I saw borticus' post linked from another thread and came here to see what the context was.
I read the entire thread, and saw a few points that I thought should bear a great deal of scrutiny from Cryptic.
Note: I don't PvP currently, and have not for a great while, so I don't have a horse in the race so to speak, but I do think that the issues outlined need to be dealt with. I hope I understood the problems correctly.
First thing that stuck out was the singling out of surgical strikes for doing far more damage than would be reasonable, even doing so much that an alpha with this ability can vaporize a target even before the rest of a volley will land. That is simply crazy. I would think that would show up in the metrics as being far outside an acceptable damage range. Perhaps giving surgical strikes a damage ceiling would work?
The other item that got my attention (and I didn't recognize and an issue before I read the thread) was about Ionic turbulance and the other intel skills which can cause a player to be effectively locked out of doing anything other than be a target. Being able to chain stun someone into helplessness is just plain stupid. That would be infuriating. I cannot see how being able to completely lockdown or lockout a target can be viewed as a good thing. There needs to be a global immunity or something that prevents you from being affected by disables for a few seconds in PVP, similar to what was done with the phaser proc (being chain proc'ed was freaking annoying). Being unresistable is just plain dumb, there should always be a counter, that is available to everyone. Otherwise you end up with a specific ship or ship type as being the must have, and relegating all others as being targets, which in turn would affect ship sales I would think.
DDIS brought up another point, and that was removing the MK from gear in PvP making it level-less. I think that this would be a good idea in that it would be a step toward leveling the playing field, so to speak. Another item that came to mind when I was thinking about that, was perhaps only allowing the first two mods of a weapon to function in PvP. Keep in mind that this is just an off the cuff idea. This would also help in streamlining the damage potentials of PvP combatants and making it more open to people who are either just getting into PvP, or those who are trying to gear, or both.
Perhaps there should be some scaling back of player damage (on the damage ceiling end, not across the board) rather than adding a health buff.
On the issue of vitriol on the forums, well...it's a case of you reap what you sow. PvP has been long neglected, and player feedback has been largely ignored (or has the appearance of being ignored). Combine that with seemingly flippant or dismissive remarks by one of the top people, and you are going to have a lot of very frustrated players. It's not hard to understand. When you have negative things happen, and you are powerless to change the situation, or gain any sort of relief from the situation, you get frustrated and angry. I was the same way with the situation with the KDF (I've since thrown up my hands and given up). The intent of the people in charge don't matter whether it's malice, ignorance, financial reasons....none of that matters when the message comes across as poorly as it has. Geko has unfortunately, come across as being completely out of touch with the state of the game and dismissive of many player concerns. This may not be the case, and he may be completely on top of what is going on, and the problems that have cropped up. Even if this is the case, the message is lost in the delivery, and it comes across as being almost incoherent, out of touch, or even "what the hell?". This isn't an indictment of anyone so much as a "why we have arrived at this destination". Better and more active engagement of the players would help alleviate this. There has recently been great steps in this direction, and should be expanded with more communication and interaction with players.
The forums should be the main method disseminating information. Having to hunt up someone's twitter feed, or facebook account to get important game information is ridiculous. Some of us don't use those services, and having everything in one place makes it easier for people to find information.
I saw borticus' post linked from another thread and came here to see what the context was.
I read the entire thread, and saw a few points that I thought should bear a great deal of scrutiny from Cryptic.
Note: I don't PvP currently, and have not for a great while, so I don't have a horse in the race so to speak, but I do think that the issues outlined need to be dealt with. I hope I understood the problems correctly.
First thing that stuck out was the singling out of surgical strikes for doing far more damage than would be reasonable, even doing so much that an alpha with this ability can vaporize a target even before the rest of a volley will land. That is simply crazy. I would think that would show up in the metrics as being far outside an acceptable damage range. Perhaps giving surgical strikes a damage ceiling would work?
The other item that got my attention (and I didn't recognize and an issue before I read the thread) was about Ionic turbulance and the other intel skills which can cause a player to be effectively locked out of doing anything other than be a target. Being able to chain stun someone into helplessness is just plain stupid. That would be infuriating. I cannot see how being able to completely lockdown or lockout a target can be viewed as a good thing. There needs to be a global immunity or something that prevents you from being affected by disables for a few seconds in PVP, similar to what was done with the phaser proc (being chain proc'ed was freaking annoying). Being unresistable is just plain dumb, there should always be a counter, that is available to everyone. Otherwise you end up with a specific ship or ship type as being the must have, and relegating all others as being targets, which in turn would affect ship sales I would think.
DDIS brought up another point, and that was removing the MK from gear in PvP making it level-less. I think that this would be a good idea in that it would be a step toward leveling the playing field, so to speak. Another item that came to mind when I was thinking about that, was perhaps only allowing the first two mods of a weapon to function in PvP. Keep in mind that this is just an off the cuff idea. This would also help in streamlining the damage potentials of PvP combatants and making it more open to people who are either just getting into PvP, or those who are trying to gear, or both.
Perhaps there should be some scaling back of player damage (on the damage ceiling end, not across the board) rather than adding a health buff.
On the issue of vitriol on the forums, well...it's a case of you reap what you sow. PvP has been long neglected, and player feedback has been largely ignored (or has the appearance of being ignored). Combine that with seemingly flippant or dismissive remarks by one of the top people, and you are going to have a lot of very frustrated players. It's not hard to understand. When you have negative things happen, and you are powerless to change the situation, or gain any sort of relief from the situation, you get frustrated and angry. I was the same way with the situation with the KDF (I've since thrown up my hands and given up). The intent of the people in charge don't matter whether it's malice, ignorance, financial reasons....none of that matters when the message comes across as poorly as it has. Geko has unfortunately, come across as being completely out of touch with the state of the game and dismissive of many player concerns. This may not be the case, and he may be completely on top of what is going on, and the problems that have cropped up. Even if this is the case, the message is lost in the delivery, and it comes across as being almost incoherent, out of touch, or even "what the hell?". This isn't an indictment of anyone so much as a "why we have arrived at this destination". Better and more active engagement of the players would help alleviate this. There has recently been great steps in this direction, and should be expanded with more communication and interaction with players.
The forums should be the main method disseminating information. Having to hunt up someone's twitter feed, or facebook account to get important game information is ridiculous. Some of us don't use those services, and having everything in one place makes it easier for people to find information.
Meh...hadn't intended to be so longwinded.
100% agree. Also, when I read Borticus's post, I felt very discouraged and disappointed. Yes, there are some pvpers that have been very vocal in being upset with the devs, but to scold an entire sub-community seems inappropriate. But I agree with the majority of the people that posted here. Raising HP won't solve the problem, unless everyone is in a cookie cutter build using surgical strikes and ionic. Perhaps the acc buff needs to be taken off of surgical strikes, or even an acc debuff. Then you wouldn't be punishing pve players since npc's are just bags of hp that dont have any defense or intelligence. Anyways, I'm a customer, not a dev. It's not my job to fix it. But my wallet has closed, at least for the time being. Please listen to the concerns of your players. If pvp is fixed, perhaps more people will play it. If you build it, they will come.
It would be very unprofessional if he didn't come back here.
He's not coming back, why continue arguing with each other? He dropped his bombshell, and is probably going to use the excuse that we're acid to not come back.
He's not coming back, why continue arguing with each other? He dropped his bombshell, and is probably going to use the excuse that we're acid to not come back.
There are... other methods for getting into contact with developers. Though I'm not nearly enough of an TRIBBLE to actually use them, but at this point we really don't have any good options. As you said, he's not likely to come back- if he was really interested in our input he would have.
That said I think there is merit to try and continue civil discussion because even if they never come back it's a good distraction from how these easily solvable problems continue to dominate PVP and the devs have no idea what they're doing.
just a guess: maybe he just reads? and as much i can understand all the bitterness (and at least partly share it for sure lol), he made a step in the right direction to come here at all. sure, it was not the most clever thing what he did, those posts in that tone, but nevertheless he did come here.
to me thats enough in the first place (as said, i'm about fundamentals ) ...
i really really appreciate that u found your way into the pvp forums. personally i dont think that increasing hp would be a good idea. you can have 120k hull already in a properly built cruiser, which is more than enough imo. if u increase hp u would drag the players into a more dps based direction like we have in pve. the heals are not designed for such huge hp, so effectively you would nerf healboats significantly and force people to rely on their own heals like the kobali console which scales with hull and would be the only viable heal left if one has 300k hp. there are not so many things which are gamebreaking to pvp in the current state. i will list the most important ones. if u fix them it would improve pvp drastically.
1. neutronic torpedo: the dmg scaling with higher torp spread is broken. i am very glad that finally you will look into it. sadly 5 month was a very long time for it to exist. i know very many players who left the game because of stupid one-shots with the torp. not even a base resistance of around 70% kinetic resistance could save you. which really depressed players and dragged them away. it was a very huge problem and it is sad that u took so long to finally acknowledge it.
2. broken game mechanics: when we all saw the new disables in the game we thought of it as not that much a problem. we were more scared about things like the subnuke carrierwave and stuff like that, because we thought that we could resist disables easily with auxiliary to dampeneres boff skill. when we encountered that this doesnt save one from intel disables many people left the game. especially team-based pvp died with this broken mechanic because you simply cant build a team setup around broken mechanics. really borticus: PLEASE fix the game mechanics. if it says you can resist ALL disables it should work as it does to other disables, like psw or tricobalt.
3. lack of hard counters: back in the days one could clear disables with engineering team. nowadays you cant. if you guys give the players a viable hard counter for disables it would really improve the player approach and adaptibility to the new powers.
4. armor penetration delta rep trait: this trait is ridiculously overpowered. the tooltip is not accurate at all. i dont know for sure but from what i have experienced in testing and from combatlogs armor pen gives a -50 all dmg resist to each shot you fire. this resistance debuff cant be countered in any way. that is probably the reason why surgical strikes or beam overload is so deadly these days. maybe you should consider nerfing this trait as it is really too powerful. i mean it is great for pve, especially for newcomers but it is way to strong in pvp. maybe you can implement something like cutting the dmg resistance debuff in half vs other players. this really would help a lot and would deal a little bit with the one-shot issues we have.
5. give playeres a general disable lockout period, like 30 sec immunity to disables after being hit from viral torp or ionic like you did with the phaser proc. this would adress the issue of being chain-disabled if one uses both ionic and viral torp.
6. surgical strikes: actually i think that the basic design of this skill is not bad at all. there are some serious issues though which need to be adressed: obviously one should not be able to fire surgical from cloak but thats an issue that has been acknowledged and is being worked on if i remeber correctly. there is a very easy way to balance surgical strikes though. just remove the accuracy buff from it. the one shots only occur with high crtD weapons, preferably crtdx4 antiproton with 100% severity. if you guys remove the accuracy buff from it, it wont change much for the pve player but it will drastically change its appearance in pvp. if the players need accuracy to hit it would reduce dmg output which would improve pvp meta very much.
with all that being said i hope you can try to fix pvp in another way than simply triple hp and shield like you did with pve content.
again: i am really glad to see a dev response in the pvp forums after such a long time and i am convinced that someone like borticus who really understands game mechanics could do something positive to the pvp part of this game.
^ what he said. Especially about surgical strike. Easy fix that would not effect pve. That's not to say surgical strikes would not still be powerful, especially if you tractor/ hold an opponent.
1) The personal attacks against Geko, the hostility and pointless animosity, are not winning you guys any favors.
2) This idea was actually mine, which I pitched to Geko several months ago.
3) It was not intended as a 'solution' to anything, but merely as an experiment - to see what effect, positive or negative, it would have on the overall atmosphere of PvP matches.
4) We haven't made the change yet because we wanted ample time to test it, either on Tribble or in a special Test Queue. We are not interested in making an experimental change become a sweeping part of the game as a whole, without having a solid understanding of the effects it has.
I'm glad the subject was raised here, but deeply disheartened by the reaction you've all had to it. Maybe try to work WITH us a little when we attempt to do anything with PvP, instead of instantly jumping on the hate-wagon? It might make us more inclined to continue examining the issue, if the community of players involved seemed appreciative of those efforts.
D2 took a rather simplistic approach. much like how control effectiveness is halved vs players in STO, all damage was halved in PvP.
1) The personal attacks against Geko, the hostility and pointless animosity, are not winning you guys any favors.
2) This idea was actually mine, which I pitched to Geko several months ago.
3) It was not intended as a 'solution' to anything, but merely as an experiment - to see what effect, positive or negative, it would have on the overall atmosphere of PvP matches.
4) We haven't made the change yet because we wanted ample time to test it, either on Tribble or in a special Test Queue. We are not interested in making an experimental change become a sweeping part of the game as a whole, without having a solid understanding of the effects it has.
I'm glad the subject was raised here, but deeply disheartened by the reaction you've all had to it. Maybe try to work WITH us a little when we attempt to do anything with PvP, instead of instantly jumping on the hate-wagon? It might make us more inclined to continue examining the issue, if the community of players involved seemed appreciative of those efforts.
Bort, I don't have a nice way to say this, so I will be blunt. IT'S YOUR JOB TO BE INCLINED. You think you and your crew have it tough dealing with these forums, you guys just come and walk a mile in my shoes for a wake up call! I work in long term health care, I deal with dementia and Alzheimer residents on a daily basis. Some so hostile and resentful they make these forums look like Club Med.
Terms like "Hate Wagon" is a big red stress flag! Your taking the job personal. And taking it out on your customers in a offensive tone. They have every right to be mad, and YOU know it. I have been slapped, gouged, spit on, and called every name in the book and I have no problem keeping my cool because I MAN up. Man up, Bort!
Bort, I don't have a nice way to say this, so I will be blunt. IT'S YOUR JOB TO BE INCLINED. You think you and your crew have it tough dealing with these forums, you guys just come and walk a mile in my shoes for a wake up call! I work in long term health care, I deal with dementia and Alzheimer residents on a daily basis. Some so hostile and resentful they make these forums look like Club Med.
Terms like "Hate Wagon" is a big red stress flag! Your taking the job personal. And taking it out on your customers in a offensive tone. They have every right to be mad, and YOU know it. I have been slapped, gouged, spit on, and called every name in the book and I have no problem keeping my cool because I MAN up. Man up, Bort!
Brody
not only that, but he can be directly linked to every reason why pvp is now unplayable. the forum is not the cryptic office hugbox were the quality of your work is measured by how many $ you get people to spend on it. here, its how good is the game to play, the forums being a hostile place should tell you that its not good at all.
Comments
And of course, general power, ship or item imbalances remain unsolved.
But if the first two items are looked into, it could be that it would extend the time to kill to more acceptable levels for most players.
I read the entire thread, and saw a few points that I thought should bear a great deal of scrutiny from Cryptic.
Note: I don't PvP currently, and have not for a great while, so I don't have a horse in the race so to speak, but I do think that the issues outlined need to be dealt with. I hope I understood the problems correctly.
First thing that stuck out was the singling out of surgical strikes for doing far more damage than would be reasonable, even doing so much that an alpha with this ability can vaporize a target even before the rest of a volley will land. That is simply crazy. I would think that would show up in the metrics as being far outside an acceptable damage range. Perhaps giving surgical strikes a damage ceiling would work?
The other item that got my attention (and I didn't recognize and an issue before I read the thread) was about Ionic turbulance and the other intel skills which can cause a player to be effectively locked out of doing anything other than be a target. Being able to chain stun someone into helplessness is just plain stupid. That would be infuriating. I cannot see how being able to completely lockdown or lockout a target can be viewed as a good thing. There needs to be a global immunity or something that prevents you from being affected by disables for a few seconds in PVP, similar to what was done with the phaser proc (being chain proc'ed was freaking annoying). Being unresistable is just plain dumb, there should always be a counter, that is available to everyone. Otherwise you end up with a specific ship or ship type as being the must have, and relegating all others as being targets, which in turn would affect ship sales I would think.
DDIS brought up another point, and that was removing the MK from gear in PvP making it level-less. I think that this would be a good idea in that it would be a step toward leveling the playing field, so to speak. Another item that came to mind when I was thinking about that, was perhaps only allowing the first two mods of a weapon to function in PvP. Keep in mind that this is just an off the cuff idea. This would also help in streamlining the damage potentials of PvP combatants and making it more open to people who are either just getting into PvP, or those who are trying to gear, or both.
Perhaps there should be some scaling back of player damage (on the damage ceiling end, not across the board) rather than adding a health buff.
On the issue of vitriol on the forums, well...it's a case of you reap what you sow. PvP has been long neglected, and player feedback has been largely ignored (or has the appearance of being ignored). Combine that with seemingly flippant or dismissive remarks by one of the top people, and you are going to have a lot of very frustrated players. It's not hard to understand. When you have negative things happen, and you are powerless to change the situation, or gain any sort of relief from the situation, you get frustrated and angry. I was the same way with the situation with the KDF (I've since thrown up my hands and given up). The intent of the people in charge don't matter whether it's malice, ignorance, financial reasons....none of that matters when the message comes across as poorly as it has. Geko has unfortunately, come across as being completely out of touch with the state of the game and dismissive of many player concerns. This may not be the case, and he may be completely on top of what is going on, and the problems that have cropped up. Even if this is the case, the message is lost in the delivery, and it comes across as being almost incoherent, out of touch, or even "what the hell?". This isn't an indictment of anyone so much as a "why we have arrived at this destination". Better and more active engagement of the players would help alleviate this. There has recently been great steps in this direction, and should be expanded with more communication and interaction with players.
The forums should be the main method disseminating information. Having to hunt up someone's twitter feed, or facebook account to get important game information is ridiculous. Some of us don't use those services, and having everything in one place makes it easier for people to find information.
Meh...hadn't intended to be so longwinded.
100% agree. Also, when I read Borticus's post, I felt very discouraged and disappointed. Yes, there are some pvpers that have been very vocal in being upset with the devs, but to scold an entire sub-community seems inappropriate. But I agree with the majority of the people that posted here. Raising HP won't solve the problem, unless everyone is in a cookie cutter build using surgical strikes and ionic. Perhaps the acc buff needs to be taken off of surgical strikes, or even an acc debuff. Then you wouldn't be punishing pve players since npc's are just bags of hp that dont have any defense or intelligence. Anyways, I'm a customer, not a dev. It's not my job to fix it. But my wallet has closed, at least for the time being. Please listen to the concerns of your players. If pvp is fixed, perhaps more people will play it. If you build it, they will come.
He's not coming back, why continue arguing with each other? He dropped his bombshell, and is probably going to use the excuse that we're acid to not come back.
There are... other methods for getting into contact with developers. Though I'm not nearly enough of an TRIBBLE to actually use them, but at this point we really don't have any good options. As you said, he's not likely to come back- if he was really interested in our input he would have.
That said I think there is merit to try and continue civil discussion because even if they never come back it's a good distraction from how these easily solvable problems continue to dominate PVP and the devs have no idea what they're doing.
to me thats enough in the first place (as said, i'm about fundamentals
i really really appreciate that u found your way into the pvp forums. personally i dont think that increasing hp would be a good idea. you can have 120k hull already in a properly built cruiser, which is more than enough imo. if u increase hp u would drag the players into a more dps based direction like we have in pve. the heals are not designed for such huge hp, so effectively you would nerf healboats significantly and force people to rely on their own heals like the kobali console which scales with hull and would be the only viable heal left if one has 300k hp. there are not so many things which are gamebreaking to pvp in the current state. i will list the most important ones. if u fix them it would improve pvp drastically.
1. neutronic torpedo: the dmg scaling with higher torp spread is broken. i am very glad that finally you will look into it. sadly 5 month was a very long time for it to exist. i know very many players who left the game because of stupid one-shots with the torp. not even a base resistance of around 70% kinetic resistance could save you. which really depressed players and dragged them away. it was a very huge problem and it is sad that u took so long to finally acknowledge it.
2. broken game mechanics: when we all saw the new disables in the game we thought of it as not that much a problem. we were more scared about things like the subnuke carrierwave and stuff like that, because we thought that we could resist disables easily with auxiliary to dampeneres boff skill. when we encountered that this doesnt save one from intel disables many people left the game. especially team-based pvp died with this broken mechanic because you simply cant build a team setup around broken mechanics. really borticus: PLEASE fix the game mechanics. if it says you can resist ALL disables it should work as it does to other disables, like psw or tricobalt.
3. lack of hard counters: back in the days one could clear disables with engineering team. nowadays you cant. if you guys give the players a viable hard counter for disables it would really improve the player approach and adaptibility to the new powers.
4. armor penetration delta rep trait: this trait is ridiculously overpowered. the tooltip is not accurate at all. i dont know for sure but from what i have experienced in testing and from combatlogs armor pen gives a -50 all dmg resist to each shot you fire. this resistance debuff cant be countered in any way. that is probably the reason why surgical strikes or beam overload is so deadly these days. maybe you should consider nerfing this trait as it is really too powerful. i mean it is great for pve, especially for newcomers but it is way to strong in pvp. maybe you can implement something like cutting the dmg resistance debuff in half vs other players. this really would help a lot and would deal a little bit with the one-shot issues we have.
5. give playeres a general disable lockout period, like 30 sec immunity to disables after being hit from viral torp or ionic like you did with the phaser proc. this would adress the issue of being chain-disabled if one uses both ionic and viral torp.
6. surgical strikes: actually i think that the basic design of this skill is not bad at all. there are some serious issues though which need to be adressed: obviously one should not be able to fire surgical from cloak but thats an issue that has been acknowledged and is being worked on if i remeber correctly. there is a very easy way to balance surgical strikes though. just remove the accuracy buff from it. the one shots only occur with high crtD weapons, preferably crtdx4 antiproton with 100% severity. if you guys remove the accuracy buff from it, it wont change much for the pve player but it will drastically change its appearance in pvp. if the players need accuracy to hit it would reduce dmg output which would improve pvp meta very much.
with all that being said i hope you can try to fix pvp in another way than simply triple hp and shield like you did with pve content.
again: i am really glad to see a dev response in the pvp forums after such a long time and i am convinced that someone like borticus who really understands game mechanics could do something positive to the pvp part of this game.
best regards
My character Tsin'xing
Bort, I don't have a nice way to say this, so I will be blunt. IT'S YOUR JOB TO BE INCLINED. You think you and your crew have it tough dealing with these forums, you guys just come and walk a mile in my shoes for a wake up call! I work in long term health care, I deal with dementia and Alzheimer residents on a daily basis. Some so hostile and resentful they make these forums look like Club Med.
Terms like "Hate Wagon" is a big red stress flag! Your taking the job personal. And taking it out on your customers in a offensive tone. They have every right to be mad, and YOU know it. I have been slapped, gouged, spit on, and called every name in the book and I have no problem keeping my cool because I MAN up. Man up, Bort!
Brody
not only that, but he can be directly linked to every reason why pvp is now unplayable. the forum is not the cryptic office hugbox were the quality of your work is measured by how many $ you get people to spend on it. here, its how good is the game to play, the forums being a hostile place should tell you that its not good at all.