Much, much better.

Nice, lecter

Suggestion for balance, reasoning "death is cheap":

You die ... you then have a delay before you are allowed to launch from station. The more often you die in close intervals the longer the period. Eventually builds to have a max time of 5 or 10 minutes.

Of course some testing would be needed to adjust the timing. But that will a "cost" to dying.

Doesn't eliminate the "danger" of a suicide run. But does reduce the chance of people just "not dying".

Slight variation: You die. All liscenses are temporarily reduced to 0/0/0/0/0. Over the next 5 minutes it slowly ranks back to what your ratings are. So a person could still leave a station. but only in an EC with training lasers ... unless they wait for the time needed for the levels to cycle back up.

I like Lecter's ideas, especially the arena. That solves several problems quite nicely.

I don't like Gulain's ideas, simply because that will be the end of furballs. They're already extremely rare, and one of the most enjoyable parts of the game. Not only that, but then everyone will run, and fun combat dies as well.

I like the way the devs have started to make dying cost something, by increasing ship prices and lowering income. You lose a greyhound, you feel it in your wallet. I can only hope that as the economy is further tweaked the cost becomes a bit more, but I definitely stand behind economic rather than handicap ways to make death matter.

I have already made several balance suggestions, but they are normally disregarded. I shall repeat them. But first, let me clarify my objectives.

I do not think you should be able to stop someone from jumping into a sector and spamming swarms, short of shooting them before they are in range to spam. I do not want to eliminate the possibility to interfere with an event, I want to bring that interference into a context that is manageable. If we over balanced the system to the point that we completely stop, or make pointless such interference, then we have gone too far. That being said, consider these suggestions in that light.

Bring certain problematic ships back into a "rock, paper, scissors" relationship with other ships. valk 60 drain, reduce thrust of corvus hog, etc...

Double the mass of all weapons and cargo. An orion blaster valk should easily out accelerate a triflare valk.

double the amount of time a ship is suspended prior to a jump.

Dr Lecter: Please do not modify my post because you are not qualified nor understand what I was trying to say. What you changed it into is not even the same context.

Everyone else: I regret posting this topic in here now, I had 2 parties in conflict about the posting and I clearly made the wrong decision from the start. Since I have been ask to not post anymore in this thread I would like to close by saying sorry for bringing this up.

I agree with Lecter's second suggestion, but I feel more details are needed.

Arena size - 10km to 5km diameter transparent sphere with skeletal structure.
Arena entrance - Race tube size transparent tube that turns at 90 degrees upon entering the arena, as noted by Lecter.
Arena exit - 200m to 100m wide transparent tube with an exit dock force field, essentially just like an oversized exit dock where the force field at the end prevents someone to enter from the outside. Whether the exit should heal is up to debate.
Arena contents - Either nothing at all so players can warp out while within the arena or filled with a low density roid field with the various roid types known to provide certain strategies, such as large cracked roids, or hollowed roids.

Criticisms?

Good god, Moda. What I said was "If you don't have a specific solution to offer, or useful debate on a previously posted solution, please don't post at all." It was directed at everyone, not just you, even if your previous post was an example (as is your current post). It'd be great if you could dial down the melodrama.

Surb: That sounds ok to me, but what does "with skeletal structure" mean? Like a large skeleton of a sphere with transparent sections between the segments or something?

Anything like "exit dock forcefields" will slow the implementation of this. Special case coding and weirdness is involved. I liked the original simplistic setup better.. just a big ball with a tube in it, period.

Roda: Those changes don't sound unreasonable, but I'm not really sure how they address the issue at hand. Aside from the making-swarms-not-work-after-jumping thing.. which we could do, but how long? And it would seem kind of arbitrary to only do it to one weapon type.

I reject the need for Roda's balance suggestions: if you reduce the Greyhound's thrust, you gut it as an interceptor, period. It already has paper armor, lowered cargo, and an extreme cost. Keep it as is, or take it out of the game.

The Valk is likewise not in need of a drain increase, which would significantly undercut its utility as a high-end light energy fighter and also reduce the relative effectiveness of the prom nerfs of ages ago. And no, further nerfing the prom to support a nerf of the Valk is not the goddamn answer. Ship differentiation sucks in this game as it is.

I'm sorry Roda cannot always catch people as easily as he might like. That is really just too bad.

The two small parts of Roda's suggestions that I will support are (1) an increase in the mass of guided munitions items--double should be sufficient--and (2) an increase in the jump suspension timer during which you're helpless--increased by 50% should be sufficient, as doubling it might be too brutal.

blacknet: what trauma befell that malformed lump of goo in your head that you call a brain? If you can't express yourself in coherent sentences, please use your native tongue instead of English and let someone else here translate.

Incarnate, it was not you who ask me. Was not you or what you posted.

Mmkay, whatever, rock on. Moving right along..

Lecter/Roda: Some time back I was actually considering increasing the Swarm mass by quite a bit. Swarms were originally intended as a defensive weapon that could be used by Traders when fleeing from a pirate.. allowing them to fire off a volley of distracting "stuff" and perhaps aid in their escape.

I was also considering adjusting the threshold under which swarms may "lose" their target. This has long been a feature of guided missiles.. I think we have a few that use it. With Swarms, it may either be disabled, or their maneuverability made it effectively pointless.. I would guess it's disabled, though. Basically, this would mean that if someone went "outside" of the FOV of the missile, it would "lose lock" and fly off into nowhere.

A whole "Guided missile change" Suggestions Thread might be warranted if there's more discussion on this.

Relating to the warp in/out state, do we want to do this for any warp/jump? Or just jumping in? Or what? Also, keep in mind this is going to drastically impact other non-PvP situations, like people trying to escape from a Hive group before they die, and so on. This might also warrant its own Suggestions thread (linked from here, like the missile one).

Inc.: if possible, I think the extension in warp time should be applied equally to both sides of a jump event (i.e., longer time to warp out, and longer time between entrance and ship control when warping in). Keep in mind that bot fire does not currently (and has never, to my knowledge) hurt someone who is jumping out . . . not sure whether it is also ineffective on incoming ships.

Surb: I think that there's no need for an exit separate from the entrance, and I really would want there to be enough rocks inside to prevent people from warping out from inside the sphere. If you go in that tube, you will be coming out that tube.

Only other thing is that it would be nice if the sphere could be blast proof. Currently, the tubes aren't: if I flare the outside, what's inside next to the wall dies. Much smaller issue since people are likely to be far from the wall, but still.

If I fill the thing with enough rocks to prevent jumping out, there may not be room for certain types of events..? Like, I don't know how much "free space" people want for NW, for instance.

I can't make anything "blast proof" beyond making the walls thicker than any blast radius, which could be considerable once we add Avalons and things back in. I can make most of the "tube" between inner and outer walls of the sphere, so basically the whole sphere is very thick.

Two ideas:

First, put rocks around the outside and in a ring around the middle. That leaves empty space in the very center and around the outer part, but if spaced right (and maybe this takes more than one layer of rock-space) it will both provide for different fighting terrain and preclude ever being 3000km from an object while inside the arena.

Second, maybe the blast thing isn't a big deal. This will be a big. fracking. sphere. If someone can lob flares at the small bit of the wall you happen to be backed up against, right while you happen to be there . . . well, tough.

How big can you make stuff to be in the game, Incarnate? Also, whats the largest object you've ever put in the game? Just curious.

Oh, and would a sphere that large cause any problems, regarding latency and stuff?

No, it being in the sector shouldn't have any negative impacts. The asteroids will have more impact on framerate. It won't create more network traffic, so it won't affect latency.

I can make any sized object, the problem is that "really large" objects can look "really bad" without texture resolution to match the scale. Because the object size effectively eliminates being able to use normal texel scales, using similarly huge textures is impossible (they'd be like 32k*32k and no videocard would render them). So you're left with other techniques, like texture tiling and "detail textures". Our engine, unfortunately, doesn't currently implement detail textures.. just haven't had a chance to add them, but it's only a partial solution anyway. Helps when you get close-up.

In this case, I'm going to totally cheat and practically not use any textures at all, since the object can effectively be a mesh of "black metal" with large areas of "transparent.. glass.. stuff", neither of which require detail. That makes it a lot more feasible to do.

So basically, I can make arbitrarily gigantic objects, but they have to be really boring looking. There are a few other outside possibilities of object types that could be made to work via LOD meshing (keep all the detail in the polygons, and little in the textures) that I kicked around a number of years ago, but we really need a "terrain rendering" type option to handle extremely large content.. like huge arbitrarily-detailed asteroids. Doing anything like that, with the current engine features, is.. problematic.

longer time to warp out, but instant warp in. bots stop shooting at you when you warp out, but i have seen bot shots that where already in the air still do damage, but hey, they where already in the air.

if the swarms lose target they should lock on to something else. anything else. even if they have to start circling in their tightest pattern to find something... anything...

I think all weapon mass should be doubled, or something that makes it so a triflare valk can't just up and run away from a super light valk. if a griefer has to pick between doing massive damage and dieing, or doing just a little damage and getting away, people would feel less strongly about these situations.

arena: just make a really big box (really simple geometry for the sake of frame rate), no exits. no more than 10k between the farthest points, enough roids that you can never jump out. you jump into the sector, you either end up in the box, or out. out? try again. in? you are there till you die.

Uhh, how about I just offset it from the center of the sector, where people warp in, so they can jump in and go fly into it. Then have a small enough entrance that someone can defend it. Wasn't that the point? If people can "jump" directly into the arena thing, they can swarm too.

Do we really care very much if people can jump out? I mean, the issue is people getting in, I would think.

you jump into the sector, you either end up in the box, or out. out? try again. in? you are there till you die.

How wonderfully efficient for getting a group event underway.

/sarcasm

Also, this guts the whole point of an enclosure with a special, easy to guard entrance.

As for this "let's double the mass of everything" foolishness, no. Things are balanced, mass wise, such that it is an issue of how mass effects the combat handling of the ship (i.e., do you remain nimble enough to dodge when engaged in a fight). Trying to use mass to counter the ability of pilots to escape, rather than participate in, combat is . . . going to be both ineffective for its intended purpose and disasterous for actual combat. Swarms . . . they're enough of a special class to justify bumping the mass, but even then, eh.

Mhmm, well, before this devolves.. I guess I'll try making an object and see how it goes. Then we can get some feedback based on actual usage.