I did not say quit playing vo. That is up to you. I play vo.

Inc is a baby. He will not tell you what he is thinking, because he does not wish to justify it. We are just players. He is too important to have to explain himself to players. Players are a dime a dozen. There is only one inc. It is his game, and our investment in the game pails in comparison to his. He does not owe us anything. He just doesn't have the balls to say it out loud. He does not owe anything, to any player, beyond his contractual commitment to deliver a playable game. And I would have to review the contract to be sure of even that.

Ghost was three times the player you will ever be, and commanded more respect from his fellow players than you can ever hope for. If he can not get the devs to fix it, no one can.

QFT

Jesus, Roda. You attribute way too much to some arrogance-of-intent and way too little to my lack of time. It's easy to assume everything has some nefarious or arrogant intent, but that doesn't make it true.

I spend an awful lot of time typing stuff into the messageboard for someone who doesn't ever want to explain anything. (Like, say, the Latency post earlier in this thread, only intended to make for a more targeted/useful discussion).

I have to spend much of my time and effort in ways I really can't discuss, trying to keep the company alive. So, when I'm out of town at CES next week, doing that, please don't assume I'm "ignoring" all your posts because I think no one else has anything useful to contribute to the game. That's just nuts.

"Getting the devs to fix something" has everything to do with timing and, unfortunately, little to do with how valid or useful the change or idea may be. If we weren't so small and fragile, that might not be the case; but unfortunately it is true. It does not stem from some arrogant view of player input.

There was bad shit going down when Ghost was posting things. Billing systems exploding, employees suddenly leaving, some pretty terrible personal events.. and there's no one else to follow up on what you guys are suggesting if I'm offline (or "mentally offline") for some reason. I'm.. the only one, across many different areas.

Looking back, I could have done everything better, or smarter, or better organized. But at the same time, I'm not sure if I could have actually done anything any better, within the limits of the moment and my capabilities. I pushed pretty hard as it was.

Now that we have rodas inane drivel aside (on the one hand "if ghost can't do it, you definitely can't!" and on the other "It doesn't matter who you are, inc does what he wants!", I mean honestly, are you bipolar?)

What are your actual thoughts on the topic of interceptors, Incarnate?

@Inc:

I spend an awful lot of time typing stuff into the messageboard for someone who doesn't ever want to explain anything. (Like, say, the Latency post earlier in this thread, only intended to make for a more targeted/useful discussion).

OK. It looks like you have a point there. If you had half as much to say about your rational for the valk, we might not be still talking about it.

"Nerf the Valk", "make an Itani prom", "nerf the prom", etc... are not new topics.

Aug 07, 2010 Ghost: The PvP +1 Thread

Check the date on that sucker. It is not that you are not right. It is that you do not say why you do what you do. You do not have to be right. No way everyone will agree with you. But to not do anything of any significance, and then not say why, under scrutiny of a large collections of interested parties, over a long period of time, comes across as pure arrogance. Your nerf of 100kg looks halfhearted at best, and to me looks like an attempt to circumnavigate the issue completely.

Every time you see a "build this ship", "make this change", etc..."because of the valk" thread, think of me.

The prom is a problem ship. the prom is a problem ship that you can run away from. I would be talking about how problematic the prom is. But we have not made it that far. In 3+ years, we are still seeing threads "because of the valk". We will always see threads "because of the valk". It would be nice if they where not so close to the truth, while being so far from a good solution.

Fix the valk, or fix half the ships in the galaxy "because of the valk".

Look at it again: Aug 07, 2010 Ghost: The PvP +1 Thread

Speak your mind, do something, or let everyone assume the worst.

the prom is a problem ship that you can run away from.

Which is exactly what the Valks do when they start to lose. What's the problem, again?

Yeah, the Valk is one of the few ships that can turn tail and *successfully* run from a SCP... Most others are overtaken by its massive turbo thrust and get a volley of flares up their ass trying.

The valk is the PERFECT interceptor. The real shame is that it is an Itani ship rather than a 500k Corvus ship. The top tier Itani military ship should not be an interceptor, it should be a high-drain high-thrust centurion on steroids.

You can argue against balancing every other ship around the valk, but the truth is the valk is right. The problem is the large number of ships which eliminate other ships as viable interceptors due to their infiniturbo capability.

Also, LOL@Roda's rants at Inc.

Suggestion:

1. Get a job.
2. Understand balancing priorities against a limited amount of time in each day.
3. Understand that working at a company with obligations is a hell of a lot easier than running a company with obligations.

Aug 07, 2010 Ghost: The PvP +1 Thread. Check the date on that sucker.

Thank you for proving my point. I remember that period in time. It was pretty frigging dark, we almost went under in the latter end of 2010 (unusually, I actually alluded to that fact in one of my aggravated responses to you on that thread).

In the middle of that real-life shitstorm, while I was drowning in worry for my co-workers lives and houses and families.. I tried to also make changes to the game, just for the sake of telling our players that we hadn't forgotten, that we still cared and wanted to make things better. Ghost had talked to me well before he ever posted the thread, and I signed off on the whole idea. When I made that minor tweak, I thought it would be well received as just a starter thing.. I only had a moment and I thought "hey, if I do this real quick, people will see I'm for real about this and paying attention". I thought it would be inspiring, just like I said.

But you were basically a dick, and jumped to the worst possible conclusion as quickly as you could. In no way was that a helpful contribution to anything, nor is it today. You aren't "speaking truth to power" or giving voice to the downtrodden, you were just being a douche.. much as you were on this thread.

Roda, you're a long-time player, and you have valuable contributions to make to any discussion. Try to not be an ass about it. Given an absence of information, "assuming the worst" rarely results in an accurate picture of reality, nor is the resulting outlook very healthy (most of all for the individual). We are each responsible for our individual assumptions, which is something the rest of us already know.

Let's focus on the technical topic at hand from now on, please.

Any good reason why the Serco Vulture shouldnt be 54/s Drain, 225/ms Topspeed?

What are your actual thoughts on the topic of interceptors, Incarnate?

I honestly don't have many thoughts about them right now, heh. I'll say this: way back the day, I had a goal of genuinely different equipment for the various factions, so they wouldn't just be 1:1 equivalents, but rather tradeoffs. That was what led to the Prom vs the Valk vs the Maud. Of course, half the originally-intended configurability stuff had to be cut during development, and so on.

At this point, I'm fine with making "equivalent" ships across all factions. My only real concern is the frequent criticism that we receive for there being so little difference between factional equipment. Obviously, this is something that will be first addressed by an increase in mutual-exclusion tradeoff, but even if that's the case.. we may still end up with a situation where we have three factions who have three slightly visually-different assortments of the same stuff.

But, I guess if there's enough nuance and slight difference in the ships that fill the respective roles, perhaps that'll be good enough. Unfortunately, the more perceived difference, the more controversy the differences seem to engender.

----------

I was fine with tweaking the Valk back in 2010.. Ghost knew that, although I don't think I told him why I had to basically "go away" for awhile. But if people would rather I re-visited the Valk tuning instead of adding new ships or tweaking the SVG, I'm fine with that too. It's actually less work, heh.

Okay, so I recognize Im wading into the deep end of this thing, and I didn't read everything that came before, but, that said.

This conversation has come up many times in the past. In fact it was around since the Alpha and Beta test days, that one ship or another was difficult to match in combat. That inconsistency was actually written into the backstory of the game, so that the mindset of the races could more easily explain the vast design differences in the ships.

With that history lesson, here would be what I propose. Rather than reinventing the wheel in the name of creating a new Serco interceptor, and an Itani heavy hitter, why not simply create or tweak an existing variant.

The Serco would receive the Serco Guardian Interceptor (SGI)
This would be a Vulture variant (since we know the Serco developed the original Vulture) that was built around a core role of high-speed interdiction and scout support. The vessel would have boosted engines and armor over the SVG, at a matching cost increase. One could subtract stats from the maneuverability, accounting for "increased engine and armor mass" and eliminate any cargo storage capacity that would set this ship more on par with a high-level Valkyrie.

The Itani would receive the Itani Heavy Valkyrie or Itani Valkyrie-Heavy
This Valkyrie would be built as a direct counter to the Ragnorok and SkyProm gunboats. Designed around the basic Itani hull, except with increased armor and a single Heavy-hardpoint, it would sacrifice a great deal in terms of speed and maneuverability owing to the increased weight/mass.

This gives the Serco a custom built interceptor, and the Itani a custom built gunship, without needing the complexities of creating new models. The exact stats would need to be tweaked, and I think both should be reserved for high-license players to prevent them becoming overused, but it seems the logical step.

If one was greatly concerned about UIT also being outfitted with a specialized ship to deal with these two new threats, the UIT could receive the Sentinel Marauder variant. A ship designed more for defense of trade convoys than for outright warfare (in keeping with UIT ideals). The Sentinel Marauder would sport a Heavy-hardpoint, increased armor and slightly better maneuverability but sacrifice cargo capacity and speed. Again, the idea being that a UIT ship will not be fulfilling an interception role, and the UIT have access to freighters, so they would be unlikely to send a ship like the Sentinel out for commercial duty.

The valk is fine, just do the SVG. Whiners will always whine about the valk, and unless you have nothing else to do, just move forward.

I don't, nor have I ever had a problem with differences between the 3 race choices and the 3 nations.

The combination of good turbo thrust/weight, low turbo drain and high top speed in a universe where you are so regularly required to catch a fleeing opponent is the problem. Interceptors don't have to be 3 ports to be effective, but they do need the aforementioned.

If there was an evenly distributed availability of ships with these characteristics then it wouldn't have ever been a problem in the first place. There is plenty of scope there for diversity. That would be my approach to tackling the problem if you're adamant that the valkryie should keep its current statline.

If you nerf the turbo drain on the valkryie, it might solve the problem of it being absurd to engage with, but it leaves the greyhound as the only ship capable of intercepting a plethora of other ships in a number of situations. Centaurs and atlases for trading/piracy, ragnarok III's for deneb, station conquering and capital ship defense.

Savet is right in that there are so many ships that you cannot catch unless you fly the valk or the hound. It's not just piracy that we're talking about here.

Maybe SVG interceptor variant with more thrust, less drain, and less mass, but less armor too?

If we want to address the problem by tweaking the SVG, make it:

1) Recharge while turboing like the greyhound
2) Reduce it to 1 small port
3) Leave stats like armor and thrust alone

Even better, make it a variant of the SVG, with increased license and cost requirements. The SVG is an amazing fighter. Throw a gauss3, widowmaker, law neut, or aap on it, and you have something truly different from the valk, but equal in ability.

I think having different ships for different factions is a good thing. Each nation should have cool and different stuff, mirror matching is not something I would encourage.

To all the "mirror matchers" a.k.a people who follow csgno1's line of thought.

You really should distinguish between differences in ship models to differences in fleet capabilities. Every modern Airforce has had craft specifically designed and capable of catching and destroying other crafts. It's not a question of "the serco should be unique, therefore they shouldn't have effective interceptors". You surely mean to say "the serco should be unique, therefore they shouldn't have valkryies".

Interception is not a quirk or a niche, it's a basic capability that any military must have. The SVG is incapable of effectively catching and destroying common infiniturbo ship loadouts as well as many fighters and support ships yet it was specifically designed for border patrol by the Serco Military. Serco don't need 3-port absurdly light ships to achieve that end, but they do need ships with stats that do it effectively.

Reduce the number of ships capable of infiniturbo, and/or increase the cost of ships that can.

I'm not opposed to each nation having ships that fill similar roles. What I don't want to see is every nation having identical stats on such ships.