I like the lobby idea. We have customs, but that’s not quite the same thing. Would be a pretty big change to go from queue to lobby though.
Tbh I’m not particularly impressed with this patch. Similar to Nuke/KT’s analysis of the patch, there were some good additions, but some bad changes.
Personally, I fail to see how removing 3 and 4 man squads and adding in SC Leagues is supposed to help everyone. I can’t tell you how many people I have met over the years who are just joining and want nothing more than to play with their friends, but now, it is impossible for newer players to do so, unless they have T5 ships. BUT, that brings up another issue. SC Leagues are a much more hardcore teamplay than regular PvP. Regular PvP is more casual, and more friendly for your average player to participate and do well, but Leagues are stepping it up quite a few notches. The main focus is removed from “having fun with friends” and put on “working together as a team to win a game”. These two things sometimes go hand in hand, but that is mostly for veteran players who understand the game’s mechanics and are very good at the game. Average players are going to struggle in Leagues as many of them don’t have that level of knowledge or experience to do well against such teams.
Sure, 3 or 4 man squads could completely swing the favor of a game. But there was a reason for that. Not enough was done to encourage squadding. I remember the days when you couldn’t go a game without seeing at least one 3 or 4 man squad on each team. But those days ended because it was made too difficult to squad up. Instead of saying “f*ck you players, now no one can play with friends except in more competetive/challenging modes”, you should have said “let’s improve this situation to give everyone more of a reason to squad up”. If you make it easier for people to squad up, more people will, vets included. Don’t believe me? The squad changes that made it so 2-man squads didn’t need a squad in the enemy team to get a game that were tested this summer were implemented, there were lots of squads in every tier. I actually got games in T4 in squads, and T4 is normally the tier where nobody squads up. When you have that volume of squads, you won’t have nearly as many balance issues as with the normal squad system, where it was often a 4-man maxed out gear squad vs a 3-man squad of pubs who wanted to play together. Sure, that wouldn’t be fair, but when you have an increased number of squads, most of the vets will be paired against each other in higher tiers. Most vets squadded in T3 because that was the only place it was easy to. But if you make it easy for people to squad in T5, most vets will, as it is more rewarding, and more fun in most cases.
Removing the ability to play with friends casually from a multiplayer game is quite literally one of the worst decisions you can ever make in a team game. Teamwork always implies working together, so why remove the way for players to do that with their friends?
On the positives of the patch, I am pleased with the new module system. It is nice to be able to use most of my ‘T5’ modules on my ‘T4’ ships, or even some of my ‘T4’ modules on my ‘T3’ ships. It definitely will make it easier for players to move up the ranks without the detriment of having no good gear.
Just looked at the video Koro posted, and remembered about recon rushing. Experienced, good players already have a hard enough time countering a recon rush, what makes you think your average players will be able to? Something needs to be done about it.
bots in SQ. You’re joking, and you’re bad at it.
Indeed. This is the worst change of this patch, aside from losing squads.
Look at this pointless joke of a game I had the pleasure of queing into this afternoon:
I will restate here what I mentioned over on /r/StarConflict:
For one thing, I didn’t play much T3 in the past weeks because bots were readded - I don’t want to deal with them in random games, and much less so in corp battles.
What really would suck would be a distribution of random players into empty games, resulting in a lot of 7v1 situations rather then a couple 7v7 ones. They might consider this because of wings complaining about organizing their team and then being “cheated” out of their game.
I think dreadbots are silly, be it against a whole team of them or using them to prop up existing teams.
I understand the want/need to strike a balance between disgruntled teams and bad games, but I’m afraid this is pushing it too far in the bad games direction.
Similarly, I understand you found no other way of balancing large squads in pvp - just a couple people coordinating (or not) can tip the scales of balance. Still, it was an important thing to be able to play in a group - where are you going to learn teamplay, if not in regular pvp with nothing which matters on the line? Tournaments are only at specific times once a week, Dreadnoughts aren’t quite the same as regular pvp and this new League thing adds the pressure of being ranked into it, it doesn’t seem like you can just hop in there and have a couple matches (like you could with the old sec con), you need a team and you’re stuck in your team until the season ends (right?)
What else is there in this patch? Ah yes, the Leagues. It’s nice to have something similar to tournaments (which were a great addition) and them being in the format of old sec con should pacify the people who missed it to some degree. I’m not sure if the whole teams thing is going to be a bit restrictive over time, but we’ll see and I actually have to try these first. In general, I’m somewhat neutral over what doesn’t seem to be too small a feature.
Ranked equipment and battles seem pretty good (better than mixing static tiers, anyway). We’ll see over the course of the next weeks. I haven’t really noticed any change at r15 yet, but that’s to be expected.
The underpowered ship disabling has gotten a bit harsher (and the difference in ship strength between ranks smaller), which is nice, but there still is nothing from preventing people to join into CTB with an incomplete lineup. We only need it for t4+, pls.
Weapon rebalance seems good. There was nothing about the Ion Beams looking snazzier now as well, but they really do look great. Conversely, a not so great thing about Ions is that the information available on how they actually work is non-existant either ingame or in an official compendium (I know, there is a project about redoing the wiki, which is indeed needed). Does the reduction stop 20% earlier than it used to? Does the reduction apply 20% slower? How long does that reduction take anyway? Does it completely reset when the beam is stopped or veers off target for just a moment? Where is it’s cap? Does it only affect me? Main weapons or all my damage?
Unfortunatly I’m not really a command player, so I can’t comment too much about it - but I feel this is a nerf to their effectiveness more than anything else. The burst is nice and gives the player more to do which should lead to more interesting gameplay if you have to time something (similar to the engineer), but, unlike the engineers heals, the resistance does not remain on your ship after the burst effect wears off, so balancing it with the same formula might be difficult.
There is now a purple color. Cute. Has been requested for a long time (like lead markers for allies with eclipse, mind you) and it’s nice to see something like this, even if I personally don’t care about the color.
Bugfixes like not being able to do anything about the outcome of attacks where the attacker didn’t show up, the system hack or the holos capping are nice. Hell, we even got rid of the zone-leaving robot in the empire hangar! Truly a day of change for this game.
Problem: using Adaptive Camo on interceptors and pressing their hotkey again afterwards disables it. I thought this was supposed to be adressed 2 years ago when it came up the first time.
Phase suppressor secondary effect (reduce heal effectiveness) pulls out tacklers of their invisibility. Should I bug report it or its a feature?
Phase suppressor secondary effect (reduce heal effectiveness) pulls out tacklers of their invisibility. Should I bug report it or its a feature?
It is not the health reduction, this weapon has also a DoT, like a Mini Plasma Web, that takes it out of cloak.
Advice: It goes for 3 seconds, cloak earliest if it’s almost over, so you do not get uncloaked.
I like the lobby idea. We have customs, but that’s not quite the same thing. Would be a pretty big change to go from queue to lobby though.
Agreed, And I’m sure it’s probably too drastic a change at this point. I do think it would work better though.
It is not the health reduction, this weapon has also a DoT, like a Mini Plasma Web, that takes it out of cloak.
Advice: It goes for 3 seconds, cloak earliest if it’s almost over, so you do not get uncloaked.
That DoT effect deal no damage, but cut heal effectiveness in half, like spy drone.
That DoT effect deal no damage, but cut heal effectiveness in half, like spy drone.
The DoT actually deals really really low damages
I came back to five pages of this thread 
Can someone do me a TL:DR?
I admit that you know our game very well, but this sentence of yours just doesn’t make any sense. really. Btw, most players are happy about these changes, they can play more and earn more.
The only real issue I have is that higher rank equipment is difficult to get vouchers for when you are new, so you start running into stuff like a leaderboard farmer in a khala with r10 purple gauss cannons and a weapons overcharge, in your level 3 synergy fox or something. In my opinion picking on new players is the highest form of unsportsmanlike conduct. Especially when they fill a platoon and go hunting in the leveling path, which is the main reason why people are complaining about the platoon changes. You’ve essentially placed yourself in a position where you have no cultivation of new players and the primary voices of the community are all predators who get off on farming new players, and by crossing them you risk losing the community altogether.
You can approach this a number of ways that won’t require tireless policing of the player population. If reducing the grind is not possible, you can look at the meta components that drive such players to farm newbies. For example making it impossible to leaderboard farm in lower rank ships, and possibly adding a statistics by ship tab in the player profile. This way everybody can see where their stats come from. You could also add some kind of matchmaking mechanic that allows players for X amount of battles in a new ship to avoid seeing max synergy ships or veteran players so long as they have no max synergy ships on their bar, so that they can get some grasp and maybe a little synergy before they start encountering these ruthless players. Also, you could consider an equipment rental system of some sort. Possibly tie it in to open world missions or pve scenarios or something like that. Or maybe even pvp missions or the rank up bonuses for new players.
Most new people quit before they spend enough time for a monetary investment to complement their time investment, and it is because the garden is not weeded and kept free from pests, so to speak.
This is why I’m glad for the synergy level changes, and for the attempts to balance out equipment between the ranks, and for the platoon changes. I can tell you know there is a problem, and this is a fantastic start.
Also, if you could add some kind of popup warning for players who take ships of vastly different tiers if you’re not going to flat out disallow this? They should be made aware of what they’re about to get themselves into if they are not already.
maroufle, you’re pretty much the only one I’ve seen claiming Commands are worse, pretty much everyone else I’ve seen discussing it feels they were buffed. Yes, the mechanics changed a bit, so you need to tweak your ship a bit. That’s what happens when they do balance tweaks.
Maybe because noone played it like me, ENERGY based!
now it’s unplayable this kind of setup, if your shield is dead means you’re dead
I had a double shield kinda, now i have…a double xxxx
well ok, i leave, i liked the gameplay, now it’s a buffbox ship, no fun at all
And if noone reported it, then my ship is bugged
Maybe because noone played it like me, ENERGY based!
now it’s unplayable this kind of setup, if your shield is dead means you’re dead
I had a double shield kinda, now i have…a double xxxx
well ok, i leave, i liked the gameplay, now it’s a buffbox ship, no fun at all
Also, I made another video about my thoughts. I think by now I’ve gotten all of them across so don’t watch this unless you want more of the same.
Everyone knows that commands are energy based, for their diffusion shields and to manage buffs. If you think your build is special I think you’re going to have to post it. I agree command is more of a support class and the passive buff values have been decreased, but the energy tradeoff and active buff make up for it. I think most players would agree.
Everyone knows that commands are energy based, for their diffusion shields and to manage buffs. If you think your build is special I think you’re going to have to post it. I agree command is more of a support class and the passive buff values have been decreased, but the energy tradeoff and active buff make up for it. I think most players would agree.
How can i post a setup that have been deleted from the game?
Now if u want a video of that broken diffusion shield i can do it no prob even on stream if you want
Everyone knows that commands are energy based, for their diffusion shields and to manage buffs. If you think your build is special I think you’re going to have to post it. I agree command is more of a support class and the passive buff values have been decreased, but the energy tradeoff and active buff make up for it. I think most players would agree.
I run two passive armors on my command, the 24 from coating polarizer passive negates the drawback I got from that without taking away from my regen. I like it. I just think the actives aren’t as long lasting as I wish they would be.
Well, you could post what you have and comment on the missing equips from what you previously had. It’s still possible to be a brawler, see Adam West’s command play.
2 passives is pretty extreme imo, but there you go, various builds are still workable. I agree with you Hyperion the actives are a little short, but they might be OP if increased to say 15 sec.
I really like getting into a battle where one player ahs already disconnected and one never connected.
Well, you could post what you have and comment on the missing equips from what you previously had. It’s still possible to be a brawler, see Adam West’s command play.
2 passives is pretty extreme imo, but there you go, various builds are still workable. I agree with you Hyperion the actives are a little short, but they might be OP if increased to say 15 sec.
I just had a module on my ship to transfer a percentage of damages taken to energy, this energy was usable for diffusion shield, and it worked for both my ship in shield mode (when still have a blue bar) or in shell mode (yellow/orange bar) (sorry i have a localised game in french so to have the exact translation it’s not easy
Now i dont have this module anymore, not exist, has been deleted, and when in shell mode, i can be full energy the diffusion shield dont work, no energy pulled, and shell go down even with full energy, that 's so hard to understand??
I’m a leveling guy, not at endgame, but, i ask myself what did they do with my ship!
Which ship specifically do you have? R8 Prometheus?