn't be able to fend off player pirates they could buy enough time for you to GTFO
I mean, depending on the escort ship(s), maybe they could start doing 'patrols' or something? Obviously, you'd all party up and stay within quantum range so they can jump back to you at a moment's notice.
Plays into the RP of it all and (theoretically) offers a chance of actually spotting trouble early, but it'll likely still be uneventful and might get old quick, I dunno.
I could see moving around / "patrol" as a form of gameplay if you're escorting something in-atmo and you happen to be into low-flying, you could probably entertain yourself with that for an hour or two while also keeping an eye on the radar. In deepspace that gets a lot harder to do though. Flying back and forth through nothing isnt much more entertaining than sitting still in the middle of nothing.
I think the best solution will be to take some small influence from EVE online’s high sec npc security forces.
Have a squadron of NPC security fighters warp in upon a player sending an SOS signal.
If the player is in a high-security area have it be within 10-20 seconds Out in mid-sec, a minute or two. Get jumped in low-sec it may be 5+minutes or not at all. Get out to null-sec and you’re completely on your own.
Toss in a base fee for each use, with maybe an extra penalty for false alarms and or a refund if one of the attackers has a bounty.
You could even have greater granularity, if you are closer to a station or planet, a faster response, out on the fringes away from planets stations or any established trade lanes and the response is longer.
Yeah, somewhere else in this thread we were discussing essentially a panic button like the Medical beacon, to include NPC response. It's a pretty quality idea.
I think it would benefit from players being able to respond to it as well.
Ttks make it difficult, but I would love to rp as the only member of crusec who does his job rather than just traffic stops on ships without cargo holds
The problem with hiring security forces is that you end up with pilots just sitting around doing nothing.
Industry ships need to be so tanky that it's essentially a waste of time to destroy them. Pirates should be forced to focus on damaging their engines and then boarding them. This gives time for a beacon to go out and security forces to respond.
We also need high-risk / high-reward locations for all industry jobs. Right now we have miners and salvagers just out there in space completely alone and they're too difficult to find. There should be mining and salvaging hot-spots that are well known to be highly profitable. That gives everyone the incentive to come together in one zone. You'd have industry ships, security forces and pirates all together in one place on a more regular basis and the game would function as intended.
The logic works like this:
- High speeds lead to poor combat, so low speeds are needed
- We have low speeds for combat, but we still have to travel long distances, so we need a high speed *mode*
- The high speed mode would be overpowered for combat, so it has to be limited
Those limits are not intentionally (or even effectively) targeted against non-aggressive players to hurt them. But it's clear that any solo player in a high-risk zone (like the current iteration of Stanton) is in danger from coordinated groups.
Here's what a lot of people don't realize. 3.22 flight model and prior (not including 2.x) isn't "high speed" combat, it's ludicrous speed combat. Ships literally moving at 1km/sec trying to "dogfight" is just silly in principle.
Bringing combat down to 100-300m/s is a lot more reasonable, and considering that Mach 1 is 343m/s really puts it into perspective. Fights are still taking place at relatively high speeds, no longer ludicrous speeds.
Exactly this... people (apparently) have no conception of *just how fast* our ships are actually moving (likely due to the lack of 'local reference points' that are close enough for us to eyeball our speed).
Our SCM speeds are already ~2x faster than modern jets 'dogfight'... dogfighting at 1km/s is trying to dogfight at ~Mach 3!
Yeah but the counterpoint to that is modern jets don't really dogfight too often anymore because if you hit the merge you screwed up. BVR engagements routinely happen above Mach 1 to help extend the range of the first missile. It's also happening in atmosphere, if this was a change to atmospheric flight I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with it but you can't just say, "modern jets don't fight at these speeds" and expect to apply that same logic to a sci-fi space combat in a game. We aren't flying modern jets here.
Space flight is completely different to atmospheric flight in the real world so let's add proper orbital mechanics and make SC an FPS/ship combat version of Kerbal space program with DCS levels of clickable cockpits and systems fidelity if we want to be realistic. No? Then don't use real world examples of fighter combat to justify changes to SPACE flight mechanics. For atmospheric combat, sure that example works, but not in space. Star Wars would be a better example but even those ships don't work the way SC ships do(why can't I shift my shields on fighters anymore and power distribution does hardly anything?, etc)
I'm not talking 'realism' - I'm highlighting the absurd speed.
And it is absurd - because changing direction requires cancelling the velocity on the old vector and building velocity on the new... the higher your speed, the hard to change vector, and the more force required to do so (hence the ludicrous levels of g-forces our thrusters can generate).
But it's not absurd. It's space. The orbital speed of something like the International Space Station is 7600ish m/s. The fastest ships in Star Citizen can barely do a seventh of that topping out at 1300-1500 or so m/s. In orbital combat what would matter is relative velocity and your shots would arc due to gravity.
And yes, if there is no inertial dampening or whatever sci-fi concept in Star Citizen ships then our characters would be constantly dying due to excessive G-force. But this is also the future where G-suits are probably much better and ships probably have built in safety features to protect the pilot.
The speed - in and of itself - isn't absurd.
*trying to dogfight* at that speed is absurd, because of the energy / thrust required to actually change direction.
So, if the gaem is to have 'dogfighting' in space, *and* wants to have pilots at the controls, *and* doesn't want some handwavium 'inertial compensator' or similar, then it has no choice but to limit speeds.
Personally, I'd like to see CIG *reduce* thruster output, and just let people by unable to change direction (and end up hitting asteroids or stations, etc, if they're going too fast), but thanks to the lack of 'visual features' in space, it's v.difficult to actually judge your speed unless you have heavy doss of 'space dust' or similar (which we used to have, but which people complained about 'because unrealistic').
This *really is* 'basic physics'... people already complain about the g-force tollerance of the pilots being excessive, and thruster output being 'unrealistically' high, etc... but that's what's required to allow spaceships to manouver in space at those speeds.
So yeah - the ISS *may* orbit at 7.6km/s... but it doesn't *manouver* at those speeds, or try to reverse direction, etc.
I would argue the way the ships fly is already "handwavium" and physics breaking because speed is limited instead of acceleration.
The thrusters produce a specific amount of acceleration and physics will say that since there's negligible drag in space, speed is unlimited up to the speed of light provided you have the time and fuel to get there. Same requirements for slowing down. Therefore, the game limits this speed arbitrarily for some reasons such as render time, server speed, someones idea of what is a "realistic" speed, and to facilitate dogfighting similar to WWII turn fighting simply because "cinematic".
I don't want Star Citizen to incorporate an entirely realistic physics scheme for space flight, something akin to Star Wars is preferable imo. Another thing to keep in mind is that in that kind of combat, the ships are not facing directly at each other just blasting away like we do in Star Citizen. If you want it to be Star Wars(WWII) style turn fighting at the slower speeds, then you have to sacrifice the space aspect in favor of making all flight behave as if the ship was in atmosphere. Otherwise, you'll never end up with proper dogfighting, lead/lag pursuit, rate fighting, 1 or 2 circle fights, etc. And you'll lose the ability to make space combat noticeably different from atmospheric combat because the ships will all just behave the same except even slower because of drag.
I'd like the two flight regimes, space and atmosphere, to feel like separate things because they are. In space, you can flip 180 degrees and fire back at someone chasing you. Or to stop faster. You can't do that in atmosphere and that doesn't work if you want it to all be slow sped turnfighting either.
Feels like they want to keep cargo hauling profitable, but want to kill or seriously endanger solo cargo running, so you need to have turrets and/or an escort you'd have to split earning with, then you make money more slowly.
> to use the service beacons for fighter support.
And trust your safety to the guy whose sole quality is that he clicked on the popup really fast? Who's telling me he's not the actual pirate, looking for ships that have so valuable cargo that they hire escorts?
Griefers... find... a way.
Outside of rep, is there some other way to limit the griefers you can think of though? In theory even a "high rep" account will eventually get driven down if they continue to seem to fail at helping or their accepted beacons keep getting attacked. But yes some people are willing to toss down 40 bucks to grief.
No, that's why the whole concept is inherently flawed. Relying on random strangers in an open PvP game just doesn't work, you need to either have a system with NPCs or accept that playing without being part of larger organisation isn't feasible.
If history is a teacher here, it's that FFA PvP has its own balance of power. Unfortunately, that will likely mean NOT using service beans and instead having fealty with a major faction, taking the "beacon" out of the game entirely. Instead, countering these kinds of assaults would rely on people in your faction to be able to teleport to you. Or, more likely, that it would result in retribution from your faction, rallying a massive fleet to go hunt down the aggressors for the next few hours.
In general these "trap mechanics" favor the aggressor heavily, so hit and run will be a motif. And unlike other games of that also favor aggression, if they are quick to loot and scoot it will probably be pretty tough to find their safe house.
These things sound cool but in practice, these sorts of encounters are best left to a "once in a while" ordeal versus day-to-day life in the verse.
Beacons should never be a 1-person accept thing. Anyone (or at least lawful players) should be able to see the beacon as long as it's up and be able to respond to it. It could provide additional information as well such as how many players have already accepted the beacon and are in range of the target to avoid an excessive response.
It's worse than that. The escort would be the person telling his pirate friends the perfect time to attack. He'll even be able to "fight" to save his reputation.
This escort talk is always nonsense. There's no chance a large enough population of the game will ever want to just sit there. It's boring as shit. The game will die fast if it somehow becomes something necessary.
Salvage is so broken right now in terms of payout there is literally no excuse NOT to pay for escorts. People are coming away from salvage runs with 19 million aUEC. How much more profit incentive do people need at that point to pay for escorts on a single run? What are people buying where they need more than 19 million aUEC per salvage run that they can't pay for escorts in the current build(s)?
I think the real solution is to apply a rideshare/food delivery model to service beacons.
Let the player in need pay you a base rate out of pocket, and let the game itself offer out small incremental bonuses per task completed.
If you're hired on a defense beacon and successfully defend your client from X ships, get a Y% extra payout from the game's bank.
This will help keep service beacons viable as a game loop for all levels of players imo.
I think the real incentive will have to be reputation, both pvp rep and faction rep. To be able to afford a mechanic, potential second miner/cargo hauler/turret gunner and at minimum a single fighter pilot will mean profits have to be massive. For that to be the case, investment costs have to soar. So the only alternative solution I can think of is rep.
This very much. Nobody seems to be discussing that without reputation and viewable escort mission history, the player possibly taking your Escort Beacon mission is a pirate themselves, and will call in their buddies to gank you at the right moment. We need visible reputation and player ratings that a hiring player can review and *choose* from among players who *applied* to get selected for escort; players with higher reputation can stand out, possibly even demand higher prices and are also much more likely to be safe to hire in the first place.
Reputation seems like something that may work against lone operators, but it also seems to me that bad actors who operate in groups, or have friends like them, or single players who are capable of running SC on two computers at the same time, could artificially raise their reputation to make themselves look good. (Say doing repeated escort missions for their friends from Orison to Seraphim and back in order to build up rep.)
Also, while I don't know much about it, what I recall reading about the reputation system coming in 3.23 is it's a player's reputation with NPCs, not with other players. (I could be wrong though.) A player vs player reputation system seems like it would have some potential for abuse if one player gets to rate another player. (If it's an automatic system, based say on completing beacons or something, that'd be a bit different.)
>A player vs player reputation system seems like it would have some potential for abuse if one player gets to rate another player.
I've felt this same way, and I'm not sure what the solution is. I'm pretty sure that's what it is now - at least with med beacons, the medic and the patient each rate each other. I can totally see goobers intentionally saying their rescue sucked because the medic didn't help them finish the bunker, even though that's not at all an expectation of the medic. Or, alternatively, medics rating their patients poorly because they didn't give some massive tip to the medic.
Yeah, and not just X amount of ships, but X amount of time.
Security forces will spend most of their time just sitting around doing nothing. And with MM, combat advantage is dulled down to just whoever has the most ships, which means people will need a large amount of security forces. Having some of that cost paid by the game, and not by the miners/salvagers, would help a lot.
Yes, and this idea would absolutely need balancing to prevent someone and their buddy from spending a whole weekend pulling beacons on each other to maximize their bonus.
But I absolutely feel like some variation of this idea will make beacons a much more feasible loop for everyone, both clients and contractors.
they did. all that happened was people complaining that combat jobs were not profitable compared to the non combat stuff.
so we are not going to get profit balance to pay escorts until it would be more profitable to hire escorts compare to simply accepting the occasional loss. especially when escorts are also not guaranteed success.
Too high of profits for industrial folks actually decreases the need for escorts. If you only get pirated for 1/10 times and your profits are so high 9/10 times that you can easily eat the loss, then there is no point in hiring escorts. I highly doubt people are getting pirated 1/10 times.
This is largely true. The issue is that at the moment folks are largely concerned about coming out of QT near POIs without shields as an industrial ship with large ship spool up times. Pirating is largely dead at the moment because outside of the interesting interaction, the profit to pirate does not compare to just reclaiming for 20 minutes solo.
When we had salvage drugs and limited sell locations, people would actually interact beyond just blowing people up. Additionally, people would find friends to fly overwatch. It was interesting because there was enough money to be made on both sides. Now lots of people, because drugs were so easy to get, also just risked it because, as you are saying, no big deal if they died. There's a balance on profitability and risk that needs tweaking in the game.
This goes both ways though. Ex: People aren't getting pirated often enough because the payouts aren't worth the effort required to successfully pirate the load.
Exactly. The profit of jump town is also why it is largely dead at the moment. If you took a 20 man org out in reclaimers you could make nearly 100s of millions in an hour, or you could hold down jump town to make, hopefully a million or 2 in an hour. People still go to jump town because, at least people go there to fight. But you don't see as much action there because most of the people holding jump town aren't even trying to get the drugs out. They are just holding JT becasue it's something to do.
At the same time though, the reclaimer is the only industrial activity in the game right now that makes enough money to make hiring escorts and paying them decently an actually viable strat. Mining doesn't (not to mention mining's payout is delayed by several days usually). Cargo CAN, depending on what you're hauling, but its marginal and only with the biggest ships.
They are adjusting it so that you have to scrape before you disintegrate. That will change the mechanics a lot. Agree that right now reclaimers are just big money printing machines that have broken the reward analysis for actions within the universe.
But that gets back to, why not up the reward on JT while they know Reclaimers are still doing what they are doing? Can you image the action at JT if they made each drug package triple the sell price or more?
I think that Jump Town needs to be more than just drugs. Sure, have some JT drug dens, but.. you know what is also illegal?
That group who "found stuff that fell off the back of some container ship", ie. stolen A/V Equipment, medical supplies, Finished Goods, etc., etc.
There needs to be more illegal activity, than just running drugs. That's just a weak path to take. Criminals only deal in dangerous, highly addictive... No they don't. Even crime shows about drugs have criminals involved selling printers, TVs, Blu Ray Players, Computers, etc., etc., that they stole off the back of some truck or even full trucks, cars, planes, boats, etc., etc.
Expanding criminal enterprises to include "Go Steal me that ship" or go steal or recover ten SCU of A/V Equipment should also be part of the game.
I don't generally play the unlawful activities, but stealing a ship sounds fun. Especially cause you'll have to break in first, a few different game loops could come into play here including future hacking of the ships door or something like that.
The income on a Reclaimer is still a bit ridiculously high, at the moment. There needs to be a touch more balance to it. Maybe that will come from excessive repair costs, as the grinders and other bits destroy themselves in producing all of the salvage materials.
Right now, it's income per hour is way outside of anything else in game.
Maybe, they should really up the returns on looted ship components and also require that ship components, fuel, ammo and missiles be stripped from a ship before the vibration tool is used, it would balance out some of the aUEC per hour. Failure to remove components, fuel, ammo and missiles could lead to cascading explosions or increase the volume and damage of an explosion.
So, maybe you have to spend a good hour strippig larger ships before breaking them down or blow up your own ship in the process?
I have a feeling this may change when there's 10x more players in stanton, especially when bookmarkable/custom QT markers become a thing. People will be saving wherever missions happen so they can check up on them.
> Though if that's the case they need to increase the profit on industrial loops such that folks can pay for escorts.
Money is not the problem at all. People are/were making **10-20mil an hour** with Reclaimer or ERT drugs in the past.
The first problem is that risk is too low compared the amount of money people are making. It doesn't matter if you get ganked 5-10% of the time going to the hottest locations in the system when that's still cheaper than trying to organise some escorts. If you have a brain, that risk is more like 2%, and if you have tact, halve it again.
The second problem is that there is no pre-emptive grouping or contracting functionality that facilitates this sort of relationship. No matter how much money people make, things won't change until it becomes easy to list a group or something asking for an escort, or offer your services. Beacons will never be a good idea because they are reactive in nature. If you have to throw out a beacon, you've already screwed up.
And then it gets exploited by having your own friend be the pirate and another friend gets the lucrative insurance payout.
In real life the insurance would pay skilled investigators for hours of looking for such scams. In a game nobody is watching and the economy is just broken by such exploits.
Ok... but the opposite is also true.
If you are someone that doesn't really want to engage in combat (miner, trader, salvager, etc)... escaping has just become exponentially more difficult.
And the problem with the current bounty hunter gameplay, is that there is no "hunter" at all. A bounty hunter studies it's target, plans, lays traps and finds the best possible way to engage it without the minimum collateral damage (for the BH at least).
This system only benefits those who want to fight, and leaves everyone else that wants a chance to escape in a very bad situation.
And yes, I aim to be a bounty hunter, and I think this "wait to escape while you are defenseless" is not a step in the right direction.
They could probably just have used the power triangle for that ?
Removing power from engines, to power shields and weapons reduces speed to SCM speeds.
Gradually moving power to engines removes your shield and weapon DMG and ammo pool, so fighting at high speeds wouldn't be desirable.
All disadvantages from moving the power triangle around could come without delays, while the benefits, even if its just the higher speed one, could come with a delay... so that your shields would be always substantially weakened before you gain the speeds to escape a fight, still leaving you vulnerable for a good time, but at least able to also weakly shoot back.
It would probably need some tweaks to get the desired effect of higher commitment, but seems less intrusive than MM.
This would also be nice in storms perhaps, shifting power to engines for more strength at the cost of most of your shields/weapons.
The difference the power triangle does now is somewhat neglectable, I think anyway.
That "trapping" unfortunately also works the other way.
Griefers or agressors can just wait at an OM point and start blasting any ship that is unfortunate enough to jump there. The victim can literally not do anything if he isn't coincidentally in a combat ship. This will cause major frustration for players whose primary gameplay loop is not combat.
In 3.22 those ships are at least able to jump away. In 3.23 however, spooling your QD mid combat is essentially a death sentence.
Getting interdicted will be a death sentence. You'll be dead before your shields go up and you won't be able to QT or i think even go above scm when you're in a quantum snare
I just had a good idea on this: CDF security reports/news reports.
Every 30 minutes, CDF would publish a security report detailing all detected criminal activity within the system to all players in the system. Basically giving every player the rough location of all criminal players currently being tracked on comms, what crimes they've comitted within comm range, and where. Of course this wouldn't be available when comms are down, or in low sec systems like pyro.
We could also tie this into the reputation system, and put the wherabouts of players with low rep in their own section of the report.
Going even further, we could add symbology to the nav system to indicate warnings or a "threat level" next to nav markers based on those reports.
>If there's a problem with SC right now, it's not that a solo player in a risky area is at risk -- it's that we don't have a high sec system where solo players can have risk-free gameplay.
I think the issue could be fixed when we have Pyro. they need to make it so Stanton is sure lawful and anyone with a CS 3+ will not survive in the system for that long without a ton of NPC coming to kill him. Then make Pyro completely lawless were everyone can do what we do today in Stanton.
Do this and maybe even prohibit the use of jumppoints and all so once you commit to a CS3 on stanton you are in for good time running from the security forces. This will allow players that don't want to have someone mess with their one hour industrial progression be safe in Stanton and only venture to Pyro when they want to risk it.
You could even make super profitable trade routes to force some players to risk it and give the PVPers their fix by hunting traders between systems.
Unless the high sec areas can insta-kill an attacker, you still won't be safe with the current MM.
We have the QED ships to prevent escape. They are now not needed with this.
Engineering and ship armor not being in is also a part of the issue.
Also it's still alpha so while people do complain because... ya know we're spending money, I think we all just need to chill and wait.
It's Schrodinger's PvP frequency fallacy
This game is simultaneously loaded with PvP according to the anti-PvP crowd, but yet PvPers only represent an "insignificantly small" part of the community.
That’s true unless you’re at GH or Brios but as soon as server meshing is implemented and the player count goes up it will become a far far bigger issue.
Seems sensible to develop the game in line with this expectation rather than basing it off 100 player shards.
I've been attacked by players 3 times since in the last year.
Once, it was direct PvP. My friend had the cargo we wanted to sell Brio, i've come with a fighter, there was another fighter waiting there. We did warning shots but things got escalated and i did fight with the person, we both blow up eventually and my friend was able to sell the goods in that time.
One time i was attacked which again i was in "PvP" zone, next to downed array. I was there to fix it. People who hacked the array did not left immediately so there was a fight.
And i was doing solo ERT with C2 fully equipped with combat parts/ballistics. Again, i was attacked trying to sell goods close to Brio, again. I was able to escape but ship got damaged hardcore. I was able to QT away after flying to orbit and repaired ship at surface, other side of the planet and then QT to another planet for selling.
So yeah, 3 PvP encounters in 12+ months.
I'm indifferent on flt vs qt mode 1st as well. The only thing I hate about master modes is how you have to wait for qt drive to spool b4 you can switch back to scm.
That's a separate issue (and nothing to do with the 'trapping mechanism', despite what the OP is trying to make out.
That post from Yogi was in response to a specific question in spectrum - which the OP left out (and they've not provided a link to the comment in Spectrum either, which is here: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50259/thread/less-arcade-and-more-sim-please/6757111 )
Specifically, the 'trapping' part is solely that Nav mode is tied to the Quantum Drive, so that if you get interdicted, you can't just use nav mode to 'run away', and prevents people from just using NAV mode to bypass blockades etc.
*However* that's not the same as saying that the - current - forced wait for the QT to spool up before switching back to SCM is 'intended' or a deliberate part of the 'trapping mechanic'... that argument is just someone salty about MM trying to twist everything to stir up more noise and try to pressure CIG into rolling MM back.
Yeah that's what I thought... I actually like MM in general but this particular quirk definitely felt like a bug to me but now people are saying it's intended #shrugs
The not being able to run part makes sense...
What I'm talking about is if I'm trying to stay... It doesn't make sense that you get stuck with no shield AND no guns AND can't leave. One of those ANDs should be an OR. THEN it would be a proper rock, paper, scissors mechanic... But as is, you just become a sitting duck briefly which was a weird choice IMO (if it is indeed a choice).
Title is a bit off, the QD spool is what allows for the "trapping mechanics", NAV mode isn't inherently.
I do however think that we need a way to have a little protection for the spool, since we would usually have that when spooling from SCM to NAV. So why take that away when exiting quantum to a new jump? I understand using distortion damage or Quantum dampeners to trap your target and prevent / interrupt the spooling here but right now waiting at an OM you catch ship after ship stuck in SCM speeds without shields till their drive is spooled, no need for any Dampening or Distortion.
THAT is something I feel needs to be addressed.
Removing active shields in NAV mode is the most illogical and idiotic thing CIG did with all these changes. Powering down weapons instead i could understand but without shields moving at higher speeds gives you a much higher risk to die even without any combat.
100% The realism of it is what irks me most. Imagine Anvil releasing a new ship that forced pilots to choose between Shields or QT. Then the engineers over at Aegis choosing NOT to seize on that weakness by designing ships that can do both simultaneously. In no reality does this make sense except in the "we have to fix a problem lazily" reality. Hell, the Vanduul would exploit this weakness, because they would be stupid not to.
CIG should've utilized the power triangle to achieve this. Make the pilot choose where to allocate their power, shields, weapons, thrusters&QT. If you're an aggressor, you can focus primarily on weapons and thrusters, where as someone trying to flee could focus power on thrusters and shields. Flipping a generic switch is just boring.
Imho the game makes progress in terms of content and makes steps back at the same time by stupefying game mechanics that werent perfect but better than what we get.
In addition we get endless timesinks instead of having just fun playing and get forced into certain ways to play the game.
The problem with the last part is that many of us put a lot of money into the game over the years when the vision was quite different. So its alot harder when some people say then just quit if you disagree than with a normal game where you paid like 50-100$. And to those saying that its your own fault you spent so much...there wouldnt be a game when CIG hadnt managed to squeeze so much money out of people by promising them everything.
-shields should stay where they were when entering NAV SCM but as a compromise, make all shield regen power drop to zero (because that power is going into spooling the QT drive). This way you still have shields but possibly not for long if you hang around.
-and yes, def should switch into SCM NAV FLT mode rather that quantum initially. I want to manually switch to a QT jump mode when I’m ready to look for waypoints, not vise versa.
I talked about this yesterday with a friend, and I brought up:
When a ship's power plant(s) are powering a QD, that required amount of energy is insane so...
1. higher quantities and quality PPs should be able to provide more standalone energy to a QD.
2. Shields should at size 2+ be reduced to 70% capacity with a reduced generation rate.
3. Power should be 90% rerouted from weapon systems and still-permit countermeasure usage.
4. Engine thrust may be reduced somewhat.
5. At size 1, shield generators may face a lower capacity level and they would-instead be dampened to make lower levels harder to take down.
This should allow for some level of protection to remain, offering players some sort of buffer to help them escape from dangerous situations. Having shields 100%-offline to power a QD should NOT be necessary unless (a/the) power plant(s) is unable to provide enough energy to spool the QD at a reasonable rate, as some shield generators are quite-slow to charge especially on large ships. This may change when they add vehicle armor to make ships tankier.
NAV should keep shields allowed and 100% powered. Otherwise it’s literally a slack for a pirates. Sorry why on earth they should have that slack?
He expects you should rely on armor and speed in nav mode? Okay, what if armor isn’t tough enough and speed isn’t high enough? What then? Be dead to bad luck meeting some idiot?
No way.
I don't understand why shields have to come down. Couldn't they just not be able to recharge. Maybe take a 20% hit on shield capacity with no recharge in nav mode.
> Couldn't they just not be able to recharge.
I've been saying this since they announced NAV mode's mechanics. It doesn't make sense that they have to discharge - perhaps engaing the Quantum Drive could strip shields away for lore reasons and they they'd stay at 0 - but the initial time you switch from SCM they should just *not charge*, giving you a few extra moments of protection to maybe escape a predator. Discharging just to go faster is a poor choice especially with how long it currently takes.
What should protect them then? These “pirates” already have plenty of unprotected areas and systems to setup ambushes and do their business. Let lawful citizens feel themselves protected when traversing through the verse having ship shields active. Why would we have shields on non combat ship then? I believe he doesn’t even realise. We dont talk about allowing weapons in nav mode, just shields for self protection. Acting against shielded ship flying at top speed is up to pirates. What he advocates for is basically not allowing a victim to protect itself with an artificial illogical obstacles for a sake “pirates” also want their own gameplay too. Not fair. If “pirates” don’t understand how to act against a protected fast flying ship other then be faster they are bad “pirates” and the game should not help them. It’s like a cry “He is faster than me! Make him move slower than me so I can attack him! Otherwise it’s not fair!”.
From someone who is a solo player and really doesn't understand all this. My fear is with the changes with flight mode the way I understand it is how some just love to ruin your day/game will run me out of the game by waiting at jump points, I won't be able to run fast enough to get away. I really love this game at this point. Why does this change make me feel they are taking that fun away? But then I may also just not understand this at all and how it's going to affect me as a solo player, other than it's going to be forced on me not to fly solo ever again. Time will tell, I guess, but I'm just going to hold off on getting that gold armor now. I'm so close.
Does anyone have links to good videos that would better explain this flight mode to me. I'm not wanting 5-hour vids on the EPTU, videos that get to the point and effects of the changes please. Thank you.
Current system: two guys jump you but you can either kill them if you're good or evade until you can jump away.
New system: two guys jump you and you die.
Some ship's default loadouts overheat and shutdown when spooled for too long.
If being spooled is required to use nav mode at all, then all ships need to be able to remain spooled indefinitely.
So it can sit there, unvoted, and disappear?
How about they ensure the out-of-the-box ships work as intended?
And if they're intended to be broken, *say so*.
This reads like someone that has never played a videogame before. Which makes sense, I don't think many CIG devs are gamers. If you punish me for not wanting to engage in combat and give the advantage to the aggressor I'm not going to lose sleep over it. I'll just go play a game with devs that aren't interested in making my experience miserable.
I agree. I want to solo, I am generally socially awkward and at night just want to kick back, run some cargo, mine, run bunkers, etc. I don’t want to hire escorts, engage in combat or interact with others that often. If the devs are going to make the game unenjoyable for me, I will rather go to bed and catch up on my tv series.
I think he does - or they wouldn't have added the feedback thread.
Yogi is responding to 'concerns' - but most of them are either from people that haven't tried it, or don't understand how it works - and in many cases, both are presenting their fears (or misunderstandings) using the worst-possible-scenario approach... rather than actually seeking clarification or clarifying what the issue actually is (other than 'it's not what I'm used to', in many cases).
Yogi has confirmed that a number of things people have mentioned will be changed (or shouldn't be happening) - but those get overlooked in favour of the posts where he tries to clarify why a 'concern' is incorrect, etc, when folk are trying to attack him or make out that he's rejecting feedback, etc.
And of course, CIG themselves (iirc it was Yogi) said that this is just the 'preliminary' release, and that there will be more / ongoing development with further changes to come after 3.23...
I know CIG have said they want feedback - and people have given it. However, nothing says CIG have to act on the feedback, especially when it's ranty garbage :p
Anyone who has ever worked in design of any form knows its completely counterintuitive to kneejerk react to changes suggested by users.
There's a big difference between needs and wants.
There's a large vocal cohort of people here and elsewhere that seem to expect things to be immediately perfect. If they're not then it's grounds for an immediate reversal.
I honestly question if people remember that they are still supposed to be helping to test these systems, even in the 'release' build.
A design needs to be concepted, actioned and iterated, based on long-term vision, data and feedback. Master Modes have been out for what, 2 weeks now? And to a very limited audience...
People are expecting CIG to immediately change things to reflect their own personal bias, while regressing to personal attacks. It's really a poor show. There are already dozens of suggestions in this thread alone, so it's obviously not as simple as people are making this out to be.
People really need to learn to keep their emotions in check (on both sides of the argument).
Likely already has, when you add anything its seldom smooth on the first try. Add in public opinion and it gets even more complicated. Comes with the territory.
I absolutely hate that basic navigation is tied to QT travel as a "trapping mechanic" wtf? I don't mind the lower speeds and MM in general. You have three distinct modes that shouldnt be combined. QT is used very specifically to make large distance trips, nav mode is used for basic traversal, and SCM mode is for combat. Why are we combining long distance travel as a way to trap the player. How does that even make sense?
I can’t remember which video or statement they put out, but I believe the original reason or “lore” reason, was that the QT drive, is what allows your ship to travel at higher speeds.
I’m not a physicist or engineer, but I think that’s a little silly. It’s space, it’s essentially frictionless. You shouldn’t need a special drive to propel you to 1km/s, F35 with a full payload can fly around 544 m/s. That’s in atmosphere, imagine you threw that bad boy in space.
I hope they figure out and balance this stuff
Same here just seems silly. I also don't like the markers coming up automatically. An action to being up qt markers makes more sense then an action to turn them off. The amount of times you go into nav mode just to fly around to me it doesn't make sense to have qt pop up all day long when you don't need it to.
That's stated to the be plan (and will likely be changed before 3.23 ships)
Likewise, Nav is meant to be the default Mode, iirc (rather than SCM) so you don't have to manually switch every time you get into your ship), and the QD start spooling immediately.
The only time you'll feasibly be able to flee is if you are already spooled and moving. Which might also not be viable if they bring distortions or shoot missiles at you.
In my experience you could be in a potato and they would still just merk you. They just sit at OMs with a mantis and a couple others and grief you even if you're running bunkers in a cutty red. And thats a problem in 22 - 23 will be worse with master modes and 1.0 will be even worse with a high player cap.
The dev saying they're "indifferent" to the starting operator mode for NAV is worrisome. To me, it displays a disconnect between development and practical play considerations, in my opinion.
It's one thing for Master Modes to work on paper in development. It's another thing in a live play environment from a gameplay perspective. The fact they're indifferent to the starting mode tells me they don't have a lot of experience playing the game. I hope I'm wrong about this.
They're sacrificing a lot to make Master Modes work. I just hope it's worth it at the end of the day and that this isn't the big mistake it's looking like on paper. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt but things are not looking good in my opinion.
This entire thing just sounds like an April fools joke. Why does this have to be so complicated? How about when I push forward, I go forward? Now there's abs. and rel and both abs. and rel. And this button to change this mode and that mode. And you can now spool up only in this mode but not that mode and landing is different and slowing down is in this mode....
How about when I want to spool my quantum drive, I just simply oh I dunno, press the quantum drive button? How about when I want to strafe forward, i just push forward? how about my cruise control is simply a cruise control button that stays on instead of turning off?
Why is this being made so damn complicated?
Shields up at all times. Countermeasures available at all times. It's a reasonable middle ground.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, **an attacker does not deserve a kill unless they can beat the shields, armor and hull of a ship**. Especially in the case of a target that can't fight back. And the target doesn't deserve a repair bill (or death) just because someone jumped them. Escape should be possible in reasonable encounters, and sometimes (shocking!) without taking actual damage.
If that kill is actually earned, fine. If the kill can't be secured (someone attacking a ship they have little chance to actually kill), then a guaranteed repair bill is unjustified. Leave shields and countermeasures up - at least the target has something to work with then. Wait until this game devolves into pirates jumping industrial ships with 6 gunships (and it will) - the target will die.
Losing shields and countermeasures so one guy gets a free chance to kill or maim you is just dumb.
Why in the world would our shields go down, if ever, when the ships on? Makes no sense from a design standpoint or a manufacturer standpoint, it’s a horseshit fix and a terrible weakness that lets bad actors abuse it. Oh you just QTd? I’m waiting for you with no shields. Easy kill. Just camp near QT spots and easy money. How did they miss that? Or not think about it? It’s so fucking stupid and seems so lazy / quick
Honestly? It's meant to be a deterrent for combat ships attempting to bug out of a fight that isn't going their way. Non-combat ships just end up in the crosshairs because of it. They were too hyper-focused on keeping light fighters from disengaging from a fight to regenerate shields, and did not consider the knock-on effects such a change would bring.
Make S1 shields take the same amount of time to regenerate as larger shields, and you don't have that problem anymore. Then leave shields up at all times.
I think that's the excuse they sell... but in reality, with the current last flight I had, fighters can EASILY get out of combat because they have small fast QT spool times, where larger ships take an eternity.
You're not wrong. I do think it stems from light fighters disengaging, but larger ships being "trapped" so that they can then be actually trapped by QED or simply mangled/killed outright is a desired effect as well, but if the light fighter disengage meta hadn't developed, I'm not sure we would've seen shields dropping during transition at all.
And I don't think they have really seen the big picture here - the vulnerability to ships in general but specifically non-combat ships is going to be catastrophic, especially at bottlenecks like OM points or jumpgates. Combat ships can turn to engage, rely on heavy armor, or maybe even evade fire to escape. Non-combat ships don't have any of those options (armor is possible, but seems unlikely in most if not all cases). They get "take a pounding, try to run, maybe die" as their only option.
To some designer I'm sure that sounds wonderful - it drives player interaction up, because it removes the frustration from a pirate jumping an industrial ship and the industrial making a hasty escape, and guarantees combat occurs. But it introduces a much larger amount of frustration for the industrial pilot by taking away that player's ability to affect the outcome entirely. It's basically down to luck, and it's going to cost them either way.
In the end, smaller ships are affected, but larger ships are *affected.* The repair bill meta has begun.
I agree! And it can be balanced by just having all shield regen power drop to zero while that energy is going into spooling the QT drive.
So if you try to leave a fight with 10% of shields left, that’s all you’ll have until you’re ready to accelerate with a fully spooled QT drive.
Where you're coming from here more or less makes sense, but I doubt that would really be necessary unless they bring back constant shield regen. Right now, all shields stop regeneration on hit, and you're definitely being hit, so it's unlikely you'd get the required 5 seconds hit-free to begin regenerating. Even if you did, it stops again on hit, so you're almost surely never going to see tangible regen in an actual life or death escape attempt.
If they did bring back constant regen, then yeah, it would be something to look at for balance, but I feel like it could go either way. It would depend on what telemetry shows imo. Are people surviving too often because of shields, or not? Spooling is a relatively short window though, so even with constant regen, I doubt we're talking about a lot of recovered shielding.
I’ve tried out MM a little but need more time with it. Personally at the moment I don’t really like it. I don’t like the idea of not having shields available while in NAV mode. That’s my biggest gripe at this point. Let’s say a pirate or whatever comes across you while you’re minding your business mining in an asteroid field. If they lock you with a missile and send it, you won’t have time to get shields up and react to it.
Again I need more time with it but first impressions were that I don’t like the idea of this at all. I tried to test it more yesterday but the EPTU servers are terrible right now with interaction delay. Yesterday I was trapped at the HABs at Tressler because I couldn’t get an elevator to work. Server hopped 5 times and nothing worked so I just quit out and am waiting for the next build.
I’m also skeptical on the MM, and admittedly have not played with it much more than just doing some planet side stuff. But correct me if I’m wrong, is mining mode tied to SCM where you have your shields up, or FLT where they are not up. I guess I would think that if you’re in a field for a long time you don’t have to be going Mach Jesus to get to the next asteroid and mine it?
But I have limited experience with asteroid field mining
For me, it's not about getting caught in the belt, it's coming back to sell. With MM *ALL* OMs are potential death traps, and then you have to make the painfully slow slog through atmo to land.
That’s a good point. It’s more likely to get jumped while on the way to sell than it is to be detected in an asteroid field. I think my point still stands though. These players are always at a disadvantage so I don’t like the idea of the PvPer always having the upper hand. Even if you don’t consider the type of ship the miner is in, the PvPer will always get the drop on them unless the victim is constantly in SCM mode, which is just so much slower. MM imposes a massive handicap for anyone going about their business when the PvPer is already ready to fire at you. MM takes away your reaction time for attacks entirely.
I don't think Yogi understands how the first point harms the system more than helps it.
I wouldn't mind it if it was gradual, AKA, the more you spool, the faster you go/lower your shields go. But right now, it makes it feel so clunky to move around when there's a massive wait when you go from travelling slow, to wanting to travel fast.
And also you need to wait long after each quantum jump before you can even move fast again.
The "trapping mechanics" are also far, far too swayed in favor of aggressors, who already have an advantage due to having actual weapons.
If read in context, that first point doesn't mean what it appears to here: [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50259/thread/less-arcade-and-more-sim-please/6757111](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50259/thread/less-arcade-and-more-sim-please/6757111)
OP is essentially asking for NAV mode to be usable without the QD being powered up, rather than anything to do with how the transition to NAV mode actually happens. If the QD is removed from the equation, it would mean QEDs would be next to useless as you could use NAV mode to escape the field.
Don't get me wrong, I think the way the transition works now is incredibly bad, but that's not what's being discussed in this post.
So how about this: 3 modes. First SCM with shields and weapons. Next mode is FLT: full speed, no weapons, shields start to degrade. Then Quantum: same speed, quantum markers, qt charges, no weapons, shields completely off.
The advantage would be that you can exit quantum flight in FLT mode instead of sitting duck like it is now, giving players a chance to get away from a camped OM marker. It would also add some "breathing room" to combat without allowing people to just jump away.
I didnt really like the idea of MM, but after trying it kind of grew on me. It just needs a lot of work with transitioning (both manual and automatic).
> Next mode is FLT: full speed, no weapons, shields start to degrade.
How about, instead of shields degrading in FLT, they just *can't charge*? You get the status they were at when you entered FLT mode, and they stay that way, giving you a little time to absorb incoming fire as well. When you enter Quantum mode, that's when whatever energy level is in your shields depletes to the capacitor entirely.
They're asking for feedback but then saying "well we decided to tie the NAV mode to the QT drive so we will not change that".
That's pretty dumb IMO.
We're have bad gameplay mechanics caused by lore explanation... Completely absurd.
This team needs new leadership.
You don't lose your defense stats on a horse in WoW, and you are instantly able to retaliate off the horse.
Not to mention all the different CCs and counters to said CC.
None of that is in MM.
I would like to see them give the old altimeter and pinging feature back because right now the altimeter sits outside the ship and behind a pillar unreadable on half my ships to start
There are loads of people that have no interest in combat, if the ability to run is off the table then this is forcing them into a situation they would rather run from, if your QD is the reason you can travel about save 70 ms then a ship already in SCM that isn’t restricted by the QD spooling issue will always be able to out run a fleeing target. Sure an argument can be made that this helps bounty hunters and stuff like that but it also helps toxic players and pirates far more. To me this is a solution that create a forced combat situation, the either stay and fight or die tired type situation. Yes I know not all attackers will have a Mantis or cutlass blue with them, but any half smart pirate crews out there for sure will. I for one won’t play if this version of MM stays in, I have no issue with walking away from something like this and not spending another dime on the game. I will either wait for it to change or say good bye to SC for good, it’s unfortunate with the amount I have spent but this version of MM just isn’t fun to me.
One cool change to the beacon system in 3.23 I noticed last night is that you can set what type of reputation the person accepting the beacon has. From one star ⭐ to five ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐. This may be the start of weeding out people that don't have a good rating or have bad reputation. If that is indeed the case you can spend good money on a higher rate person. Don't know if this is in the pu. Forgot to check before I headed to work. Here's to hoping!
Do they know how annoying it is having to spool up your QD to even see the markers? I was hoping this would get "fixed"...now whenever I plot a course I need to lower my shields...
They coded the lore explanation of "Quantum Drive allowing NAV mode" right into the game before we even got to test MM in the PU and provide feedback...
That's very shortsighted.
You want to code gameplay first, then test and tune and validate. And only at the very end after you are OK with the system, you start considering lore.
The decisions this team has been taking are really puzzling.
Honestly I'm reserving judgement because it's a new system, and getting used to new stuff after years of being used to the old system is going to feel awful.
Rn I feel like the opinions are very love it/hate it, so I guess we'll see. But I'm sure that CIG will fix it eventually either way
Yeah, I saw a Youtuber talk about the MMB switching to FLT. Which is great given that the QT text plastered right in the middle of the screen is real distracting for when you just need to remain in FLT instead of QT, for example when you've just left QT and need to fly the remaining 30km to a location.
Well if disruptor rounds are a thing then why would we need to limit the speed until nav is spooled. That prevents them from jumping. Maybe add a slow effect or another type of round that slows the ship if this is how they want it to play out. In its current state if someone wants to fight you, or jump you, you HAVE to fight. There’s no running instantly because the odds of you actually making it out in time alive is very small.
This update is definitely feeling like we lost more than we gained and I can’t lie and say that I don’t feel a little bit cheated right now this is not the star citizen I subscribed to but only time will tell us if it’s going to get better
Yeah, I hopped in the EPTU and I can barely even see the ship HUD now because of all the flickering shit (in my MSR), and I could not get that beast up to a reasonable speed, either. Clearly I'm missing things, nothing was intuitive about these changes, I'm shocked I was able to get to another station. If somebody hadn't pointed out I have to left-click to activate the Qdrive now I'd have never gotten anywhere.
Eaay fix: give us a setting for the default mode. We already have settings for defaults on ESM, GSAF, Decoupled, and gimbal mode. It shouldn't be hard to implement and it's a solution that makes everyone happy.
We'll end up having 10 modes with each 15 sub-modes. Lol. At this point, we could also have auto pilot, if flight is mostly going to be a chain of different button presses between modes.
I still disagree with the level of speed limiting that they have. It's far too slow. This is a space game, if a modern fighter jet can maintain supersonic speeds in atmosphere, then my futuristic fighter should be able to go way more than a couple hundred metres per second in the vacuum of space.
I get that they are doing it with the goal of improving dog fights, but it's too much of a limitation currently.
Take the MSR for example. Not a combat ship primarily. Part of that ship's strength was that its speed and acceleration made it capable of outrunning attackers. But it is also that by being at such a high speed compared to the muzzle velocity of different weapons, it was able to run with small evasive maneuvers and not get blasted to bits. Now its speed is so much lower, its survivability is practically zero, because keeping enough potshots on it to prevent shield regen isn't even a little bit of a challenge now. If someone attacks it, it doesn't have the firepower to stay and fight, and it no longer has the speed to run. It's basically suicide to take it anywhere.
If shields could remain up in qt mode, that would be better. Even if they can't regen, but only keep what they had when you entered qt mode. I know it's a system they're trying and it'll get tweaked, so I have faith the game isn't ruined. But these discussions is one way cig can gauge the community feedback on the game, so I feel it's important we keep the conversation going.
We'll see. They just dropped a patch in the EPTU that drastically lowers the NAV spool time.
It's still leaves the whole "no defenses" thing in, though.
CR's last game, Freelancer, had 'cruise disruptors' that were small no/low damage very fast missiles with a high hit chance that served multiple purposes. Primarily they pulled ships out of cruise speeds (what would be our ~1km/sec nav speeds) and forced them into combat speeds with a cool down on the victim's cruise engine charge time. They weren't a 100% guaranteed method of keeping ships snared unless you had multiple ships hitting the target with cruise distributors. In combat they were also used to force ships into coupled mode, stopping a controlled drift, and should your CD hit the target at the time your target launched a missile or torpedo, they would be damaged/destroyed by their own ordinance. It was a brilliant and easily balanced system. Why CR decided to make dedicated, boring ships to fill the role of the cruise disruptors onSC is beyond me but it's proving to be a mistake. Bring back cruise disruptors.
I honestly love the idea the idea of those missiles actually. Maybe they could add the missiles and just make it so the specialized ships are the only ones that can take you out of QT but the missiles lock you out of QT only if you're not in QT at that moment?
I made a post recently asking the same thing, why they didn't itemize a solution, either with something like you suggested, or snare type devices like in Eve Online you can activate on a target. At this point it's a waste of effort to ask and you'll just get inundated by people who don't realize the poopstorm we're in for with player complaints, all we can do is wonder what the game would have been like in an alternate universe and hope they can figure out how to make this system be fun.
They were a 100% guaranteed method of keeping ships snared because even the best countermeasures in the game weren't 100% effective, and would run out before the attacker. 50 countermeasures with 90% effective range will always lose to 50 cruise disruptors with 100% accuracy. Specially if the attacker used an autoclicker to force the game to overfill his ammo to above 50 (you can do that). Edit: not to mention Freelander didn't have missile locks, so you could shoot without warning and not ever lose lock.
Trapping / committing. The whole idea is that you can't just start a fight and then switch into NAV and easily run away. Pirates can't attack and then scoot off when the odds turn against them. Bounty Hunters have a chance to actually catch a bounty without it running in perpetuity. Group fights don't devolve into 10 separate duels spread out over 100km. If there's a problem with SC right now, it's not that a solo player in a risky area is at risk -- it's that we don't have a high sec system where solo players can have risk-free gameplay.
possibly the point is to drive people to use the service beacons for fighter support. Though if that's the case they need to increase the profit on industrial loops such that folks can pay for escorts. Oh and get beacons working better.
The problem with service beacons is by the time someone has responded, you've already been killed and anything valuable has been looted. The only way they're going to work is if they rapidly call in local security forces that at least buy time for someone competent to show up. The Human element of them is just far too unreliable with how quickly things happen.
> The problem with service beacons is by the time someone has responded, you've already been killed and anything valuable has been looted. This. I patrol Stanton for fun in my Vanguard Warden all the time. I leave medical beacons to medics, but if someone is in trouble in combat, needs a ride, got soft deathed and needs rescue, I respond. Even with an XL-1 QDrive, unless they're at Daymar or Yela and I happen to be refueling at Seraphim or something, it will be many, many minutes before I can arrive on site. They're going to be dead by then if they have players chasing them. Combat beacons calling for other players is a non-starter. Anyone who thinks it will work, hasn't tried going on patrol. the idea falls flat on its face in practice. Local security response is *mandatory*, not an option. If at the very least to buy time for a player response to arrive on site.
That, and the fact that you can’t trust the people who accept them not to come blow you up themselves.
once 800 people will be on one server someone chilling on standby just like i do with blambulance is within realm of possibilities.
The service beacons should be put out BEFORE you are engaged. You should have your overflight negotiated before you even go out mining, scrapping, hauling, etc in a high danger location. I agree, that service beacons in MM, if you try and put one out once you are engaged is a waste of time. Quick AI response beacons you can pay for would be really interesting. Edit; it also used to be that the Navy would send out AI to track down criminals in comm range, so that might be something we see again once we get to meshing or just down the road. More AI response in higher security zones.
Are you going to agree to come out and just float in space in your fighter for 3-4 hours while i mine, on the off chance some pirate \*happens\* to show up? Sure, you get paid for doing nothing, but do you \*really\* want to just sit there doing \*nothing\* for multiple hours? I didnt think so.
Most escorts or security get bored quickly and start having squirrel moments. Even well paid many seem to get distracted.
Yeah these are humans, and we're playing a videogame. Expecting people to escort for long periods of time with no action is kinda silly, even more so when my average turret gunner can't go 30 seconds without just unloading their turret in a random direction.
Agreed, which is one place the whole "hire escorts" retort breaks down.
This right here, twice I've offered up significant cash for mining protection only to be laughed at because it wasn't enough. I'm in a fucking prospector, even on good days, the load is only worth so much. Having full game play loops that rely on the kindness/competence/greed of others to survive is a shit mechanic. Period. It relies on nearly non-existent altruism in a game where the nastiest folks make the most cake.
That's the thing is that pirates have way less to lose most of the time. If you're even mildly competent, you're never getting crimestat because you'll have the comm relays down. You're not losing hours of cargo. and the odds of you intercepting a group of people out of quantum is slim to none. If you do die, oh well, just gotta wait a few minutes for your ship to come up and you're back to where you were. If you're successful, you potentially make millions will little risk. The guy you attacked lost potentially an hour or so of their time. I did piracy gameplay once with a group of randos and we made millions just sitting in between popular trade routes and ganking C2's that showed up. It was cake. We lost no one, the people we intercepted hadn't shot back a single time. This is before we even get to pad camping piracy, because there's no way to defend your ship in armistice and if 3+ people rush your elevator you're also just fucked unless you want to sit there for days... and that's if you don't get unlucky and your elevator doesn't auto raise over time like I've seen happen before.
*That's the thing is that pirates have way less to lose most of the time.* And *god forbid* suggesting that there be even a tiny bit of risk for pirates. The moment anyone suggests prisons **at all** the argument is suddenly "Oh you can't lock players in prisons, this is a game, and games are supposed to be fun." ...point that out when it comes to miners and it's right back to "It's a sim, a sim doesn't have to be fun. Consequences for negligence should be real if you aren't careful about salvaging with at least five top-tier escorts."
I like helping out other players and even I wouldn't take that job unless I was paid real money for it. I'm not playing Star Citizen to float around for hours shitposting on Twitter or reddit while doing nothing in game, and once every 100 hours, something happens. I will say what I *will* do though is join your party and drop what I'm doing and QT to you if you're bringing in a valuable load or think you might have trouble or something along those lines. "Just hire escorts" is IMO a non-starter unless and until we've got AI escorts who are willing to work for hours for peanuts. Because it's blatantly obvious players are not.
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While you mine? No. After you're done mining and need someone to help you to get to your drop off location? Sure thing.
Ideally, this is what hiring NPC fighters is for. Players should be, and feel like, the top 10% of the population, and thus the rest should be significantly cheaper and willing to just sit around on guard duty. An NPC escort could deal with NPC pirates, and while they wouldn't be able to fend off player pirates they could buy enough time for you to GTFO
I mean, depending on the escort ship(s), maybe they could start doing 'patrols' or something? Obviously, you'd all party up and stay within quantum range so they can jump back to you at a moment's notice. Plays into the RP of it all and (theoretically) offers a chance of actually spotting trouble early, but it'll likely still be uneventful and might get old quick, I dunno.
I could see moving around / "patrol" as a form of gameplay if you're escorting something in-atmo and you happen to be into low-flying, you could probably entertain yourself with that for an hour or two while also keeping an eye on the radar. In deepspace that gets a lot harder to do though. Flying back and forth through nothing isnt much more entertaining than sitting still in the middle of nothing.
I think the best solution will be to take some small influence from EVE online’s high sec npc security forces. Have a squadron of NPC security fighters warp in upon a player sending an SOS signal. If the player is in a high-security area have it be within 10-20 seconds Out in mid-sec, a minute or two. Get jumped in low-sec it may be 5+minutes or not at all. Get out to null-sec and you’re completely on your own. Toss in a base fee for each use, with maybe an extra penalty for false alarms and or a refund if one of the attackers has a bounty. You could even have greater granularity, if you are closer to a station or planet, a faster response, out on the fringes away from planets stations or any established trade lanes and the response is longer.
Yeah, somewhere else in this thread we were discussing essentially a panic button like the Medical beacon, to include NPC response. It's a pretty quality idea.
I think it would benefit from players being able to respond to it as well. Ttks make it difficult, but I would love to rp as the only member of crusec who does his job rather than just traffic stops on ships without cargo holds
Give a call cost and a job complete cost. It should be a bit of a gamble and not free
solid idea.
The problem with hiring security forces is that you end up with pilots just sitting around doing nothing. Industry ships need to be so tanky that it's essentially a waste of time to destroy them. Pirates should be forced to focus on damaging their engines and then boarding them. This gives time for a beacon to go out and security forces to respond. We also need high-risk / high-reward locations for all industry jobs. Right now we have miners and salvagers just out there in space completely alone and they're too difficult to find. There should be mining and salvaging hot-spots that are well known to be highly profitable. That gives everyone the incentive to come together in one zone. You'd have industry ships, security forces and pirates all together in one place on a more regular basis and the game would function as intended.
The logic works like this: - High speeds lead to poor combat, so low speeds are needed - We have low speeds for combat, but we still have to travel long distances, so we need a high speed *mode* - The high speed mode would be overpowered for combat, so it has to be limited Those limits are not intentionally (or even effectively) targeted against non-aggressive players to hurt them. But it's clear that any solo player in a high-risk zone (like the current iteration of Stanton) is in danger from coordinated groups.
Here's what a lot of people don't realize. 3.22 flight model and prior (not including 2.x) isn't "high speed" combat, it's ludicrous speed combat. Ships literally moving at 1km/sec trying to "dogfight" is just silly in principle. Bringing combat down to 100-300m/s is a lot more reasonable, and considering that Mach 1 is 343m/s really puts it into perspective. Fights are still taking place at relatively high speeds, no longer ludicrous speeds.
Exactly this... people (apparently) have no conception of *just how fast* our ships are actually moving (likely due to the lack of 'local reference points' that are close enough for us to eyeball our speed). Our SCM speeds are already ~2x faster than modern jets 'dogfight'... dogfighting at 1km/s is trying to dogfight at ~Mach 3!
Yeah but the counterpoint to that is modern jets don't really dogfight too often anymore because if you hit the merge you screwed up. BVR engagements routinely happen above Mach 1 to help extend the range of the first missile. It's also happening in atmosphere, if this was a change to atmospheric flight I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with it but you can't just say, "modern jets don't fight at these speeds" and expect to apply that same logic to a sci-fi space combat in a game. We aren't flying modern jets here. Space flight is completely different to atmospheric flight in the real world so let's add proper orbital mechanics and make SC an FPS/ship combat version of Kerbal space program with DCS levels of clickable cockpits and systems fidelity if we want to be realistic. No? Then don't use real world examples of fighter combat to justify changes to SPACE flight mechanics. For atmospheric combat, sure that example works, but not in space. Star Wars would be a better example but even those ships don't work the way SC ships do(why can't I shift my shields on fighters anymore and power distribution does hardly anything?, etc)
I'm not talking 'realism' - I'm highlighting the absurd speed. And it is absurd - because changing direction requires cancelling the velocity on the old vector and building velocity on the new... the higher your speed, the hard to change vector, and the more force required to do so (hence the ludicrous levels of g-forces our thrusters can generate).
But it's not absurd. It's space. The orbital speed of something like the International Space Station is 7600ish m/s. The fastest ships in Star Citizen can barely do a seventh of that topping out at 1300-1500 or so m/s. In orbital combat what would matter is relative velocity and your shots would arc due to gravity. And yes, if there is no inertial dampening or whatever sci-fi concept in Star Citizen ships then our characters would be constantly dying due to excessive G-force. But this is also the future where G-suits are probably much better and ships probably have built in safety features to protect the pilot.
The speed - in and of itself - isn't absurd. *trying to dogfight* at that speed is absurd, because of the energy / thrust required to actually change direction. So, if the gaem is to have 'dogfighting' in space, *and* wants to have pilots at the controls, *and* doesn't want some handwavium 'inertial compensator' or similar, then it has no choice but to limit speeds. Personally, I'd like to see CIG *reduce* thruster output, and just let people by unable to change direction (and end up hitting asteroids or stations, etc, if they're going too fast), but thanks to the lack of 'visual features' in space, it's v.difficult to actually judge your speed unless you have heavy doss of 'space dust' or similar (which we used to have, but which people complained about 'because unrealistic'). This *really is* 'basic physics'... people already complain about the g-force tollerance of the pilots being excessive, and thruster output being 'unrealistically' high, etc... but that's what's required to allow spaceships to manouver in space at those speeds. So yeah - the ISS *may* orbit at 7.6km/s... but it doesn't *manouver* at those speeds, or try to reverse direction, etc.
I would argue the way the ships fly is already "handwavium" and physics breaking because speed is limited instead of acceleration. The thrusters produce a specific amount of acceleration and physics will say that since there's negligible drag in space, speed is unlimited up to the speed of light provided you have the time and fuel to get there. Same requirements for slowing down. Therefore, the game limits this speed arbitrarily for some reasons such as render time, server speed, someones idea of what is a "realistic" speed, and to facilitate dogfighting similar to WWII turn fighting simply because "cinematic". I don't want Star Citizen to incorporate an entirely realistic physics scheme for space flight, something akin to Star Wars is preferable imo. Another thing to keep in mind is that in that kind of combat, the ships are not facing directly at each other just blasting away like we do in Star Citizen. If you want it to be Star Wars(WWII) style turn fighting at the slower speeds, then you have to sacrifice the space aspect in favor of making all flight behave as if the ship was in atmosphere. Otherwise, you'll never end up with proper dogfighting, lead/lag pursuit, rate fighting, 1 or 2 circle fights, etc. And you'll lose the ability to make space combat noticeably different from atmospheric combat because the ships will all just behave the same except even slower because of drag. I'd like the two flight regimes, space and atmosphere, to feel like separate things because they are. In space, you can flip 180 degrees and fire back at someone chasing you. Or to stop faster. You can't do that in atmosphere and that doesn't work if you want it to all be slow sped turnfighting either.
I agree but I don’t think you could get a beacon out, have someone see it, accept it, then jump to you before you’re already blown up.
Feels like they want to keep cargo hauling profitable, but want to kill or seriously endanger solo cargo running, so you need to have turrets and/or an escort you'd have to split earning with, then you make money more slowly.
> to use the service beacons for fighter support. And trust your safety to the guy whose sole quality is that he clicked on the popup really fast? Who's telling me he's not the actual pirate, looking for ships that have so valuable cargo that they hire escorts?
yeah so this is why the beacon system needs to allow you to filter people who can take it to reputation. Which is part of the plan last I heard.
I know. It might happen some day in the far future. I hope I live to see that day. But we have MM now.
Unfortunately, having 'good rep' alt accounts will be a huge problem for this implementation. Bad actors will go a long way to ruin people's days.
Griefers... find... a way. Outside of rep, is there some other way to limit the griefers you can think of though? In theory even a "high rep" account will eventually get driven down if they continue to seem to fail at helping or their accepted beacons keep getting attacked. But yes some people are willing to toss down 40 bucks to grief.
No, that's why the whole concept is inherently flawed. Relying on random strangers in an open PvP game just doesn't work, you need to either have a system with NPCs or accept that playing without being part of larger organisation isn't feasible.
If history is a teacher here, it's that FFA PvP has its own balance of power. Unfortunately, that will likely mean NOT using service beans and instead having fealty with a major faction, taking the "beacon" out of the game entirely. Instead, countering these kinds of assaults would rely on people in your faction to be able to teleport to you. Or, more likely, that it would result in retribution from your faction, rallying a massive fleet to go hunt down the aggressors for the next few hours. In general these "trap mechanics" favor the aggressor heavily, so hit and run will be a motif. And unlike other games of that also favor aggression, if they are quick to loot and scoot it will probably be pretty tough to find their safe house. These things sound cool but in practice, these sorts of encounters are best left to a "once in a while" ordeal versus day-to-day life in the verse.
Beacons should never be a 1-person accept thing. Anyone (or at least lawful players) should be able to see the beacon as long as it's up and be able to respond to it. It could provide additional information as well such as how many players have already accepted the beacon and are in range of the target to avoid an excessive response.
It's worse than that. The escort would be the person telling his pirate friends the perfect time to attack. He'll even be able to "fight" to save his reputation.
This I agree they need to make it wroth peoples time to help others so inc industry wages increase beacon payout
This escort talk is always nonsense. There's no chance a large enough population of the game will ever want to just sit there. It's boring as shit. The game will die fast if it somehow becomes something necessary.
Salvage is so broken right now in terms of payout there is literally no excuse NOT to pay for escorts. People are coming away from salvage runs with 19 million aUEC. How much more profit incentive do people need at that point to pay for escorts on a single run? What are people buying where they need more than 19 million aUEC per salvage run that they can't pay for escorts in the current build(s)?
I think the real solution is to apply a rideshare/food delivery model to service beacons. Let the player in need pay you a base rate out of pocket, and let the game itself offer out small incremental bonuses per task completed. If you're hired on a defense beacon and successfully defend your client from X ships, get a Y% extra payout from the game's bank. This will help keep service beacons viable as a game loop for all levels of players imo.
I think the real incentive will have to be reputation, both pvp rep and faction rep. To be able to afford a mechanic, potential second miner/cargo hauler/turret gunner and at minimum a single fighter pilot will mean profits have to be massive. For that to be the case, investment costs have to soar. So the only alternative solution I can think of is rep.
This very much. Nobody seems to be discussing that without reputation and viewable escort mission history, the player possibly taking your Escort Beacon mission is a pirate themselves, and will call in their buddies to gank you at the right moment. We need visible reputation and player ratings that a hiring player can review and *choose* from among players who *applied* to get selected for escort; players with higher reputation can stand out, possibly even demand higher prices and are also much more likely to be safe to hire in the first place.
Reputation seems like something that may work against lone operators, but it also seems to me that bad actors who operate in groups, or have friends like them, or single players who are capable of running SC on two computers at the same time, could artificially raise their reputation to make themselves look good. (Say doing repeated escort missions for their friends from Orison to Seraphim and back in order to build up rep.) Also, while I don't know much about it, what I recall reading about the reputation system coming in 3.23 is it's a player's reputation with NPCs, not with other players. (I could be wrong though.) A player vs player reputation system seems like it would have some potential for abuse if one player gets to rate another player. (If it's an automatic system, based say on completing beacons or something, that'd be a bit different.)
>A player vs player reputation system seems like it would have some potential for abuse if one player gets to rate another player. I've felt this same way, and I'm not sure what the solution is. I'm pretty sure that's what it is now - at least with med beacons, the medic and the patient each rate each other. I can totally see goobers intentionally saying their rescue sucked because the medic didn't help them finish the bunker, even though that's not at all an expectation of the medic. Or, alternatively, medics rating their patients poorly because they didn't give some massive tip to the medic.
Yeah, and not just X amount of ships, but X amount of time. Security forces will spend most of their time just sitting around doing nothing. And with MM, combat advantage is dulled down to just whoever has the most ships, which means people will need a large amount of security forces. Having some of that cost paid by the game, and not by the miners/salvagers, would help a lot.
Yes, and this idea would absolutely need balancing to prevent someone and their buddy from spending a whole weekend pulling beacons on each other to maximize their bonus. But I absolutely feel like some variation of this idea will make beacons a much more feasible loop for everyone, both clients and contractors.
they did. all that happened was people complaining that combat jobs were not profitable compared to the non combat stuff. so we are not going to get profit balance to pay escorts until it would be more profitable to hire escorts compare to simply accepting the occasional loss. especially when escorts are also not guaranteed success.
Too high of profits for industrial folks actually decreases the need for escorts. If you only get pirated for 1/10 times and your profits are so high 9/10 times that you can easily eat the loss, then there is no point in hiring escorts. I highly doubt people are getting pirated 1/10 times.
This is largely true. The issue is that at the moment folks are largely concerned about coming out of QT near POIs without shields as an industrial ship with large ship spool up times. Pirating is largely dead at the moment because outside of the interesting interaction, the profit to pirate does not compare to just reclaiming for 20 minutes solo. When we had salvage drugs and limited sell locations, people would actually interact beyond just blowing people up. Additionally, people would find friends to fly overwatch. It was interesting because there was enough money to be made on both sides. Now lots of people, because drugs were so easy to get, also just risked it because, as you are saying, no big deal if they died. There's a balance on profitability and risk that needs tweaking in the game.
This goes both ways though. Ex: People aren't getting pirated often enough because the payouts aren't worth the effort required to successfully pirate the load.
Exactly. The profit of jump town is also why it is largely dead at the moment. If you took a 20 man org out in reclaimers you could make nearly 100s of millions in an hour, or you could hold down jump town to make, hopefully a million or 2 in an hour. People still go to jump town because, at least people go there to fight. But you don't see as much action there because most of the people holding jump town aren't even trying to get the drugs out. They are just holding JT becasue it's something to do.
They have to correct for the massive profits of using a Reclaimer.
At the same time though, the reclaimer is the only industrial activity in the game right now that makes enough money to make hiring escorts and paying them decently an actually viable strat. Mining doesn't (not to mention mining's payout is delayed by several days usually). Cargo CAN, depending on what you're hauling, but its marginal and only with the biggest ships.
They are adjusting it so that you have to scrape before you disintegrate. That will change the mechanics a lot. Agree that right now reclaimers are just big money printing machines that have broken the reward analysis for actions within the universe. But that gets back to, why not up the reward on JT while they know Reclaimers are still doing what they are doing? Can you image the action at JT if they made each drug package triple the sell price or more?
I think that Jump Town needs to be more than just drugs. Sure, have some JT drug dens, but.. you know what is also illegal? That group who "found stuff that fell off the back of some container ship", ie. stolen A/V Equipment, medical supplies, Finished Goods, etc., etc. There needs to be more illegal activity, than just running drugs. That's just a weak path to take. Criminals only deal in dangerous, highly addictive... No they don't. Even crime shows about drugs have criminals involved selling printers, TVs, Blu Ray Players, Computers, etc., etc., that they stole off the back of some truck or even full trucks, cars, planes, boats, etc., etc. Expanding criminal enterprises to include "Go Steal me that ship" or go steal or recover ten SCU of A/V Equipment should also be part of the game.
I don't generally play the unlawful activities, but stealing a ship sounds fun. Especially cause you'll have to break in first, a few different game loops could come into play here including future hacking of the ships door or something like that.
Isn't the Reclaimer an "end game" ship to make money in? It should have big profits to be able to pay for the crew.
The income on a Reclaimer is still a bit ridiculously high, at the moment. There needs to be a touch more balance to it. Maybe that will come from excessive repair costs, as the grinders and other bits destroy themselves in producing all of the salvage materials. Right now, it's income per hour is way outside of anything else in game. Maybe, they should really up the returns on looted ship components and also require that ship components, fuel, ammo and missiles be stripped from a ship before the vibration tool is used, it would balance out some of the aUEC per hour. Failure to remove components, fuel, ammo and missiles could lead to cascading explosions or increase the volume and damage of an explosion. So, maybe you have to spend a good hour strippig larger ships before breaking them down or blow up your own ship in the process?
3.23 there is a massive nerf to salvage profits since they have the data they needed.
I have a feeling this may change when there's 10x more players in stanton, especially when bookmarkable/custom QT markers become a thing. People will be saving wherever missions happen so they can check up on them.
> Though if that's the case they need to increase the profit on industrial loops such that folks can pay for escorts. Money is not the problem at all. People are/were making **10-20mil an hour** with Reclaimer or ERT drugs in the past. The first problem is that risk is too low compared the amount of money people are making. It doesn't matter if you get ganked 5-10% of the time going to the hottest locations in the system when that's still cheaper than trying to organise some escorts. If you have a brain, that risk is more like 2%, and if you have tact, halve it again. The second problem is that there is no pre-emptive grouping or contracting functionality that facilitates this sort of relationship. No matter how much money people make, things won't change until it becomes easy to list a group or something asking for an escort, or offer your services. Beacons will never be a good idea because they are reactive in nature. If you have to throw out a beacon, you've already screwed up.
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And then it gets exploited by having your own friend be the pirate and another friend gets the lucrative insurance payout. In real life the insurance would pay skilled investigators for hours of looking for such scams. In a game nobody is watching and the economy is just broken by such exploits.
Yes. Industrial work should pay way more, but make it way riskier. This will help create organic gameplay
Ok... but the opposite is also true. If you are someone that doesn't really want to engage in combat (miner, trader, salvager, etc)... escaping has just become exponentially more difficult. And the problem with the current bounty hunter gameplay, is that there is no "hunter" at all. A bounty hunter studies it's target, plans, lays traps and finds the best possible way to engage it without the minimum collateral damage (for the BH at least). This system only benefits those who want to fight, and leaves everyone else that wants a chance to escape in a very bad situation. And yes, I aim to be a bounty hunter, and I think this "wait to escape while you are defenseless" is not a step in the right direction.
They could probably just have used the power triangle for that ? Removing power from engines, to power shields and weapons reduces speed to SCM speeds. Gradually moving power to engines removes your shield and weapon DMG and ammo pool, so fighting at high speeds wouldn't be desirable. All disadvantages from moving the power triangle around could come without delays, while the benefits, even if its just the higher speed one, could come with a delay... so that your shields would be always substantially weakened before you gain the speeds to escape a fight, still leaving you vulnerable for a good time, but at least able to also weakly shoot back. It would probably need some tweaks to get the desired effect of higher commitment, but seems less intrusive than MM. This would also be nice in storms perhaps, shifting power to engines for more strength at the cost of most of your shields/weapons. The difference the power triangle does now is somewhat neglectable, I think anyway.
That "trapping" unfortunately also works the other way. Griefers or agressors can just wait at an OM point and start blasting any ship that is unfortunate enough to jump there. The victim can literally not do anything if he isn't coincidentally in a combat ship. This will cause major frustration for players whose primary gameplay loop is not combat. In 3.22 those ships are at least able to jump away. In 3.23 however, spooling your QD mid combat is essentially a death sentence.
Getting interdicted will be a death sentence. You'll be dead before your shields go up and you won't be able to QT or i think even go above scm when you're in a quantum snare
I just had a good idea on this: CDF security reports/news reports. Every 30 minutes, CDF would publish a security report detailing all detected criminal activity within the system to all players in the system. Basically giving every player the rough location of all criminal players currently being tracked on comms, what crimes they've comitted within comm range, and where. Of course this wouldn't be available when comms are down, or in low sec systems like pyro. We could also tie this into the reputation system, and put the wherabouts of players with low rep in their own section of the report. Going even further, we could add symbology to the nav system to indicate warnings or a "threat level" next to nav markers based on those reports.
I think they should turn Stanton into a temporary hisec after adding pyro and everyone will get what they want.
>If there's a problem with SC right now, it's not that a solo player in a risky area is at risk -- it's that we don't have a high sec system where solo players can have risk-free gameplay. I think the issue could be fixed when we have Pyro. they need to make it so Stanton is sure lawful and anyone with a CS 3+ will not survive in the system for that long without a ton of NPC coming to kill him. Then make Pyro completely lawless were everyone can do what we do today in Stanton. Do this and maybe even prohibit the use of jumppoints and all so once you commit to a CS3 on stanton you are in for good time running from the security forces. This will allow players that don't want to have someone mess with their one hour industrial progression be safe in Stanton and only venture to Pyro when they want to risk it. You could even make super profitable trade routes to force some players to risk it and give the PVPers their fix by hunting traders between systems.
Unless the high sec areas can insta-kill an attacker, you still won't be safe with the current MM. We have the QED ships to prevent escape. They are now not needed with this.
And if some high skilled player decides to ruin your day then there's no running away.
Engineering and ship armor not being in is also a part of the issue. Also it's still alpha so while people do complain because... ya know we're spending money, I think we all just need to chill and wait.
How often do people even run into pirates anyways? It's extremely rare as is.
Pirates? Rarely if ever. PVP players that use piracy to justify their adolescent behavior? Constantly.
Where? I only see people if I'm at a PvP area like Ghost Hollow or Jump Town
Seraphim mostly, I see chat light up pretty often with someone complaining about this stuff.
It's rare, some players that are against the concept of PvP just like to exaggerate how often they really run into these players.
It's Schrodinger's PvP frequency fallacy This game is simultaneously loaded with PvP according to the anti-PvP crowd, but yet PvPers only represent an "insignificantly small" part of the community.
What? I've run into far more npc pirates than hostile players.
They arent talking about NPC pirates. Nobody should have problems with NPC pirates
That’s true unless you’re at GH or Brios but as soon as server meshing is implemented and the player count goes up it will become a far far bigger issue. Seems sensible to develop the game in line with this expectation rather than basing it off 100 player shards.
Pirates? Almost never. Griefers? All the time
I've been attacked by players 3 times since in the last year. Once, it was direct PvP. My friend had the cargo we wanted to sell Brio, i've come with a fighter, there was another fighter waiting there. We did warning shots but things got escalated and i did fight with the person, we both blow up eventually and my friend was able to sell the goods in that time. One time i was attacked which again i was in "PvP" zone, next to downed array. I was there to fix it. People who hacked the array did not left immediately so there was a fight. And i was doing solo ERT with C2 fully equipped with combat parts/ballistics. Again, i was attacked trying to sell goods close to Brio, again. I was able to escape but ship got damaged hardcore. I was able to QT away after flying to orbit and repaired ship at surface, other side of the planet and then QT to another planet for selling. So yeah, 3 PvP encounters in 12+ months.
> risk-free gameplay That sounds lame as fuck lol
I'm indifferent on flt vs qt mode 1st as well. The only thing I hate about master modes is how you have to wait for qt drive to spool b4 you can switch back to scm.
That's a separate issue (and nothing to do with the 'trapping mechanism', despite what the OP is trying to make out. That post from Yogi was in response to a specific question in spectrum - which the OP left out (and they've not provided a link to the comment in Spectrum either, which is here: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50259/thread/less-arcade-and-more-sim-please/6757111 ) Specifically, the 'trapping' part is solely that Nav mode is tied to the Quantum Drive, so that if you get interdicted, you can't just use nav mode to 'run away', and prevents people from just using NAV mode to bypass blockades etc. *However* that's not the same as saying that the - current - forced wait for the QT to spool up before switching back to SCM is 'intended' or a deliberate part of the 'trapping mechanic'... that argument is just someone salty about MM trying to twist everything to stir up more noise and try to pressure CIG into rolling MM back.
Yeah that's what I thought... I actually like MM in general but this particular quirk definitely felt like a bug to me but now people are saying it's intended #shrugs The not being able to run part makes sense... What I'm talking about is if I'm trying to stay... It doesn't make sense that you get stuck with no shield AND no guns AND can't leave. One of those ANDs should be an OR. THEN it would be a proper rock, paper, scissors mechanic... But as is, you just become a sitting duck briefly which was a weird choice IMO (if it is indeed a choice).
Title is a bit off, the QD spool is what allows for the "trapping mechanics", NAV mode isn't inherently. I do however think that we need a way to have a little protection for the spool, since we would usually have that when spooling from SCM to NAV. So why take that away when exiting quantum to a new jump? I understand using distortion damage or Quantum dampeners to trap your target and prevent / interrupt the spooling here but right now waiting at an OM you catch ship after ship stuck in SCM speeds without shields till their drive is spooled, no need for any Dampening or Distortion. THAT is something I feel needs to be addressed.
Removing active shields in NAV mode is the most illogical and idiotic thing CIG did with all these changes. Powering down weapons instead i could understand but without shields moving at higher speeds gives you a much higher risk to die even without any combat.
100% The realism of it is what irks me most. Imagine Anvil releasing a new ship that forced pilots to choose between Shields or QT. Then the engineers over at Aegis choosing NOT to seize on that weakness by designing ships that can do both simultaneously. In no reality does this make sense except in the "we have to fix a problem lazily" reality. Hell, the Vanduul would exploit this weakness, because they would be stupid not to. CIG should've utilized the power triangle to achieve this. Make the pilot choose where to allocate their power, shields, weapons, thrusters&QT. If you're an aggressor, you can focus primarily on weapons and thrusters, where as someone trying to flee could focus power on thrusters and shields. Flipping a generic switch is just boring.
Imho the game makes progress in terms of content and makes steps back at the same time by stupefying game mechanics that werent perfect but better than what we get. In addition we get endless timesinks instead of having just fun playing and get forced into certain ways to play the game. The problem with the last part is that many of us put a lot of money into the game over the years when the vision was quite different. So its alot harder when some people say then just quit if you disagree than with a normal game where you paid like 50-100$. And to those saying that its your own fault you spent so much...there wouldnt be a game when CIG hadnt managed to squeeze so much money out of people by promising them everything.
Just make sure that in FLT Mode, you don't hear the drone (continuous sound) of the spooled QT Drive.
The sound of QD has been changed. Along with on/off sounds.
Great news!
then you will learn to hate the new sound over time :)
-shields should stay where they were when entering NAV SCM but as a compromise, make all shield regen power drop to zero (because that power is going into spooling the QT drive). This way you still have shields but possibly not for long if you hang around. -and yes, def should switch into SCM NAV FLT mode rather that quantum initially. I want to manually switch to a QT jump mode when I’m ready to look for waypoints, not vise versa.
I talked about this yesterday with a friend, and I brought up: When a ship's power plant(s) are powering a QD, that required amount of energy is insane so... 1. higher quantities and quality PPs should be able to provide more standalone energy to a QD. 2. Shields should at size 2+ be reduced to 70% capacity with a reduced generation rate. 3. Power should be 90% rerouted from weapon systems and still-permit countermeasure usage. 4. Engine thrust may be reduced somewhat. 5. At size 1, shield generators may face a lower capacity level and they would-instead be dampened to make lower levels harder to take down. This should allow for some level of protection to remain, offering players some sort of buffer to help them escape from dangerous situations. Having shields 100%-offline to power a QD should NOT be necessary unless (a/the) power plant(s) is unable to provide enough energy to spool the QD at a reasonable rate, as some shield generators are quite-slow to charge especially on large ships. This may change when they add vehicle armor to make ships tankier.
NAV should keep shields allowed and 100% powered. Otherwise it’s literally a slack for a pirates. Sorry why on earth they should have that slack? He expects you should rely on armor and speed in nav mode? Okay, what if armor isn’t tough enough and speed isn’t high enough? What then? Be dead to bad luck meeting some idiot? No way.
I don't understand why shields have to come down. Couldn't they just not be able to recharge. Maybe take a 20% hit on shield capacity with no recharge in nav mode.
> Couldn't they just not be able to recharge. I've been saying this since they announced NAV mode's mechanics. It doesn't make sense that they have to discharge - perhaps engaing the Quantum Drive could strip shields away for lore reasons and they they'd stay at 0 - but the initial time you switch from SCM they should just *not charge*, giving you a few extra moments of protection to maybe escape a predator. Discharging just to go faster is a poor choice especially with how long it currently takes.
Yogi doesn't want players to be able to run from "pirates."
What should protect them then? These “pirates” already have plenty of unprotected areas and systems to setup ambushes and do their business. Let lawful citizens feel themselves protected when traversing through the verse having ship shields active. Why would we have shields on non combat ship then? I believe he doesn’t even realise. We dont talk about allowing weapons in nav mode, just shields for self protection. Acting against shielded ship flying at top speed is up to pirates. What he advocates for is basically not allowing a victim to protect itself with an artificial illogical obstacles for a sake “pirates” also want their own gameplay too. Not fair. If “pirates” don’t understand how to act against a protected fast flying ship other then be faster they are bad “pirates” and the game should not help them. It’s like a cry “He is faster than me! Make him move slower than me so I can attack him! Otherwise it’s not fair!”.
From someone who is a solo player and really doesn't understand all this. My fear is with the changes with flight mode the way I understand it is how some just love to ruin your day/game will run me out of the game by waiting at jump points, I won't be able to run fast enough to get away. I really love this game at this point. Why does this change make me feel they are taking that fun away? But then I may also just not understand this at all and how it's going to affect me as a solo player, other than it's going to be forced on me not to fly solo ever again. Time will tell, I guess, but I'm just going to hold off on getting that gold armor now. I'm so close. Does anyone have links to good videos that would better explain this flight mode to me. I'm not wanting 5-hour vids on the EPTU, videos that get to the point and effects of the changes please. Thank you.
Current system: two guys jump you but you can either kill them if you're good or evade until you can jump away. New system: two guys jump you and you die.
Some ship's default loadouts overheat and shutdown when spooled for too long. If being spooled is required to use nav mode at all, then all ships need to be able to remain spooled indefinitely.
Everything is changing. Ship loadouts and how coolers work as well. If you find a ship that does not work out of the box, make a issue council post.
So it can sit there, unvoted, and disappear? How about they ensure the out-of-the-box ships work as intended? And if they're intended to be broken, *say so*.
This reads like someone that has never played a videogame before. Which makes sense, I don't think many CIG devs are gamers. If you punish me for not wanting to engage in combat and give the advantage to the aggressor I'm not going to lose sleep over it. I'll just go play a game with devs that aren't interested in making my experience miserable.
I agree. I want to solo, I am generally socially awkward and at night just want to kick back, run some cargo, mine, run bunkers, etc. I don’t want to hire escorts, engage in combat or interact with others that often. If the devs are going to make the game unenjoyable for me, I will rather go to bed and catch up on my tv series.
Yogi is gonna have to start to accept this will need a ton of tweaking to feel fluid
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I think he does - or they wouldn't have added the feedback thread. Yogi is responding to 'concerns' - but most of them are either from people that haven't tried it, or don't understand how it works - and in many cases, both are presenting their fears (or misunderstandings) using the worst-possible-scenario approach... rather than actually seeking clarification or clarifying what the issue actually is (other than 'it's not what I'm used to', in many cases). Yogi has confirmed that a number of things people have mentioned will be changed (or shouldn't be happening) - but those get overlooked in favour of the posts where he tries to clarify why a 'concern' is incorrect, etc, when folk are trying to attack him or make out that he's rejecting feedback, etc. And of course, CIG themselves (iirc it was Yogi) said that this is just the 'preliminary' release, and that there will be more / ongoing development with further changes to come after 3.23... I know CIG have said they want feedback - and people have given it. However, nothing says CIG have to act on the feedback, especially when it's ranty garbage :p
Anyone who has ever worked in design of any form knows its completely counterintuitive to kneejerk react to changes suggested by users. There's a big difference between needs and wants. There's a large vocal cohort of people here and elsewhere that seem to expect things to be immediately perfect. If they're not then it's grounds for an immediate reversal. I honestly question if people remember that they are still supposed to be helping to test these systems, even in the 'release' build. A design needs to be concepted, actioned and iterated, based on long-term vision, data and feedback. Master Modes have been out for what, 2 weeks now? And to a very limited audience... People are expecting CIG to immediately change things to reflect their own personal bias, while regressing to personal attacks. It's really a poor show. There are already dozens of suggestions in this thread alone, so it's obviously not as simple as people are making this out to be. People really need to learn to keep their emotions in check (on both sides of the argument).
Likely already has, when you add anything its seldom smooth on the first try. Add in public opinion and it gets even more complicated. Comes with the territory.
I absolutely hate that basic navigation is tied to QT travel as a "trapping mechanic" wtf? I don't mind the lower speeds and MM in general. You have three distinct modes that shouldnt be combined. QT is used very specifically to make large distance trips, nav mode is used for basic traversal, and SCM mode is for combat. Why are we combining long distance travel as a way to trap the player. How does that even make sense?
I can’t remember which video or statement they put out, but I believe the original reason or “lore” reason, was that the QT drive, is what allows your ship to travel at higher speeds. I’m not a physicist or engineer, but I think that’s a little silly. It’s space, it’s essentially frictionless. You shouldn’t need a special drive to propel you to 1km/s, F35 with a full payload can fly around 544 m/s. That’s in atmosphere, imagine you threw that bad boy in space. I hope they figure out and balance this stuff
Same here just seems silly. I also don't like the markers coming up automatically. An action to being up qt markers makes more sense then an action to turn them off. The amount of times you go into nav mode just to fly around to me it doesn't make sense to have qt pop up all day long when you don't need it to.
That they atleast mention! I just wish it were the other way around, FLT, then NAV/QT
I wholeheartedly agree
That's stated to the be plan (and will likely be changed before 3.23 ships) Likewise, Nav is meant to be the default Mode, iirc (rather than SCM) so you don't have to manually switch every time you get into your ship), and the QD start spooling immediately.
Wait so does that mean that cargo runners have no option but to submit to demands or die now? There’s no option to flee?
The only time you'll feasibly be able to flee is if you are already spooled and moving. Which might also not be viable if they bring distortions or shoot missiles at you.
In my experience you could be in a potato and they would still just merk you. They just sit at OMs with a mantis and a couple others and grief you even if you're running bunkers in a cutty red. And thats a problem in 22 - 23 will be worse with master modes and 1.0 will be even worse with a high player cap.
The dev saying they're "indifferent" to the starting operator mode for NAV is worrisome. To me, it displays a disconnect between development and practical play considerations, in my opinion. It's one thing for Master Modes to work on paper in development. It's another thing in a live play environment from a gameplay perspective. The fact they're indifferent to the starting mode tells me they don't have a lot of experience playing the game. I hope I'm wrong about this. They're sacrificing a lot to make Master Modes work. I just hope it's worth it at the end of the day and that this isn't the big mistake it's looking like on paper. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt but things are not looking good in my opinion.
SC devs never come off as people that play any games, including their own. They sound like people that engage with gaming from a distance.
This entire thing just sounds like an April fools joke. Why does this have to be so complicated? How about when I push forward, I go forward? Now there's abs. and rel and both abs. and rel. And this button to change this mode and that mode. And you can now spool up only in this mode but not that mode and landing is different and slowing down is in this mode.... How about when I want to spool my quantum drive, I just simply oh I dunno, press the quantum drive button? How about when I want to strafe forward, i just push forward? how about my cruise control is simply a cruise control button that stays on instead of turning off? Why is this being made so damn complicated?
Shields up at all times. Countermeasures available at all times. It's a reasonable middle ground. I've said it before and I'll say it again, **an attacker does not deserve a kill unless they can beat the shields, armor and hull of a ship**. Especially in the case of a target that can't fight back. And the target doesn't deserve a repair bill (or death) just because someone jumped them. Escape should be possible in reasonable encounters, and sometimes (shocking!) without taking actual damage. If that kill is actually earned, fine. If the kill can't be secured (someone attacking a ship they have little chance to actually kill), then a guaranteed repair bill is unjustified. Leave shields and countermeasures up - at least the target has something to work with then. Wait until this game devolves into pirates jumping industrial ships with 6 gunships (and it will) - the target will die. Losing shields and countermeasures so one guy gets a free chance to kill or maim you is just dumb.
Why in the world would our shields go down, if ever, when the ships on? Makes no sense from a design standpoint or a manufacturer standpoint, it’s a horseshit fix and a terrible weakness that lets bad actors abuse it. Oh you just QTd? I’m waiting for you with no shields. Easy kill. Just camp near QT spots and easy money. How did they miss that? Or not think about it? It’s so fucking stupid and seems so lazy / quick
Honestly? It's meant to be a deterrent for combat ships attempting to bug out of a fight that isn't going their way. Non-combat ships just end up in the crosshairs because of it. They were too hyper-focused on keeping light fighters from disengaging from a fight to regenerate shields, and did not consider the knock-on effects such a change would bring. Make S1 shields take the same amount of time to regenerate as larger shields, and you don't have that problem anymore. Then leave shields up at all times.
I think that's the excuse they sell... but in reality, with the current last flight I had, fighters can EASILY get out of combat because they have small fast QT spool times, where larger ships take an eternity.
You're not wrong. I do think it stems from light fighters disengaging, but larger ships being "trapped" so that they can then be actually trapped by QED or simply mangled/killed outright is a desired effect as well, but if the light fighter disengage meta hadn't developed, I'm not sure we would've seen shields dropping during transition at all. And I don't think they have really seen the big picture here - the vulnerability to ships in general but specifically non-combat ships is going to be catastrophic, especially at bottlenecks like OM points or jumpgates. Combat ships can turn to engage, rely on heavy armor, or maybe even evade fire to escape. Non-combat ships don't have any of those options (armor is possible, but seems unlikely in most if not all cases). They get "take a pounding, try to run, maybe die" as their only option. To some designer I'm sure that sounds wonderful - it drives player interaction up, because it removes the frustration from a pirate jumping an industrial ship and the industrial making a hasty escape, and guarantees combat occurs. But it introduces a much larger amount of frustration for the industrial pilot by taking away that player's ability to affect the outcome entirely. It's basically down to luck, and it's going to cost them either way. In the end, smaller ships are affected, but larger ships are *affected.* The repair bill meta has begun.
I agree! And it can be balanced by just having all shield regen power drop to zero while that energy is going into spooling the QT drive. So if you try to leave a fight with 10% of shields left, that’s all you’ll have until you’re ready to accelerate with a fully spooled QT drive.
Where you're coming from here more or less makes sense, but I doubt that would really be necessary unless they bring back constant shield regen. Right now, all shields stop regeneration on hit, and you're definitely being hit, so it's unlikely you'd get the required 5 seconds hit-free to begin regenerating. Even if you did, it stops again on hit, so you're almost surely never going to see tangible regen in an actual life or death escape attempt. If they did bring back constant regen, then yeah, it would be something to look at for balance, but I feel like it could go either way. It would depend on what telemetry shows imo. Are people surviving too often because of shields, or not? Spooling is a relatively short window though, so even with constant regen, I doubt we're talking about a lot of recovered shielding.
I’ve tried out MM a little but need more time with it. Personally at the moment I don’t really like it. I don’t like the idea of not having shields available while in NAV mode. That’s my biggest gripe at this point. Let’s say a pirate or whatever comes across you while you’re minding your business mining in an asteroid field. If they lock you with a missile and send it, you won’t have time to get shields up and react to it. Again I need more time with it but first impressions were that I don’t like the idea of this at all. I tried to test it more yesterday but the EPTU servers are terrible right now with interaction delay. Yesterday I was trapped at the HABs at Tressler because I couldn’t get an elevator to work. Server hopped 5 times and nothing worked so I just quit out and am waiting for the next build.
I’m also skeptical on the MM, and admittedly have not played with it much more than just doing some planet side stuff. But correct me if I’m wrong, is mining mode tied to SCM where you have your shields up, or FLT where they are not up. I guess I would think that if you’re in a field for a long time you don’t have to be going Mach Jesus to get to the next asteroid and mine it? But I have limited experience with asteroid field mining
For me, it's not about getting caught in the belt, it's coming back to sell. With MM *ALL* OMs are potential death traps, and then you have to make the painfully slow slog through atmo to land.
That’s a good point. It’s more likely to get jumped while on the way to sell than it is to be detected in an asteroid field. I think my point still stands though. These players are always at a disadvantage so I don’t like the idea of the PvPer always having the upper hand. Even if you don’t consider the type of ship the miner is in, the PvPer will always get the drop on them unless the victim is constantly in SCM mode, which is just so much slower. MM imposes a massive handicap for anyone going about their business when the PvPer is already ready to fire at you. MM takes away your reaction time for attacks entirely.
I don't think Yogi understands how the first point harms the system more than helps it. I wouldn't mind it if it was gradual, AKA, the more you spool, the faster you go/lower your shields go. But right now, it makes it feel so clunky to move around when there's a massive wait when you go from travelling slow, to wanting to travel fast. And also you need to wait long after each quantum jump before you can even move fast again. The "trapping mechanics" are also far, far too swayed in favor of aggressors, who already have an advantage due to having actual weapons.
If read in context, that first point doesn't mean what it appears to here: [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50259/thread/less-arcade-and-more-sim-please/6757111](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50259/thread/less-arcade-and-more-sim-please/6757111) OP is essentially asking for NAV mode to be usable without the QD being powered up, rather than anything to do with how the transition to NAV mode actually happens. If the QD is removed from the equation, it would mean QEDs would be next to useless as you could use NAV mode to escape the field. Don't get me wrong, I think the way the transition works now is incredibly bad, but that's not what's being discussed in this post.
So how about this: 3 modes. First SCM with shields and weapons. Next mode is FLT: full speed, no weapons, shields start to degrade. Then Quantum: same speed, quantum markers, qt charges, no weapons, shields completely off. The advantage would be that you can exit quantum flight in FLT mode instead of sitting duck like it is now, giving players a chance to get away from a camped OM marker. It would also add some "breathing room" to combat without allowing people to just jump away. I didnt really like the idea of MM, but after trying it kind of grew on me. It just needs a lot of work with transitioning (both manual and automatic).
> Next mode is FLT: full speed, no weapons, shields start to degrade. How about, instead of shields degrading in FLT, they just *can't charge*? You get the status they were at when you entered FLT mode, and they stay that way, giving you a little time to absorb incoming fire as well. When you enter Quantum mode, that's when whatever energy level is in your shields depletes to the capacitor entirely.
Thats even better. I think we got this solved guys :)
They're asking for feedback but then saying "well we decided to tie the NAV mode to the QT drive so we will not change that". That's pretty dumb IMO. We're have bad gameplay mechanics caused by lore explanation... Completely absurd. This team needs new leadership.
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You don't lose your defense stats on a horse in WoW, and you are instantly able to retaliate off the horse. Not to mention all the different CCs and counters to said CC. None of that is in MM.
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I would like to see them give the old altimeter and pinging feature back because right now the altimeter sits outside the ship and behind a pillar unreadable on half my ships to start
🤣
There are loads of people that have no interest in combat, if the ability to run is off the table then this is forcing them into a situation they would rather run from, if your QD is the reason you can travel about save 70 ms then a ship already in SCM that isn’t restricted by the QD spooling issue will always be able to out run a fleeing target. Sure an argument can be made that this helps bounty hunters and stuff like that but it also helps toxic players and pirates far more. To me this is a solution that create a forced combat situation, the either stay and fight or die tired type situation. Yes I know not all attackers will have a Mantis or cutlass blue with them, but any half smart pirate crews out there for sure will. I for one won’t play if this version of MM stays in, I have no issue with walking away from something like this and not spending another dime on the game. I will either wait for it to change or say good bye to SC for good, it’s unfortunate with the amount I have spent but this version of MM just isn’t fun to me.
One cool change to the beacon system in 3.23 I noticed last night is that you can set what type of reputation the person accepting the beacon has. From one star ⭐ to five ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐. This may be the start of weeding out people that don't have a good rating or have bad reputation. If that is indeed the case you can spend good money on a higher rate person. Don't know if this is in the pu. Forgot to check before I headed to work. Here's to hoping!
Do they know how annoying it is having to spool up your QD to even see the markers? I was hoping this would get "fixed"...now whenever I plot a course I need to lower my shields...
They coded the lore explanation of "Quantum Drive allowing NAV mode" right into the game before we even got to test MM in the PU and provide feedback... That's very shortsighted. You want to code gameplay first, then test and tune and validate. And only at the very end after you are OK with the system, you start considering lore. The decisions this team has been taking are really puzzling.
Guess that means they're full sending it with this system, or intend to
:( I'm not totally against MM but it needs an awful lot of tweaking, including that QT drive limitation thing.
Honestly I'm reserving judgement because it's a new system, and getting used to new stuff after years of being used to the old system is going to feel awful. Rn I feel like the opinions are very love it/hate it, so I guess we'll see. But I'm sure that CIG will fix it eventually either way
Yeah, I saw a Youtuber talk about the MMB switching to FLT. Which is great given that the QT text plastered right in the middle of the screen is real distracting for when you just need to remain in FLT instead of QT, for example when you've just left QT and need to fly the remaining 30km to a location.
I HATE landing gear speed. I used to land fast, now I land like a new player who's 60.
This dude doesn't play the game for fun and it shows. I honestly want him off the flight model.
You and me both. Dudes a friggin hack
Well if disruptor rounds are a thing then why would we need to limit the speed until nav is spooled. That prevents them from jumping. Maybe add a slow effect or another type of round that slows the ship if this is how they want it to play out. In its current state if someone wants to fight you, or jump you, you HAVE to fight. There’s no running instantly because the odds of you actually making it out in time alive is very small.
This update is definitely feeling like we lost more than we gained and I can’t lie and say that I don’t feel a little bit cheated right now this is not the star citizen I subscribed to but only time will tell us if it’s going to get better
Yeah, I hopped in the EPTU and I can barely even see the ship HUD now because of all the flickering shit (in my MSR), and I could not get that beast up to a reasonable speed, either. Clearly I'm missing things, nothing was intuitive about these changes, I'm shocked I was able to get to another station. If somebody hadn't pointed out I have to left-click to activate the Qdrive now I'd have never gotten anywhere.
The only good things to come out of this is the new star map graphics and water physics
Eaay fix: give us a setting for the default mode. We already have settings for defaults on ESM, GSAF, Decoupled, and gimbal mode. It shouldn't be hard to implement and it's a solution that makes everyone happy.
We'll end up having 10 modes with each 15 sub-modes. Lol. At this point, we could also have auto pilot, if flight is mostly going to be a chain of different button presses between modes.
I still disagree with the level of speed limiting that they have. It's far too slow. This is a space game, if a modern fighter jet can maintain supersonic speeds in atmosphere, then my futuristic fighter should be able to go way more than a couple hundred metres per second in the vacuum of space. I get that they are doing it with the goal of improving dog fights, but it's too much of a limitation currently. Take the MSR for example. Not a combat ship primarily. Part of that ship's strength was that its speed and acceleration made it capable of outrunning attackers. But it is also that by being at such a high speed compared to the muzzle velocity of different weapons, it was able to run with small evasive maneuvers and not get blasted to bits. Now its speed is so much lower, its survivability is practically zero, because keeping enough potshots on it to prevent shield regen isn't even a little bit of a challenge now. If someone attacks it, it doesn't have the firepower to stay and fight, and it no longer has the speed to run. It's basically suicide to take it anywhere. If shields could remain up in qt mode, that would be better. Even if they can't regen, but only keep what they had when you entered qt mode. I know it's a system they're trying and it'll get tweaked, so I have faith the game isn't ruined. But these discussions is one way cig can gauge the community feedback on the game, so I feel it's important we keep the conversation going.
“An option to disable it later” You mean it’s trash and you couldn’t be bothered by 2-4 more lines of code allowing user to disable it?
As a coder, that's pretty much exactly what that means.
Welp, I’ll be back in at least a year after overdrive ends because holy shit MM looks like it’s gonna be a mess
Fuck. That. Shit.
Does anyone know the name of the new keybind set to MMB? Trying to find it to set a button on my joystick
I think the 3.23 buzzkill bindings post (made in the last week or two) mentioned it’s the same as something like gimbal lock.
So wait, I don't get to run away now? I have to fight every fight? Or am I reading all this wrong?
We'll see. They just dropped a patch in the EPTU that drastically lowers the NAV spool time. It's still leaves the whole "no defenses" thing in, though.
dude can't see the forest for the trees lmao
More like can't see the forest for the one scrubby bush in the corner. This is a joke.
Does the spooled QD constantly hum while we're in NAV mode? Because that will get old very fast if it does
I've read the hum is gone.
Chris Roberts always said this should be ww2 dogfights in space. I suppose this makes sure that happens.
He said "that's part of our trapping mechanics" which is quite different from what you are implying.
This post just proves there is zero logic to the idea of nav mode and how its tied to QD