There are more patterns in the game than currently available.. but they rotate them in and out of the market.

I imagine bundles don't exist for most of them because they're missing for a couple of the ships(the Jupiter Tactical doesn't have the woodland pattern, for example).

Well.. the only way a global MMR pool would work is if it had brackets/grades that would prevent 'platinum' players from getting matched against 'bronze' players.

At that point we'd just run back into the situation of Legendary Queues where the wait between matches would be painful.

Conversely, if there was no bracket system, we'd end up with 10% of the playerbase who winds up playing 90% of the games, constantly stomping people who are fresh out of sheltered matchmaking because they're the only competition available. This is exactly the kind of environment we had before the introduction of the tier system.

The other point of consideration is how do bots figure into a tier-less system? Wouldn't they skew matches, and thus your rating? If they're removed, matchmaking times would skyrocket. If there's a bracket system, should there be bots to help populate lower matches to keep the queue-times moving and bolster the confidence new/less skilled players?

I'm just repeating myself at this point, but I think the most efficient solution to the current situation(new players getting completely turned away from the game upon leaving Recruit, enmass) is to restrict veteran queue exclusively to T3 ships. I imagine the most resource-intensive part of this would be figuring out how to handle officer briefings, but compared to the various other solutions I've seen proposed, this seems like it would require the least work/be the fastest fix.

Well, I imagine PS4 is at a slight disadvantage due to the slower camera/target panning limitation of the analog control sticks.

Most of the complaints regarding corvettes on PC typically boil down to either negligence(not actively watching/preparing/countering them) or people expecting to single-handedly counter multiple players working together as a team(which tends to apply to a lot of complaints, including heal-blobs). That said, there are some ships/setups that can absolutely shut down multi-corvette offensives if they are in capable hands on PC.

(As a side tangent, I do personally think that corvettes are very poorly handled on a design level. Such tiny ships somehow having incredible powerplants that can feed both the engines, primary weapon system, and perfect shielding system aboard corvettes is completely silly. Conceptually, I think it would have made a lot more sense to design them as weapon delivery systems akin to modern aircraft or patrol/torpedo boats - their main guns would be relatively weak and more of a deterrent than deadly, but their modules would be extremely potent with long-ish cooldowns.)

Wasn't the Trident freely given away to players who participated in an autumn event of 2016 a few months after Open Beta?

Either way, saying you should get something because you had it pre-wipe is like saying I should have all the customizations availabe because they were offered for 1gp each at one point during a testing phase.. or that I should start with all ships unlocked because I went through the grind a dozen or so times before the final wipe.

(As a side comment, do any of the people who won the blood-spattered coating still actually play the game?)

What really boggles my brain is why the recent return of various marketplace items only lasted.. two?.. weeks and then were removed without anything to replace them. This left the market feeling 'barren' afterwards, and that is not a good feeling to instill in customers.

My only conjecture is that it was either a manipulative ploy to indoctrinate 'impulse buying', or there was a snafu(perhaps related to PAX) with whatever 'should' be in the market right now. Either way, a healthy/circulating marketplace is a good thing for consumer confidence; and by proxy, word of mouth.

Not having new market deals(not necessarily new assets) to go along with this event seems like a lost opportunity.

The Tartarus Purge-Nuke is pretty much the main heal-blob meta counter at the moment, yes.

I'd suggest swapping the Vultures for Light Missiles, though; Vultures are just too slow(they're too easy to terrain-block or simply outrun). Auto-guns don't really synergize that much with their short range. You'd probably be better off stacking armorbooster pulse(to protect your healers/fire support) or, perhaps, running a tractor beam to pull priority targets away from a heal-blob(or a healer out of cover). Shields may neutralize tractor beams, but a purged ship cannot shield. You can also use the tractor beams to throw off ramming runs if they're not directed at you(if they route power to shields to compensate, it means they're not running power to engines or weapons).

The downside to this kind of setup, obviously, is that you're not personally going to get as many points because the game doesn't reward purging/CC like it rewards doing damage.

LYB-DeathToll007#8196 posted (#post-217710) said:

Excellent points. As I understand it, you shared a previous concept where manufacturer module specialization was done, but once unlocked could be fitted to any ship in the fleet. What I am proposing is specializing modules for manufacturers unique to the manufacturer. Either a shakeup of what is currently in the game, or additional content. I favor additional content personally.

Kind of, I went off on a bit of tangent/rant, but the main point I was getting at there is that it seems like the design team has already decided on how they want to handle module allocation and I doubt we'll see a complete overhaul at this point.

On a personal note, I'm not really keen on absolute module exclusivity. From all my experience, adding forced exclusivity to what is otherwise an 'open' system leads down a dark, power-crept path of elitism and entropic communal misery.

However, something that MIGHT be interesting is if a factional event system is eventually added where you can choose to side with certain conflicting regional powers that offer unique benefits . Say three factions are fighting over mining rights to an asteroid cluster and the player is able to side with one of them; Faction A gives you access to special 'rock-breaking' sustained laser satellites that do more damage the longer they are locked on target; Faction B gives you access to deployable cluster-bomb charges that can be planted on terrain and remotely detonated; Faction C gives you access to deployable survey satellites that automatically scan nearby hostiles for weaknesses and enhance damage done to them.

Either way, this kind of feels like it's drifting from Grimm's original topic. We're getting away from talking about existing issues and meandering into 'feature wishlist' territory.

Maneuver Modes:

My main concern with this one is that is might 'pollute' the controls beyond the point of being accessible for some players. How often do you see new players struggling to even mange their power properly? Adding a second 'layer' to ship management might turn away potential players.

The idea of rams disabling terrain anti-collision measures is.. interesting. It might be a little 'too' punishing/unfun though.. for the same reason arming timers were added to nukes.

Faction Modules:

Unfortunately, I think the ship already sailed on this one.

Back before they added tiers to the game, I did a couple write-ups(with visual mock-ups) for proposals of potential 'progression systems' along the lines of what you're proposing. The core idea being that every ship would start with a specific playstyle in mind and you had to play those ships to unlock those modules and their variants. Likewise, certain manufacturers specialized in certain kinds of modules, but once you unlocked them, you could use them on any ship of the same class archetype.

For example, Rams and 'Pulse systems' were the domain of Oberon; Akula specialized in Nukes and 'modes'/specialty ammo. If you wanted to fit a Jupiter Destroyer(which normally specialized in missiles and jump/movement) with Goliaths and Weaponbooster Pulse, you'd have to 'learn how to use them' on the respective counterpart ships to unlock/earn those modules for 'global use'. (There was also the idea to unlock special factional coatings/patterns when you fully 'mastered' a ship and all its available modules as an extra incentive to keep going.)

I thought that was a much more attractive progression, tutorial, lore-immersion and monetization system to keep players/customers engaged than the Tier system we wound up with.. but the people in charge decided otherwise.

(Monetization Note: Hero ships would come with special fixed loadouts that were a-typical of their manufacturer - like a Scramble Pulse Akula Destroyer with Evasive Maneuver - in addition to the cosmetic perks. It would allow players/customers to buy into interesting playstyles before investing/inspiring the grind required make a custom loadout for that chassis.)

First (dumb) question:

Will teams be automatically color-coordinated like in the screen shots? Or, was that just something that was done for demonstration reasons?

Less-so questions, more-so suggestions:

Any chance we could get the basic grids for every map within all game modes? (A grid-based map would be wonderful for callouts and overall coordination. "Corvette spotted in C1.", "Regroup at B4", etc.)

The new map really should be on display for a preview article like this; I'm really surprised that it's not.. especially when talking about Linking and the minimap itself.

Yeah, Ram is.. definitely a hot-topic. I like it in principle(along with the current counter-play for it), but.. I wish it functioned (in practice) slightly more as a nice 'coup de gras' module instead of a 'one-shot wonder'/'instant player-killer' module that the entire ship is built around.

There's a nice sense of tactical choice in using them on Jupiter/Medium Destroyers, but using them on Akula Destroyers feels like a handicap/hardmode and I don't think anyone would disagree that they're a little too prolific on Oberon Destroyers. I think scaling their damage based on the Destroyer's max health would be the best way to fine-tune the 'relative' risk versus reward of using them on all destroyer archtypes. (Oberon rammers would be surgeons that rip up softer targets while Akula rammers would become bulldozers that would threaten to even push dreadnoughts off contested points.)

As for a 'balance' solution that wouldn't involve changing any numbers: I think making Stasis Beam the default/starter module for all Oberon Tactical Cruisers would go a LONG way in teaching new players how to deal with both ram-destroyers and corvettes. It might be a bit presumptious, but I think this one small change might even alter the meta due to more players having awareness/access to this counter-play option. I do worry that 'career rammers' might complain about how much more difficult their 'job' would become when so many people are readily equipped to hard-counter them though(whether that's a good or bad thing is another debate entirely).