Question to the community

[Sombs]

I used to be among the best with battleships a few years ago. Then I took a break from Discovery and the battleship balance changed drastically.

Snub PvP always felt incredibly dull to me. Duels are always the same, and groupfights are always the group chasing one fighter that has to dodge to buy the rest of the group as much time as possible while they shoot the chasers. Get instakilled and you feed regens to the enemy, making it worse for your own team. There is no matchmaking, and some devs prefer to keep the skill gap as high as possible. Plus you always have some groups that will use flimsy justifications to make fights as unfun as possible.

So why bother with things that don't feel fun or have little to no reward when Discovery offers plenty of other content to enjoy without a time investment.

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[Lythrilux]

Something else I've also realised that makes Disco PvP significantly less interesting compared to other games: bizarrely, it's a game where you actually won't improve much from playing the game regularly in normal interactions. Investing time into conn to improve is a mandatory requirement, and I think for a lot of players that's not very fun. It feels disconnected from the experience of the overall game. It turns improvement into a chore, rather than something that can grow naturally from normal play (and in tandem with the RP experience).

Also something else other people have touched upon; the overall balance of ship classes seems to change wildly each year and it can be tedious to keep up. Not to downplay the efforts of Developers trying to improve the game, but lowkey I've never really understood why every year it seems like balance has to change so drastically. Could be rose-tinted glasses speaking but for me the balance of .86/87 outside some fringe cases was largely fine.

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[Ramke]

Honestly, there's not much need to focus on the PvP aspect. It is very much a PvP game, and if you feel motivated to become better, participate in more fights and you will.

But I feel most people's priorities aren't to be the best PvPer - it's a roleplay server where most of the gameplay lies in doing communal activities, speaking with others, trading, interacting. PvP is inevitably a part of interaction and roleplay, but not the "main" aspect. This is especially more relevant nowadays as most fights are group fights, where coordination beats raw skill.

I used to be one of the better ones when it came to flying bombers, but as time went on and I fell off from not playing, I've found zen in just doing okay, and focusing my effort elsewhere. I'm far from an ace nowadays, and not really interested at all in getting back to that point. If I get to fly with friends and have fun, I'll opt to do that instead of sweating in Connecticut trying to chase the mythical ace skills and feel bad when I don't beat aces anyway.

In other words, I play after work to have fun, and stressing over trying to become better and my performance isn't fun. If I get to participate in fights, I just do it to have fun and try something wonky or funny. As Sombs said, plenty in the game to focus on other than sweating in PvP enough to "get good".

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[SeaFalcon]

Honestly, there's not much need to focus on the PvP aspect. It is very much a PvP game, and if you feel motivated to become better, participate in more fights and you will.

But I feel most people's priorities aren't to be the best PvPer - it's a roleplay server where most of the gameplay lies in doing communal activities, speaking with others, trading, interacting. PvP is inevitably a part of interaction and roleplay, but not the "main" aspect. This is especially more relevant nowadays as most fights are group fights, where coordination beats raw skill.

I used to be one of the better ones when it came to flying bombers, but as time went on and I fell off from not playing, I've found zen in just doing okay, and focusing my effort elsewhere. I'm far from an ace nowadays, and not really interested at all in getting back to that point. If I get to fly with friends and have fun, I'll opt to do that instead of sweating in Connecticut trying to chase the mythical ace skills and feel bad when I don't beat aces anyway.

In other words, I play after work to have fun, and stressing over trying to become better and my performance isn't fun. If I get to participate in fights, I just do it to have fun and try something wonky or funny. As Sombs said, plenty in the game to focus on other than sweating in PvP enough to "get good".

This for me.

Time vs Reward is very much out of balance, especially with the lower population.
Back in the day you didn't really need to sit in Conn to get good, you just had a lot of fighting in-game to naturally make you good. And there was a bigger pool of enemies to fight.

I do miss the long lengthy fights, but no game mechanic will fix that.
I very much doubt any real mechanic will fix the skill ceiling this game has, especially on snubs.

Getting the guns and layouts and ship handling changed all the time also doesn't help much.

This actually put me off from even bothering to try and get back into it, knowing that next patch the setup I'm comfortable with is either broken, nerfed or just doesn't exist anymore. Just like some other games out there that change so much with constant patches to their mechanics, when you go back you see a hundred notifications of new things which makes having to re-learn a game you liked unfun.

So yeah, got older, game changed too much in both community & mod.
Time vs reward is not there in pvp, but that's different for everyone.

[AuruemSaber]

But I feel most people's priorities aren't to be the best PvPer - it's a roleplay server where most of the gameplay lies in doing communal activities, speaking with others, trading, interacting. PvP is inevitably a part of interaction and roleplay, but not the "main" aspect. This is especially more relevant nowadays as most fights are group fights, where coordination beats raw skill.

In other words, I play after work to have fun, and stressing over trying to become better and my performance isn't fun. If I get to participate in fights, I just do it to have fun and try something wonky or funny. As Sombs said, plenty in the game to focus on other than sweating in PvP enough to "get good".

I do miss the long lengthy fights, but no game mechanic will fix that.
I very much doubt any real mechanic will fix the skill ceiling this game has, especially on snubs.

Getting the guns and layouts and ship handling changed all the time also doesn't help much.

this pretty much captures it all for me. though i do think the last part falcon mentioned deserves a bit more of a spotlight as well.

especially in a community where burn out and multiple month long hiatus's are a thing. It can be very jarring to come back from a break and have a lot of things changed and having to play catch up as well.

The one other thing I feel like is worth mentioning, at least in my case is that pvp (especially for snubs) is a skill that requires upkeep. And as someone who started playing disco as a teen without having to work and stuff. That meant I had a lot more time to spend in conn or just looking around in game for fights that I don't really have anymore, that and as I feel like i have gotten better at it, I find rp to be a much more rewarding experience.

After all, Conn training these days does tend to feel like an experience where you kinda just smash your head against the wall against the same few people over and over again and it's understandable to me why people can't really stick with it and personally I'd rather spend the time playing other games where pvp is the main focus if i want the experience or even more usually just playing sp/coop games which I personally vibe with a lot. Maybe it'd be different for me if i got into disco at like 14 or something where I was very much in my cod/battlefield era where i enjoyed pvp a lot more but im rambling now.

At the end of the day, considering conn is somewhere you'll only really ever get duel experience, which as mentioned isn't quite the same hard requirement as a basic understanding of group fights are to have a half decent time (except in the few fringe cases of pretty heavily stacked instances).

It kind of just brought me to the conclusion that it's a lot of investment for not a lot of reward. Especially since you have no guarantee whether you are a cap or snub player that you're going to run into the ship class you might have spent your time practicing for in conn, or even more importantly not even winding up getting into a fight at all.

edit: one thing i forgot to touch on that i only remembered from reading vends post is the fact that for me snub combat is very fast paced and also requires a lot input management that can be very, very overwhelming and personally just isnt for me 90% of the time. Oh and I should also note that I never really considered myself good, at my peak I was maybe barely pushing above average if you want to be generous.

[TheSauron]

Back in the day, I couldn't be bothered to take it seriously as I mostly played groups with off-meta ships. Having to compete with old Valks, Titans or Lynxes in something like a Sichel was a comedy and not a particularly good motivator.

Nowadays, as many people already said before me, I'm just not invested in Discovery enough to keep up the kind of training schedule needed to get to a high level and stay there. Ambient activity is not enough for facilitate it, and I'm not too keen on spending hours on throwaway duels in conn.

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One MD Admiral

[Madvillain]

When I was at my peak I was somewhere in my early twenties. I never cared much for dueling but I did and still do enjoy mixed groupfights a lot.

The time when I was good is long past me now and ever since the raid gamma every day days I notice that I care less. There's a small group of people that is so incredibly good at PvP that theres basically no point in trying for a rusty old player like me.

Things have changed a lot, and now that it becomes dangerous to deal with an ace by overwhelming numbers, and there really isn't much to enjoy about being someone else's NPC, I opt out of PvP more often.

The real strength of this game, in my opinion is the roleplay, and in the rare case that a fight is really equal, its amazing!

It must suck to be an ace nowadays, all that time spent on honing a skill but nearly every opponent that isn't on your tier (the vast majority of the community,) feels like interacting with you outside of conn is a waste of their time.

I really don't know a solution for that, all I know is that I'm happy being average, and I don't think its healthy to want to be the very best pvper in this game. That energy seems to be better spent elsewhere.

The game is more enjoyable for me when I don't feel like I need to prove myself. Not just for me, but the people I interact with as well.

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[Chronicron]

the most basic of cases of "not fun". snub pvp is too fast paced for me to handle, and for someone who loves battleships but is peer pressured into not playing them by every aspect of cap pvp balance, i'd rather spend my days pveing or rping. the former is, gladly, enjoyable. the latter comes down to the lobotomized state of casual RP environment that we have nowadays

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[RedEclipse]

Long and tedious battles in discovery, especially snub ones that's why I gave up in getting any better on it. Back in old times I enjoed a lot of PvP that pretty close to vanilla on other servers like: EG MAIN HQ, Void, Hamburg. For current PvP system, I would rather spent my time in game for any other activity, than jerking mouse and keyboard for a hour or even more.

[Chxlls]

As an aside to this,

When I first started really getting into pvp, I had people that were basically practice partners at an equal skill level as me like @HonourWolf and @Leeon26 where I could improve together with them. Because of IRL obligations and time zone issues that just stopped happening. I also had players like Wesker and @Levenna who really never pulled punches and were quite blunt in telling me where I was weak as I was learning the game, and eventually became good friends with them.

I find dueling at an extremely high level satisfying and rewarding even in defeats, often times feeling like a chess match as players try to counter each others styles. Coming from a background in mixed martial arts probably attributes to some of that, but I understand that I’m more of an oddball in that way.

If I get motivated to get back into this community, I want to spend more time making digestible content that makes learning snubs not so daunting. I think it’s easier than most people think to get to a level where they are serviceable in groupfights. Duels are a different story, but most people I think enjoy groups more anyways.