Look, everyone knows that once you start taking steroids, you don't want to stop. Muscle-mass gain is addictive, yet 'roids can lead to anger due to secondary hormonal changes which increase anxiety and depression. This isn't helped when you're being beat up by all the featherweights in the room. But you have to keep taking more because people are going to beat the crap out of you because you appear to be big.
The same applies to spaceships. And factions.
Now here's your problem - all - of my members are newer players, or older players who either have ping issues (me), due to unavoidable factors like global location, or simply having toaster hardware. These newer players are essentially the Arbeiter's only consistent playerbase apart from the Connecticut crowd who pull a no-RP con-only Arbeiter out of their behinds, mostly to handshake each other about how powerful the ship is, and meme about how undeserving we all are.
Newer players cannot appropriately use its strengths. A fighter like the wraith or guardian, on the other hand, is pretty easy for newer players to pick up. I'm averse to everyone flying eagles as that's a fairly flavourless thing to do - besides, the Eagle is a Libertonian design, and thus doesn't need to be overrepresented by Unioners flying them for obvious lore reasons, despite the Unioners having a stockpile of the craft. Eagles are bland.
Now a noob can pick up a Guardian or an Odin and thrash an Arbeiter in anything other than a 1v1 joust. With the removal of the extra gun, this just became a bigger problem.
I do not care what the 0.1% of snub pilots can make the Arbeiter do, as that fact is irrelevant in regards to who actually plays the ship. If the creme of PVPers played the Arbeiter, that would be a concern. They do not.
Therefore, nerfing the experience for less capable snub pilots only motivates people to play caps instead. And I refuse to turn Unioners into an all-caps faction.
In addition my actions were largely supported by Unioners, with one exception whose advice I did take, and reposted the document once the file was back. It had the intended effect - attention was brought to the issue, which is the purpose of a protest. I do not particularly mind how people regard me - I care about the happiness of my member base, and the happiness of people who have ingame encounters with my member base.
@Durandal put it best. There is an overarching issue that factions at large are immediately hounded when they log in. This is okay if you have the capability, organisation, and will, to spin fifty plates at once whilst playing a strategic Napoleon and maximising equipment meta as hard as you can splash credits at it, but most of us do not have the time.
When I took the reigns over of the Unioners, I did so with an agenda. I wanted to prove that an under-loved ID for an NPC faction that was regarded in the community as dead-in-the-water could be made survivable and that vanilla unlawful factions other than Outcasts, Corsairs, Rogues, Hessians, Blood Dragons, could have some life, in much the same way that Mollys and Gaians have done so in Bretonia. That there was some love in the little guys. I also wanted to create relatively fun piracy and bring a similar aesthetic to what Liberty Rogues have done for Liberty, to Rheinland, as that's always healthy. We haven't succeeded in everything we wanted to do, but we've done pretty well. Six months from now, Unioners will still be official, more likely than not.
I will always prioritize the interests of less experience players than veterans. Not only because they're my member base, but because veterans (like you and me) can look after ourselves, are loud, outspoken in our opinions.
I do listen to feedback, Blacko. I agree I could have handled it better. I still maintain that the Arbeiter nerf was injudicious - not especially because I want broken equipment, but because I want to conserve what was already occurring: a more-or-less even PVP situation between lawfuls and Unioners - which is good and healthy. You might go to conn and do well in it for all I know - you're a good snub pilot. You can figure out its strengths and weaknesses in a matter of hours whilst somebody who plays the ship tagged might take months to figure its nuances. Consider that. I also have to motivate people to play snubs before we turn into a community where everyone less skilled flies caps and only some kind of illuminati of hyper-wiz kids flies around in fighters.
As is universally recognised, even by you, the Arbeiter is a bad fighter in the hands of noobs, but great in the hands of pros. This was the case even when it had eight guns. It's still good for pros, but now it's a lot worse for noobs.
It rewards learning to PVP properly in a way its stats don't immediately make obvious. And I try to make UN somewhere where learning is meant to be fun. Where people who arn't into PVP, or arn't into smuggling, or into more intense RP, can be gently nudged into learning. And I know I am banging my head against a wall here and I can't convince you. But I will not abandon my position to people who do not fly the ship on the real server. Make a different unioner group and fly it for a year and then come back to me.
We should not all be held to the smallest denominator: PVP supermen. And every time PVP supermen go and complain to the balance devs the gameplay of the actual, less-skilled player-base gets shafted. Over and over. This was what the eight guns were originally implemented to fix; Haste recognised this.
Edit: It may surprise people, but I do not like stirring forum debates. It doesn't benefit me or Unioners. However I will always challenge groupthink when I believe it's dangerous to the wellbeing of the server as a whole.
