Capital Ships and the Future of Discovery RP 24/7

[Luke.]

My opinion on Capships:

I understand people who like to fly caps and it is their right. There should not be any limitating system that decides "who is worthy of owning one" or any restrictions.

Why?

Pretty much because fighter combat sucks in Disco. In my experience, only every 10th fight is cool, most are just boring, long-winded, repetitive... too slow (e.g. no progess) or too fast (e.g. insta out of nowhere)... spoilt by dick moves like rebotting, lag dodging, base-hugging, jumphole-play, npc-farming or generally just insta-repairing the damage that was caused slowly.

Snub combat is generally too hectic, ships too small, guns too slow, dodging too effective, difference between no-skill, medium skill and high skill is much too large...to sum it up: snub combat plainly sucks.

If you are not giften with eagle eyes and reflexes and some rare talents of whatever sort, you will likely just suck at snubs, hardly ever hitting anything, but dying like a baws to ships you never even see, not even to talk about hitting.

So it comes as no surprise that a lot of players go for ships that are immune to these pesky little unhittable VHFs that are (for them) impossible to kill. A cap offers invulnerability against the VHF ship class and also against the players that rule this ship class.

Cap fights offer something else. A completely different gaming experience. And one that is in my opinion much better than the snub experience. Cap fights end faster, they actually feel like fights pretty often (while snub combat feels like 'slowly draining' instead of 'fighting fiercely'). These ships can get hit and if you hit with them, you hit hard and... the most important part is: you have an impact.

You hit in a VHF? Congrats. You just drained 2 bots of... 80 (not counting the rebotting that will happen in every 3rd fight anyway).

You almost killed a VHF? He goes full dodge and docks. Another fight without an explosion. Or he thrusts for 30 k effortlessly and planetdives with a fat trollface.

In VHF, people gank like hell because it's the only way to win in a reasonable time frame. But the gank also justifies every dick move as an answer.

=> And so we go on and on and on and nearly every VHF fight leaves a bad taste.

Caps have the decency to go down, to da damage before they go down and to blow up beautifully.

So the problem is not caps.
The problem is the unattractive snub system that forces people incapable of doing snub combat to play with caps.

My solution:

Fix snub combat, and you will have much less cap spam because many players would not feel like "I have no chance in the snub segment, I fly something they cannot touch.".

I agree with almost everything here. This pretty much sums up why Caps of all kinds are a decent addition. Except, I think the skill comes with playing for a lot longer and learning how to map your keyboard to your own style correctly. 99% of people in snubs (whether it be LF, HF, VHF or SHF) use mines and a CD, most of these again to good effect. The problem is, the server nowadays doesn't really give much lee-way for those that aren't that great at PvP and they'll just get killed over and over again until they can learn what style suits them best. This is difficult though when you can't last long enough to figure out how to do better against an ace fighter.

Anyway, back to the subject of Caps...I play an Outcast a lot, being high ranking in CL} and what-not. I see many indy's start out in their CSV's, work up to a Sabre then mission spam for their life going through Gunboat, Destroyer and then finally the Battleship. What i've learnt from this is that I think people are just bored of using fighters. Yeah sure bombers are a good variant and a few skilled pilots (you have to be to fly one) at once can down almost any Cap BUT...I think you see so many because people get bored of snubs and then because everyone has a Cap these days, they want to join in. And why not? Money isn't hard to get if you're motivated enough to trade, missions aren't too bad and become easy to gain millions in a matter of hours.

You can't stop it. Nerfing them, SRPing them, bumping up price or whatever is just not viable at all. It also seems proportional to the areas you play in. Liberty is the biggest and most popular house so therefore you see a lot of Caps. Therefore, because of RP regarding the Rheinland and Liberty conflicts, Rheinlands population is mainly caps to combat Liberty without being ganked to hell every time. If there's going to be a solution, it's making fighters more fun so that players boredom of snub flying in Vanilla Servers is overridden. How to do that? Don't even ask. Obviously that's opinion based though.

Maybe one day people will get bored of using Caps, who knows. Unlikely but it's not ruining the server, there's still abundance of fighters etc. People still like flying them, just not as many as before due to the game being old and many people playing for years. Factions are a good way to get round this, their ranking systems sometimes limit ship use etc and encouraging fleets that have to consists of fighters as well as Caps. Again, this depends on the ZoI of the faction though.

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