This Thursday, Star Conflict servers should see the next update, but what it will be?
Today’s blog article will tell you everything about it!
The first part of our blog is devoted to the changes in camera operations. As we’ve already mentioned earlier, we continue to work on this aspect of the game and the patch this week will present the camera’s the next iteration! You will see that we have tuned the targeting mechanics (now the sights will move along have an elliptic border instead of circle border during targeting) and also added the option to tune the distance where the camera is located in battle. You can change this distance in the game settings. In addition, the problem has been corrected with PC mouse behaviour during fight — now the players should have no trouble with jerking or bad response while operating their ships.
Next, we would like to tell you about the changes among premium ships. Having analyzed the collected statistics, we decided that the level of generation of free synergy on premium ships should be increased to 20%. This is due to the fact that with a stronger synergy generation rate, players could opt out of further development of the ship branch, and just happen to be tied to a single vessel. In addition to changing the bonus, information about it will now be displayed in the tooltip of the ship.
In conclusion, we’ll tell you about squads. As you know, there’s a difficult situation with the balance of power between the players who come into battle alone and going into battle in a squad. Now, the situation is that the players who are in battle against squads find it extremely hard to beat the squads.
For many of our players this situation is a major problem and reduces their interest in the game. Therefore, we have decided to reduce the number of members in squads to three people. In the following patch this change will be enabled on the server. We understand that players who are used to fly in groups of four may be unhappy, but they should not forget the interests of the other pilots!
In addition to these three changes, players should expect all sorts of changes to weapon balance, and some modules, check tomorrow’s patchnotes yourself!
All of this is great, with the sole exception of the reduction in squad size.
I cannot even begin to express my discontent with this change. The entire structure of some corporations is build surrounding the fact that squads have a size of 4.
Solo players have every opportunity to grab other solo players and form squads as well - we even further facilitated this by providing them a public Teamspeak so they can communicate at the same level as well. Reducing our ability to play with friends and corporation mates will severely reduce the overall long-term enjoyment of this game - for the sake of pleasing people who choose to play an ‘MMO’ style game without interacting with other users.
Imagine this - Many people formed regular 4-man groups and these now need to leave 1 person out. What is this person going to do? Twiddle their thumbs? Take turns?
In addition, how does this work in PvE? Do we have smaller squads there too? If anything, many of us have asked for bigger squads. I’ve spend most of the weekend going through feedback and suggestions made by the community and I can tell you right now - reducing the squad size was not one of the things I came across.
Please reconsider - I couldn’t urge this more strongly.
Next, we would like to tell you about the changes among premium ships. Having analyzed the collected statistics, we decided that the level of generation of free synergy on premium ships should be increased to 20%. This is due to the fact that with a stronger synergy generation rate, players could opt out of further development of the ship branch, and just happen to be tied to a single vessel. In addition to changing the bonus, information about it will now be displayed in the tooltip of the ship.
Terrible. Simply terrible. So, instead of 100 Synergy (from a 1k base), we’re getting 200. Truly horrible. THIS is why you waited 2-3 weeks for “analysis”?
In addition to these three changes, players should expect all sorts of changes to weapon balance, and some modules, check tomorrow’s patchnotes yourself!
I’ve spend most of the weekend going through feedback and suggestions made by the community and I can tell you right now - reducing the squad size was not one of the things I came across.
Hmm… so we’re getting an “oldish” camera pack? That’s kind of cool.
The squad size change is a surprise I have to admit. I don’t know if it’s a solution that’ll work, but it does look promising as it suggests moving away from the old attitude of “our Russian corps are all that matter”.
Premium… 20% Free Loyalty is nice, but I don’t think it’s nice enough. It still doesn’t address the main issue; that Premium ships are less valuable than free ones. You will still have to fly for longer overall using a Premium than you would if you just flew the free ship.
Having just ground the last of the Rank 4 ships I can honestly say the biggest problem you have is matchmaking. When Rank 4s are put up against other Rank 4s, with a few R3/R5 outliers, they feel good ships. Not great, but good. They get the job done. But when they get bumped up into full-blown Tier 2.5 matches with R6/R7 dominating the field, their (considerable) design flaws really begin to show. Flying them becomes a chore, and the fun disappears.
I have already made suggestions on how to work around this. Premium ships could be divided by tier, with Elite Experience transferable for free (ideally) or for Credits (to balance progression speed) within a tier. As such, players could just buy a Premium ship and use that to carry them through a tier, or just to get past ships they don’t want. However, they couldn’t just use one ship to go all the way from T1 to T5.
Example: If you don’t want to fly certain Fed ships, you could buy a Fed T2 Premium and the synergy generated can be used for any T2 Fed ship. More generously, you could allow any Premium in T2 to be used in any faction, but that would still cause certain issues… like someone just buying the Superkite DLC and then using that to blitz Empire, Fed and Jericho. I would personally prefer you actually have to fly the faction you are leveling.
Overall… it’s a nice gesture, but it’s not enough. You haven’t given us back the value the Premiums lost. Now they are just a slightly less terrible waste of time and money.
In conclusion, we’ll tell you about squads. As you know, there’s a difficult situation with the balance of power between the players who come into battle alone and going into battle in a squad. Now, the situation is that the players who are in battle against squads find it extremely hard to beat the squads.
For many of our players this situation is a major problem and reduces their interest in the game. Therefore, we have decided to reduce the number of members in squads to three people. In the following patch this change will be enabled on the server. We understand that players who are used to fly in groups of four may be unhappy, but they should not forget the interests of the other pilots!
Huh. There’s really nothing all that bad here. I mean, sure, some of them could *possibly* turn out to be bad, (Like hidden weapon/module changes), but until we actually know what they are, there’s no point in whining about them. Especially the squad one, which sounds reasonable.
Camera change > good, will be intresting to see how it will work.
Locking chage > Hard to imagine this…Will have to see.
Premium change > as mention earlier, a step in the right direction, but it definitly doesn’t make me want to fly my premiums any time soon
Squad changes > I don’t see a problem in this, beyond 1. What about PVE? PVE will have to be through the custom lobby(Which is a pain to use) or with 1 random, which will basicly mean a very good chance of failure in the T5 PVE.
This is my theoretical feedback, practical will come tomorrow after testing the new patch.
The only thing wrong with limiting size of the squad is that now we get to play with less of the people in our corp.
I feel this change was inspired by World of Tanks. It wasn’t something the community asked for and doesn’t address the root cause of the problem that it is trying to solve.
Organised teams will always be stronger than disorganised ones - that’s a given in any game which squarely revolves around team play.
If anything, there’s a higher chance that 2 squads of 3 end up on the same team than 2 squads of 4 - thereby potentially making the alleged problem worse. It will just be a lot less consistent and you’ll end up fighting your own corporation even more often. Which by itself is already a silly game feature.
I did. It came as a surprise there as well. The reason why they did it is obvious, but the solution is strange, though I suppose understandable. They want to prevent the “kill squad farming” as much as possible, but it seems they do not think they have the concurrent online userbase large enough to segregate squads in some way.
I feel this change was inspired by World of Tanks. It wasn’t something the community asked for and doesn’t address the root cause of the problem that it is trying to solve.
It makes sense then. I mean, they’re LITERALLY turning this game into SWoT.
How about you fix the singularity cannon damage and finish the animations for it before you go about tweaking other stuff?
I feel this change was inspired by World of Tanks. It wasn’t something the community asked for and doesn’t address the root cause of the problem that it is trying to solve.
Organised teams will always be stronger than disorganised ones - that’s a given in any game which squarely revolves around team play.
If anything, there’s a higher chance that 2 squads of 3 end up on the same team than 2 squads of 4 - thereby potentially making the alleged problem worse. It will just be a lot less consistent and you’ll end up fighting your own corporation even more often. Which by itself is already a silly game feature.
Completely agree. This is not the fault of corporations nor squads, but game design. Stop babysitting new players, let them feel the real game early on, so that they are prepared and better able to play at a higher level when they reach the tiers that corporations are at.
Why not fix synergy to make it less abusive to players instead? Why not make the game less of a grind, so players aren’t turned off by that, because I will tell you this, more people are turned off by the stagnant progression and lack of options for corporations to do anything together than the size of squads.
You want feedback, here it is: Stop making it exactly like World of Tanks. The grinding of tanks actually sucks, and is why I played Star Conflict instead.
Why not fix synergy to make it less abusive to players instead? Why not make the game less of a grind, so players aren’t turned off by that, because I will tell you this, more people are turned off by the stagnant progression and lack of options for corporations to do anything together than the size of squads.
With numbers actually showing the exact opposite (specifically GS expenditures on Elite Synergy and increased peak player base, topping off at around 2.3/2.5k pop, atm) I highly doubt they’ll want to think away from WoT. Which is pretty damned terrible.
How about you fix the singularity cannon damage and finish the animations for it before you go about tweaking other stuff?
Completely agree. This is not the fault of corporations nor squads, but game design. Stop babysitting new players, let them feel the real game early on, so that they are prepared and better able to play at a higher level when they reach the tiers that corporations are at.
Why not fix synergy to make it less abusive to players instead? Why not make the game less of a grind, so players aren’t turned off by that, because I will tell you this, more people are turned off by the stagnant progression and lack of options for corporations to do anything together than the size of squads.
You want feedback, here it is: Stop making it exactly like World of Tanks. The grinding of tanks actually sucks, and is why I played Star Conflict instead.
You should check into a mental hospital, you just went 180 on your usual comments about this game so I fear something might be wrong with you…
However yes, the impossible grind is a huge letdown and an insane obstacle…
Reducing the squadsize to 3 will not change anything.
This Problem exists only in T4/T5 since you get mostly 4v4 matches there. So instead of a 4 man squad stomping 4 pugs, we will have a 3 man squad stomping 3 pugs. So what? No change at all. Other than taking away a part of the fun that corps have to fly with 4 PPL.
