Balance

[Nadir]

I was asked in the KNF forum by a senior member to make rules about reducing the number of missile turrets available on ships. The same member also suggested people patrol and make contact with enemies in fighters instead of capital ships in order to encourage agressors not to turn up exclusively in battleships, and only break out the heavy stuff when the heavy stuff turns up at our front door. This is my response, for better or worse. I would be interested in what people think about the issue of solving balance problems. I'd like a sober discussion on this so please, no off-the-cuff flaming - I have a few 'brave' and possibly quite unpopular things to say.

There are quite a lot of balance issues and, agreed, worse is the missile turret ones.

So now people are saying we have to modify the way our characters do things because of yet another game 'bug' (balance issue). I hate that situation. Playing 'fair' invites the argument that no-one should fly ships or fine tune their weapons loadout at all as that could be, and often is, unfair to an opponent. Hey, the only way to ensure battles in FL are fair is to change everything so everyone has one gun type and one ship type available - then it would be purely a test of flying skill. Are we expected to nerf our own load out and nerf our fleet (such as it is) to placate anyone who comes after us?

How would Quake 3 be if you got pissed off at the guy (or girl) who just fragged you just because they had a BFG and you only had a shotgun, then proceeded to insult them because of it?

Unfair situations happen.

It's childish behaviour from losers that is endemic in the Disco community. Loosing is annoying, especially when it seems that the enemy is 'cheating' by having better ships and weapons. But they're not cheating. And it's inevitable.

We don't have enough active members to start playing nice when battleships turn up on our door step and blow stuff up - our 'fleet' has one battleship with one player who's play time is now strictly limmited. We're not encouraging other players to attack us with bigger ships, the game allows that to happen so people will do it anyway.

The game balance of FL is skewed all over the place. A fighter cannot even dent a battleship's shields so if one of us is on and an enemy battleship turns up (I can count three times that happening when I flew just a fighter), we have to go hide until it goes away.

I will NOT mandate artificial un-RP rules to limit ship types or weapons. It would be good if KNF players all had fighter characters and did patrolls in them but I won't mandate it. We have the entire NPC KNF/KNP running around doing that - not that they're much use but that's another issue to do with FL we work around.

Let the flames commence, but if no-one can find a an ineluctable argument in regard to role-play to stop people doing what the FL Disco universe encourages , things will happen as they will. If the whole community falls apart - good! - perhaps that will show Igiss some of the underlying faults in his Mod and allow him to fix them. Let the machine break if it's built with flaws! It's sometime the only way they can be fixed.

If you feel a moral urge to play fair, reduce the number of missile turrets on your ship. If you feel flying cap ships encourages people attacking you to use cap ships (who would choose to attack a House faction in less than the biggest damn ship they could afford?) by all means, fly a fighter.

Remember that it's other players who choose to attack the KNF: we do not attack them. And again, if you're worried that eventually no one will attack us, or the attacks will get out of hand - sorry, it's the unbalanced nature of the game. Give me an strong RP reason to tell people to behave differently and I will, but I won't patch up game problems for Igiss. You can quote me on that.

If anyone goes "missile spamming!" my response is "yes, of course! You have a point?". It's a Kusari invention and it's inevitable for our RP for us to use them. Report personal insults to the server admins with screen shots, or just point out it's not our fault missiles are too useful. Are we playing fair? Not our problem, we're doing what our characters would do.

So, sorry, I'm not going to be making any rules over this - I think you will find what's good for the game in the short term will make it unplayable in the long - I won't interfere with natural evolution. Things need to evolve by themselves if the whole is to be made stronger.

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ex