You're willfully missing the entire point, though... that the problem you are trying to solve (lack of PVP players) is not being caused by a lack of economic incentive or a lack of opportunity. It's being caused by PVP being so broken / imbalanced that new or inexperienced PVP players get ROFLstomped so badly and so routinely that it is actively driving people away.
That however is just part of PvP. Take for example Street Fighter or Overwatch, a noob vs a vet playing the same character will get very different results. In STO you design your move set and that adds yet another layer of challenge. But even using the same build the vet will own the noob.
The only way I've seen games effectively deal with this is player tier rankings. IE each player's win/loss rate is recorded (in some cases this is abstracted as a single number that goes up or down each match). The idea of course is to sort players by approximate skill level. PvP is more fun when not fighting people drastically more powerful than you.
The vet would likely win, yes, but I'm talking about situations where the noob literally has absolutely no chance at all not only of winning, but of even putting up a challenge. As in instadeath... respawn... instadeath... ad nauseum. Literally spending over 50% (and perhaps as much as 90%) of the time staring at a respawn timer.
How likely do you think a noob will come back after that happens a few times and they can't figure out how (or can't afford) to avoid the constant instadeaths?
As you said... "PvP is more fun when not fighting people drastically more powerful than you." This is and has all along been my exact point. The balance right now is so F'd up that every noob is coming in to this exact situation. In fact, I'll simplify that statement to : ""PvP is fun when fighting."
Trying to make the game "balanced" so that all build are even vaguely close? nope. I've used these pics as examples before but I find it useful.
I wasn't a top tier PvPer. My team was top 10%, but just barely. Actual noobs in that game had no chance whatsoever. See how my team in the comparison shot has 10 times the HP of the enemies? Well my team also hit 10X harder. That team got one-shotted with an AoE and I went on to the next.
The only reason my team was fighting them at all was that the game would reset the PvP ranks periodically and this was the first day after reset. So the Noobs trying to fight my team would look at that arcane logic puzzle that was my agent gear and pray that they only had to fight someone like me once per ladder reset. Why was my gear an arcane logic puzzle? Because this is competitive PvP. I'm trying to win, and as Sun-Tzu put it preparing for battle is as important as the battle itself. So I did my best to make my team as close to invulnerable as was possible. Why? because the goal was to win.
The PvP in that game would typically have noobs fight other noobs. This was based on the way it did win/loss records and thus it was how often you lost that determined your ranking. The power of your gear, and team determined how often you won.
This kind of experience exists in all games that have pvp option, it cant be dodged, one thing you could do if it happens in sto is wait for them to move into another direction, use revive consumable and hit the cloak, or masking energy signature. Or if you do not have a consumable, respawn, hit the speed and use one of your cloaking consoles, ship cloaks, intel teams, rep cloaks and run to regroup.
Actually, in STO you can prevent being spawn camped.
The most crazy spawn camp in STO i ever seen, was in ker'rat, where team KDF would drop plasma storm right ontop of the respawn location, everyone summons a massive spam of pets on your face and hit the turbo speeds while abusing exitus/intel (being untargetable). In the presence of a defense zombie that is a waste of targetting and always confuses your tab-targeting since everyone else is exitus/intel/speed spamster.
So what i did was simply: spawn, hit the teleport, use one my hiding defenses, and boost away on my happy way to regroup. It wasnt difficult at all to escape it.
Also this kind of a thing can only happen in team vs team play. When less players are involved, they tent to behave with good manners.
You realize that you are just giving more points to what he is saying about the balance of this game right?
In team vs team it is inescapable to have this kind of scenarios, an organized team would obliterate a collection of individual champs.
I actually agree that in large team vs large team scenarios, the matters can escalate to ridiculousness, when one side is so well organized that the other is completely shut down.
But in 1v1 or 2v2, it is very much playable and it doesn't end in extremes.
@keepcalmchiveon
I agree, everything have a solution, or u could add low energy/untargetable/mask energy buff right after spawn for 20secs or until the player willfully enters combat.
What I don't get, and you'll have to forgive me for not reading every single reply in depth, is why anyone cares about PvP in its current state. Why are we proposing solutions like separate PvP instances or PvP patrols or whatever? Are there any players who think the seizure-inducing, visual and target spam, methed-up zoomy-zoom clicky console immunity and instakill-fest is something *worth* saving, outside of a delusional few who make up not even a fraction of a fraction of a percent of STO's population?
Frankly I think it's pointless to propose any kind of "balance" change or special arena for PvP when it's a nightmare of special abilities added to sell ships and lockboxes. It should be obvious from the numerous anecdotes in this thread alone that modern PvP is unredeemable when you spawn and instantly die to bloom effect vomit and status effects filling the entire screen. I will say, from my experience with Vanilla PvP, there *is* a redeemable core gameplay buried under mountains of powercreep, bonuses, gimmicks, and passives, but the only way to get it is a literal clean slate wipe. Something like being assigned a completely different captain upon entering a PvP map (which they can do, see missions like Quark's Lucky Seven) and either selecting premade builds or slotting pre-provided gear and boffs from a list.
Anyway that's my rant, hope I didn't offend anyone by saying that PvP isn't even a joke, it's a vestigial side effect of powers and products made for PvE slaughterfests.
No amount of "get good" will fix a build that can't survive an alphastrike, and the suggestions I've seen to do so either don't work or are ridiculously expensive.
Just check the discovery arc rep items and store consoles, add tactical protomatter from colony combined with Hull Image Refractors and congratz, now you have 200~250 hull points, 100~200k temporal hit points and maybe 20~30k shields on top on respectable resists stack, swap mostly defensive traits (the cheap ones are ok) and set temporal spec as main so you may get a "free zahl", get reverse shield polarity III and the doff that extends it, on a aux to batt build. That is 30 seconds of complete immunity every minute. Add some beam overloads or Concentrate firepower III, on your free fleet ship for some lol damage.
Wait, i forgot the dyson rep shield... yep the one that denies alpha strike.
Now u r a very resilient little freebie that can do a punch. Congratz on getting good for cheap.
I don't think "bloom effect vomit and status effects" are the problem, but simply the vast disparity in damage vs. HP which makes alphastrike vape builds so common. Fixing that disparity might make PVP redeemable.
The initial poster insists that the lack of players is because there's not enough incentive or opportunity. I think the player interest is there already, but the system is so broken that new (to PVP) players try it and walk away.
I think we're on the same page here. I totally agree that it's the disparity in damage vs. HP that's the issue, but my take is that to someone who's not deeply invested into the system it's impossible to parse what is causing the disparity, hence my comment about visual spam and status effects, and it's a complete turn-off trying to build up to that power level. That's why I don't believe that any amount of balancing will ever save the gamemode because you literally can't tell what's going on when so many things are going on at once (Ostensibly that's what the mini status icons are for, but they become useless when I get so many that they run off the side of my screen. Nobody can parse that.). To buff player health/nerf player damage while leaving the rest would just be a slugfest of activating abilities as they come off of cooldown... and at that point, it's just PvE except that you've got one target and it's moving too fast to keep a single weapon arc locked on.
Back in my day, as it were, there was an art to alpha strike builds. You had to set your ship up around it, and carefully manage your abilities and time your attack. I constructed a glass cannon fleet Defiant when it was still one of only two or three Fed ships that could cloak, and its power wasn't so byzantine that it couldn't be explained with a little bit of thought (as a victim, you'd see me decloak, a beam overload hit your shields, followed by a couple quantum torpedoes just as the hull was exposed). What people are doing now (I mean I can only assume, I haven't done PvP in a long while) is just lighting up all powers at once in one tremendous burst (as you do against PvE health monsters) hoping to overwhelm the other player before they activate their immunities, repairs, and control abilities.
In any case, the system is broken and I believe the only way to redeem it is some kind of vanilla mode that puts people on a level field.
No amount of "get good" will fix a build that can't survive an alphastrike, and the suggestions I've seen to do so either don't work or are ridiculously expensive.
Just check the discovery arc rep items and store consoles, add tactical protomatter from colony combined with Hull Image Refractors and congratz, now you have 200~250 hull points, 100~200k temporal hit points and maybe 20~30k shields on top on respectable resists stack, swap mostly defensive traits (the cheap ones are ok) and set temporal spec as main so you may get a "free zahl", get reverse shield polarity III and the doff that extends it, on a aux to batt build. That is 30 seconds of complete imminity every minute. Add some beam overloads or Concentrate firepower III, on your free fleet ship for some lol damage.
Wait, i forgot the dyson rep shield... yep the one that denies alpha strike.
Now u r a very resilient little freebie that can do a punch. Congratz on getting good for cheap.
So, I can spend forever grinding up rep and dil to buy items that are only really useful in one particular situation, ignoring the parts of the game I actually enjoy, in order to maybe, if my reaction time is good enough (it's not, but whatever), might enable me to survive long enough to get vaped by somebody else while those abilities are on cooldown, in a mode of the game that I don't actually enjoy. (Weirdly enough, not all of us get off on killing our supposed allies...)
So, I can spend forever grinding up rep and dil to buy items that are only really useful in one particular situation, ignoring the parts of the game I actually enjoy, in order to maybe, if my reaction time is good enough (it's not, but whatever), might enable me to survive long enough to get vaped by somebody else while those abilities are on cooldown, in a mode of the game that I don't actually enjoy. (Weirdly enough, not all of us get off on killing our supposed allies...)
Yeah, sounds like lots of fun.
This, right here. vanhyo, take a step back and think about what you're saying because you are catastrophically missing the point. The fact that you have to go through that whole song and dance of acquiring shiny A, B, and C, grind powers X, Y, and Z, and slot abilities I, J, and K just to not die in the first three seconds of combat, that is the problem. Nobody wants to do that. People already run the rat races to get whatever latest reward or ship Cryptic's put out because they want to have fun, what you are suggesting is not fun. As a part of this game PvP should just be fun to play, which means not going through all those things you're saying before you can begin figuring out why you're not having fun with it.
@jonsills , if you want to pvp, you go there prepared. That is the point.
Also, you guys have it wrong. In a real pvp situation the problem is not that players get vaped, the problem is that they can't die if they actually come prepared and are serious about it.
The problem with that is that it FORCES people into builds and playstyles that they may not like. On top of that, it would only delay an Alpha Strike Vaper, and eventually they will learn how to fake out someone with that build so that they waste it on a basic attack, wait for the cooldown, and THEN vape you when you're vulnerable. Either that or everyone will be flying the same exact build, and nothing really happens because everyone is literally immortal.
If someone can't brute force it (Alpha strike), they WILL work around it. Also I wouldn't be surprised if some of the Alpha Strikers are Sci Captains with Subnuc, or team up with a Sci Captain. The second you buff up... you get subnuc to the face stripping your buffs and slowing down your cooldowns. That happens, you're frakked.
There is no magic build to save someone and make PvP enjoyable for all. There is ALWAYS going to be some workaround.
Gear is not going to solve the problem. You can give 16 people the same exact build on the same exact ship, and you will get 16 different results. Everything from amazing performance to "I don't know what I'm doing".
I could probably give my balanced Cruiser build to a vet and they may be able to get 40k DPS. I could give that same balanced Cruiser build to a rookie and end up seeing maybe 7k DPS. Why? Because gear isn't the end all solution. You could have the best gear in the game, but if you don't know how to USE it... then it might as well be the same as stock gear. Knowing what to use and when to use it. THAT is what matters. The skills. Something you can't learn from getting instakilled all the time.
Even if PvP was balanced and accessable to everyone without fear of Alpha Strike Instakills, its an arms race. As soon as people discover a build that is more survivable, people will start working on a way to counter said build.
@voporak, This is not the only build, it is something i quickly came up with in my mind, to get a freebie lowbie started with something simple that works and will help vs vape paranoia.
Tinkering with builds and coming up with ideas is the better part of pvp, and the game definitely offers dept it only lacks meaningful platform.
That's not "preparedness", that's bad balance gatekeeping.
"Tinkering with builds and coming up with ideas is the better part of pvp" ... very possibly AGREED. I certainly enjoy same in PVE. However, the PVP needs to at least be balanced enough that someone can come in with an above-average PVE build (nothing exclusive to PVP) and have a non-zero chance of having any fun at all. Which at this point I would categorize as being able to inflict ANY damage at all, and spend less than 50% of the time looking at a respawn timer. Because if that's not possible, they're not going to stick around and try to "improve".
Actually your "balance" complaint is way off the mark. Abilities are typically balanced for PvE, so you think oh maybe if the devs were to actually balance for PvP it'd be fine?" NOPe. the problem is that the PvP community is actively working to break the game balance. It's not an accident that you got vaped repeatedly. Your enemies were prepared to vape people and it sounds like they had a lot of practice.
This is why I suggested rankings and stuff. It gives the game a way to separate the NooBs from the vets.
Which is an example of differing playstyle and build. Like I said earlier in the thread, you could give several people the same exact build, and you'll get different results.
Seems like there is 2 sides going here, 1 side is "No I don't want to PvP", the other side is "I want to PvP therefore I will beg/shame/try to force everyone else to PvP too because there isn't enough people left to PvP with".
That's not "preparedness", that's bad balance gatekeeping.
"Tinkering with builds and coming up with ideas is the better part of pvp" ... very possibly AGREED. I certainly enjoy same in PVE. However, the PVP needs to at least be balanced enough that someone can come in with an above-average PVE build (nothing exclusive to PVP) and have a non-zero chance of having any fun at all. Which at this point I would categorize as being able to inflict ANY damage at all, and spend less than 50% of the time looking at a respawn timer. Because if that's not possible, they're not going to stick around and try to "improve".
Actually your "balance" complaint is way off the mark. Abilities are typically balanced for PvE, so you think oh maybe if the devs were to actually balance for PvP it'd be fine?" NOPe. the problem is that the PvP community is actively working to break the game balance. It's not an accident that you got vaped repeatedly. Your enemies were prepared to vape people and it sounds like they had a lot of practice.
This is why I suggested rankings and stuff. It gives the game a way to separate the NooBs from the vets.
Balancing HP vs. damage output in such a way that vaping becomes almost, if not entirely, impossible.
I'm not saying they need to tinker with individual abilities. Just a scaling factor compared to the numbers in PVE, because of how they've artificially pumped up NPC HP to avoid things being "too easy".
Problem: BOTH players now have 5X hp... he may not be able to insta-gank you now, but how are you going to hurt him?
Comments
I wasn't a top tier PvPer. My team was top 10%, but just barely. Actual noobs in that game had no chance whatsoever. See how my team in the comparison shot has 10 times the HP of the enemies? Well my team also hit 10X harder. That team got one-shotted with an AoE and I went on to the next.
The only reason my team was fighting them at all was that the game would reset the PvP ranks periodically and this was the first day after reset. So the Noobs trying to fight my team would look at that arcane logic puzzle that was my agent gear and pray that they only had to fight someone like me once per ladder reset. Why was my gear an arcane logic puzzle? Because this is competitive PvP. I'm trying to win, and as Sun-Tzu put it preparing for battle is as important as the battle itself. So I did my best to make my team as close to invulnerable as was possible. Why? because the goal was to win.
The PvP in that game would typically have noobs fight other noobs. This was based on the way it did win/loss records and thus it was how often you lost that determined your ranking. The power of your gear, and team determined how often you won.
My character Tsin'xing
This kind of experience exists in all games that have pvp option, it cant be dodged, one thing you could do if it happens in sto is wait for them to move into another direction, use revive consumable and hit the cloak, or masking energy signature. Or if you do not have a consumable, respawn, hit the speed and use one of your cloaking consoles, ship cloaks, intel teams, rep cloaks and run to regroup.
Actually, in STO you can prevent being spawn camped.
The most crazy spawn camp in STO i ever seen, was in ker'rat, where team KDF would drop plasma storm right ontop of the respawn location, everyone summons a massive spam of pets on your face and hit the turbo speeds while abusing exitus/intel (being untargetable). In the presence of a defense zombie that is a waste of targetting and always confuses your tab-targeting since everyone else is exitus/intel/speed spamster.
So what i did was simply: spawn, hit the teleport, use one my hiding defenses, and boost away on my happy way to regroup. It wasnt difficult at all to escape it.
Also this kind of a thing can only happen in team vs team play. When less players are involved, they tent to behave with good manners.
@coldnapalm
In team vs team it is inescapable to have this kind of scenarios, an organized team would obliterate a collection of individual champs.
I actually agree that in large team vs large team scenarios, the matters can escalate to ridiculousness, when one side is so well organized that the other is completely shut down.
But in 1v1 or 2v2, it is very much playable and it doesn't end in extremes.
@keepcalmchiveon
I agree, everything have a solution, or u could add low energy/untargetable/mask energy buff right after spawn for 20secs or until the player willfully enters combat.
Frankly I think it's pointless to propose any kind of "balance" change or special arena for PvP when it's a nightmare of special abilities added to sell ships and lockboxes. It should be obvious from the numerous anecdotes in this thread alone that modern PvP is unredeemable when you spawn and instantly die to bloom effect vomit and status effects filling the entire screen. I will say, from my experience with Vanilla PvP, there *is* a redeemable core gameplay buried under mountains of powercreep, bonuses, gimmicks, and passives, but the only way to get it is a literal clean slate wipe. Something like being assigned a completely different captain upon entering a PvP map (which they can do, see missions like Quark's Lucky Seven) and either selecting premade builds or slotting pre-provided gear and boffs from a list.
Anyway that's my rant, hope I didn't offend anyone by saying that PvP isn't even a joke, it's a vestigial side effect of powers and products made for PvE slaughterfests.
Wait, i forgot the dyson rep shield... yep the one that denies alpha strike.
Now u r a very resilient little freebie that can do a punch. Congratz on getting good for cheap.
I think we're on the same page here. I totally agree that it's the disparity in damage vs. HP that's the issue, but my take is that to someone who's not deeply invested into the system it's impossible to parse what is causing the disparity, hence my comment about visual spam and status effects, and it's a complete turn-off trying to build up to that power level. That's why I don't believe that any amount of balancing will ever save the gamemode because you literally can't tell what's going on when so many things are going on at once (Ostensibly that's what the mini status icons are for, but they become useless when I get so many that they run off the side of my screen. Nobody can parse that.). To buff player health/nerf player damage while leaving the rest would just be a slugfest of activating abilities as they come off of cooldown... and at that point, it's just PvE except that you've got one target and it's moving too fast to keep a single weapon arc locked on.
Back in my day, as it were, there was an art to alpha strike builds. You had to set your ship up around it, and carefully manage your abilities and time your attack. I constructed a glass cannon fleet Defiant when it was still one of only two or three Fed ships that could cloak, and its power wasn't so byzantine that it couldn't be explained with a little bit of thought (as a victim, you'd see me decloak, a beam overload hit your shields, followed by a couple quantum torpedoes just as the hull was exposed). What people are doing now (I mean I can only assume, I haven't done PvP in a long while) is just lighting up all powers at once in one tremendous burst (as you do against PvE health monsters) hoping to overwhelm the other player before they activate their immunities, repairs, and control abilities.
In any case, the system is broken and I believe the only way to redeem it is some kind of vanilla mode that puts people on a level field.
Yeah, sounds like lots of fun.
This, right here. vanhyo, take a step back and think about what you're saying because you are catastrophically missing the point. The fact that you have to go through that whole song and dance of acquiring shiny A, B, and C, grind powers X, Y, and Z, and slot abilities I, J, and K just to not die in the first three seconds of combat, that is the problem. Nobody wants to do that. People already run the rat races to get whatever latest reward or ship Cryptic's put out because they want to have fun, what you are suggesting is not fun. As a part of this game PvP should just be fun to play, which means not going through all those things you're saying before you can begin figuring out why you're not having fun with it.
Also, you guys have it wrong. In a real pvp situation the problem is not that players get vaped, the problem is that they can't die if they actually come prepared and are serious about it.
If someone can't brute force it (Alpha strike), they WILL work around it. Also I wouldn't be surprised if some of the Alpha Strikers are Sci Captains with Subnuc, or team up with a Sci Captain. The second you buff up... you get subnuc to the face stripping your buffs and slowing down your cooldowns. That happens, you're frakked.
There is no magic build to save someone and make PvP enjoyable for all. There is ALWAYS going to be some workaround.
Gear is not going to solve the problem. You can give 16 people the same exact build on the same exact ship, and you will get 16 different results. Everything from amazing performance to "I don't know what I'm doing".
I could probably give my balanced Cruiser build to a vet and they may be able to get 40k DPS. I could give that same balanced Cruiser build to a rookie and end up seeing maybe 7k DPS. Why? Because gear isn't the end all solution. You could have the best gear in the game, but if you don't know how to USE it... then it might as well be the same as stock gear. Knowing what to use and when to use it. THAT is what matters. The skills. Something you can't learn from getting instakilled all the time.
Even if PvP was balanced and accessable to everyone without fear of Alpha Strike Instakills, its an arms race. As soon as people discover a build that is more survivable, people will start working on a way to counter said build.
Tinkering with builds and coming up with ideas is the better part of pvp, and the game definitely offers dept it only lacks meaningful platform.
This is why I suggested rankings and stuff. It gives the game a way to separate the NooBs from the vets.
My character Tsin'xing
My character Tsin'xing