I wanted to keep it short but I started writing an essay here so… I kept going. I don’t like bitching, I have registered to forums simply to xxxxx uhh… thrice in my life. Twice this week when I bought Rome II and thought that my copy was broken because the AI was so piss poor that for long stretches I thought the AI simply shut down. Turns out Rome II is just the first step in the eventual plundering of another franchise. It’s not a finished game if you can get away with doing NOTHING on the highest difficulty setting; Sega wants money for blood effects, it wants money for factions already in the game, it wants money for DLC while the vanilla simply does not even function yet. My life long love affair with another beloved franchise is now at an end when the game is so poor I wouldn’t even want to spend the hard drive space to keep it, even if free.
@ Error - it was normal pvp, not sector conquest. The decision to xxxxx came after I had expended a full Pulsar, a Torpedo and a lot of coil mortars on a Tier 5 Gunship which was hurt to begin with; it very nearly survived as well. Super Test Dev Medal Kill! I don’t want the medal; it means nothing in this context.
So, the Guard frigate has used its cooldowns on a hurt Gunship which took my 3 or 4 team mates’ combined effort to hurt. And we weren’t missing at all.
I was in a 1v1 game against one of these full synergy ESB Tier 5 Gunships during the last 4 or 5 days. In less than ten seconds he ate through the two bots. Then sat in front of my Guard Frigate with his laser, and made very short work of my 200+ thermal resistances. Just to frame this right, I’m not talking about winning a match or wrestling an objective from them, I’m talking about killing one lonely Gunship inside a group of enemies. I sat there, as I do after most games, thinking “What order of buttons could I have pressed? Did I miss my shots? Was I out of position? Was I alone? Did I watch my mini-map? Did I know where the other team was? What could I have done better?”; I must not be good enough because my mind was strangely quiet after it simply answered yes to all the checks . Meh. I switched back to Tier 3 essentially halting all my forward progress in 40% of Star Conflict content.
This is where my money gripe comes in as well. I don’t normally read forums or worry over-much about community opinions but let’s say that the balancing and match making are FINE. Then you guys have a massive community-perception problem. It seems that everyone dislikes ESB and then you find Super Dev Medals in the ESB games; it starts to feel, just that little teensy bit, that somehow the devs are in on a diabolical conspiracy to hamstring their own game. It’s just a feeling, not a truth, but it is one that children and frustrated players will happily accept despite what the truth may be. Feelings are important whether we like it or not.
I’m not blaming ESB or making them out to be “evil”, they are the guys who got in good with the game in terms of when they started playing, the time they’ve spent in game etc. I appreciate these things and accept that there’s probably not a single ESB guy who does not have more experience and skill than I do right now. But reading the forums and keeping my ear open I am becoming aware that no one wants to play Tier 4 as it stands, and they’re all blaming (Raging!) ESB and the devs.
Doesn’t it defeat the point of holding Tier 4 events or trying to coax players into Tier 4 with reduced ship-, module prices and tournaments? What did all that effort mean if this is the aftermath?
I tried the new sector conquest for the first time last night. I forgot about the ranking thing and went in with Ranks 6 - 8 ships and guess what. Yes, ESB. This is fine, this is stated and is part of the game. It’s my responsibility. I play with a guy called Bliksem. We beat a three man ESB Tier 3 squad last night; tight game, fun and challenging. It was close, it was a fight, it was exciting. It was everything I love about this game. A tight, challenging match. It was Tier 3 vs Tier 3; not Tier 4 vs Tier 5.
The difference between my Templar S and normal Tormentor is immense! It’s not fun to float around in a Tier 4 blowing away Tier 3. I don’t want to fight Tier 4 ships when I get my Tier 5s. What’s the point? I become frustrated when there are 1800 people online and I’m stuck with two bots against a low Rank Tier 3 player for three games in a row. What’s the point! He’s not learning anything, I’m not getting better. It’s free synergy and credits yes, but it means nothing.
@xKostyan - Getting better in the process is a sentiment I am 100% behind. I’ve played national/provincial Squash, I’ve played provincial tennis; sportmanship first, practice and incessant technique-drilling second, intuitive execution is the last thing to come to the toolbox. The Golden Rule in tennis and squash and chess and almost any other interactive game with pre-determined rules is that the only way to get better is to push yourself by playing tougher opponents. My father is a world class squash and tennis player in his early 60s. If I get onto a court with him, he simply outplays me. If he doesn’t want me to have a point I won’t get it. He is a Tier 5 player with 40 years of fitness and experience behind him but the difference between him and I are not thanks to our racquets. I, on the other hand, am in my twenties. He and I both know that a serious game between the two of us will be a pointless exercise where in which I will learn very little (unless he holds himself back which is also a bit pointless). So, I drill with him and then we go looking for our own opponents. You have to be on the far edge of your own skill to have a valuable game.
Equipment is a fixed variable once a game starts. Falling off the edge because of equipment? A bit pointless. Isn’t that why F1 rules change constantly, so that equipment difference doesn’t end up outshining the drivers’ personal skill and killing the sport in the process? Game after game of full synergy Tier 5 Gunship loving ESB players is not a way, I would guess, to get better because, if killing one is a 4 or 5 man job what happens when we want to take a beacon? Oh but wait, I’ve won a T4 vs T5 game against ESB because they were simply flying around killing players and not going for objectives. They got alot of kills and I was just lucky enough for the old “Avoid the enemy, capture the beacon.” strat to work because they didn’t seem to care at the time; a win yes, but not a good game.
I love this game. I would have married it when I read something like a mission statement saying that this game will never be a shallow experience. It wasn’t and it isn’t, but there is a massive problem now with 40% of the game. Whether the math is 100% and my “problem” is imaginary what isn’t imaginary is that when I read this other thread complaining about the same thing and all the other SC loving players agree, it seems like this is a game killing trend in the long run. Tier 4 and 5, at the current time, with the current population and tier demographics and matchmaking system, is simply a place where no one apart from stat farming ESB players seem to have anything meaningful to do apart from ‘dying through it’.
I would like to know what the dev team’s thoughts are on this at this time? Does the Super Tester I shot down think that fully synergized Tier 5 vs Tier 4 ships makes for balanced games? Does this super tester have a relatively balanced win loss ratio in this sort of set up? What exactly does it feel like on the other side of one of these games? I don’t know yet, I’d have to “die my way” through tier 4 and 5 to even get a glimpse. Dying my way through a game seems… pointless. And once again, if you take my money I expect a certain standard despite beta status; 40% of the game disappearing for whatever reason seems… counter-productive.
