(11-28-2024, 05:00 PM)Omi Wrote: Lyth pretty much nails it too. It was about the overall experience of playing with friends rather than the actual mechanics of the fight for me, and that sense of building a little squad of your own and setting out to fight for your common roleplay cause is essentially gone. Half your Discord will swap sides for balancing reasons now when you're still 2 jumps out, and then you'll get to experience another bland, obsessively balanced fight with no real stakes or soul behind it whatsoever.
When I made my initial post, I was still on the fence about playing again. Since then I have been playing more and partaking in more PvP. Have to say what Omi says rings true. Almost none of the fights I have partaken in have felt organic, or that there's any soul to them (I had one pew in Dublin that felt natural-ish) It really does feel like pvp is just rotating flavours of Firstname.Lastname. And whilst I get their implementation these fairplay rules are honestly so stupid for the RP environment, it really is just making every brawl feel like glorified conn. Nothing feels natural. And I don't think it's feasible in the long run.
Otherwise, it's login, hope I find someone worse than me I can clobber, or I get clobbered by someone better than me. It's difficult to find something that feels genuinely even and balanced (which is ironic, given the fairplay rules). I had forgotten how staggering the skill gap in this game can feel, even with the new mechanics in place. The core of the issue to me is it highlights one of Discovery's biggest problems with PvP and I'll go out and admit it: it's tough to enjoy a fight without winning it. It feels like the whole experience leading up to either scoring a blue message of being faced with the death screen just still isn't that great - it's just a means to an end. The roleplay, or the circlejerking, or whatever other magic you have with these moments just isn't there like it was before.
You either come out with a tiny drizzle of dopamine from the blue, or you're just left feeling like shit afterwards because you spent 30 minutes floundering around in a pew that two minutes in you could already tell wasn't going to go in your favour. It's things like that which make me think the game really needs instakills again, or just SOMETHING to add some spice to pvp to make it feel more dynamic and allow genuine comebacks to be possible. It feels way too much like a numbers game and you're counting down seconds on a clock.