Dealing with destroyer spam in PvP

Suggestions PvP
1

So I just came up with a random suggestion: what if destroyers could only be used once per battle?

 

How this would work is, when you die in your destroyer during battle, the destroyer would no longer be able to be picked for the rest of the match. I believe this would greatly help against the current destroyer spam and  maybe  balance PvP a little/make it less frustrating in my personal opinion.

 

This change would obviously only apply in PvP and Sector Conquest (and maybe some Brawl game modes), but not in PvE, Versus AI, and Spec Ops.

2

This was proposed many times over during the ye old days and i guess it will begin to be a thing now too. I hope some solution pops up tho.

3

It’s not the best solution since there still could be 8 zetas at the start, but how about limit dessies to groups like this:

no group / 1-2 ppl group - 0 dessie

3-5 group - 1 dessie

6-9 - 2 dessies

10-12 - 3 dessies

if you made it in this way it will be:

  • no randoms in dessies

  • max 2 dessies in seccon, 3 in pvp

  • it won’t be random like a few people wanted so you don’t have to worry that the only 2 dessies in your team are stupid idi0ts

 

Ofc limit it only to pvp and seccon. Skirmish, spec op, os and pve shouldn’t have such limits.

4

Your suggestion has a point, but problems still occur.

First, what if matchmaker brings a group of destroyer and dedicated engineer frigate that makes destroyer never die?
Hope our team has a dedicated ECM and Gunship to counter them.
Even if we succeed to destroy them somehow, that group will respawn with another destroyer + engineer frigate (destroyer->engineer frigate, engineer frigate->destroyer)
You want to hear about the worse situation?
A group of 3 people brings destroyer + engi+ tackler or destroyer+engi+ fighter.
Oh my lord…
The only way to counter is to drain their life points fast or kill other guys before destroyer player respawns, which is not likely to happen in random PvP.

Second, that system would make players with no Zeta and R17 destroyer as trolls.
If one team loses, that team will blame players who didn’t bring a destroyer regardless what they did in the game.
(You know human mind that sb want to blame others even if it is his or her fault.)

If someone brings up a solution for these, then I’m with your suggestion.

5

I feel like it should be partially limiting the number of times you can use the destroyer in a battle, and partially the amount of destroyers you can have active at once.

 

First, limiting the amount to one time use won’t be fair since there are cases where you can be swarmed by interceptors, Stingrays(also an interceptor in disguise but for simplicity’s sake it will be referred to as a gunship), and other ships specifically used to counter destroyers that will kill you without you being able to do much in a battle, and in case you need to do tasks that involve a destroyer, or when you need them in specific situations(like breaking frigballs or holding a beacon), it won’t leave you with much room for error, and not even being able to learn from your mistakes will be a bad learning curve, the game is already harsh enough to newer players.

 

Secondly, limiting the amount you can have active at once would mean modifying the matchmaking so you don’t end up with people only having destroyers in their lineup, which could increase queue times, something that is already high enough considering the population, then there is the simple solution of not allowing people to queue for pvp if they only have destroyers in their combat slots, and then it’s the question of coding it so you can’t exploit it and use more than the max number of destroyers, of course, first come first serve would be the best way to go, but there are many things you need to keep track of and think about, something that could be out of the scope of the current dev team, it’s a good solution, but it might turn out to be too complex, and further nerfing the destroyers will render the R14 and under destroyers completely useless, even though some of them already are.(*cough* *cough* Invincible)

6

4 hours ago, SilverIris said:

Your suggestion has a point, but problems still occur.

First, what if matchmaker brings a group of destroyer and dedicated engineer frigate that makes destroyer never die?
Hope our team has a dedicated ECM and Gunship to counter them.
Even if we succeed to destroy them somehow, that group will respawn with another destroyer + engineer frigate (destroyer->engineer frigate, engineer frigate->destroyer)
You want to hear about the worse situation?
A group of 3 people brings destroyer + engi+ tackler or destroyer+engi+ fighter.
Oh my lord…
The only way to counter is to drain their life points fast or kill other guys before destroyer player respawns, which is not likely to happen in random PvP.

Second, that system would make players with no Zeta and R17 destroyer as trolls.
If one team loses, that team will blame players who didn’t bring a destroyer regardless what they did in the game.
(You know human mind that sb want to blame others even if it is his or her fault.)

If someone brings up a solution for these, then I’m with your suggestion.

Nothing you said is actually true

What forbids you from making that group with dessie, engi and tackler now?

And why they have to change their ship? I didn’t say that dessie will be one-off only

And why you suggest that this dessies will be unkillable? Is it any better now? When you see 8 of them

Actually it will be much easier to kill that 1 or 2 dessies since there is something like WOLFHOUND or maybe THARGA with a funny thing called SINGULARITY CANNON (and it works the better the less dessies are nearby)

And no it won’t make ppl without dessie a trolls, who said that they will be any good at them? I would prefer a good intie/fighter than an useless dessie

Not to mention that only 3+ group will be able to use dessies

And yes there will be some blaming others just like it is now you know why? coz idi0ts will be idi0ts no matter on what ship

7

53 minutes ago, xXThunderFlameXx said:

 

First, limiting the amount to one time use won’t be fair since there are cases where you can be swarmed by interceptors, Stingrays(also an interceptor in disguise but for simplicity’s sake it will be referred to as a gunship), and other ships specifically used to counter destroyers that will kill you without you being able to do much in a battle, and in case you need to do tasks that involve a destroyer, or when you need them in specific situations(like breaking frigballs or holding a beacon), it won’t leave you with much room for error, and not even being able to learn from your mistakes will be a bad learning curve, the game is already harsh enough to newer players.

With my solution you can use your dessie how many times you want and at the same time it won’t be too much dessies in a battlefield just 2-3 max for each side, which I think is enough.

 

55 minutes ago, xXThunderFlameXx said:

Secondly, limiting the amount you can have active at once would mean modifying the matchmaking so you don’t end up with people only having destroyers in their lineup, which could increase queue times, something that is already high enough considering the population, then there is the simple solution of not allowing people to queue for pvp if they only have destroyers in their combat slots, and then it’s the question of coding it so you can’t exploit it and use more than the max number of destroyers, of course, first come first serve would be the best way to go, but there are many things you need to keep track of and think about, something that could be out of the scope of the current dev team, it’s a good solution, but it might turn out to be too complex, and further nerfing the destroyers will render the R14 and under destroyers completely useless, even though some of them already are.(*cough* *cough* Invincible)

It can be fixed pretty easy

  1. if you have 4 dessies you can’t go to pvp it just displays an error no matter if you’re in group or not (to make no room for exploits in group like when everyone have only dessies)

  2. you don’t need to modify matchmaking just when you’re in battle you’re unable to pick a dessie if you aren’t in group 

and for groups there should be a “destroyer access” count which shows you how many dessies your team can take (and it depends on the values I mentioned earlier)

if someone took a dessie the rest have it blocked just like they wasn’t in group, but if that one change it’s ship to any other class the rest of the team have access to this free spot until someone uses it

 

8

1 hour ago, Boczek121 said:

Nothing you said is actually true

What forbids you to make that group with dessie, engi and tackler now?

And why they have to change their ship? I didn’t say that dessie will be one-off only

And why you suggest that this dessies will be unkillable? Is it any better now? When you see 8 of them

Actually it will be much easier to kill that 1 or 2 dessies since there is something like WOLFHOUND or maybe THARGA with a funny thing called SINGULARITY CANNON

Calm down man.
Of course, a good fighter players will kill dessies no matter what circumstances they are in, and I said this:

 

5 hours ago, SilverIris said:

Hope our team has a dedicated ECM and Gunship to counter them.

But I’m assuming a normal random PvP.
I saw many wolfhound and tharga ppls dead by dedicated destroyers players by 1v1, yes with Singuarity cannon.
And I also countered some of Singurartiy fighters with Emperor by using my combo.
That means not all fighters with singurarity cannon kill dessies so easily.

Also fighter is not going to 1v1 with a destroyer but instead +1 dedicated engineer and a tackler that slows down the fighter.
Plus there is highly chance that they will use team speak to communicate their information, which is a disadvantage for surprise attacker.
(They will also ping specific player that is approaching and that will make other players to ready for an incoming surprise attack)

 

 

1 hour ago, Boczek121 said:

And no it won’t make ppl without dessie a trolls, who said that they will be any good at them? I would prefer a good intie/fighter than a useless dessie

Not to mention that only 3+ group will be able to use dessies

And yes there will be some blaming others just like it is now you know why? coz idi0ts will be idi0ts no matter on what ship

Sorry for my short explanation about this.
Let me explain more:
 Assume one team has 5 destroyer player and other team has 4 destroyer player and 1 non destroyer player.
One team has 5 chances to bring destroyers and other team has only 4 chances to bring destroyers cause one of them didn’t bring the destroyer.
Of course dedicated fighter player can annihilate the whole team but, once again I’m assuming a normal random PvP.

Due to current PvP meta, there is a real disadvantage that one team has less chance to bring Ze’ta and R17 destroyers.
( Sadly this is true, since I had a lot of matches defeated by the swarm of Ze’ta and R17 dessies on the other side)

At first, players consider their defeat as their mistake or other reasons.
But as the time goes on, they find out that the team with more dessies has higher chance to win.
And the consequences? In someday, people consider player who didn’t bring Ze’ta or R17 dessies as the reason of the defeat and start to blame him or her.
The problem does not stop here: Players would tell newbie to bring Ze’ta or R17 dessies to play T5 random PvP match.
After that even dedicated players like u say “Dessies are not the problem”, majority of them would not listen.
Because that’s how they learn, they experience in T5 PvP.

This is what I worry about.

 

9

Oh, I forget to say this.
R8 R11 R14 dessies should be excluded from the suggestion.
They are not the problem in PvP battle

10

1 hour ago, SilverIris said:

But I’m assuming a normal random PvP.
I saw many wolfhound and tharga ppls dead by dedicated destroyers players by 1v1, yes with Singuarity cannon.
And I also countered some of Singurartiy fighters with Emperor by using my combo.
That means not all fighters with singurarity cannon kill dessies so easily.

Also fighter is not going to 1v1 with a destroyer but instead +1 dedicated engineer and a tackler that slows down the fighter.
Plus there is highly chance that they will use team speak to communicate their information, which is a disadvantage for surprise attacker.
(They will also ping specific player that is approaching and that will make other players to ready for an incoming surprise attack)

Ofc there are some counters and conters to this counters (and it also has a counter) but that’s how it should looks like

If someone plays bad on counter dessie or enemy have some counter for him then enemy are just better and nothing more it’s not like everything should be equal just because it has a counter

pvp is already a cancer, but staying in place just because we worry about balance didn’t make this mode any better

1 hour ago, SilverIris said:

Assume one team has 5 destroyer player and other team has 4 destroyer player and 1 non destroyer player.
One team has 5 chances to bring destroyers and other team has only 4 chances to bring destroyers cause one of them didn’t bring the destroyer.
Of course dedicated fighter player can annihilate the whole team but, once again I’m assuming a normal random PvP.

No, there would be max 3 dessies vs 3 dessies (at 12vs12) the rest would be on other ships so it’s not too much, maybe there could be a problem for one side for having less dessies than the other side but it’s still better than 8 dessies vs 8 dessies when you can do just nothing. And as I said pvp is a cancer so there can be one good zeta player that destroys a whole enemy team but there also can be a good fighter who will destroy a whole enemy team as well. So it’s more based on skill than on brainless zeta spam.

1 hour ago, SilverIris said:

Due to current PvP meta, there is a real disadvantage that one team has less chance to bring Ze’ta and R17 destroyers.
( Sadly this is true, since I had a lot of matches defeated by the swarm of Ze’ta and R17 dessies on the other side)

There always will be better side and worse no matter on what ships, but it’s much easier to counter 2 zetas than 8 and win even when your team have no dessies at all

1 hour ago, SilverIris said:

At first, players consider their defeat as their mistake or other reasons.
But as the time goes on, they find out that the team with more dessies has higher chance to win.
And the consequences? In someday, people consider player who didn’t bring Ze’ta or R17 dessies as the reason of the defeat and start to blame him or her.
The problem does not stop here: Players would tell newbie to bring Ze’ta or R17 dessies to play T5 random PvP match.
After that even dedicated players like u say “Dessies are not the problem”, majority of them would not listen.
Because that’s how they learn, they experience in T5 PvP.

There is a unwritten rule in pvp: the one who has better randoms wins. And no matter if they’re on dessies or gunships or any other class, I saw many times in seccon ppl that uses zeta with kai or halo vs other dessies and they’re unable to even hit and remember that randoms in seccon sux, but they’re still better than randoms in pvp so it’s not like “they don’t have dessie take one so we will win” but still like “they’re useless we can win this without getting tired” or “they’re too good we can’t win this”

And I’m not saying “dessies aren’t the problem”, a single or 2 dessies aren’t but 5 or more surely are that’s why we should nerf not quality, but quantity of dessies

And if someone wants to learn how to play a dessie why not to give him a chance? Just he need to play in group, there are so many newbies that they can make a group and play vs another newbies just there will be less dessies maybe they will finally learn how to play this game for real? not just in dessie (which most ppl do wrong anyway)

11

12 minutes ago, Boczek121 said:

 

No, there would be max 3 dessies vs 3 dessies (at 12vs12) the rest would be on other ships so it’s not too much, maybe there could be a problem for one side for having less dessies than the other side but it’s still better than 8 dessies vs 8 dessies when you can do just nothing. And as I said pvp is a cancer so there can be one good zeta player that destroys a whole enemy team but there also can be a good fighter who will destroy a whole enemy team as well. So it’s more based on skill than on brainless zeta spam.

I finally got your point. I was thinking you were talking about an original idea.
And yes I’m with you, that Dessie spam like 8 or so should be stopped.

 

 

17 minutes ago, Boczek121 said:

There is a unwritten rule in pvp: the one who has better randoms wins. And no matter if they’re on dessies or gunships or any other class, I saw many times in seccon ppl that uses zeta with kai or halo vs other dessies and they’re unable to even hit and remember that randoms in seccon sux, but they’re still better than randoms in pvp so it’s not like “they don’t have dessie take one so we will win” but still like “they’re useless we can win this without getting tired” or “they’re too good we can’t win this”

I learned a lesson from you.
Maybe I was overheated for some reason.
I’ll take some rest now to cooldown my brain.
 

12

Just 2 thoughts:

 

  1. “dealing” means in fact being able to handle the dessie spawn. And you can easily do that without setting a limit to dessies. How? When you start pvp, slot different types of ships: dessie, ecm, gunship, LRF. Imagine an example: … an Emperor, a big sitting duck, with a huge tank, easily popped by a Chiron with torps, rightly built… 2 jumps and you can easily take it down to 10-15% hull. Imagine you have smart pilots in your team (not bots!) and 2-3-4 of them watch the initial ships used by enemy. Then when they see 8 dessies, they choose LRF and they FOCUS FIRE!! Then 2-3 shots/player and the dessie takes 30-40 seconds brake ![:)](<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/001j.png “:)”) Problem solved. Same solution with 3-4 gunships. Tharga with jump is very hard to kill, and 3-4 gunships on a dessie kill it in 3-4 seconds. Simple as that. What limit are you talking about??? ![:)](<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/001j.png “:)”)

 

  1. setting limits, generally speaking, is a bad idea. Or an experiment. Other simple ways to solve the dessie spawn: damage amplifiers (Tracer plasma gun fits just nicely here, but ask yourself how many people use it in pvp?? (sad face) ). I guess you have seen in Defiler how big the damage gets when it’s hit with multiple Photons. You almost don’t need chips to kill it :)) Same thing goes for dessies. But again, how many pilots focus fire? I am tired of asking that question ![:(](<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/003j.png “:(”)

The only thing really needed is the pilot’s awareness! Lots of people play on a fast-forward mode, instead of simply looking round, judging the situation, and deciding what to do. 

 

One more thing: the match starts when the team is formed, not when you land in the map! Did you understand that - and prepare accordingly?? (there's a tip sometimes on the bottom of the screen, which I am willing to bet 2-3% of pilots see it and read it - something like "choose the ship according to the teams' needs, not acc. to what you want to play!"). This is one of the most useful tips i've seen (and kept in mind)! So the idea is when you start a match, it's about the team, not about yourself. The more pilots understand this (and prepare the ships with this in mind!), the more quality there will be in pvp.

 

Edit: also, keep in mind there are pilots who work on upgrading Zeta for like 6-12 months. Or longer! It wouldn’t be fair-play towards them to limit the spawns, then how will they upgrade? Ideally, you upgrade a ship in pvp,  not pve or bots. So you really need to be able to do that, not to be limited/blocked. ![;)](<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/002.png “;)”)

 

Cheers!

 

 

 

13

I think a good solution would not be to limit destroyers in battle by number or whatever, but by individual destroyer.

For example, only one Relic can be launched on the field at any given time, and after they are killed, another ally has the option of using theirs.

That way destroyers don’t really see a “nerf” there is just no spamming the same meta dessies.

14

1 spawn for high rank destroyers and +1 more as you go lower in rank?

 

15

How about setting a limit on the number of PvP games one must have, before being allowed to use a dessie (level 17 especially!) in pvp?!

 

Everyday i meet pilots who have 300-400-500-800 pvp games, but they own a Relic. Or an Emperor. ![:(](<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/003j.png “:(”)And, obviously, they have 0-1 kills and very, very low efficiency. 

Would you want a dessie like that in your team? Everyone knows the answer ![:)](<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/001j.png “:)”)

 

 

My idea: you can build/buy (with RL money or ingame) a level 17 dessie, can use it everywhere EXCEPT pvp. Or, you must have 2.000 (yes, 2 thousand) VsAi games to be allowed to use it in PvP. And 2.000 more for each level 17. And 5.000 for Zeta, because it’s way more complex than a level 17. This way that pilot will not be a minus for that team.

 

 

16

11 hours ago, DaCookiez said:

Everyday i meet pilots who have 300-400-500-800 pvp games, but they own a Relic. Or an Emperor. ![:(](<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/003j.png “:(”)And, obviously, they have 0-1 kills and very, very low efficiency. 

Would you want a dessie like that in your team? Everyone knows the answer ![:)](<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/001j.png “:)”)

This is due to Relic and Emperor being the  most available ships in the game. If you had just begun playing the game within 20 days of the beginning of the ‘Faction Wars’ or ‘Galactic Tour’ battlepasses then you were eligible to build the ships - as it can take as little as  one to two days  to reach the required clearance level to build the ships after creating an account.

Remember, there is  another battlepass coming with ANOTHER Destroyer.

 

 

As for the proposal overall - it is a temporary measure to a toxic meta. It would create more problems than it would solve due to several issues:

  • Varying balance state
    • The developers are liable for implementation and removal of the mechanic at their own discretion based upon the state of the class, the last four years or so Destroyers were complete fodder but not once did the development team consider removing the “melee coefficient” that was responsible for the awful balance state
  • Complications of freedom
    • It would enable the possibility of a relatively low skill or “returning player” to bring four destroyers and be  eliminated permanently  from a match without knowledge of the mechanic
  • Detriment to progression
    • This would make it incredibly difficult to learn how to control a Destroyer against player opponents - managing Ai opponents will always be trivial due to predictability and lack of reaction to module usage

Although yes the proposal would ease the pain of the current meta, once the balance issues causing the meta are resolved it would be highly liable for the development team to refuse to remove the mechanic, as per how they handled the melee coefficient and it’s god awful implementation.

 

 

I will write up and revise yet another rebalance thread later - this one will be complete and comprehensive, covering every single module, all secondary slots, all destroyers and all modifiers.