Bias Concerning Snubcrafts (My Opinion and Suggestion to the Dev Team)

[Kalhmera]

A little bit about me,

I am Kalhmera, I came to this server around 2008, left for the Military then came back in 2015 and I have been known since then to exclusively fly cap ships (Mainly the Osiris). Now I am no expert and there are some people here with a bit more knowledge on caps as a whole. I feel I am still qualified to make an educated opinion on what I see around me and How it affects my game play experience. Most recently thanks to @Wesker and @Antonio I have been flying more snubs than ever before and I have to say I really do see the appeal. The ability to fly in a group and really get into snub combat is really taking over and I do enjoy the rush.

My opinion,

I honestly feel the Dev Team, mainly the one dealing with PvP have bias towards snubs. Most recently this Corona weapon was added and it has the ability to fire a devastating beam at a Battleship at 1k range and those of you who know, battleships cannot fire at bombers at that range. The Dev team wanted to make sure snubs was not affected heavily so they added a FL Hook probably created by @Kazinsal (only guessing you due to your position) to limit the damage depending on the size of the vessel. Pretty neat right? Well not so much, Battleships obviously have damage against them upped due to their size, while snubs due to their small size are not getting hit as hard. Now having the weapon at 1k range shows high reward with no risk. Now the dev team states that they wanted to start off small making minimal changes here and there to tweak it. Well the issue is Patches dont come every few days, its takes a week or two (or a month). Now you have a weapon that can wreck Battleships all because we wanted to make sure the snubs where ok first and we will worry about the capital ships later.

Battleship weaponry,

Battleship weapons do not have the ability to reliably challenge snub crafts. I have made my stance on this very clear to @"Aristaan" that Snubs and bombers should fear coming up to Battleship. Sadly they really dont have any fear at all. When the flaks was buffed I had a snub fly right on my behind (500m roughly) and start boxing because before the patch there was really nothing Caps could do to shooo them away. Well insert the new flaks and when that person was destroyed It was reverted back because it was "to powerful" Well here is another instance of snubs having the devs favorite spot.

What I propose,

~The Corona weapon needs to be nerfed to around 700-850m.
~Battleship secondaries, primaries, and Solaris need to have their projectile speed increased.
~The Head Dev @Xalrok To hold department heads more accountable for the decisions they make and ensure that Bias towards any class are not present.
~Ensuring new weapons that are implemented be looked over for both cap and snub effectiveness prior to implementation to avoid instances like the corona being way to overpowered.

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[Unseelie]

What should the goal of balance be?


It seems like they took a class of ships, bombers, which we think of as a meant as anti-capital class, and turned down its effectiveness vs fighters while maintaining effectiveness against capitals...which makes perfect sense?

Or ought a battleship player be able to beat any other player?

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[McNeo]

Here's the current balance:

VHF > Bomber > Battleship

Now I'm not passing judgement on whether the philosophy in question is right or wrong, as that's fundamentally another discussion, but...

Why do you think Battleships should be able to effectively combat a class currently aimed as their counter? What you're actually saying is exactly the same as somebody like me, who would be part of the group whining about how useless and powerless bombers now are against VHFs. Both arguments, with the current balance ethos, are intended consequences of flying a specialised class.

[Sciamach]

I've said this countless times before and I'll say it again:

Balance-wise, there is no point in flying anything but snubs.

There just isn't when a snub can just avoid all incoming fire and missiles by evading slightly to not take shots from the asininely slow capguns, or by pressing the C button once to nullify all incomming missiles - meanwhile there are orders of magnitude more CMs in a CM launcher than any missile launcher in the game. Caps are nothing more than an amusing money-sink that can be killed at any point by a determined enough snub pilot. Sorry but watching 2 VHFs take down a dreadnought over the course of a 2 hour long prolonged fight isn't exactly what I'd call entertaining gameplay for any individuals involved. The very few times any changes regarding cap weapons to counteract snubs in a logical and sensible way have universally been met with vitriolic childish screaming from those that fly snubs at the possibility that the hegemony their preferred class of ship enjoys being challenged - and of course, the moment someone complains about something that they don't like and a staff member agrees with them, that change gets removed.

This is compounded by the fact that historically, "balance devs" have largely been snub-focused players who've by and large done nothing but neuter caps ability to have any effect on the presence of snubs in a fight. Furthermore, I've seen the claim made by multiple staff members that "Oh but snub ace X can do it" is a valid reason for making balance changes that affect the wider community. Balancing for the higher-skilled players of a game largely ignores the very basics of balance and game design theory. You cannot ignore the entirety of the community's skill level just because someone at the skill-ceiling is able to make a certain ship or play-style work. Doing this does nothing more than make those aces even more separated from the rest of the community in terms of skill gap and eventually, the people at the bottom of the gap find the constant losing to be frustrating, and will largely just up and quit.

It's a wonder then that Discovery has had so many people leave the game over the years when they're just starting out. /s

This mod is not balanced for anything but snubs, never has been, and considering the responses from certain members of the community and staff regarding my pointing these issues out: probably never will be.

Edit: Because I'm trying to be more helpful by offering suggestions for fixes when complaining about something, rather than just complaining, I direct the balance staff to the following video for a surface-level intro about what I'm talking about. The balance of Discovery between the ship classes does not at all reflect the information conveyed. Disco is rapidly becoming a ghost town, and if we have any hopes of keeping people around at all, having people leaving discouraged because of the atrocious balance of the game is not at all conducive to the long-term health of the game.

As mentioned, for your informational viewing pleasure:

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[ sci·am·ach ]
/sīˈamək/

A simple, angry man casually working his way through life on a personal quest to acquire copious amounts of street cred.

[Karlotta]

What should the goal of balance be?

Progression (skill, shipclass, credit, yeah they are all perfectly seprable) giving you a higher chance of winning, but not a 100% chance of winning,

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[Kazinsal]

Couple points of clarification, plus what ended up being a few paragraphs extra than I was setting out to write on damage calculation.

The damage the Corona deals to battleships was never increased. Previously it was doing 5000 damage per tick^[1] to all ship classes. This was objectively bad and turned the Corona into a fighter-spanking god-lance. The solution involved redefining the Corona's damage values on the client side and writing a new plugin on the server side to dynamically override damage values from specified weapons against different classes of ship. The result is that the Corona deals scaling amounts of damage to different ship classes. Probably the easiest one to kill with Corona bombers is cruisers and I think that needs a bit of a tweak, considering that cruisers are generally not outfitted with defensive weapons that can reach bombers at the kind of range the Corona is capable of dealing out.

Yes, bombers are designed to kill capital ships. That's entirely the point of a bomber. In the most recent patch, we reduced their effectiveness at swatting fighters out of the sky because that's A) not what they're meant for at all and B) an incredibly un-fun mechanic. Imagine if someone could lay down a mine right in front of your battleship that you would immediately float into and take five million damage? Not exactly fun. Now imagine that same weapon is applied to a cruiser, which wouldn't even have half of that one-shot EHP^[2] from full with a cap8. That's what SNAC snipes are like to fighters. Except a lot more small craft tend to be involved in fleet engagements than battleships, partially by design, but the rate happens.

As for patch rate, we're intending to increase that when needed. For weapons like the Corona that are already set up to have their damage values dynamically tweaked server-side, we can do that on the fly without even restarting the server. For weapons that aren't set up we can only buff them on the fly, and for range or speed changes, we need to deploy a patch. The patch deployment process can be a bit slow for a number of reasons, and it requires the server to be down for about half an hour, so we try to do them at off-peak times, which is unfortunately the middle of the night.

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^[1] For beam weapons, "tick" is defined as the invisible "pulse" generated by a the weapon at the refire rate set up for its continuous damage. In the case of the Corona, the refire is 16.67, so the tick rate is one tick per 60 milliseconds. Generally we'd refer to this for regular weapons as "damage per shot", but since it's a bit hard to determine when and where the actual "shot" of a beam weapon that's intended to be continuously fired is, "tick" is used instead.

^[2] We need to talk a bit about HP (hit points) vs. one-shot EHP (effective hit points) vs. total EHP. HP is your unarmoured, unmodified hull values. For an Eagle, this is 11,700. For an Osiris, this is 1,650,000. One-shot EHP is your HP multiplied by your armour multiplier, or how much points of damage you can effectively take from a single shot before dying. An AU Eagle has 11,700 * 2.5 = 29,250 one-shot EHP. A Cap8 Osiris has 1,650,000 * 4.0 = 6,600,000 one-shot EHP. Total EHP includes nanobots, which is currently valid for all ships except battlecruisers and larger. Nanobot calculation is a bit more complex since it's applied to HP, not one-shot EHP. An AU Eagle has (11,700 + 600 * 66) * 2.5 = 128,250 total EHP^[3]. A Cap8 Osiris has a total EHP of 6,600,000, the same as its one-shot EHP, because it has no nanobots.

^[3] If you've ever wondered why large fighter engagements take so long, look no further. You can put 700,000 damage into an Osiris with a single Heavy Mortar and eat almost 11% of its hull right there by just looking in the right direction and right clicking. Both you and the Osiris are moving so slowly that from close enough it's impossible to miss. The closest thing that exists for fighters is achieving a Mini Razor shot, which is significantly more difficult than achieving a Heavy Mortar shot on another battleship. A Mini Razor deals 17400 damage, which won't one-shot an AU8 Eagle -- remember, its one-shot EHP is 29,250 -- but will take away 13.5% of its total EHP assuming the pilot immediately slams that nanobot button. But the margin of error on a Mini Razor shot is a lot higher than the margin of error on a Heavy Mortar shot, so trying to get that kind of big damage chunk from a single shot against a fighter is difficult. When the SNAC was doing 132,000 one-shot damage against a fighter, well... there's the rub.

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None of this post is intended to be justification for the way fighter balance is. It's just the surface level of a deep dive into the game's mechanics and how they fundamentally apply differently to small ships than they do to large ones.

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Retired, permanently.

[McNeo]

....

Aside from the position concerning caps vs snubs, which I think is not right considering that cruisers and battleships are impervious to snubs until a certain number of snubs are reached to a point where they outnumber the caps...

I actually agree with the two main points I can identify in the post, those being:

1. Balancing for the high skill tier punishes people of low skill and takes away the clear progression required to show players that investing time in training and becoming better has a payoff.
2. Long multi-hour engagements are not fun for anybody involved.

Also, Kaz articulates the issue with snubs and cap balance quite well. I guess I would say its about how reliably you can deal damage to ships of those classes, and thats a hard problem to work with. Not impossible, but the gulf to bridge is a yawning one.

[Greylock]

~Battleship secondaries, primaries, and Solaris need to have their projectile speed increased

Solaris have decent projectile speed as they are, but sure, let's go buff the speed some more.

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[Binski]

Yeah I have to disagree a bit on some of this.

The way it is now, BC and BS get flaks, and they still seem quite easily capable of deterring 100% of the torps from a lone bomber. You need the numbers of 2 or more just to get the dps to keep the shield down, and do hull damage. Even with smaller caps like cruisers and BC's, they have the maneuverability to dodge a lone bomber's torps. They work a little harder, but know that they can't be taken down in that situation unless they go idle.

You try to fly in to use a SNAC, Corona, ASURAS or Scortcher, you realistically have to get to around 800m at least to try to be effective. With TZ, hitting a snub in the 600-800 m range is pretty easy. That's why snubs try to torp from a distance, which makes them easy to get flak'd, which brings us back to the vicious cycle of stalemate that results from bothering to attack any capital ship as an individual bomber.

Storytime

The main problem is that back in the day, 1 lone bomber patrol could deter an enemy capital ship, because it was a given that the outcome was determined by it being only a matter of time before the bomber takes down the cap. Albeit, slowly. So the cap usually has the time to put up a fight, or slink to safety if still possible, and use an allied base for defense advantage, or dock before its too late. You could use both a snac and torp to shave away at a larger ship. Now as it stands, projectile weapons like torps, are useless on caps unless fired in large numbers. Caps don't fear just 1 bomber anymore, they can either avoid torps, flak them, and keep that lone bomber from doing too much damage at close range, being the only target to worry about.

It made more sense to me when even a single bomber had a shot at any capital vessel if they could drag the battle out long enough (depending mostly on where the engagement occurs). Things went better because when a bomber could pose a real threat to a cap, battles didn't last too long. The more bombers, even faster things went unless they were countered by smaller ships.

So from my perspective, the last while has actually shown more bias for capital ships. This is not even considering all of the changes to cloaking devices and jumpdrives just to keep capital ship flyers from getting jumped or cloak ambushed. Both problems could simply be negated by paying close attention to your environment, and not taking any chances like straying far from a safe base if you weren't sure of your safey or able to fight back if ambushed. See, some people sat pretty in their carriers yet became so purturbed if not every battle was like jousting where you always see your enemy coming at you fair and square with lots of warning. I've flown every class of ship, and as far as I was always concerned, when you launch a ship like that, you take responsibility for staying afloat. If you want to sit at Freeport 11 to chat but don't want to work at all to stay safe from Nomad ambush (for example), you should rethink your understanding of the game.

If it were me, I'd look at the list. If there were ships in the same system as me that might fit the profile of being able to cloak or jump, and be potentially hostile, I'd not sit there idly, or stray far from a base. If these things happen once battle has started, just accept you couldn't win them all for God's sakes. Those other players used accumulated skill (we literally train for stuff here) and accumulated tech to pull off those maneuvers, and it gets met with disdain by the loser!

Last point as to original topic, I liked the Corona as it was. Same with the SNAC. The corona was powerful, but being considered 'overpowerful' was really a matter of who got to wield it. I'd say limit it to bombers and SHFs, not just anything with a powercore and CD slot. 2 might be overkill, but with power drain it sort of doesn't matter for caps, only smaller ships that could be insta'd. So I'd support limiting 1 per ship. The range was lower than listed it seemed, and depended on what angled you approached a target from. Basically its about the same as a snac or scortcher was when it comes to capitals, but is otherwise useless to use for piracy, unlike a SNAC (til now), ASURAS or scorcher.

How to fix Corona

Lower range to 800m (which really mans UP TO 800 m depending on the vessel it seems, so is more like 600m),

Remove plugin nerfing dmg based on ship class.

Limit to 1 per ship

Limit to bombers and SHF's

How to fix Cap vs Bomber battles

^^^ Coronas as above, can't be flak'd, low enough range to give cap a fair chance at hitting the attacker. Not too short a range to make it insta easy kill (like 600 would guarantee).

Really the Corona is like the evolution of weaponry in Sirius. In real life, we attack with missiles and torps, our enemy uses countermeasures...flares, bullets, anti missile missiles, flak, etc.

So what counters that? In real life, particle weapons will be where we go. If you can't land a projectile because of deterrence, you go with energy weapons that can't be physically guarded against by a simple counter projectile. We would then try to counter with energy dissipation (shielding) and bam, we're in the world of star trek, star gate, Freelancer! The same purpose was behind these antimatter cannons. Low range, can't guide it, but too fast to intercept with anything but an energy shield you already use.

So if you think about it, where torpedoes fail, directed energy weapons prevail. The answer to flaks was antimatter cannons, but now can be Coronas. Ranges on these heavies should always be low if powerful, just not too low. That was the only real problem, and that is where the main balancing factor is for this.

Its just the same for cruisers/destroyers, as you can try to counter out maneuvering torpedoes with the beam weapon. Its already going to still be like this for caps, so the range is key all around.

So last issue is for transports. The plugin 'fixes' that. but its silly. yes its powerful, transports wind up the most vulnerable. But personally, if limited properly to Bombers and SHF's, it will add an edge to those ships, but I don't see it being the end of the trade. Having SNAC's wasn't, having a SNAC/NOVA combo, or a Scorcher/NOVA combo wasn't the end of trade either. Again, the toss up should be in the range. Bring them in close, even a transport has a chance. Bottom line, if you won't do well fighting a bomber with all those other heavy weapons, don't bother see Corona's any different.

There's always the possible counter of a new kind of shield. Or, since I haven't double checked the infocard, maybe one of the three shield types could be made to be more resistant to the Corona than others. That would make more sense as to why it might be less powerful against one ship or another, and its on players to play, and determine how much of a threat they face from this weapon, and let them choose a shield wisely. Time for a moneysink shield for traders only. It could be exactly like a normal shield spec wise, but reduce Corona damge by X% etc. That would be way cooler than just a nerf plugin!

RP wise even, Coronas are a new weapon. Do you invest in a new moneysink shield? Or take your chances?

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[Banned player t202085]

I bit of a short response I guess but my advice is to play it out for a month or so, this change is still new and we shouldn't reject new ideas simple because they aren't already popular.

Lets just roll with what we have been given for a while, give the community time to react and change tactics before making or reverting major changes.

I'm just glad a mod this old is still getting updates

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