pardon me for complaining on my first posting to the BB, but I just checked out the stats on a guy outside the Deneb wormhole station in GR. He was 9/9/8/x/x with 24 deaths, but only 38 kills. I'm a combat 6 pilot with about 1500 kills (all bots).

Now maybe I'm bitter that I lasted only 10 secs both times I warped in to the BP sector in Deneb, but come on, I've been playing months to get to 6........

Dexter.

Hey, join the club Archevan.

You know what though, I don't feel sorry for you at all. I feel sorry for the guy who is 9/9/8. I'm sure you'll soon get the chance to show him that his high levels don't mean squat without the pilot experience to back it up. Now who is going to be the frustrated one? Uberlevelnewb: "Wth? I've got maxed out levels, I'm supposed to be uber! This sux."

Part of the reason leveling is supposed to take time is to prevent players from scrambling all the way to the top in 2 days then becoming disillusioned when they realize they can still get owned by a pilot half their levels, and they've run out of bigger guns to work toward.

well alkon, I know that. And you prolly knew beforehand when you posted that this remark would come: Hit us with the darned story already :D.

The only point that I was trying to convey is that the time dedicated to killing the bots is quite ok in my regard. It is just that the action in itself is boring, if you ever replace that with the storyline missions and stuff then it is ok and we will play the missions and our licences will come naturally. But the implimentation of the bp mission like divided the time needed to bot oneself up in 4 (well actually this factor is a bit bigger since I am comparing to a lower level person). Or do you think that after paying for 1 month for VO we have levelled up 4 chars in 1 week to max neeed level. At the same time we spent the rest of the 3 weeks just goofing off. And seeing as you can good off just that much, we stop paying for it since we reached everything there was to reach.

PS: im still waiting for my numero uno ctc cap medal :D.

Somehow I don't think too many of those using the BP mission to powerlevel are really newbs. More likely they're people leveling alts and the like. The "damage" is done, I guess, so a bunch of people have high level alts with less time than it took everyone else...

It's not that big of a deal, since the only thing to do in game is fight :P Might as well give more people more options to that end.

Aww Rene I think botting is fun, for the first 1,000 bots or so.

Okay, I just got the chance to play the BP mission with a group of 8, I knew people had been saying the rewards were "good" but... wow.

No exaggeration, we were getting 6k experience every 10-15 minutes, for killing bots (and they were about the difficulty of a prosus assault). Seriously, devs, what's up with that? And this is after it was toned down? And one of our group members wasn't doing anything but sitting in the station AFK!! The rewards would be okay IMO if it only rewarded you for killing players, but the way it is now is insanity pure and simple.

Even when there were other players in the sector our group would normally just go after the bots because they were easier to kill.

I've been playing for 3 months and I had done a good job leveling one of my chars, when BP came, it gave me a chance to get it's levels up fast so that i didn't have to do another long boring 3 months of leveling. And it is official that I SUCK at pvp, so don't even bring that up.

Wow. It MUST be a problem if this many replies popped up. Anyway...
It DOES hurt someone. Who? The people who won't get such luxuries when it's put back down. How is it fair if older players and future players have to work harder, even if someone already worked hard already currently.
VincentV, you may have worked hard, but that amount of work before super BP wouldn't have given you 10/10/10.
Although it seems most like an argument against easy stat getting, I'm arguing more along the lines of how a typical out of training pilot gets into a top of the line Prometheus SkyCommand in two days. If you're advancing through a story, you'd be slowly rising in "combat skill" and go from bus, to wraith, to vulture, to rag, to SCP.

BTW, I love you Phaser and Rene. You two seem excessively supportive against the power leveling.

That does not hurt anyone, Fnugget. Just because I have a donut, and you do not have a donut, does not mean that you have been harmed. Just because right now combat XP is easier than it has been (and possibly will be) to gain, does not mean anyone is hurt by it. To say that it does do harm is a logical fallacy.

I may have gotten to SCP in 2 days, but my other char already had them. I also think that for the future, there should be a better way to gain xp. Not only botting or BP. Or, raise the xp given from botting. In regards to how my skill is, I suck, I always have, and always will. I just can't PvP well. I didn't "Power level" my char in the traditional sense. If you want me to delete it, in your next post, tell me to, i'm eager to take my anger out on anything...

Beolach, that's not quite the same. I think inflation is a better analogy.

Heh, yeah, inflation would be a better analogy, but I still hold that different circumstances (money inflated, XP easier to gain) applying at different times is not valid evidence that anyone has been hurt.

ok, hope i can make some people feel better with this comment,

From my point of view, I don't give a flying (fill in bad language yourself) about XP lvl's or duel stats or kill/death ratio or whatever. I'm playing the game and i'm enjoying the game. I'm a UIT pilot who's working on the bigger picture, saving credits for this and that, supporting my guild and basicly trying to keep grey and UIT space safe. Thats what I do, thats my mission in this game. I make sure people from TGFT or IGPK (or any other trader for that matter) can do their thing and keep the UIT going. We are a nation of trade, I don't even get involved in the serco/itani war. They are all good customers of us, and i like them to be able to do their buisiness without too much trouble. Now if a 13/15/15 rookie tries to pirate in the space we control, haha, he'll know what time it is.

I have an alt with one of the other nations too, and his job atm is doing his best to contribute to his nations war effort. Now, thanks to the new interest in BP, I'm just glad i found a purpose for this alt. I don't realy care what his lvls are, he can get a FC, neut3's and a good fighter, thats all he needs, and he enjoys the battles.

Anyway, the point is, we aren't all looking to lvl up as fast as we can, some of us are here to enjoy the game and just have fun in it playing the role we play. I mean, my main char is 8/10/9/11/4 (notice the 4 mining xp to get the moth ;) and i've been playing quite a lot since december 2004.

Hope i made at least 1 person feel better here :)

well, here comes my 2 cr...

oh, well!

many have had a lot of fun doing this, maybe it's exploiting, maybe it's power-leveling, maybe some n00b will be a higher level than me, but oh well.

it's fun, players are having fun, quit complaining about EVERYTHING and GO PLAY!
The boards are FULL of complaints and rants! I am tired of reading all of them.

all the time the devs have spent fixing crackbotting, tweaking balance, un-ubering or re-ubering ships and fixing all that we complain about has kept the HIVE out of our reach...

maybe all the Hive stuff is a few months off still, but if the devs keep having to go back and fix everything over and over again, it will never get done. I for one want to see this stuff before next year...

There are times when it's difficult to get ANY progress in the BP mission. As an Itani, if the Deneb warzone is infested by serco players, it's much more difficult for me to get any kills. There's also the time when the warzone doesn't have many serco players at all, and it's infested by Itani bots.

A real powerleveling session can only really be done if there's a big group on either side. Thus, this mission encourages player group effort. VERY GOOD!

There should be substantial reward for this mission. BUT I do still think that someone standing still should not be able to reap the same benefit of the mission as the player that's killing 90% of the enemy.

Its obvious that I can't win. I'm not posting on this subject unless I become extremely offended.

I know it's kind of the way RPG's function (or seems to be), but the idea of XP always hit me as… why??

I can't say that I have a particularly useful solution to this "problem", except that I found the venture of leveling and XP as being pointless in the first place. No one's skill can be measured by points, and neither does their "deserving" (whatever that is) of a given ship. Maybe certificates in a kill/death, ratio, like badges can be used to certify ships, but even that can lead us right back to "levelling".

Gaining money to buy ships, even to buy (/"register") liscences, I'd see that as more sensical. More advanced, powerful ships cost more money. We can use that to seperate players instead of an XP system, and it'd contribute to industry more. This is why I didn't feel much shame about crackbotting. Levels don't show you skill, the larger activity of the game shows that—levels can't even tell you how long someone's been around because they just botted for a solid week during summer vacation. It certainly doesn't tell if they play "well", dueling, CtC, Guild managing, trading, whatever. It's really just a barrier between you and technology, and one that spawns useless, repetitive activities.

My philosophy is, ok, you want this ship. You have to learn how to fly it, how to customize it well. Just get the money, make sure the government likes you, and its yours. I don't need a game measuring whether or not I deserve to have it through an "experience" point system. It's just a hurdle for me to get over. It's unrealistic, ungainly, and it's pointless now, as we've seen how imbalanced a system like this can get. Botting for hours on end, doing the single highest-XP giving mission is the result of these systems.

I mean, I'll deal with it. That's the game, that's ok. I'll still have fun. I'm just saying that none of it made sense to me in the first place—whether or not it's "RPG".

I don't know how I got offended so fast, but if this was based on skill and not licence, I would never get passed a bus.
Stukov

faction-standing, meet experience-points...

experience-points, meet faction-standing...

..by the way, faction-standing, have you met border-patrol, experience-points' date for this evening?

...hmm, come to think of it, you two look good together ... :O

Just to set the points straight, I give a rats ass about powerlevelling. If people do it, its their choice. I was just irked that somebody dared to call doing the BP missions hard labour, while he himself experienced what hard labour really is by levelling his first char. (sorry for the reference, but that was the easiest way to state my point).

However, all I am trying to say is that in my book and in many others seeing your toon grow up is part of the fun, otherwise they can just ditch all the levelling all together.

U just hope that later on, missions are going to be considered as the main licence getters. Aka hello there little grunt, I'm your instructor for this evening. I see that mister x has done a great job in fastening your seatbelts and it seems you can hold your mettle in your nice and shiny bus. I would like to give you the option of modding it somewhat, but before i can let you do that. Could you please take care of person Z in sector Y and bring me the item that he dropped, its from supreme importance for our nations security. I can assure you that if you take that action that I'll make it worth your time.

The little toon goes and does the job, having to disable a small group of orun collectors, with as boss a nice fat dentek.

After completion he goes to the questgiver, and hands in the dropped item. Person states: thanks man, I was waiting for this item for ages. I'll tell you a small secret, this item is part of one of our new weapons. But to make them we need certain hiveparts. So I'll give you the schematics for weapon x (example a phased blaster MK2), if you ever find a station that has those botparts in stock, then you will be able to buy that weapon from the stationsmerchant.

This would also be the first part of crafting if ever implemented. And would be considered the pve part.

That and that alone is what I am looking for. The pvp is there as a secondary fun part, but IT is NOT the main importance or should not be for an RPG. It should be that for an FPS.

But again, its only my opinion.

cheers

PS: if you all cnsider this to be to pve oriented and to much time put in into 'levelling', then maybe to please pvp and pve crowd we could put in the creation of a char for pvp only. Meaning that it has a permanent -1000 faction with all other factions and fractions except its own nation. It has access to all the nifty tools that a maxlevel could get. But it can't do any pve. Meaning it has to make its money from the pvp aspect. (also they can't receive money from the /givemoney thing). It could also chose to be only corvus POS and hated everywhere else. How you are going to balance that, I have no idea how to blance it, so lets just forget about it, unless the devs ever consider some pvp only areas which these pre-made pvp chars would be unable to exit. Like for instance a small universe resembling the very old 21 sector galaxy which you can only enter as a pve char from one of assigned UNIQUE wormholes within naton territory (like 3 main nations have one near their homebase) and there is one in corvus that would teleport you imediately to the old sector 9. But this will saddly only work once these storyline missions and quests are put in. Anyway this is just an idea, i don't care if it ever gets implemented or not. But if implemented, it will be a very tough nut to crack since why would some people even level if they don't get any benefits from levelling their char in the pve part. I'll let this over to the devs to iron out.

Well, have YOU ever tried to take out those pesky cents with a BUS!?!? It was pretty hard. :P
I finally got swarms, rockets, jacks, ect, it was all downhill from there...