Ranges: I is very simple, most ships have a huge power spike when they have an extra active module added right? so there is your answer. Make the battle tiers accordingly to that, easy to do and will have a great effect upon the balance issue. If you want to keep the battle tiers system you can adjust this by changing the ships themselves. I’ll talk about this in the designed ship rebalance area.
MM teams: I know the more shackles you put on the MM generator the longer are the waiting times. What makes every game broken in pvp is the unbalance of this. In my honest opinion a skill based system should be used, combined with a modifier related to the ships. This is where it gets interesting:
-Skill level modifier: Take into account the recorded performance for the player with that specific ship, but by the love of the gods, don’t make this “rank” public, people will learn how to manipulate itif you do. It should be based on how well they do in the match, consider healing also so the engineering ships can do they hole they are intended for, same with buffs, objective captures, those should be very valuable to this “rank” system, a player that plays to win should be rewarded over the player that plays to farm kills
-Ship modifier: Every ship should have a modifier attached to it (it should be something like a multiplier for the player skills rank. For exemple, if a player is piloting lets say a gargoyle, it is a very rare very overpowered ship, so her multiplier should be something like 1.5-2x the rank of the player, now the player is piloting an engineering ship, that he just got and he is using mostly green modules, give it a slack, put a 0.3-0.5 multiplier on the ship.
-How this is relevant to the MM: Simple, make sure that the top 5 players have a very close skill range between them, put shackles on the MM he will be unshackled based on the time it is taking to find a match, for example: lets say that the team difference in power is allowed to be at best on 50%. On the first 10s it will try to find a team that the top 5 players are 5% max one from another, the teams could be at 10%, if it can’t find a match, on the next 20s it will increase this number by 5% and 10% respectively, until it will reach a 25% - 50% max.
This is a very complex system, and require A LOT of tunning, but in a few months, maybe a year you will have a very fair MM system, that will take into account the overpowered ships, the ships that are being grinded, and the skills of the player. It also has the plus to fix a broken ship that compensates the lack of skill of player. It will be very unlikely for a new player to meet a gargoyle in battle when he is first grinding the game.
The ships should be changed like this:
Tiers 1-2: They should be considered the newbie ships, they need to have only one active module, the passive modules available to them should be very minimal and they need to have their own MM system, new players should play alone. This will give the MM system time to learn how good a player is, is he a reroll account? things like that, and will adjust the mm once he get level 3.
Tier 3-5: They will get the second module and all the class modules should be available to them, so they can use this tier to learn how active modules work, keep the passive modules ver simple heve so they don’t get overwhelmed.
Tier 6-7: Give this tier all the weapons that that class can use, keep the 2 active modules rule and the passive slots very simples
Tier 8-10: Give this tier a 3rd module, all the weapons and all the equips available, this s the mid tier, that most people will use to play missions because it is very casual and don’t require a team, having the option to fit your ship with variety and clever thinking is a very good thing
Tier 11-13: Give them the 4th module, they should know how to use them at this point.
Tier 14-15: Change the ship bonuses they get, and the layout they have to be able to be custom made, like the destroyers are for example, At this point they will learn how to create a “dream ship” that they can use in PVP and the hardest of the missions and it is a very good reward for them.
How can this be balanced. Simple: for exemple, give the tier 1 ship a better bonus or passive module layout to compensate for the extra hitpoints better stats that the tier 2 ship have. You should consider compensating for the skill tree also in this one, for example today tier 10 gets a resistance bonus that tier 8 and 9 lack, this makes them way harder to kill, they should get very bad layout and skill bonuses to compensate this to compensate this. What i am trying to say is give high tiers more options, shackle low tiers so they don’t have to take the decision and make a bad one. For example, give ier 8 and 9 guard a bonus resist, on the tier 10 give ita speed bonus for example.
Crew implants (skills) to be honest think this system works well as it is, the only thing that i would do to change it is swapping some powerful ones to lower tiers, like the said before tier 10 bonus could be swaped with the tier 2 bonus for example, the roll that has the capacitor increase and the afterburner energy use should be swapped with the critical damage roll for example… So what would i do is, give low tiers the survival skills, mid tiers should have the damage skills and high tier should have the utility skills. This can be done to compensate a little bit the power spike of the ships, As said before with tier that i suggested is a huge spike in power, give them the worst perks to compensate this. Use this system to give Aces more susrvival, and pros more utility and specialy to help balance the power spikes. One extra thing you should consider is punting drawbacks on them. For example the tier 10 change them to this, one will give you armor resistance but will lower your shild resistance for the same value, other will do the opposite and the last on will increase you speed a lot in exchange of some of your armor and shield resistance.
The bonus system should be completely removed. That is a lazy way to fix a unbalanced game. It is a nice placeholder until ships can be more balanced and he skill system is implemented, but it should be removed ASAP. What you can change now that will help A LOT is simples, every ship will be buffed to a elite status on PVP, and every module will upgraded as if it was a orange/purple, and some overpowered modules like cristal plates should b nerfed on PVP (for example they will always count as white modules) This will lower a lot the power difference between a player that is grinding a ship and the seal clubber with a rare OP ship. Also it will encourage people to do PVP. I myself don’t play it because the way it s now it is very unfair, and i am sure you know this, otherwise you will not be asking for our thoughts.
I hope some of this are useful or that they inspire the team to make the right adjustments. Please consider at least giving mid tiers more options to fit the ships, there are a lot of awesome modules taht get available only on tier 11 that will increase a lot the variety of ships capable of doing PVE with great effect. Some of us are so casual that we don’t care at all with the pvp system, and they are very frustrated with pve being the way it is. Tier 11+ mission can only be completed with a very specific ship with a very skilled player with a half decent team or they need to have a god squad to do it, tier 6 stock ships with white modules get destroyed by the AI, A LOT of people, myself included gave up this game for a long time because of this. I was a beta tester and i stopped playing the game for years because of this frustration, now i came back to give it another chance.
Thanks for your time and sorry for the long message.
