[Armoring technical blocks]

PVP players actually don't want exploits, they want a broad set of possible strategies with ultimately similar power, which means that the learning phase is extended (its usually the most fun part), and so that the best pilots play in ways that accommodate a lot of possibilities in their opponents and are good at forcing their opponents to do what they want them to.

 

... I'm guessing you haven't been playing ay of the PVP-only games released these last few years, they've all been going exactly opposite of what you claim.

 

 

When you post a bad guess its likely to be wrong, which it is.  Its never a great idea to start out a post by being wrong.

 

 

As an example, World of Tanks used to have classes that were actually balanced.

Then the inevitable happened, the Hardcore PVPers bawwed and whined at the devs, and a plethora of nerfs and buffs happened, and it got to be impossible to actually hurt the hardcore pvpers, and the majority of the players left.

 

 

Its a pay to win game.  Avorion is not a pay to win game, the developer gets his money upfront.

 

I also played WoT for some time, and I've got several lines to T8 or T10 in world of warships.  Here is an obvious point about WoWs, there is no point grinding any shipline in that game, unless you have some desire to play T10.  The premium ships, which anyone can buy and use, dominate win/loss.  See asia.shipstoday set it to 2 weeks.  Clemson, Fiji, a few others are worth grinding, but most of the top ships are pay ships, that are accessible to any walletwarrior.  The only bad ship in that game is the flint, but there has to be some reward for being the best.

 

 

The Developers of nearly any game where PVP is allowed to occur, tend towards balance.

The Players DON'T.

 

The PVPers gravitate directly towards the least-balanced aspects/characters/strategies. Anything and everything that isn't explicitly patched out, they do to gain an infinitesmal "edge" against the other PVPers, and anyone who hasn't been PVPing the entire time, is "free xp".

 

Look at the original Smash Brothers.

 

Look at Tekken. (literally, any of them)

Look at StreetFighter, and BlazBlue, and SoulCaliber.

 

Look at League of Legends, and DoTA, and even StarCraft.

 

All of them have some manner of exploit, that all the "good" (read, hardcore+ranked_battle_leader) PVPers are abusing literally every battle they think they can get away with it.

(World of Tanks is particularly bad on this front, the devs encourage mod use, except in "tournament" play. Guess what the most popular mod is?  an aimbot. guess how the devs pick tourney players? by stats. Kills vs deaths being the most important stat.)

 

Now, a GOOD developer, will actually keep track of what exploits occur, and will remove the from the code.

A BAD developer, will make it easier to perform the exploit. (I'm looking at you, Smash Brothers 2, making Fox's exploit bull**** from the first game into an actual move, and even more powerfull too.)

 

A truly horrendous developer, will simply nerf the snot out of anything the PVPers claim need nerfing. (naturally, anything that could possibly hurt their precious stats gets the nerf, usually followed by a swift demotion to "utterly useless, why is this still in the game?")

 

 

Let's use an example from within Avorion.

 

PVPers that don't have morals, they use Railguns to the exclusion of all other weapons.

Why? because railguns are bugged such that they do full penetrative damage to the Ship HP, even if blocked by armor.

 

 

Choosing railguns is not a point of honour or a moral decision.  This is a hilariously poor line of reasoning.  That is an efficiency decision and one that is so frequent that it benefits the counter decision of defending the ship primarily against railguns.

 

I have a xan ship with some og and trinium armor.  120k hull hps, 350k shield hps, ie perfectly fine for PVE.  Max thrust 57, max brake 16, yaw 0.26, pitch 0.11. max v 1167

 

All of the outside armor pieces (7 visible) have more than the 120k hull hps.  I leave the engines at the rear open for aesthetic reasons, presuming that I'm good enough to not face them to a railgun strike or if they are it would be an oblique and thus very small target, the sides of the engines are armored.

 

I've just redone it as a hull tanker.  I replaced my 2 exceptional shield subs with 2 generator subs, removed the shield generator , thickened all the armor plates till their values were 50k, and made the overall hull hps 500k, so the armor plates all have 500k hps vs railguns (10x ifg bonus to hp).

 

I added extra drive and thrusters to preserve the performance and as it turned out it now has vastly excessive generator and could be made to perform better than my shield version (the triumph of thrust over mass), or I could further thicken the armor and raise the hull hps within the same visible profile (take the same percentage of hits/misses) as the shield ship.  The drawback for that was requiring more crew and a little more crew quarters (thrusters are crew heavy).  I expect that on the same generator and same resource budget than using shields, but I decided to make this a first pass rather than a carefully tuned example, since my shield unit wasn't carefully tuned either.

 

Since it has no shields anymore and does not allow multiple block penetration, there is no benefit for shooting railguns against it.  In fact other weapon systems might be more effective, since their bonus figures might be better for raw damage instead of only being applied when successfully defeating blocks.

 

ie if I don't accept that railguns are broken, I can easily make them one of the least successful weapon systems against my ship.  IMO the actual issues are,

 

- that ifg bonuses aren't shown ingame

- armor can substitute for hull

- armor area can substitute for armor thickness

- hull outside of armor can count for full damage multipliers even if it didn't have the hitpoints to begin with, which makes it impossible to layer a nice visual design outside of a central armored citadel without giving up excessive survivability

- ai sucks and thus pve even on hardest settings does not resemble pvp.

 

 

 

Now, the typical PVPer response whenever a player mentions the horribly broken nature of the weapon, is to cry that "it's not broken, you just suck" or the battlecry of the jackass: "git gud noob".

 

I'm genuinely surprised that sort of thing hasn't been seen all that often on these forums.

(the steam forums for Avorion has a fairly high incidence of it, usually followed by a mod Deleting it.)

 

 

See above, where changes to the ship design pattern renders railguns non optimal.

 

 

Hell, going back to Every game with PVP ever:

Advanced PVPers eventually get bored of actually fighting one another, (because it's hard to advance their stats vs an evenly matched opponent) and descend upon the only player type that developers should be giving a damn about more than any other: the New Player.

 

Guess what this joyous fest of beating on the newbie so he decides "this game is garbage" and leaves forever is called?

Seal clubbing.  Because it is exactly as easy as going forth and killing a baby seal with a club to the skull.

 

There's nothing the New Player can do to prevent his imminent demise. Meanwhile, the PVPer has just improved his stats.  Another kill for him!

 

The only games you don't see this sort of behavior in, are the games where the PVPers are segregated away from everyone else.  They can murder the crap out of each other, and eventually a player can decide "I want me somma that" and banish themselves to the land of PVP.

 

Why does this happen?  Mostly because Developers quit caring, and allow it to happen.

 

it is possible trivially to design out railguns vs your ship if it lived in a PVP context.  The issue ingame is simply that its aesthetically awful. Its a borg cube.

 

 

[Stop F'ing killing ships via Asteroids]

I used to rage at deaths when I played diablo 3, then I played hardcore, where death was the end of the game, which soon taught me to learn how to not die instead of raging about deaths.

 

In this game

(a) you slow down if the sector is foggy

(b) you start your initial thrust towards a gate not directly at it, which will reveal any roids that were directly between you and the gate (they can be hard to see against the gate field).

© Combat, you do from outside the roid field shooting at all the stupid NPCs caught on the roids, which is literally fish in a barrel.

 

Since I have done that, I have not collided with a roid in a way that seriously damaged my ship.

 

 

[Armoring technical blocks]

Honestly you can already have it both ways.  Take your engines.  Cover them in armor.  Then cover the armor with a thin facade of an engine block.  People who try to take out your thrust will be sorely disappointed.

 

Against railguns, putting a layer of instantly penetrable material outside thick armor just causes the railgun strikes to reliably deal 2x hull damage even if it doesn't go through the armor layer.

 

Armor is purely volume based, thickness is no more important than the other dimensions, which leads to a few options, but in any case you can build a cube where after the ifg x10 effect each plate on the outside has more hitpoints than the total hitpoints of the hull, which should eliminate the railgun multiplier as a thing.

 

Trying to balance a game for multiplayer PVP does nothing but grind development to a halt and ruin games for everyone. Any and every system will be pushed to its max and abused by the pvp crowd.  Any advantage will be exploited and any weakness will be used to its fullest. Pvp players are the loudest and most vocal so the devs end up getting to make them happy and the rest of us get screwed. They are never happy with anything.  Eventually nothing cool gets added because a pvp player could abuse it, and make the other pvp plays whine. Any game with creative freedom to build any ship we want will be impossible to balance and if the devs try they might as well bury this game now. I love this game and hope it doesn't end up like all the other games the pvp crowd had ruined

 

PVP players actually don't want exploits, they want a broad set of possible strategies with ultimately similar power, which means that the learning phase is extended (its usually the most fun part), and so that the best pilots play in ways that accommodate a lot of possibilities in their opponents and are good at forcing their opponents to do what they want them to.

 

Furthermore, development of the AI to take advantage of the options afforded to PVP players should make for a better single player experience.  The game goes dull fast because the ai is so farmable - ie the whole single player experience feels like an EVE level 4 mission extended adnauseum - where I warp in my battleship to 60 opponents including 10 enemy battleships and destroy them all in turn.

 

I don't think complete creative freedom is required - imo one should be required to organize the internals of ones ship to have damage control or suffer consequences (its why we have different difficulty levels in PVE) and some visual designs are going to interfere with that.  The problem right now is that one creative freedom is to put an armored box around the whole thing, where each of the 6 plates has more hull hitpoints than the entire ship - imo armor should be thickness not volume based for penetration management and it should be sufficiently expensive that it can't substitute for an outer hull - ie I shouldn't be able to afford to plate my entire ship and retain good movement performance and more importantly if I increase the area of an armor plate, it shouldn't also improve its penetration defence (which it does).

 

ie the design questions that arise from how badly the game currently plays are pretty serious - and PVP just exposes those issues.  I'd even go so far as to ask the question as to why armor plate provides hull hps.