Armoring technical blocks

[Weylin]

I think it's somewhat unfair that thrusters and engines which are buried in armor are just as effective as those which are exposed.

 

There is the concern of creative freedom, but I think some kind of compromise should be made here, though I'm not entirely sure what that should be exactly.

 

In any competitive environment where minmaxing will be the norm, everything fragile and of value will likely be stuffed inside thick blocks of armor with integrity fields, so you're going to see a lot of monolithic bricks with reactionless drives and no discernible weak points.

[Michigo]

In any competitive environment

 

Last time i checked Avorion wasn't e-sport material anyways, besides: the doesn't even intent to focus on PvP.

PvP is one of many features, but the core of Avorion has nothing to do with it.

 

=> No reason to focus balance towards PvP use.

[Weylin]

I'm expecting to have warring factions at some point, and me getting scolded for making something that wastes resources because it's a substandard "pretty" design with breakable components all over it, whereas if I had stuck to their template of big solid chunks of armor, I could let my mechanics repair me to full without any cost towards the replacement of destroyed blocks.

[SageThe13th]

In any competitive environment

 

Last time i checked Avorion wasn't e-sport material anyways, besides: the doesn't even intent to focus on PvP.

PvP is one of many features, but the core of Avorion has nothing to do with it.

 

=> No reason to focus balance towards PvP use.

 

While PvP isn't focus of Avorion the devs said they do consider PvP a feature and want to try and balance it.

[DivineEvil]

I think it's somewhat unfair that thrusters and engines which are buried in armor are just as effective as those which are exposed.

 

There is the concern of creative freedom, but I think some kind of compromise should be made here, though I'm not entirely sure what that should be exactly.

Then there's nothing to discuss. Either they has to be exposed, which undermines creative freedom, or they don't, which allows them to be covered by armor. There's no third option.

 

In any competitive environment where minmaxing will be the norm, everything fragile and of value will likely be stuffed inside thick blocks of armor with integrity fields, so you're going to see a lot of monolithic bricks with reactionless drives and no discernible weak points.

Baseless assumptions. You can make a good looking ship, which is still well protected. WTF "reactionless drives" are?

 

I'm expecting to have warring factions at some point, and me getting scolded for making something that wastes resources because it's a substandard "pretty" design with breakable components all over it, whereas if I had stuck to their template of big solid chunks of armor, I could let my mechanics repair me to full without any cost towards the replacement of destroyed blocks.

In warring factions environment and with current IFGs in action, expenses to replace destroyed blocks are negligible, especially in Shipyards or Repair Docks. Having different profiles or an alternative internal system distribution does not makes a design suboptimal in any way. Ratios of particular systems and blocks within a ship and weapon choices are what will define efficiency in all cases.

[Michigo]

While PvP isn't focus of Avorion the devs said they do consider PvP a feature and want to try and balance it.

Did i say otherwise? No!

 

Can you even imagine implementing PvP into the game and saying "nope, we won't balance it at all!".

Ofc the devs say they want to balance it, cause they want to balance EVERYTHING in Avorion... it's kind of what they dream about. :D

 

All i said was PvP isn't important for Avorion, and as such balancing the game towards good PvP should be put on a lower priority.

[Namuras]

Considering the current railgun mechanics means that haveing a big armored cube might even be a disadvantage in PvP tbh.

 

 

[Guswut]

I'm expecting to have warring factions at some point, and me getting scolded for making something that wastes resources because it's a substandard "pretty" design with breakable components all over it,[...]

 

Don't belong to a faction of people that are going to "scold" you for playing the game the way you want to play it?

 

That aside, so long as you put on integrity field generator blocks to cover your ship, your "pretty"/breakable design should be fairly robust.

 

whereas if I had stuck to their template of big solid chunks of armor, I could let my mechanics repair me to full without any cost towards the replacement of destroyed blocks.

 

As stated above, integrity field generator blocks help here in keeping blocks from breaking. Are you finding that you are often taking enough hull damage to actually need to replace blocks? If so, are you making sure to completely cover your ship with full integrity field generator coverage?

 

Additionally, you'll likely want to consider increasing your shielding as shielding keeps any and all hull damage at bay (minus weapons that have the rare trait of shield penetration).

[Grungle]

I think it's somewhat unfair that thrusters and engines which are buried in armor are just as effective as those which are exposed.

 

There is the concern of creative freedom, but I think some kind of compromise should be made here, though I'm not entirely sure what that should be exactly.

 

In any competitive environment where minmaxing will be the norm, everything fragile and of value will likely be stuffed inside thick blocks of armor with integrity fields, so you're going to see a lot of monolithic bricks with reactionless drives and no discernible weak points.

 

you're absolutely right, it makes no sense.  Space Engineers got this part right: have thrusters do damage to nearby blocks.

[Gatt]

Deleted

[SageThe13th]

Honestly you can already have it both ways.  Take your engines.  Cover them in armor.  Then cover the armor with a thin facade of an engine block.  People who try to take out your thrust will be sorely disappointed.

[DivineEvil]

Trying to balance a game for multiplayer PVP does nothing but grind development to a halt and ruin games for everyone. Any and every system will be pushed to its max and abused by the pvp crowd.  Any advantage will be exploited and any weakness will be used to its fullest. Pvp players are the loudest and most vocal so the devs end up getting to make them happy and the rest of us get screwed. They are never happy with anything.  Eventually nothing cool gets added because a pvp player could abuse it, and make the other pvp plays whine. Any game with creative freedom to build any ship we want will be impossible to balance and if the devs try they might as well bury this game now. I love this game and hope it doesn't end up like all the other games the pvp crowd had ruined

Please stop spitting your nonsense over the forums. You're not contributing anything to the discussion.

[JasonB]

Honestly you can already have it both ways.  Take your engines.  Cover them in armor.  Then cover the armor with a thin facade of an engine block.  People who try to take out your thrust will be sorely disappointed.

 

Against railguns, putting a layer of instantly penetrable material outside thick armor just causes the railgun strikes to reliably deal 2x hull damage even if it doesn't go through the armor layer.

 

Armor is purely volume based, thickness is no more important than the other dimensions, which leads to a few options, but in any case you can build a cube where after the ifg x10 effect each plate on the outside has more hitpoints than the total hitpoints of the hull, which should eliminate the railgun multiplier as a thing.

 

Trying to balance a game for multiplayer PVP does nothing but grind development to a halt and ruin games for everyone. Any and every system will be pushed to its max and abused by the pvp crowd.  Any advantage will be exploited and any weakness will be used to its fullest. Pvp players are the loudest and most vocal so the devs end up getting to make them happy and the rest of us get screwed. They are never happy with anything.  Eventually nothing cool gets added because a pvp player could abuse it, and make the other pvp plays whine. Any game with creative freedom to build any ship we want will be impossible to balance and if the devs try they might as well bury this game now. I love this game and hope it doesn't end up like all the other games the pvp crowd had ruined

 

PVP players actually don't want exploits, they want a broad set of possible strategies with ultimately similar power, which means that the learning phase is extended (its usually the most fun part), and so that the best pilots play in ways that accommodate a lot of possibilities in their opponents and are good at forcing their opponents to do what they want them to.

 

Furthermore, development of the AI to take advantage of the options afforded to PVP players should make for a better single player experience.  The game goes dull fast because the ai is so farmable - ie the whole single player experience feels like an EVE level 4 mission extended adnauseum - where I warp in my battleship to 60 opponents including 10 enemy battleships and destroy them all in turn.

 

I don't think complete creative freedom is required - imo one should be required to organize the internals of ones ship to have damage control or suffer consequences (its why we have different difficulty levels in PVE) and some visual designs are going to interfere with that.  The problem right now is that one creative freedom is to put an armored box around the whole thing, where each of the 6 plates has more hull hitpoints than the entire ship - imo armor should be thickness not volume based for penetration management and it should be sufficiently expensive that it can't substitute for an outer hull - ie I shouldn't be able to afford to plate my entire ship and retain good movement performance and more importantly if I increase the area of an armor plate, it shouldn't also improve its penetration defence (which it does).

 

ie the design questions that arise from how badly the game currently plays are pretty serious - and PVP just exposes those issues.  I'd even go so far as to ask the question as to why armor plate provides hull hps.

 

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

PVP players actually don't want exploits, they want a broad set of possible strategies with ultimately similar power, which means that the learning phase is extended (its usually the most fun part), and so that the best pilots play in ways that accommodate a lot of possibilities in their opponents and are good at forcing their opponents to do what they want them to.

 

... I'm guessing you haven't been playing ay of the PVP-only games released these last few years, they've all been going exactly opposite of what you claim.

 

As an example, World of Tanks used to have classes that were actually balanced.

Then the inevitable happened, the Hardcore PVPers bawwed and whined at the devs, and a plethora of nerfs and buffs happened, and it got to be impossible to actually hurt the hardcore pvpers, and the majority of the players left.

 

 

The Developers of nearly any game where PVP is allowed to occur, tend towards balance.

The Players DON'T.

 

The PVPers gravitate directly towards the least-balanced aspects/characters/strategies. Anything and everything that isn't explicitly patched out, they do to gain an infinitesmal "edge" against the other PVPers, and anyone who hasn't been PVPing the entire time, is "free xp".

 

Look at the original Smash Brothers.

 

Look at Tekken. (literally, any of them)

Look at StreetFighter, and BlazBlue, and SoulCaliber.

 

Look at League of Legends, and DoTA, and even StarCraft.

 

All of them have some manner of exploit, that all the "good" (read, hardcore+ranked_battle_leader) PVPers are abusing literally every battle they think they can get away with it.

(World of Tanks is particularly bad on this front, the devs encourage mod use, except in "tournament" play. Guess what the most popular mod is?  an aimbot. guess how the devs pick tourney players? by stats. Kills vs deaths being the most important stat.)

 

Now, a GOOD developer, will actually keep track of what exploits occur, and will remove the from the code.

A BAD developer, will make it easier to perform the exploit. (I'm looking at you, Smash Brothers 2, making Fox's exploit bull**** from the first game into an actual move, and even more powerfull too.)

 

A truly horrendous developer, will simply nerf the snot out of anything the PVPers claim need nerfing. (naturally, anything that could possibly hurt their precious stats gets the nerf, usually followed by a swift demotion to "utterly useless, why is this still in the game?")

 

 

Let's use an example from within Avorion.

 

PVPers that don't have morals, they use Railguns to the exclusion of all other weapons.

Why? because railguns are bugged such that they do full penetrative damage to the Ship HP, even if blocked by armor.

 

Now, the typical PVPer response whenever a player mentions the horribly broken nature of the weapon, is to cry that "it's not broken, you just suck" or the battlecry of the jackass: "git gud noob".

 

I'm genuinely surprised that sort of thing hasn't been seen all that often on these forums.

(the steam forums for Avorion has a fairly high incidence of it, usually followed by a mod Deleting it.)

 

 

Hell, going back to Every game with PVP ever:

Advanced PVPers eventually get bored of actually fighting one another, (because it's hard to advance their stats vs an evenly matched opponent) and descend upon the only player type that developers should be giving a damn about more than any other: the New Player.

 

Guess what this joyous fest of beating on the newbie so he decides "this game is garbage" and leaves forever is called?

Seal clubbing.  Because it is exactly as easy as going forth and killing a baby seal with a club to the skull.

 

There's nothing the New Player can do to prevent his imminent demise. Meanwhile, the PVPer has just improved his stats.  Another kill for him!

 

The only games you don't see this sort of behavior in, are the games where the PVPers are segregated away from everyone else.  They can murder the crap out of each other, and eventually a player can decide "I want me somma that" and banish themselves to the land of PVP.

 

Why does this happen?  Mostly because Developers quit caring, and allow it to happen.

[Tsunamik]

we don´t have pvp stats do we? so yeah, not that much motivation for seal clubbing heh... maybe griefing, but griefers gonna grief

[Lord_Greyscale]

True, we don't have in-game stats of that sort.  That alone does tend to keep that type away.

[Gatt]

Deleted

[Gatt]

Deleted

[SageThe13th]

Did i say otherwise? No!

 

Can you even imagine implementing PvP into the game and saying "nope, we won't balance it at all!".

Ofc the devs say they want to balance it, cause they want to balance EVERYTHING in Avorion... it's kind of what they dream about. :D

 

All i said was PvP isn't important for Avorion, and as such balancing the game towards good PvP should be put on a lower priority.

 

Quite right.  I misread your post.  Also it's funny you should mention having PvP and not balancing it because I believe that's what EVE's policy was.

 

... I'm guessing you haven't been playing ay of the PVP-only games released these last few years, they've all been going exactly opposite of what you claim.

 

As an example, World of Tanks used to have classes that were actually balanced.

Then the inevitable happened, the Hardcore PVPers bawwed and whined at the devs, and a plethora of nerfs and buffs happened, and it got to be impossible to actually hurt the hardcore pvpers, and the majority of the players left.

 

 

The Developers of nearly any game where PVP is allowed to occur, tend towards balance.

The Players DON'T.

 

The PVPers gravitate directly towards the least-balanced aspects/characters/strategies. Anything and everything that isn't explicitly patched out, they do to gain an infinitesmal "edge" against the other PVPers, and anyone who hasn't been PVPing the entire time, is "free xp".

 

Look at the original Smash Brothers.

 

Look at Tekken. (literally, any of them)

Look at StreetFighter, and BlazBlue, and SoulCaliber.

 

Look at League of Legends, and DoTA, and even StarCraft.

 

All of them have some manner of exploit, that all the "good" (read, hardcore+ranked_battle_leader) PVPers are abusing literally every battle they think they can get away with it.

(World of Tanks is particularly bad on this front, the devs encourage mod use, except in "tournament" play. Guess what the most popular mod is?  an aimbot. guess how the devs pick tourney players? by stats. Kills vs deaths being the most important stat.)

 

Now, a GOOD developer, will actually keep track of what exploits occur, and will remove the from the code.

A BAD developer, will make it easier to perform the exploit. (I'm looking at you, Smash Brothers 2, making Fox's exploit bull**** from the first game into an actual move, and even more powerfull too.)

 

A truly horrendous developer, will simply nerf the snot out of anything the PVPers claim need nerfing. (naturally, anything that could possibly hurt their precious stats gets the nerf, usually followed by a swift demotion to "utterly useless, why is this still in the game?")

 

 

Let's use an example from within Avorion.

 

PVPers that don't have morals, they use Railguns to the exclusion of all other weapons.

Why? because railguns are bugged such that they do full penetrative damage to the Ship HP, even if blocked by armor.

 

Now, the typical PVPer response whenever a player mentions the horribly broken nature of the weapon, is to cry that "it's not broken, you just suck" or the battlecry of the jackass: "git gud noob".

 

I'm genuinely surprised that sort of thing hasn't been seen all that often on these forums.

(the steam forums for Avorion has a fairly high incidence of it, usually followed by a mod Deleting it.)

 

 

Hell, going back to Every game with PVP ever:

Advanced PVPers eventually get bored of actually fighting one another, (because it's hard to advance their stats vs an evenly matched opponent) and descend upon the only player type that developers should be giving a damn about more than any other: the New Player.

 

Guess what this joyous fest of beating on the newbie so he decides "this game is garbage" and leaves forever is called?

Seal clubbing.  Because it is exactly as easy as going forth and killing a baby seal with a club to the skull.

 

There's nothing the New Player can do to prevent his imminent demise. Meanwhile, the PVPer has just improved his stats.  Another kill for him!

 

The only games you don't see this sort of behavior in, are the games where the PVPers are segregated away from everyone else.  They can murder the crap out of each other, and eventually a player can decide "I want me somma that" and banish themselves to the land of PVP.

 

Why does this happen?  Mostly because Developers quit caring, and allow it to happen.

 

This correct for the most part.  You have people who want a balanced game and an even playing field.  But, it will get ruined by the guys who use exploits to win.  And once everybody sees them dominating everyone just seems to jump on the band wagon.

[thedamngod]

Here we go:

 

Gatt, this is your first and last warning. If you don't stop with the insults or if you start spamming you will not be welcome here any more.

 

You most certainly have the right to your opinion on the topic, but it is not your decision which direction the development of the game will take. This is the decision of Koonschi and he has a vision of what he wants the game to become. In that he will most certainly know how he thinks about the PvP/PvE discussion and balancing in general. Trying to influence that through spamming is just a way to get your opinion discarded right away.

There is also no silencing of people who are not 'pro-pvp' as far as I can see. If you want, you can make suggestions on what you would like to see. There are a lot of discussions about AI and balancing of factory made weapons versus AI ships for example. Not to mention posts about difficulty 'scaling' from the outer regions to the core. Why not participate in those and let others discuss what they would like for some pvp aspect? Koonschi can read them all if he wants to and decide then whether he likes it.

 

My take on the whole PvP/PvE discussion is, that if there are a lot of players who want to play PvP then why shouldn't koonschi at least try to create some kind of balance? Again, his decision. But with the upcoming factions update this will imo certainly be an issue that he has to address. There are going to be wars between factions on some servers, as they are right now between AI factions. The wars between player factions will involve players fighting and there the PvP balancing issue comes into play.

Servers who want the most competitive PvP fights will use mods and their own balancing to achieve that goal. That's what is so great about this game. You can modify many things if you want them to be a bit different.

And if you don't like that a server encourages PvP gameplay then you can still go on another one. Just as you can do in Minecraft for example.

 

But there are probably also a lot of players who just play alone in singleplayer, just like I do most of the time. They will never have to battle another player and don't care about the PvP balancing. But they will care about balance of AI and that most likely also has to take place when balancing factions. So they (and I) are still likely going to profit from this in the end.

[Gatt]

Here we go:

 

Gatt, this is your first and last warning. If you don't stop with the insults or if you start spamming you will not be welcome here any more.

 

You most certainly have the right to your opinion on the topic, but it is not your decision which direction the development of the game will take. This is the decision of Koonschi and he has a vision of what he wants the game to become. In that he will most certainly know how he thinks about the PvP/PvE discussion and balancing in general. Trying to influence that through spamming is just a way to get your opinion discarded right away.

There is also no silencing of people who are not 'pro-pvp' as far as I can see. If you want, you can make suggestions on what you would like to see. There are a lot of discussions about AI and balancing of factory made weapons versus AI ships for example. Not to mention posts about difficulty 'scaling' from the outer regions to the core. Why not participate in those and let others discuss what they would like for some pvp aspect? Koonschi can read them all if he wants to and decide then whether he likes it.

 

My take on the whole PvP/PvE discussion is, that if there are a lot of players who want to play PvP then why shouldn't koonschi at least try to create some kind of balance? Again, his decision. But with the upcoming factions update this will imo certainly be an issue that he has to address. There are going to be wars between factions on some servers, as they are right now between AI factions. The wars between player factions will involve players fighting and there the PvP balancing issue comes into play.

Servers who want the most competitive PvP fights will use mods and their own balancing to achieve that goal. That's what is so great about this game. You can modify many things if you want them to be a bit different.

And if you don't like that a server encourages PvP gameplay then you can still go on another one. Just as you can do in Minecraft for example.

 

But there are probably also a lot of players who just play alone in singleplayer, just like I do most of the time. They will never have to battle another player and don't care about the PvP balancing. But they will care about balance of AI and that most likely also has to take place when balancing factions. So they (and I) are still likely going to profit from this in the end.

I apologize for my posts and will remove them. I was respoding to a person telling my shut up and mine my own business. I was under the impression that as a customer who paid actual money for this game i could at least voice my opinions on its development, so to be told to be quiet by a person not any more in titled  to an opinion than myself is frustrating.  I apologize for my response

[JasonB]

PVP players actually don't want exploits, they want a broad set of possible strategies with ultimately similar power, which means that the learning phase is extended (its usually the most fun part), and so that the best pilots play in ways that accommodate a lot of possibilities in their opponents and are good at forcing their opponents to do what they want them to.

 

... I'm guessing you haven't been playing ay of the PVP-only games released these last few years, they've all been going exactly opposite of what you claim.

 

 

When you post a bad guess its likely to be wrong, which it is.  Its never a great idea to start out a post by being wrong.

 

 

As an example, World of Tanks used to have classes that were actually balanced.

Then the inevitable happened, the Hardcore PVPers bawwed and whined at the devs, and a plethora of nerfs and buffs happened, and it got to be impossible to actually hurt the hardcore pvpers, and the majority of the players left.

 

 

Its a pay to win game.  Avorion is not a pay to win game, the developer gets his money upfront.

 

I also played WoT for some time, and I've got several lines to T8 or T10 in world of warships.  Here is an obvious point about WoWs, there is no point grinding any shipline in that game, unless you have some desire to play T10.  The premium ships, which anyone can buy and use, dominate win/loss.  See asia.shipstoday set it to 2 weeks.  Clemson, Fiji, a few others are worth grinding, but most of the top ships are pay ships, that are accessible to any walletwarrior.  The only bad ship in that game is the flint, but there has to be some reward for being the best.

 

 

The Developers of nearly any game where PVP is allowed to occur, tend towards balance.

The Players DON'T.

 

The PVPers gravitate directly towards the least-balanced aspects/characters/strategies. Anything and everything that isn't explicitly patched out, they do to gain an infinitesmal "edge" against the other PVPers, and anyone who hasn't been PVPing the entire time, is "free xp".

 

Look at the original Smash Brothers.

 

Look at Tekken. (literally, any of them)

Look at StreetFighter, and BlazBlue, and SoulCaliber.

 

Look at League of Legends, and DoTA, and even StarCraft.

 

All of them have some manner of exploit, that all the "good" (read, hardcore+ranked_battle_leader) PVPers are abusing literally every battle they think they can get away with it.

(World of Tanks is particularly bad on this front, the devs encourage mod use, except in "tournament" play. Guess what the most popular mod is?  an aimbot. guess how the devs pick tourney players? by stats. Kills vs deaths being the most important stat.)

 

Now, a GOOD developer, will actually keep track of what exploits occur, and will remove the from the code.

A BAD developer, will make it easier to perform the exploit. (I'm looking at you, Smash Brothers 2, making Fox's exploit bull**** from the first game into an actual move, and even more powerfull too.)

 

A truly horrendous developer, will simply nerf the snot out of anything the PVPers claim need nerfing. (naturally, anything that could possibly hurt their precious stats gets the nerf, usually followed by a swift demotion to "utterly useless, why is this still in the game?")

 

 

Let's use an example from within Avorion.

 

PVPers that don't have morals, they use Railguns to the exclusion of all other weapons.

Why? because railguns are bugged such that they do full penetrative damage to the Ship HP, even if blocked by armor.

 

 

Choosing railguns is not a point of honour or a moral decision.  This is a hilariously poor line of reasoning.  That is an efficiency decision and one that is so frequent that it benefits the counter decision of defending the ship primarily against railguns.

 

I have a xan ship with some og and trinium armor.  120k hull hps, 350k shield hps, ie perfectly fine for PVE.  Max thrust 57, max brake 16, yaw 0.26, pitch 0.11. max v 1167

 

All of the outside armor pieces (7 visible) have more than the 120k hull hps.  I leave the engines at the rear open for aesthetic reasons, presuming that I'm good enough to not face them to a railgun strike or if they are it would be an oblique and thus very small target, the sides of the engines are armored.

 

I've just redone it as a hull tanker.  I replaced my 2 exceptional shield subs with 2 generator subs, removed the shield generator , thickened all the armor plates till their values were 50k, and made the overall hull hps 500k, so the armor plates all have 500k hps vs railguns (10x ifg bonus to hp).

 

I added extra drive and thrusters to preserve the performance and as it turned out it now has vastly excessive generator and could be made to perform better than my shield version (the triumph of thrust over mass), or I could further thicken the armor and raise the hull hps within the same visible profile (take the same percentage of hits/misses) as the shield ship.  The drawback for that was requiring more crew and a little more crew quarters (thrusters are crew heavy).  I expect that on the same generator and same resource budget than using shields, but I decided to make this a first pass rather than a carefully tuned example, since my shield unit wasn't carefully tuned either.

 

Since it has no shields anymore and does not allow multiple block penetration, there is no benefit for shooting railguns against it.  In fact other weapon systems might be more effective, since their bonus figures might be better for raw damage instead of only being applied when successfully defeating blocks.

 

ie if I don't accept that railguns are broken, I can easily make them one of the least successful weapon systems against my ship.  IMO the actual issues are,

 

- that ifg bonuses aren't shown ingame

- armor can substitute for hull

- armor area can substitute for armor thickness

- hull outside of armor can count for full damage multipliers even if it didn't have the hitpoints to begin with, which makes it impossible to layer a nice visual design outside of a central armored citadel without giving up excessive survivability

- ai sucks and thus pve even on hardest settings does not resemble pvp.

 

 

 

Now, the typical PVPer response whenever a player mentions the horribly broken nature of the weapon, is to cry that "it's not broken, you just suck" or the battlecry of the jackass: "git gud noob".

 

I'm genuinely surprised that sort of thing hasn't been seen all that often on these forums.

(the steam forums for Avorion has a fairly high incidence of it, usually followed by a mod Deleting it.)

 

 

See above, where changes to the ship design pattern renders railguns non optimal.

 

 

Hell, going back to Every game with PVP ever:

Advanced PVPers eventually get bored of actually fighting one another, (because it's hard to advance their stats vs an evenly matched opponent) and descend upon the only player type that developers should be giving a damn about more than any other: the New Player.

 

Guess what this joyous fest of beating on the newbie so he decides "this game is garbage" and leaves forever is called?

Seal clubbing.  Because it is exactly as easy as going forth and killing a baby seal with a club to the skull.

 

There's nothing the New Player can do to prevent his imminent demise. Meanwhile, the PVPer has just improved his stats.  Another kill for him!

 

The only games you don't see this sort of behavior in, are the games where the PVPers are segregated away from everyone else.  They can murder the crap out of each other, and eventually a player can decide "I want me somma that" and banish themselves to the land of PVP.

 

Why does this happen?  Mostly because Developers quit caring, and allow it to happen.

 

it is possible trivially to design out railguns vs your ship if it lived in a PVP context.  The issue ingame is simply that its aesthetically awful. Its a borg cube.

 

 

[DivineEvil]

To JasonB

Against railguns, putting a layer of instantly penetrable material outside thick armor just causes the railgun strikes to reliably deal 2x hull damage even if it doesn't go through the armor layer.

This is a problem with Railguns alone due to their placeholder mechanics. Its not really something, that is related to variety versus freedom, which this thread seems to be about.

 

I'm guessing you haven't been playing ay of the PVP-only games released these last few years, they've all been going exactly opposite of what you claim.

 

As an example, World of Tanks used to have classes that were actually balanced.

Then the inevitable happened, the Hardcore PVPers bawwed and whined at the devs, and a plethora of nerfs and buffs happened, and it got to be impossible to actually hurt the hardcore pvpers, and the majority of the players left.

All the time I've played WoT (from original release to the introduction of France designs), it was never balanced. Ever. It's a raw pay-to-win title, and Wargames always supported that concept making changes to balance to hide the obvious.

 

The Developers of nearly any game where PVP is allowed to occur, tend towards balance.

The Players DON'T.

The PVPers gravitate directly towards the least-balanced aspects/characters/strategies. Anything and everything that isn't explicitly patched out, they do to gain an infinitesmal "edge" against the other PVPers, and anyone who hasn't been PVPing the entire time, is "free xp".

I for one find this general line of thinking unjustified. Developers often has a very limited understanding of how their game works in the context of multi-player environment it is designed for, mostly because they have very little time or desire to actually play it themselves regularly. PvP players gravitating to overpowered assets is what allows to expose and demonstrate them to developers, and at this point its up to developers in the extent of their experience and clarity to weed out the actual problem and come up with a well-weighted solution.

[Thundercraft]

In my mind, protecting thrusters and/or engines by layering armor over them or burying inside the hull are valid strategies. What's wrong with that?

 

Last time I checked, thrusters were very vulnerable. They're super easy to destroy. I don't think engines are nearly that flimsy, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're weaker than hull material. If koonschi didn't want players to hide thrusters under armor, then they shouldn't be so very, very fragile.

 

Granted, I also like the glow of engines. And I like the look of thrusters firing. So, for me, there is some trade off. But I also create engine glow props and thruster props to make it look like it has external engines and thrusters.

Props like this: