Moche

not trying to be mean here dude but, play a progen and a terran to 150, spend plenty of time at the various weapon levels, they change drastically and terrans have it better than progens in most cases when it comes to ammo use rate. there are a number of factors that come into play balancing a class, the terrans are all supposed to have larger hulls than the other races that is part of their trader herritage. i really don't feel like listing every 1 to 1 trade off for stat and ability but look at the classes, play them, get a feel for the game, they were pretty well balanced in live and their hull size was part of that. the only reason that the new trader classes have the same hull as the TT is because no one has complained yet, the new classes were cut and pasted together with some known info and some guessed and are known to be incomplete, there have been pages and pages of ranting posts that use 6+ quotes and rebutals so that they are too anoying to read about balancing the new classes. it's just that they are incomplete and shouldn't be expected to be perfect yet. i'm sure there is method to the development madness here but it boggles my mind that they try to do things like ballance income and ecconomy before half or better of the resources are in game. think about all those little random mob spawns, all the normal and hidden roid fields, the loot drop rates and quantities, the respawn rates on mobs and roids. there is so much that needs to be done before we are even at a point where complete arguments can be made about rebalancing the ecconomy much less the classes. at the moment it's probably safest to stick to the patterns we have from live to determine stats like hull size.

i seem to remember bonus skill points for certain missions or hull upgrades in live, like 2-3 points on a couple different occasions. then there were also referals for skill points if you really couldn't wait. but they were largely unecesary, i knew many people that had maxed all their skills and had 40-60 SP just sitting there that they couldn't use. e&b was always relatively easy to level in and was always adictive, you really shouldn't wory too much about skill points they will come along as you try to get your fix, you up your dose, and then finally OD.

the cargo sizes go back to the idea of race/class strengths and balancing, terrans are supposed to be all part trader so they get negotiate and larger cargo holds and the TT then is the absolute trader, the JE is the absolute explorer so you see explorer traits in all Jens, and the PW is the absolute warrior and we see warrior skills in all progen, what you point out that is usefull though is that the 2 new trader classes that were added have the same total cargo as the terran trader so i would propose that terrans should regain their cargo size crown and see the Jenquai and Progen traders both loose 5 slots to cap at 35.

if you'd kept up on the forums you'd have seen many discussions already about the missing skills for the new classes on the old forums, but i am still waiting for you to make your case for the PP being the worst trader class. in my mind they have level 9 reactors and shields so they are survivable, a 5th weapon slot with crit targeting so they do about double the damage a TT does and well more than any other non warrior class. there have already been multiple explanations for TT's having 1 more build than the others, but trader class to me is based on playability so PP is tops, TT second, and JS 3rd because they still have jen range, level 8 shields, and last i knew fold space didn't work right. builds, negotiate, and navigate are not the only or the best measures of a trader class.

that is probably the best description yet... i too have lost the will to log in and find myself instead watching horrible american television. what they are doing is being forced into a release time that they were no where near ready for, they will bust their butts to make it mildly enjoyable/playable for some people while they finish the game over the next year with those die hard subscribers propping it up i figure, so that while to some extent we all pay for beta testing in MMO's this one is taking it too far imo. i may try to play this game again in a year or 2 when it's got some substance and is actually worthy of judgement, putting it out now is just wrong.

i had never really thought about enb being an mmo version of privateer but you're right there are several similar elements that that game was my all time favorite before i found enb, The Darkening and Freelancer were fun but in some respect never measured up. you know that EA bought out Origin, the company that made Privateer too don't you? i believe they closed down a project for a privateer online game that was underway in roughly 2000. the smilarities are spooky ehh

well we have to assume that you mean what is different here from live allowing for all the non-finished content to come in (there is a great deal yet to add). so we've got the 3 unfinished classes, several new sectors, many relating to the new classes, a few new mobs in those sectors but not many. some skills self target by default when you have no target or a mob targeted (fairly intuitive and very sensible), there are now all kinds of racial building, analizing, dismantle bonuses that are fairly well hidden, there are more factors for final build quality now like, overall trade level, total number of prints in that field, player made component percentage. there is for now an xp boost on the low end of things, i think it ends at 100 but it's been some time since i saw a post on it. there are new bonus xp rules like trading to players gives more xp than the vender for all items, at some point this was tied to the trade level of your trading partner, but i'm not sure if that is still relevant, at the time the lower the TL of the recipient the better your xp was. the fishbowl is an open instance atm, this is probably temporary since none of the raid progressions are in yet. i persoanlly don't think the community is back yet but i kept alot of channels off in live, i knew who i wanted to talk to and associate with and market was only on when i was actively shopping, so it seems like largely the bottom of the barel atm with all channels on. there are lots of actual noobs around now not just people playing noob for a laugh. they are waiting to advance some things because of the desire for a storyline progresion so some of the mobs, loot, etc you remember from live will not be in for some time.

i got a beta key from a beta in enb and wow he was right it is not so good... i can't believe they are going to ship it as live release by february, there is no way it'll be worth buying even by the end of the 2 week "open beta" that isn't really very open. missions work sometimes not others, lots of typos in text blocks that even someone with my gramatical skill notices. about as much crashing as we get in enb only it takes longer to crash out. if they did a first 2-3 months free thing or extended "open beta" to that duration it might be polishable by then, it's not all bad but it may still end up an attempt to polish a turd.

i got the email notices for ST 1 and 2 but skipped them... so i came in as a player when ST 3 began, i do a pretty good job of not demanding anything but part of what i was suggesting is that... on our old forums we had talk of devs trying to start ballance the ecconomy so now the cost of things is based on their mineral values or some such. well without having all of the navs populated with asteroids and/or mobs and not having all the mining resources populated with actual content and all the mobs having apropriate drops.... why on earth are we adjusting prices of resources? the cart seems to have gotten ahead of the horse, so i was suggesting the devs find a more systematic approach because there are some things that need to be done before others. as for the payup bit... well alot of people do or did donate enough that this project could run for months without another donation last i heard and they cannot require a payment or the lawyers would get involved.

since getting contributions here seems to be like pulling teeth let me see if i can help. i'm not a live purist i like many of the things that have been added that were not in live, character classes, secors, skills auto targeting, etc but there are some things like weapon activation that we got very used to in live that i don't like to see messed with. i have not been on since the rollback but the weapon activation semed to go back and fourth every couple days between pretty much live and what some people thought made more sense. -please avoid unnecesary changes things seem to get added or changed without much in the way of consensus gathering like the current long respawn on ore fields and the field wide harvest bonus i don't care for, there is no way to maintain a hunting/mining group when all the fields can be depleted in 20 minutes by a single miner then sit vacant for half an hour. we need regular steady respawn so that miners can pace themselves, or make a path so that it is possible if you find the right field to have constant mining. and one of my favorite parts about mining was hearing the resources deplete, be destroyed, then respawn. -if we're going to go off the live model can we have a say in it i don't like how much the forums do seem to influence development, we get a loud group of people to whine about something and it seems to get the attention. there is alot of basic resource placement that seems to have been overlooked or left on the back burner. what ever happened to all the ore fields around asteroid navs, how about resizing some of the massively stretched out ore fields we do have. we've seen high end mobs come in that warriors camp all day so the fishbowl, BBW+controller, antares are all in reasonable working order but there is virtually no hulk loot in yet and explorers are still the poorest classes. -is there anyway we could encourage proportional development so that one race or class doesn't get all the new content while another is static i realize the wording here may be somewhat more negative than is palatable for some but it is intended to be constuctive and i've tried to add little summaries to make sure the point gets accross. so maybe read it as... i'd like to see us try to get the game back to live before we go changing everything, is there anyway we could get a rough development roadmap so that we know what is coming in what order and perhaps it would help you to be more systematic, and can we stop oiling the squeaky hinges and expect them to realize we're still in alpha stress test.

there are device hulk drops in very few places and they are interspersed with the crap debris filled ones, i've found actual things in hulks in only 3 sectors, Io, Endriago, and Lagarto, in all the times i've leveled up exploreers since ST 3 began i havn't found any other locations.

imo shield recahrge skill on the CFB seems OP, already it is THE shield of choice for all Progens and is a mordanna drop so shouldn't be in the game yet (especially since it is the only mordanna drop in game and no other classes get theirs) but that is a buff that is of such value that you should have to make some sacrifice for it. it does not exist on any must have TT gear it is something you have to go out of your way to equip and why even in live end game TT's used to equip smuglers recourse for raids.

it is my general understanding that there are a few random missions all over the place but that we were never told which npc's to talk to. rather they were trying to encourage us all to go everywhere and talk to everyone, in part so that we would actually explore and in part because they also asked us to start finding and taking note of errors in npc chat trees. i seem to remember in live many of the missions relating to hull upgrades granting bonus skill points as well though i'm fuzzy there and it certainly isn't implimented yet.

this is the type of information that really should never be compiled except in your head, exploring the game and finding those spots are part of the intended gaming experience. this is one of the reasons i encourage everyone to play an explorer class at some point, so that you have an idea of where things are not just resources but stations and mobs as well. also please don't post the same topic 9 times, you can put these in more general places, you don't need one in each class forum.

really glad to see you guys discussing this issue, from the live game i don't recall there being a z axis shift of more than about 5k, virtually all the asteroids spawned in belts that were on a fairly even plane, nor did they have super high center concentraitions I.e. 5-6 roids in the same spot, with outliers 25k away (here i'm thinking of the asteroid spawn south of the nav path in Inverness sector and of a certain crystal field in BBW that is off to the west of the navs). i seem to remember on average 3 different types of roids being in fields and that they were close enough together that you could get a dozen or so without having to move though you'd probably get 2-3 then move closer to the rest.

really to be perfectly accurate we have to go through the whole database and change restriciton now that the new classes are in because by the old rules as i've stated we'd still have things like the galina/draco/cygnus reactors that are jen only not progen restricted being built by progens, in live we didn't have to worry about progen builders so it worked fine but looking at many of those other items they do need to be built by other classes, so to make the labels " *Race* Restricted" and "*Race* Only" work they do need to be more as you describe but to not loose functionality some items would have to have their restricitons changed. i in no way want to make the DD or VO shields non buildable that seems silly but you do want only jens using them so how do we reconcile that maybe we rely more heavily on class retricitons so those shields would just become Defender only and Explorer only instead of class and race restricted as they are at present so that the race restrictions can maintain their logical meaning rather than the meanings used in live.

if you changed it to how you proposed instead of how i stated it was in live you end up with problems though. who makes the jenquai shields? defenders doumaru, veiled oyoroi or however they are spelled are both labeled jen only and their class only but no jens build shields, i know i had both in live made by TT's. it doesn't matter if the game interprets something as terran only when you try to put 2 restrictions on it, there were lots of things that could be picked up and analized by off classes that never were because they were made notrade items. you can do other things to encourage only certain classes have them. and though i really shouldn't have to repeat myself again, this functionality can be easily proven by the few manufacturable progen reactors from live. the buildable ones were "Progen Only" the ones no one could do anything with were "Jenquai Restricted".

there has been a great deal of confusion on this issue and it has been reworked at least once in ST3 though the last i checked it still didn't work right. the difference that is supposed to exist is that Race or Class Only is supposed to reffer to equipability only not have anything to do with analizing or building, this is how in live JE's made Sentinel's Dynamo, Juggernaut, and Vulture reactors (and why we had live comp lists for these unlike most other progen reactors) which they currently can't in ST3 (at least the last i checked which was prior to the last wipe), where as Race Restricted means that the named race can have nothing to do with that item, so no equiping or building of it, which is one of the reasons terrans were always the best builders because nothing was terran restricted. so your case of a PW building a DG is perfectly within the rules the way they are supposed to work, on pegasus most people that had DG's i knew were made by TT's cause the TT was the one that had to make the terror gaze comp.

the need for new engines in general or the addition of buffs to existing engines is an often beaten horse especially when it comes to the high end. i agree for the most part with many sentiments expressed here, but to throw in my 2 cents... in live level 8 engines allowed for warping through many grav wells which is not implimented yet, level 8 engines were the max for most classes so it made sense that there were a number of good engines at that level though the SS8 was far and away everyone's favorite once it was added in the very late game, the level 8 loot only engines are fantastic for most people at this point so there is little reason to search out player made ones. what i'd like to see is many level 5+ engines gain buffs as that's when devices and weapons gain more buffs on average and i'd like to see rare for terran buffs added to high end engines. at the moment TE's have no real problem with crit rate as they have level 5 crit targeting and a crit buff from rally, but terans in general have a hard time getting a crit targeting buff, a buff that is built in to many mid range and high end progen and jenquai weapons and equipment. for terans their only options are the prototype dark matter launcher at level 9 that isn't in game yet, some celestial warder drops that aren't in game yet and even when they are are fairly rare, or the deadly breeze which as an engine underperforms thrust wise what many other engine and buff combinations will do. other buff options i'd like to see would be hull damage controll as TT's especially end up being the focus of fire and will be more so when mob AI is reworked, also atm the smugglers recourse is a fantastic buffing item for TT's one used even in end game raids in live for its buffs, perhaps it would be appropriate to add reactor cap increase or shield recharge skill buffs to engines, atm the prismatic dragon wing controller drop engine does have that buff but as it is the only really usefull buff on the otherwise mediocre engine it is really more a novelty. i still think if any of my buff seggestions were implimented with decent performance on thrust and warp that they'd be often looked over for the SS8 as it is such an amazing engine with a secondary stacking equiped reactor recharge buff and device energy conservation. on my teran toons i don't care about sig at all so that is not a consideration in my decission making, but to get people to look past the SS8 and to get terans to go past level 8 engines for more than spending points on an otherwise maxed toon you'd have to really do something special.

i've been fairly active since stress test 3 started and had avoided getting back to my first love before that, this was always my favorite even after trying many others, but in retrospect it was the comunity that made it so good in conjunction with a game mechanic that didn't require massive ammounts of camping. since coming back i've been largely dissapointed due to the comunity but i've maintained the faith because i believe that the game mechanic encourages membership that is simmilar to what i expect. most of the new people that came to the game that never played live are the antithesis of what i want to find but stick with it, there are some good people from back in the day and the whole new generation can't be worthless. i refuse to maintain an illusion that all my favorite people from live will ever come back, though they are what made it fantastic and priceless. though i'm now part of an guild started by a beta+ that found it neccessary to cheat with his extra powers i'll be looking for an guild full of people from my original server that have a simmilar value system to mine (basically we'll be a crochity old bunch that sets high standards for everyone). atm with the promise of regular wipes no one will be held to any decent standard of morality as it is too easy to start anew, but once we go live people will have to live with their reputations and will be forced by the community to live within some sort of regulated behavior system.