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What would happen to PVP if....
alexraptorr
Member Posts: 1,192 Arc User
"ALL" Traits, Specializations and Doffs were disabled in the PvP match? I'm not talking unslotted, but simply rendered "inactive.
These three systems have definitely contributed to a huge variety of builds cropping up, but also very heavily to the rampant power creep thats fouling up the game. Not to mention the specialization system alone creates a massive power gap between new players/characters and veteran players/characters.
So if we removed all these "enhancements" from the PvP arena and instead were made to rely exclusively on the abilities of your ship and your crew... would that be enough to start leveling the playing field and making for a more balanced PvP experience?
And yes I do mean all ships and bridge officers, including Intelligence, Command, Pilot and Temporal ships.
These three systems have definitely contributed to a huge variety of builds cropping up, but also very heavily to the rampant power creep thats fouling up the game. Not to mention the specialization system alone creates a massive power gap between new players/characters and veteran players/characters.
So if we removed all these "enhancements" from the PvP arena and instead were made to rely exclusively on the abilities of your ship and your crew... would that be enough to start leveling the playing field and making for a more balanced PvP experience?
And yes I do mean all ships and bridge officers, including Intelligence, Command, Pilot and Temporal ships.
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid." - Q
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Personally though, I think completely prebuild ships would be the way to go, imbedded into a story scenario. For example: battle of wolf 359: one team can actually play as borg probes, defending a massive assimilation cube, while federation mirandas try to destroy it before it reaches its destination
battle of chintoca: bug ships for everyone
etc...
but how do you monetice all this? skins maybe? buying zen store ships grant access to certain prebuilds in PvP? I do not know.
And I think that is the main concern cryptic has regarding PvP if it was absolutely balanced. No incentive to buy anything, yet they have to invest man power to it.
I'm not sure how you'd monetise it, perhaps you could make certain maps require a monthly pass or something that's sold in the shop for a modest price? Afterall, we have enough maps now for a free list, any new ones can be put in the shop and monthly passes means repeat purchases, perhaps leave them unbound so those with no interest in pvping can still sell them on the exchange.
PvP ship choices are already limited by what you won so that isn't really an option in my model, although it is a nice enough side benefit.
The problem right now is that the system has become so complex that its virtually impossible to balance. Which Is why i'm thinking down the lines of peeling away some of those layers of complexity and getting back to basis without completely eliminating player choice and ship builds.
Care to elaborate?
Two thoughts:
As you said, DOffs/traits/specializations both "increase power creep" and fuel build diversity. Removal of these "power creepers" would, by extension, remove the "build diversity" - and we'd be back to zombie cruisers vs. cannon escorts.
Which wasn't exactly... balanced... to begin with.
Two, are you really paying attention to what the limits "baked into" the trait and specialization systems are doing to promote "newbie vs. veteran" PvP?
Remember: A character can only bring two specializations to a fight. At "level 110", a character who's focused on filling only two trees would have accomplished the feat, and, at level 80 (90 pilot primary, 85 pilot secondary) could have bought all the "space affecting" powers out of his primary and the two tiers of secondary that's accessable by the character, but obviously lacks the remaining points to top off the global bonuses from filling that tree.
Trait wise, it takes what, 2 days for an unsponsored character to reach tier 1, and 4 more days after that to reach tier 2, doing only daily reputation projects. As such, one week's worth of grinding at least 2 reputations would give enough boxes to fill both "reputation trait" sets.
Does this "hypothetical bare minimum Level 80-110" character have the variety of build options that the Level 215 "maxxed it all" has? No. Does said character at least bring the same number of boxes to the table? Yes.
Well, to be exact and literal, a min-level character doesn't have any "reputation actives"... Still, less than a month of play can get someone to a "bare minimum" PvP readiness, and on a fairly-close-to-Veteran level of power (not choice, but power).
Honestly, the biggest "PvP issue", to me, right now, is that we're using offenses scaled to taking down 100,000+ HP enemies, but still only running around with tens of thousands in defenses. I've been flying my Temp Agent through Mirror Incursion Advanced because his build, right now, "unoptimized" (still has a few Mk XIII weapons, nothing golden) has that one lockbox power (someone spotted me a subspace vortex III manual) that allows his science behind to solo a 3-pack of ships (led by up to a cruiser, soloiong a dreadnought for him is still a bit... interesting...) when the cooldowns are aligned. My big problem with him is that I can't withstand the fire of a half dozen or more mirror ships "long enough" to bite off bigger groups (like when the station's getting swarmed, I'll GW III/SSV III, and draw so much aggro that I die under the bazillion Terran quantums spread at me)... Now starting to wonder if "when player enters PvP, player's ships & heals are multiplied by 10 or 100" might be a "quick and sloppy" start to "fixing" PvP...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
Yeah.... I say your dead wrong about that.
This game was designed for PvP as was its lore, at least in the beginning, and it was pretty active for many years. The playerbase did care but clearly the devs did not, as such "they" broke it with rampant and irresponsible power creep and are solely responsible for it today being "dead".
But please if you know of another Star Trek space PvP game then by all means share it. *rolleyes*
You can't have universal consoles that the devs clearly never intended on balancing AND have pvp, besides, if you're taking away doffs, rep and spec then universal consoles really aren't a big jump.
Allowing players to pick from the basic gear and abilities (i.e eliminating lobi, rep, fleet and lockbox gear and abilities) still allows for large variations in potential builds, leaving open the option to play any ship a player owns widens that range of potential builds while eliminating all the blatantly OP things and things that break the core rules of the game itself and that leaves it largely to player skill again as to whether your win or not and not down to "how many OP things can I fit on this ship without running into shared cooldowns?".
In the system outlined there I think you can probably include doffs, limiting players to the five slots you get without paying massive sums of dilithium.
Everything available in pve could be available in pvp. Different PvP maps would e locked to you if the combined point value of your ship, equipment, traits and doffs exceeded a point value.
These values could be adjusted individually for each ship and item so If one build type becomes dominant within a point range its most game braking components could have their point values increased. Or if counters exist, their point values could be decreased.
This system could also stimulate demand for lower tier ships. Maybe a Tear 5 ship would leave a player enough points for a more powerful build then they could fit on a tear 6. Or maybe the community might find it just has more fun in maps with a tear 2 point limit.
And lets not forget the opportunities a point system presents for winge posts on the forums from people who cant equip that thing they like on a low point value map.
The only real broken things in PvP now are the neverending disables and this temporal bridge officer abilities.. insane debuffs and powercreep.. here an example:
-100 allres by my rapid decay 3
-70 allres by sensorscan
- 15 struc collapse
- x kemocite
Lets go shoot some entropic stuff with my 600 particlegenerators! Pew pew. My disabled target just died of a 200k physical crit with 100% shield bypassing.. does he has no phys. Resistances?
Too bad he cant even shoot back while his zahl trait is running.. my placate doff is doing nice
Oh his zahl is gone.. lets shoot my entropic stuff again cause of my lovely cooldown reduction traits and stuff, im able to spam that insane phys. Dmg every 15 seconds..
Gonna ask some friends if they go into arena with me.. share my build.. 5 men untargetable, usage of broken damage and disabling everything what they see..
THAT is the current issue of pvp!
Thats the current meta!
Btw.. healing is the same.. on my healer its kinda easy now to reach a hazzard emitters 3 which heals 200k (tooltip) cause of some friendly ultimates and consoles..
Dont forget to add the 25% or 50% additional healing of my radiant nanite cloud and percentage outgoing and incoming heal stuff..
Easy way to let your haz tick with 20k+ per tick.. to bad it doesnt avoid this oneshot mechanics.. welcome to PvP..
Still waiting for balancing..
Totally agree.
Yep, that settles it. Your completely full of rubbish.
You often talk about yourself in the third person?
I got better things to do with my time than to waste it dismantling the posts of an obvious Anti-PvP troll.
Good day to you, sir.
That's a particularly interesting solution indeed but it would all boil down to money. Would sales of such ships be enough to cover for the man-hours required to create and balance them?
I think this is where the "PVP is Dead" argument comes from. At present, there may not be enough players that play or want PVP
to make it a profitable venture for Cryptic to allocate dedicated resources for it.
Nerfing the current skills probably won't happen either unless something is blatantly broken. They've already said several times that they are very reluctant to make real "nerfs" and they preferred buffing under-performing aspects to bringing down over-performers.
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