i've been thinking about the relationship between equipment (specifically weapons) and license levels. (and i searched through the archives, and i'm reasonably certain that this particular perspective hasn't come up before.)

a question to start you off: do you think it would be easier for a moderately skilled player to hit a reasonable opponent with a plasma cannon or a neutron blaster? the neut has a higher rate of fire, a higher velocity, and does more damage than the plasma cannon; essentially, there's no reason why anyone would choose the plasma cannon if offered either.

i make several assumptions about the game: first, that a player's skill will improve with time and practice; second, that PvP is more exciting than botting; third, that certain weapons are easier to use than others; and fourth, that certain weapons are more efficient (can deal more damage in less time) than others. please speak up if you don't think these are valid assumptions. :)

so noobs start off restricted to weapons that are more difficult to use than those available to more advanced players. as the noobs' skills improve, they gain access to weapons that are easier to use (faster energy weapons, missiles with better homing). this seems backwards to me; it produces an artificially high barrier to entry for beginners and keeps noobs from trying out PvP, or even attacking more challenging bots. it's like telling a little kid "ok, you want to ride a bike? here's a ten-speed. when you've mastered that, then i'll give you this BMX with training wheels. go practice!"

i submit that the level restrictions on weapons should be balanced such that the low-level weapons are the ones that are easier to use (high rate of fire, high velocity), but that these weapons should be less efficient. weapons available to more advanced players should be more difficult to use (and some are, e.g. railguns and rockets) but should be able to deal out damage more efficiently in skilled hands. as players progress to more advanced weapons, they should be able to rely less and less on the autoaim or volume of fire to get their hits, but this shouldn't be a problem because their skills are increasing.

another advantage of rebalancing according to this principle will be that players who are not particularly interested in combat will not have to spend too much time practicing in order to gain access to weapons that, while they aren't going to win dogfights, will at least serve as a reasonable deterrent to attackers (e.g. swarms, GT).

thus a reasonable order is preserved: a high-level player should still be able to beat a low-level player in a dogfight, but it should be because the high-level player has the skills to use advanced weapons efficiently, NOT because the high-level player is in a valk with neutIIIs and the low-level player is in a centurion with a plasma cannon.

I understand what you are saying, but let me ask you in what RPG that you are familiar with are starting players equipped with +5 swords of sharpness, and more experienced players are given ordinary longswords?

I submit that what you are worried about has less to do with the game's balance, than it has to do with the game's design.

Since I also feel that the game's weapon design (and not just weapon balance) is entirely messed up, we are in agreement to some extent. On the other hand, the sort of vague design changes you are arguing for don't seem like they are all that practical to me. Are you suggesting that players be given NB3's to start with, and then latter access to plasma cannons? Obviously, that's not what you intend, but I can't help but think that practically that's what would happen.

There are other ways of approaching this that find a better design balance (as opposed to game balance) between the competing desire that n00bs be able to play the game right from the start, and yet always have a carrot dangling in front of them encouraging them to continue play.

I also feel that n00bs ought to be able to contribute something to PvP causes right from the start, but we must be careful to understand that what they can contribute is somewhat limited. In a mechwarrior game, we might equip the n00bs with LCT's and WSP's - which have some effectiveness as weapons; but, we would not expect them to be able to take such weapons up against a GRF, WHM or ARC (or AS-7 or Madcat) and survive. The current barrier to entry in PvP is high, but it certainly isn't any more 'artificially high' than it is in any other RPG we could name.

One problem with this is that it would be too easily exploited. Experienced players who have gained skill will just keep restarting as new characters, so that they have both advantages of being skilled & having the powerful beginner weapons, so basically nothing would change, except now you wouldn't know if your target really was a new player or not (of course to some extent, you don't know for sure now, but it would be worse if beginning characters had more powerful weapons).

Also, from a realism/believability perspective, it makes sense to require licenses for more powerful weapons.

people have stated it before, rpg especially mmorpg's are not about instant gratification. They are about time spent building up a character(pilot) so that they can achieve a level of power, greatness, bla bla bla, but as they progress they gain access to bigger and better thingg. It would be a mistake to give too good of weapons to a new player. You have to learn how to walk before you can run kind of thing, sure the bigger better weapons will make new players more viable in the pvp arena but they still need to know what they are doing and the first few levels of botting introduces people to what the game is about and how it is played. I vote no on stronger/faster weapons for new players.

" in what RPG that you are familiar with are starting players equipped with +5 swords of sharpness, and more experienced players are given ordinary longswords?"

well, in this game, unlike in other RPGs, the skill of the player rather than the quality of the equipment is supposed to be the major deciding factor.

as for your and Beolach's concerns, let me toss some numbers out to more accurately describe what i mean:

consider two representative players, Rookie and Veteran. for the purposes of argument, let's say each of them flies a ship that has 10 points of armor and is identical in every way (again, this is just a simplification to make my point). Rookie's weapon fires once every second and does 1 point of damage when it hits; however, the difference between his and Veteran's abilities is such that only 3 out of every 10 shots he fires hits. Veteran, on the other hand, has a weapon that fires every 5 seconds and does 6 points of damage when it hits; he is a better pilot than Rookie, and so 6 out of every 10 shots he fires hits.

so what happens when the two of them duel?

over the course of one minute, Rookie fires 60 shots and hits with 6 of them, dealing 6 points of damage. Veteran is somewhat damaged but still flying. during the same minute, Veteran fires 12 shots and hits with 8 of them, dealing 48 points of damage; Rookie was destroyed before half a minute was up.

so far, not so surprising. but what if you exchange the places of the two players, just as a test?

now Rookie is firing a shot every 5 seconds and dealing 6 damage per shot; again, only 1 shot in ten hits (and he's lucky to get that!). Veteran is firing once per second and dealing 1 damage per shot, and he's hitting poor Rookie 6 out of 10 times.

after a minute, Rookie has fired 12 shots and hit once, maybe twice if he's really lucky, dealing 6 points of damage. he's barely doing any better than he was with his original weapon. Veteran, however, has fired 60 shots and hit 36 times, dealing 36 points of damage. Rookie is hosed; unless he gets a lucky shot in, he won't win, since Veteran kills him in ~20 seconds.

so what does all this mean? i know that this is a simplified model, but based on my experience so far, it maps moderately well to actual VO play. let's look at some other scenarios:

Rookie is botting with his beginner weapon. he can hit an Orun Collector with 7 shots out of 10, but that tricky TyCorp Assault keeps dodging, and he can only hit 3 out of 10. he can kill the collector with no problem, given enough time, but he tends to have a tough time killing the assault before it kills him. however, even if he were to have access to the advanced weapon, his skills are weak enough that he wouldn't be able to take advantage of its greater power; rather than going to Corvus and buying the advanced weapon, he needs to learn to dodge.

Veteran is dueling with his buddy, OtherVeteran. their skill levels are comparable. OtherVeteran decides to equip the beginner weapon, figuring that its higher rate of fire will make up for its low power. is he right? well, Veteran does 48 points of damage per minute with the advanced weapon, and OtherVeteran does 36 points per minute, so, ceteris paribus, it's still a better idea for both of them to use the advanced weapon (though since each only has 10 points of armor, the contest is much less one-sided than it might appear).

does this make any more sense? i'm not recommending that advanced weapons be less powerful than beginner weapons; i'm recommending that advanced weapons have greater potential damage than beginner weapons but be more difficult to use.

(essentially, i may be recommending that the N3 not exist at all, since it seems to be the beginner-skill weapon that does advanced damage. whoo boy is this idea going to make me popular. :) )

johnhawl218: the point i am trying to make is that the current system obliges newbies to run for a while until they reach higher levels, and only later on are they permitted to walk.

an advanced weapon should require a skilled user in order to perform up to its potential; a beginner weapon should be easy to use but be limited in the amount of damage it can do. as things currently stand, beginner weapons are difficult to use AND limited in damage, and some advanced weapons are easy to use and very destructive.

hakamadare: I suggest you actually write a little C program that simulates a few 1000 combats with the weapons you suggest and reports the winning percentages. I suggest that you might be surprised at the results, because you are completely ignoring the first strike effect. You have also carefully buried what you are actually suggesting by employing arbitrarily small numbers. If you used realistic numbers, just about every reader would pick up on the problems in your example because it would violate thier common sense. Nor have you actually in your example done anything which suggests you've actually implemented your goal of having a weapon which is harder to use compared to newbie weapons since you've presumed (right or wrongly) the same accuracy rate for both weapons (on the part of the veteren at least). What is less obvious, but which sticks out like a sore thumb to me, is that you've just _assumed_ nice numbers for accuracy that 'make' your point without any attempt to prove that given a set of real numbers it would generate anything like the 'nice' numbers you use. What's to say that a veteren couldn't use the n00b weapon to get 80% or 90% accuracy? What's to say that a weapon which a n00b could only get 10% accuracy out of, a veteren could get 60%?

Before you can just assume that weapons which behave the way you want even exist, you are going to have to suggest some possible numbers and make believable assertions about how those numbers will effect accuracy. Doing so is non-trivial, but my gut feeling is that it would be much harder to produce weapons with the sort of accuracy to skill curves you want than it is to talk about them.

In short, you've got a theory which isn't well grounded in reality and which you aren't attempting to ground in anything concrete. As such, I think it will seem like a really good idea until you actually try to implement it.

Hakamadare, I like this idea of yours.

Implimentation would definately be non-trivial as Celebrim points out. However, I think there are enough weapon variables to create the appropriate spectrum. (easy to use pea-shooter -> difficult to use killer)

We've got:
- Mass (affects manuverability)
- projectile speed
- projectile size
- effective damage
- Recoil?
- firing interval
- effective range (or gradual slope?)

Yeah, it would be a task to get the balanced spectrum of weapons that Hakamadare suggests.

My only 2cents would be to also impliment some kind of in game training for each weapon. (something other than PvP to train on weapon skills) {actual skills, not a XP tree}

Like maybe:
- target practice missions
--- specific distance
--- repeated hits in certain time
- certain bots behavior perfectly suited for specific weapon use, while other weapons are almost useless against them...
- certain bots fire certain weapons, requiring different dodging skills.

It could be that this all sounds great on paper and won't work in reality, but I think we all agree that while the current implimentation is functional, there is room for improvement. ;-)

/me encourages more ideas.

I agree with banister_murray.
While Celebrim's points about the dificulty of implemintation and the abstract nature of hakamadare's description are valid, i think that there are enough variables in curent weapon desine to allow for hakamadare's plan to work. Of coarse it would require a total rewrite of all the weapons in the game and i'm not certain if a gradual change could be efectivly achieved.

All things conciderd though i like the idea that there not be any weapon that is obviously better than all the others, no matter what lisence level it is. there should always be some downside.

Celebrim: thanks for the advice. i had to step away from this discussion for a while (work intruded), but i have written up a bash script that does simulate combat according to this model:

--- begin paste ---
#!/bin/bash
#
# Simulates a combat between two VO players, using a simplistic model.

# seed RNG
RANDOM=`date "+%m%d%s"`

# set some constants
# A and B are players, r is ROF (number of seconds per shot)
# d is damage per shot, a is armor, x is accuracy (1==10%)
Ar=1
Ad=1
Aa=10
Ax=1

Br=5
Bd=6
Ba=10
Bx=6

# define functions

# shoot (shooter's accuracy, shooter's damage)
# returns amount of damage dealt
shoot () {
target=$1
damage=$2
rand=$[ ( $RANDOM % 10 ) + 1 ]
if [ $target -le $rand ]; then
echo $damage
else
echo 0
fi
return
}

# A shoots at B
do_shoot_a () {
shoot_a=`shoot $Ax $Ad`
let "Ba = $Ba - $shoot_a"
if [ $Ba -le 0 ]; then
echo "A"
exit
fi
}

# B shoots at A
do_shoot_b () {
shoot_b=`shoot $Bx $Bd`
let "Aa = $Aa - $shoot_b"
if [ $Aa -le 0 ]; then
echo "B"
exit
fi
}

# main

# cycle: if A is ready to shoot, A shoots at B, if B is ready, B shoots at A
# repeat cycle until one is dead

# both fighters get off an opening shot
do_shoot_a
do_shoot_b

# and then the dogfighting commences, if both are still alive
delay_a=$Ar
delay_b=$Br
while [ 1 ]; do
if [ $delay_a -eq 0 ]; then
do_shoot_a
delay_a=$Ar
let "delay_a = $delay_a + 1"
fi
let "delay_a = $delay_a - 1"
if [ $delay_b -eq 0 ]; then
do_shoot_b
delay_b=$Br
let "delay_b = $delay_b + 1"
fi
let "delay_b = $delay_b - 1"
done
--- end paste ---

to change the attributes of the two combatants, change the constants near the top of the script. i'm currently running my scenario with Rookie firing first; when that's done i'll run it again with Veteran firing first and post the accumulated results. anyone else should feel free to do the same (and should also feel free to mock me for writing ugly bash).

while the particular numbers i came up with may not, in fact, provide me with the results i'm looking for, i do think it is possible to balance weapons according to these characteristics. in a nutshell, i find that high ROF==easier to hit a moving opponent and low ROF==more difficult to hit a moving opponent. likewise, high projectile velocity==easier to hit and low projectile velocity==more difficult to hit. hey, experienced players: is this at all in line with your experience? am i the only one who thinks this? of course, it's possible to tweak weapons a bit by increasing or decreasing the effectiveness of the autoaim or by making the weapon a proximity weapon, but the basic point still stands.

and so i continue to believe that beginner, low-level weapons should have high velocity and high ROF, but inflict damage slowly, whereas advanced, high-level weapons should be slower and have a slower ROF, but hit like a sledgehammer. to the skilled pilot, both sorts of weapons have their uses; i could see an experienced pilot using a fast-firing energy weapon to herd opponents into the path of his rockets, for example. however, i don't see any point to weapons such as the initial plasma cannons, as they are no use to anyone.

but i'll get off my soapbox.

Cool.

I've actually wrote the simulation before as well. I previously did it back when the Gauss was the game's top energy weapon because I wanted to investigate what the effect of having a harder hitting slower cycling weapon actually was.

Start you simulation at t=0, and assume both players start firing immediately. (You appear to have done something like this, but I want to make sure, because you speak of first one and then the other.)

The effect of 'first strike' is bigger than you might think. If you have two weapons, one of which hits twice as hard but fires half as often, you will NOT get a 50/50 split in victories between two evenly matched fighters. I shudder at numbers like five times as hard but a fifth as often. Depending on the choice of numbers, the effect can be really pronounced. One of the most annoying things about weapons with pronounced 'first strike' is that alot of combats are obviously resolved by 'lucky shots'.

Of course, in the real world, two fighters don't hold still and shoot at each other. If you go further and introduce the idea that the effects of manuever is to randomly delay firing oppurtunities by some ammount, the effect of harder hitting but slower cycling gets even more pronounced. Although this isn't a perfect simulation of manuever, it is I think a reasonable approximation of reflex for human pilots; all it says is that if , your opponent evades, you must spend extra time aiming.

I'm just not convinced that weapons with every behavior that one might desire can be built. Say we give n00b's a homing missile that is difficult to evade. If it can be evaded at all, this would actually hurt the n00bs in PvP more than it would hurt the Vets because the Vets could use it against a n00b knowing that there is little which has a steeper skill curve than knowing how to evade a fast agile homer. And so on and so forth. Common sense may be telling you that everything is possible, but sometimes things just aren't. What you are calling for is something extremely subtle and its very difficult for me to even guess how to start. My suspicion is that even if it was a worthwhile goal, we'd all be stumbling around blindly trying to achieve it.

My experience is a little bit more varied than yours. I'm worried that your perception of what is effective and easy to use is colored by what is currently effective and easy to use. Just because NB3's are dominating current play does not mean that fast cycling weapons have always dominated play. Gauss are probably easier to use and have a less steep skill curve than NB3's. What you are really seeing is the effect of nerfing (hopefully partially offset by recent tweaks, though I don't have my hopes up).

yeah, based on a couple 10,000-iteration trials the first strike effect seems to be quite pronounced. well, crap.

what i'm hoping to see VO avoid is the cycle that i've seen with other MMORPGs that goes roughly like this: hardcore players, through exhaustive elimination, find the single most efficient tactic for [accomplishing whatever the game is supposed to accomplish] and then do nothing else. word of this trickles down to casual players, and eventually everyone, except for a few eccentrics, is doing nothing else. the developers/administrators discover this fact, and instead of improving other options, simply nerf the tactic in question. players bitch and moan for a while, then the hardcore discover the new most efficient tactic, and the cycle begins again.

frankly, given the importance of reflexes, hand-eye coordination, and air combat maneuvering in this game, i had hoped that VO would be more able to avoid this cycle, but given what i've read on the boards, this does not seem to be the case.

devs: i know you're working on it, and it's a tough job. you have my respect and gratitude.

anyway, just wanted to give this idea a spin.

hakamadare: "the developers/administrators discover this fact, and instead of improving other options, simply nerf the tactic in question. players bitch and moan for a while, then the hardcore discover the new most efficient tactic, and the cycle begins again."

You've noticed, huh?

In short, that's a very perceptive observation. Look, I'd love to tell you what I think of this practice, but its got beyond the point were I can talk about and still be civil. I have spent a great deal of time trying to work out how this cycle can be avoided, and I might as well been beating my head on a wall. So, while I could describe to you what I think the problem is, at this point I'm tired of wasting my breath. Anyway, before I get too angsty...

"frankly, given the importance of reflexes, hand-eye coordination, and air combat maneuvering in this game, i had hoped that VO would be more able to avoid this cycle, but given what i've read on the boards, this does not seem to be the case."

Unfortunately, it is the case. And even though Vendetta would seem to have the tools to develop a wide range of different tactics, because we've always been going through this cycle of moaning and gross nerfs nothing like that has ever really developed.

The really truly tragic thing is that Vendetta was alot better game in the past.