20 hours ago, xKostyan said:
on top of that that would eliminate a lot of a psychological factor for rank difference (like r10 fighting r15 even backed up by survivability and dmg buffs).
i totally get where you are going there.
i have no problem with 13-15 existing, i would just design it less of a step up than r9->r12. i think the main issue is, that those ranks are artificially tried to be enhanced / differentiated. the worst and best ships of the game are in those ranks. but you summarize it well. it is a huge psychological factor
imho 13-15 should keep its modularity, full access to all tech gadgets, but otherwise be similar to r12.
i am totally against stretching it further as the other post implied.
however on the psychological side of things, i think, its not just psychological, it is a somewhat unspoken of design issue. t4 and t5 were basicly the same thing with other ships, and t3 was more a subset of it, however resulting in a different meta, that until that point felt evolving. even the t5 implants were kinda more “tries to get some mechanic change into the gameplay” imho, but in the end, it made them single choice. t4 has a good amount of ships, t5 offers more individualization. since this is the case, they should never have been separate tiers, instead, 10-15 should be seen as one big family of endgame ships imho. In the past, the tiers summarized groups of ships better, psychologically, but it really depends on the “base design” what “comes through”
to explain in an example: dirty bomb has loadout cards ranging lead, iron, bronze, gold, platinum and whatever. while lead and iron have only 1 or 2 perks, bronze or anything above it has 3 - the max. so bronze is what you want gameplaywise, the rest is just skins. since this design idea is presented like this, you quickly adjust your expectations: yes there are iron and leads, and you wanna get bronze. but anything above that is not different. you dont see gold as better. you only see iron and lead as worse. you still may want gold or higher for heroes you love.
same goes for ranks. if the game presents you, that ships from r10/r11 onward are state of the art warships capable of endgame, the rank differences become less psychologically impacting above that. with the hidden bonuses however, you do not see this on paper, it is not presented this way. because there is indecision behind it.
if you get what i mean, how would you formulate this?
only asking, since i really mean it, and you and me are basicly almost identical i think in some of our basic expectations of balance.
something that seems unclear to me, should we send that form AND post it here, or just send that form?