Hi! I decided to peek back in and see if they've decided to un-ruin the game yet. Looks like no.

RoyalWallace#5774 posted (#post-144704)

Reality is wot progression is a good proven system to this day wot is going strong you are probly in the minority thinking that a wot based progression system is wrong

Reality is that the WoT model has been proven time and again to NOT work, and that it was only GOTTEN AWAY WITH in that game because of extenuating circumstances which Dreadnought doesn't have any way to reproduce. Nothing about WoT's success (which has been limited by the model, and which even its own devs have openly admitted was limited by their model) reflects on the model itself being any good. It's the exception that proves the rule. And the rule is that most games aping their model fail, and fail HARD.

1. WoT was basically the first game in its genre. It got a lot of attention for being unique, allowing people to forgive/overlook the poor model until they were already invested, and the competition didn't show up until too late to capitalise on "we have a better model than WoT" because people had already gotten invested. Dreadnought can't do this, because Fractured Space already exists. Also Galactic Junk League, and several other games with less incompetently-designed pricing models.


2. A super-important point - WoT has actual variety in the different tiers. It's not a linear "better i almost every way except a tiny bit slower" progression. And it's not as harsh a jump between tiers, in part BECAUSE it's not a direct linear "scale everything up" process. Dreadnoughts tiers are literally T5 is better at everything than T4, which is basically the level all the ships were at when the game was good, and T4 is better than T3 at literally everything, and so on down the list to T1 which is an unfinished junk heap masquerading as a spaceship.


3. There's real-world history and long-running established background on all the vehicles in WoT, making their semi-realistic portrayal of varied real-world vehicles a valid justification for having a tier system. Dreadnought is making things up, and STILL managed to get the progression process wrong-er than WoT when they had justification to do it wrong.

It is, unfortunately, objective fact that this game was better in alpha and closed beta than it has been since the faillure that was the progression 2.0 update. This change literally got announced in advance, had everything about it shot to pieces, then happened anyway in spite of being definitively proven to be a bad idea.

I... can't actually find any game on Steam which is just called "Leviathan". Or any game which could reasonably be called "Leviathan" that bears any resemblance to Dreadnought. Got a linky to share?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/297350/The_Old_City_Leviathan/

The Old City: Leviathan could reasonably be called "Leviathan" for short. It's a first-person exploration game which isn't anything remotely like Dreadnought in the first place. I'm inclined to think it's not what you meant, since you probably wouldn't have found it and bought it if you were looking for an experience like Dreadnought.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/411130/Leviathan_the_Cargo__Ongoing_series/

Leviathan: The Cargo is the newest game I could find on Steam with the title "Leviathan". It looks more like an interactive visual novel or a point-and-click adventure game than anything remotely resembling Dreadnought. Once again, seems unlikely to be a game you'd find and buy if you want

http://store.steampowered.com/app/549900/Leviathan_Starblade/

Leviathan Starblade isn't just "Leviathan" or even "Leviathan: subtitle" but I guess it's close, and newer than The Cargo. It's a vertical scrolling 2D shoot-em-up game. It does at least involve spacehips, but once again, I can't see any real comparison to Dreadnought.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/202270/Leviathan_Warships/

This is the only other game I could find that's actually reasonable to call "Leviathan". It's also the only game I own with that word in the title. It's a really good game, and a lot of fun. It's about custom-building ships and sending them into battle. But, once again, nothing like Dreadnought. it's actual naval battles in water, not flying in the sky or space. It's also a top-down simultaneous turn based strategy game. And the "Jazzy" trailer series they made for the game are pretty epic - but for very different reasons from the old but awesome Dreadnought trailer.

None of those games has any relation at all to Dreadnought, but I couldn't find any game which it would be reasonable to call "Leviathan" which looks, sounds or seems to be competing with Dreadnought in any way.

If you're specifically talking about games with a pricetag and vaguely Dreadnought-ish concept of flying big spaceships around and shooting other big spaceships, there are two single-player games I could point to. Starpoint Gemini Warlords and Rebel Galaxy. You'll notice that neither of these games has "Leviathan" anywhere in the title.

The closest comparisons to Dreadnought in terms of games you can find on Steam are Fractured Space and Galactic Junk League. Both are free-to-play games about flying around in space in capital ships and shooting other people who are also flying around in capital ships.

Fractured Space, for a long time, was being referred to by many people as a "bad ripoff of Dreadnought" after the Dreadnought trailer and some alpha gameplay footage had been shown. Fractured Space went public first though, and the devs have been VERY consistent about listening to the fans. In the meantime, when Dreadnought finally did open up to the public, they botched things horribly right before going into "open beta but we're pretending it's not" and have since actually entered open beta without fixing the core issues. The game was absolutely and almost inarguably at its best in the early stages of the closed beta, with the "progression 2.0" release being essentially the killing blow for the game before they opened it to the public. Since Dreadnought's open beta began, I've been hearing it described as a "bad ripoff of Fractured Space" more often than the reverse used to happen.

The two games have a similar gameplay perspective. Both games involve teams of players in large capital-scale spaceships. Fractured Space takes more of a MOBA-like approach, with each team defending a base as an objective, and with a range of lesser objectives spread throughout each map.

Galactic Junk League is best described as a mashup of Dreadnought and the early days of Robocraft. It has custom-buildable ships with a "core" piece that functions sort of like the "seat" that Robocraft used to have. Ships are destructible on a piece-by-piece basis. The core gameplay is basically the same as Dreadnought - team deathmatch battles with players charging in and slaughtering one another. It lacks any kind of healers, however (also a throwback to the early days of Robocraft).

Overall, both FS and GJL are great games worth playing, and each has its own distinctive features that makes it obviously different from Dreadnought - some good and some bad in each, but since they, like Dreadnought, are free-to-play, it's worth trying them out as well and seeing which of these three games really suits you the best.

thedeath#8178 posted (#post-128200)

sigh migs really?

it's a known 'isuse' that's working as intended

Just like how maintenance was "working as intended" for over 6 months before they finally admitted how stupid an idea that was. And still haven't fixed it yet. And just like how the tier system itself is "working as intended" even though it's probably the single worst attempt at a tier system in the history of the gaming industry. And that's even if we ignore that having a tier system was a bad idea in the first place even if it had been done well.

The best solution, as usual, would be to un-release the progression 2.0 update.

-Remove maintenance IMMEDIATELY instead of waiting for unknown time until they can balance the new system.

-Remove tier system IMMEDIATELY and open the way for the current tiered designs to add to the pool of paid cosmetics.

-Removal of tiers means less artificial divides on matchmaking, speeding up queues INSTANTLY.

-Return to when the game was AWESOME will bring back a lot of old players who quit over the mistake that was 2.0

-More players on top of an already-improved matchmaking system = epic win.

I've been saying this off and on since the devs decided to trash the best parts of the game. It was true then, it's true now, it will be true if and when they actually get around to replacing maintenance with the planned new system (which would be easier to balance without a tier system and thus make it into circulation faster).

VERSUS#7174 posted (#post-128216)

I wont make assumptions, but i'm gonna make a guess (i might not be right): The whole idea of making the grinding painful is to tempt players to spend money to make it "less" painful. Some of the complaints that are made, cannot be taken away, the rationale is, if the journey is NOT painful, less players would need to spend money to elevate the "pain".

What the game company is trying to do is, finding the sweet spot, between too painful a journey which might push players to quit altogether and too painless a journey which would result in nobody needing to spend anything.

Honestly, i hope i'm wrong, but i rarely am. lol!

As shown in the link I shared above, the devs have (finally) admitted maintenance is so bad they're describing it in language that's banned on the forums. That said, for the more than 6 months leading up to that, they were defending it aggressively saying it was here to stay. During that time, they had openly admitted it exists purely as a way to force monetisation into the game.

The lack of awareness of how bad a system it was has pushed me away pretty hard, and it's going to take a lot more than the new system finally showing up to actually bring me back. Still need them to realise the tier system as it stands is equally horrendous compared to how the game was before it.

VERSUS#7174 posted (#post-128238)

The only scenario its not pay2win is when matches are filled with both sides all max tier max module levels. Until then, tier/module level differences create quite a wide gap. The gap is large enough that skill cannot compensate, imagine facing up against a ship that can do more damage to u per hit, take more damage plus have access to modules you may not even be able to use. Its almost akin to saying, "Yo i'm skilled with a knife" but the problem is you're up against dudes using machins guns, EVEN if he's less skilled, who u gonna place ur bets on?

Thing is, as much as the game was MUCH better without the tier system (and the tier system is exceptionally bad even by the low standard set by other tier systems), that's not necessarily pay to win.

You CAN get all the top tier things in the lowest tier without spending money, in fairly short order. You can kit out a fleet with T2 gear, and as long as you keep a token T1 ship to avoid being thrown into matches against T4, you can be the top of your tier. Getting full T4 to do the same in veteran is a lot harder, and the ability to just by an already-loaded T4 ship is somewhat of a "pay-to-win" shortcut in that instance. That said, in order to use that T4 ship and be sure you won't be thrown up against T5 players, you need to have at least one T2 or T3 ship to throw into your veteran fleet with it.

This thread was posted twice. I commented in the other version of it, and it was then deleted. My comment mentioned that the devs have had a lot of trouble making anything remotely resembling competent AI. Not sure if I just got unlucky with them deciding to delete the version of the topic with more views for no rational reason, but at the time, neither one had any replies in it.

But yes, these devs haven't shown any ability to make AI worthy of facing even the least capable human players. In order for the AI Dreadnought has shown to compete on a level worth considering, it would need a serious overhaul or they'd need to cheat by giving the AI ships improved stats. Buffing AI enemies is generally anti-fun and spoils the feeling of power the players are meant to have in this game. Then again, so does the failtastic implementation of tiers, so I doubt that'll stop them.

They've sort of stopped talking about it, and avoided the topic whenever people try bringing it up for a while, but WAAAY back in the day, there was talk about single player, and about a full campaign being a planned part of the release build. Realistically, if this "beta" was actually a beta, it SHOULD be feature-complete, but they're still adding game modes and have yet to include any real PvE even though such content had been promised. There are practise matches where you can fight bots, but the AI is pretty incompetent and the only way it's going to hold its own without massive overhauls on the system would be to give it "cheats" like buffed stats (turning the ships into damage sponges with bigger guns than you) or higher-tier ships than the players can fly.

According to the devs and Greybox, they've already "expanded" from 15 ships to "over 50". What's actually happened is that they've stripped chunks off the original 15 ships to make them crappier and less fun to fly and marketed that as a tier system.

Most people who have been around from the beginning are hoping they TAKE BACK the ships they "added" and sell the super-obvious reskins that don't even pretend to have remotely varied stats, but linear upgrades from tier to tier. Instead of having a failtastic attempt at tiering the game, they should have just the original 15 ships (with room to add more actually different and unique models) and sell the different tiered variants as skins for the base ships. Many of the modified designs are pretty awesome looking, and would be well worthy buying as cosmetic options.

None of this is particularly likely to happen, though, because the devs are incredibly slow to realise good ideas that they're being beaten over the head with. I'm not going to rule it out entirely, but it took them 6 months to admit the most blatantly provable part of the progression 2.0 mistake was a mistake. And that had been such a hugely obvious blunder that the few people who suggested it might happen were almost laughed out of the forums for thinking it was a plausible theory about the direction the game might be heading before we saw it come to life. Before 2.0 actually happened, nobody thought it was possible for anyone working on the project to be that obviously and obnoxiously stupid. Turned out, not only were they that stupid, but they were stupid enough to both implement the literally worst attempt the world has ever seen at an already-impressively-horrible game mechanic AND to double down and spend 6 months shutting down or shouting down every complaint they could find about it before finally admitting they were wrong (and openly describing it in terms that are censored on their own forums... go figure).

Where will they go from here? Honestly, I don't think even THEY know that. The earliest parts of the beta, and almost the entire alpha testing period, were a more fun, and more stable, experience than what you're getting now. I would hope they're going back where they came from, but I sincerely doubt it. I hope they can actually grow up enough to admit the game wasn't, and isn't, ready for beta, and turn back the clock. Given the nature of the business side of things, that's probably not going to happen, but it would be a bigger step in the right direction than even the announcement last month that they had screwed up with the maintenance system.

ZetsubouX#7109 posted (#post-126827)

1: Being able to purchase temporary boosts to performance with real money.

I'm going to assume you're referring to something like "Premium ammo" type bonuses. Items which are consumable, and which expire after a number of matches or a period of time has elapsed. In that regard, Dreadnought has no such items, and is not pay-to-win in this way at all.

2: Being able to purchase equipment, weaponry or anything else that may offer a tactical or statistical advantage over your peers with real money.

There are premium ships. You can buy ships up to and including tier 4 (maximum is 5). These ships are absolutely better than any ship you can start with. The T4 ships in particular can be problematic, because if you have at least a tier 2 ship to put into a veteran fleet, you can guarantee yourself to be in a top-tier ship for veteran matches instantly. If you don't have a T2 ship, you're risking the game throwing you into battles against T5 ships, but getting T2 is a very short process, so you won't have that problem for long. With that said, in comparison with an equal-tier ship, the premium ships aren't actually "better" - in fact, the fixed unmodifiable loadouts make for a good argument that they're WORSE than the regular version of that ship. The primary motivation for most people buying them is that they also unlock cosmetics which can be used on that ship (or ship range? It's been a while since I checked). This isn't really pay-to-win, but the T4 ships being fully-equipped T4 ships with no need to grind up to get good performance and letting you jump right to the top end of the veteran scale can give you an unfair advantage against T2 - 3 ships who are queuing for the same battles. So this is somewhat of a debatable point.

3: Being able to boost progress with real money (In my opinion, this is just as pay to win as paying for stats, because it is, essentially, what you are doing and most of the time you will have a DIRECT advantage over anyone who does not pay for the same progress boost. Provided they do not go full automated drone and farm themselves to social self destruction.).

Elite status is EXACTLY that. While maintenance is still in play (although it's been confirmed the devs finally - 6 months late - admitted it was a terrible idea and are getting rid of it), this is even worse. The maintenance system is broken to an offensive degree, even by the standards set by other games with similar mechanics. Without maintenance, this can be reasonably expected to be less obnoxious, but there is still a plan to keep a "subscription" option which allows for faster progression. Like point 2, this is somewhat open to debate as to how "pay to win" it is, but I'd say it's less p2w than the T4 hero ships.

4: Being able to buy stat boosts, or anything else that directly influences your performance while free players can 'also buy them' by simply 'playing alot'. This is a trick I've seen many times before. Sure, you can get everything you want as a free player, provided you play 18 hours a day and continue doing so for months, then you'll be competitive. Until the next update, which is gonna be a week later since it took you half a lifetime to get up to their level.

They did experiment with this at one point when they tried making officer briefings a real money only purchase. These were (relatively strong) passive buffs they locked behind a paywall. It was announced shortly after the change was made from free to paid currency that this had been an experiment, but the playerbase received the change EXCEPTIONALLY badly, for good reason. They reversed course on it quite promptly, though, and haven't made such a mistake again... at least not yet.

Honestly, while I have plenty of issues with how the devs have handled certain aspects of the game, calling it pay-to-win isn't really one of the problems. The core of having a tier system is bad. The absolutely HORRENDOUS implementation of such a system only exacerbates all the problems while avoiding literally every possible benefit it can offer in the few games that do get away with it. The maintenance system (which, as mentioned, is on the way out) only served to further reinforce exactly WHY all the other mistakes in the tier system were, in fact, mistakes. But there isn't a particularly large window in which you can throw money at things to do better than a free player.

SOS-Anyone#6415 posted (#post-127365)

I suppose they meant to be just an atmospheric fighters

Then explain TE in space maps

The shipments got mixed up. The space fighters went to the planetary battle regions and the atmospheric fighters got accidentally shipped off to Saturn's rings. It was the postman's fault. He's the guy in the grey box.