Currently we mix r7 with r9s, without any consideration to gear on those ship, simply by ranks, if new modules unlocked in more appropriate way AND implant progression looked at as well, I don’t see how, for example, mixing r8-r10 is worse than current r7-r9, or r4-r6.
(note: haven’t talked to gizmo, but i agree with him for my own reasons)
because this is just confusing, and basicly the only thing warthunder e.g. does really wrong and it doesn’t really work there either, so please do not copy that trend. in that game i dont care, because its just planes for lol, even if some ppl might take it slightly more seriously, but most people really don’t, they are just looking for something better than wot; there it does not have to be fair. but this game is supposed to be a game which should center around teamplay and balance, and already creates very solid communities behind the game, with lots of players who try to unlock the games potential, and being able to explain the game to new players is KEY to this.
rant going on in spoiler.
Any change in this direction will most likely hurt squad play yet again, because squads will again face weapons they cannot equip; the past has taught us this. It again does not increase incentive to squad up, or end in experimentation, which ships to take to get ranked into games where the squad does not have to fly uphill battles nonstop, again creating stuff like R8 ships killing T2s… So if changes are made in this direction, I hope there will be no squad penalties, or other weird things.
instead: make sure all tiers are balanced internally. make sure, every tier has its metagame, which can be explained and explored by players. make sure, tiers are very easy to unlock until t4, especially in terms of modules, so everybody can come into t3 endgame in the first month (and so they stop blaming other stuff, like golden ships or purple modules), and people get enough rewards, to tinker around with stuff. the game is fun on full purple and that is what keeps older players in the game. it is not fun in terms of rewards, item management, etc. and even if the grind has been reduced, it seems that “older players” is a group of players which does not get a lot of new faces each week for months now, and the gap between the players seems to stay the same in both skill and equipment.
the dead ranks (R4, R7, R10) could be much better integrated into their tiers, by taking the 5 tiers seriously, instead of focusing on even more dissection and experimentation between all the ranks, and create even more fluid differences nobody can overlook. if in the end, the tier does not say anything about the usage of the ship, and the game gets heavily complicated to figure out the matchmaker, people who love the game for actual gameplay will be turned off.
5 tiers is more than enough to create diverse emerging game metas, and only makes it easier to balance out stuff, not harder.
i personally disagree therefore with any inter-rank-balancing, since it already proved SEVERAL TIMES in the past, that it does not work, and every few months or so, we get back to this until it ends in massive problems and player loss and QQ.
it was a design decision to put in tiers, for progression, for being able to be f2p, for creating diversity with different layouts and ships, we all get that. it was not a very modern design decision, because most modern games aim to be tier-less or at least balance all tiers against each other, except a few like wot, which are slowly fading away. but we are there, the game got balanced like this. and especially in t2 and t3 the game had huge success from the start.
5 tiers are enough. 15 ranks is 15 ranks nobody really needs. it can exist for balance/progression purposes, but instead of trying to achieve a fluid balance between ranks - which would even break the game population further - try to stabilize what was great in open beta, and what DID work, and rather go on optimization of GUI, social game experience (corps, ui, …), individualization instead of progress blocking for the monetization, etc., aka learn from the past, try to go into a direction which makes this game more popular, and give it the success it deserves.
especially also with microchanges, like the ship browsing in queue, the icons, etc. a lot of things were implemented, that made things better, but often way too late, and accompanied by weird bugs in either modules (weeks of adaptive bug), or the matchmaking, which was one of the main reasons why people left in the upper ranks later - sometimes after it was fixed, because it exhausted the players to wait for it. and without experienced players, nobody is there to teach new players, and we have yet again a skillgap, and people moaning about “t3 farming” and other unreflected subjective nonsense.
why? because i cannot just “play better” for the next week and get my stuff together. i have to play for the next month to even be somewhere near the possibilities of the older player with the more stuff IN THE SAME RANK AS I AM.
more fluid ranks: people will even specialize less, will not continue to fly fully synergized ships, will keep arrogantly blaming anything and everything. problems get worse.
IF current tiers are hard to maintain, why not change the tier system? make R8-R10 T3?
I mean, yeah, we could also get rid of tiers completely, but this would again just make everything even more confusing. In my opinion, the problems come not from tiers.
the problems are the ranks. try to create tiers without ranks instead.
