- You can. Warpgate works.
And then the interceptors follow and are soon back on you unless you actually gated to a group of teammates. The main time I see warp gates being used well is five or ten seconds after spawn while the interceptors catch up before the enemy gets to the middle.
From what Luckyo is saying, it seems making frigates bots would solve the problem perfectly.
-bot that never engages.
-bot that will go behind everyone in your team, and your team’s job is to cover it.
-bot will turn its modules on ALL the time.
Frigates should never have been playable.
That does seem to be his view. A guard should help be a holding line, not an oversized fighter.
- You’re accusing ESB of using gameplay features that do not exist for other players, i.e. cheating.
I didn’t see anyone here mention cheating. ESB mentioned ESB cheating technically. The main thing ESB gets accused of is being kill squads who are effective at it.
You won’t get around that anymore. As gaming went mainstream the casuals became the target audience. They are the market, they bring the money. And they don’t have the skills (or the time to aquire them) so they want an easy time.
Do you really think the top 100 rated players can support the game? The devs must cater to the casual players. Otherwise those top players would be stuck in 3v3 matches with bots all day long. But you seem to infer that casual players are all bad players. Maybe the casual players just don’t shell out over $2k for a gaming rig and play with enough focus to lose the fun.
I think 90% of people are looking a this game the wrong way.
People look down on T1, players and staff alike. This is a very, very dangerous, and thus wrong outlook.
Tier 1 should be fun! It should be a tier people want to play. I admit that I’ve gone back to it a few times and, when you find a match that only has T1 ships, it feels really fun to play.
Pure T1 is unlike anything I’ve seen in other tiers. It’s all about personal power; your skill as a dogfighter, where hull can’t heal, where railspam is the norm and where modules are secondary to guns and missiles. It isn’t Star conflict as we vets know it. It’s not even comparable to T2, but it’s fun. If you keep T1 ships together, the resulting gameplay is fast, frantic and brilliant in its simplicity.
To turn around and dismiss that as a “baby tier” that people should rush out of as fast as possible does T1 a great disservice. If T1 isn’t fun an engaging, then why should players bother trying the rest of the game? T1 should hit them in the face with core mechanics that make them beg for more, and in my opinion the only times that doesn’t happen is when T1 are matched vs T2, whose superior weapon and module options overwhelm the purity and elegant minimalism of the tier.
T2, likewise, deserves equal respect. It is a tier where modules count, but solo action still matters. Teams will win more often than not, but T2 is a tier where it feels like you can do what you want. Act as a group, and you’ll go far. Fly solo and trust in your skills, and so long as your skills are there you will make yourself felt and help your team to victory.
T2, perhaps more than any other Tier, needs to be the selling point of the game. Why? Because this is the make-or-break tier. This is where players start to make big choices; do they want to keep playing? Do they want to put money into this game? Are they happy alone or do they need a Corp?
If players don’t feel they have the freedom to explore the game in T2, they won’t be able to answer these questions. If they can’t answer these questions, odds are they’ll become frustrated and walk away.
Talk down at the lower tiers, and before long the elitist upper tiers, and the Devs for that matter, will be sat around wondering why the hell nobody plays except a tiny core of die-hards that gets smaller with every passing week…
T1 should be training. It’s the players with a few battles under their belts. It’s probably more fun because more experienced players are trying to level up their T1 ships in a different faction and it’s not getting dominated by squads.
T2 should be fun, you’re getting the hang of your modules and gameplay.
T3 should be fun as well. The ships are more customizable. As it’s currently the “top tier actually populated” it’s populated by some of the negative aspects of the game.
As for T4 and T5, other than player experience, what makes it so much different than T3? One more passive module?