fuulishone

@Kyp/CDel/Bidoc A compromise then? Since the Net7 db already shows information you're okay with, and hides the "fun" aspect of the information, would you be willing to do a static extract/dump of that view for folks that are interested in building their own player contributed wiki/database? This static dump need not be updated ever, it's simply a set of seed data. If no, that's fine, just thought I'd toss that idea out there. ----- @Everyone For everyone asking for a "better" database, the game (and all others in this genre) already provide a very workable, live and organic database that has search capabilities that far exceeds anything you could find on the web. It's the global chat channel, or in our case, market channel. Ask it a natural language question and oftentimes you'll receive an answer within seconds. No need to learn SQL or fancy advanced search forms. How easy is that? Joking aside, the Net7 database provides the right amount of information for a lot of needs. For what's missing, the player channels really do do a great job of filling in the rest, give it a try. ----- Re: hiding information for the benefit of the game and enhancing exploration There may be drops that are hard to find simply because they're randomly linked to illogical mobs. I know this part of the game is still a work in progress. As the game continues to develop, I'd like to suggest some things for the content team: - Link items to more logical mobs so folks can have a fighting chance when it comes to organically discovering the mob that drops a certain item. - Or add some random drops in the game that are vendor fodder, but have descriptive text that enhance the "explore" aspect of the game. Like the old drops that hinted at hidden Chavez bases. For those that played EVE, there used to be drops that hinted at pirate plexes. Stuff like that. - Add random hint dialog to NPCs. Perhaps the folks at Trader's Fort could tell you about a rumor they heard from their mother's sister's second son's wife's hairdresser about a hidden base in Niff Cloud that was researching some interesting devices. Just some thoughts.

I did not say Lvl 9 beams. I said good racial Lvl 8 beams. It's a matter of choice. If you choose to circumvent the pain of having to deal with ammo, you could choose to not use PL/ML at all, just put all your weapon points into beams and be done with it. The only thing preventing this is gear to support it. Adding gear is relatively easy as that's purely content. It could be easily balanced to be PS/TS only. Lots of ways to deal with it. Or... if you're that much of a combat-oriented TS/PS, then just go ahead and get a ton of ammo made and store it. It does take some time, but not so much that it's unbearable. Bring your comps to F7 and I'm sure you can find a builder willing to build ammo for you 20 stacks at a time. When you go to get your gear upgrades, you have to engage a builder anyway. Why not engage them to build your ammo at the same time? Sorry, but I have to disagree. There are enough hermits in the game already, why make it even easier to be one? Edit: An amendment... There was precedent in Live for a device that helped ease a little of this problem by allowing PS to make a special type of Archos ammo that only they could use. If such a thing was enabled here and made available to both PS/TS for their respective weapons, that might be something that'd work without having to make skill changes, etc.

In a word, yes the one's that come after have nothing to complain about as they have as much choice/freedom to play the game however they want as the alleged cherry-picker. I'm not saying the cherry-picker is a model citizen in the community. I'm just saying that the issue the "come-afters" have is really a non-issue if the game mechanics were fixed to take into account some of this behavior. What Terrell suggested with a per roid despawn timer is a good solution, as long as you take into account Kyp's concerns about maintaining rarity. There's also potential for abuse which needs to be addressed. But in general terms this seems like the type of solution folks should be discussing. Not individual ways to reward YOUR play style and punish someone else's. In a perfect world, both your playstyle and their's would be just as rewarding/or not, and neither would affect the other. Example... You spend 3 hours mining, and fill your hold to the gills with ore, every cargo spot topped off as full stacks thru careful management of your stacks. You spent roughly 95% of that 3hrs mining. Can't 100% since you warped around to find your choice spots, etc. Your take at the end of it could be several stacks of really rare level 9 ore, mixed with an entire hold of other stuff. Your stereo-typical cherry-picker spends 3 hours cherry-picking. They do NOT come back with a full hold, and they do NOT make as much money/xp as you do since they only spent roughly 10% of that 3hrs actually mining. They come back to station with a cargo hold full, every spot taken up with something, but almost nothing is full stacks. This is the ideal scenario. Nothing the cherry-picker does should affect the dedicated miner, and vice-versa. It should be obvious that a hardcore miner will make more money/xp than the cherry-picker. And, IMHO, this is what the various discussions regarding cherry-picking should be trying to achieve. While I don't have any strong objections to your suggested device, I just don't see how it would actually fix anything when the issue isn't the playstyles conflicting, but game mechanics causing an impact on the "come-afters."

I think you misunderstand... What I'm trying to point out is that your frustration is due to the after-effect of a partially picked field. This is a game mechanic issue, not a behavior one. It's unreasonable to dictate that anyone interested in mining should forever and always clear a field, just like it's unreasonable to dictate that anyone going out to do some combat should forever and always clear all side mobs in addition to the named spawns. That's just never going to happen. My point is really that, if there's a side effect to partially mined fields, then THAT's the thing that needs to be addressed, not things that are meant to change how people play. Forcing people to play a certain way isn't fun for them, and is a slippery slope for if/when it happens to you. Fixing the mechanics that allow a partially cleared field to affect the fun for others IS something that should be addressed. It's a fine distinction, but there is one nonetheless. I'm not dismissing that there's a problem when there's cherry-picking. I just disagree that the fix is to punish/remove gameplay options from the cherry-pickers. Instead, I believe what's needed is to fix/modify the game mechanics so that once they leave, whoever comes after doesn't have to deal with poor left-behinds. Does that convey better what I'm asking?

With all due respect Mimir, isn't this just perpetuating the core problem? That there's a reason for folks to cherry pick, and that for some reason that behavior affects the gameplay for others? Removing the ability to inspect a roid doesn't fix the core problem. Cherry-pickers will simply go to the field, open a roid and then close it. I know it sucks after having gotten ready to mine, only to arrive and find fields empty of anything "good." Or just plain empty. My question is, why is this strictly the work of cherry pickers? Why can't it be a more reasonable answer? That someone's cleared the fields (a good miner mind you), but the fields aren't instantly respawning at the same time? Do we know if they fully respawn at once, or if it's staggered? Do we know if the percentage of "good" is so low now that it may be virtually impossible to find anything "good" even when everyone fully clears out fields? Another question is, why does the community believe cherry-picking as a play style impinges on their own game play? Is there something fundamentally wrong with the mechanics of it that's causing the problem? Most everything is hearsay unless a Dev pipes up and tells us what the mechanics are, and are able to confirm that some type of activity affects things for others. Folks need to be careful about asking for things that remove the competitiveness of the game and replaces it with pure carebear-ism. Like mob spawns, roid fields are first come, first serve. Folks will cherry pick mobs all the time, why hasn't that caused a ruckus?

Rather than changing the classes at large, why not advocate something that's fairly easy to implement? Allow PS/TS to find good/decent racial level 8 beams? Beam mode is probably very compatible with mining mode as you save on cargo space. Since you're not opposed to spending skill points on a build ammo skill, you're probably not opposed to spending points on beam skill. The only alternative is to stop thinking you need to use the absolute best ammo/best guns as an explorer. Realistically, having raid quality weapons doesn't really make all that much difference when mining/protecting yourself from field guardians. You could always equip vendor ammo. IIRC, there's vendor Archos and Zet ammo. If you feel the need to use the very best ammo @ 200%, then feel free to find a friendly builder and load up your cargo/vault with pre-made ammo. That's what I did. It's really not as big a deal as you make it out to be. Unless you're toting top level turbo and all you do is combat, you're not going to burn through all that much ammo. I'm not dissing the suggestion, just playing Devil's Advocate on the subject.

Quoted for emphasis. @Ambush, have you tried asking on market for a mappable Theo 5?

Trader, please add slim jims to the meaty snack list. Thanks

http://www.pcworld.com/article/217810/ten_awesome_freetoplay_online_games.html

@Hrathgar I wasn't meaning to remove the existing shield recharge skill, but to add a new skill for the PP. As far as I understood, the PP was still missing a skill (I could be wrong) and thus that was the angle I was taking.

Disclaimer: I don't play a TT, so forgive me if any of this seems unfair. I will admit that I'm a fan of both the PP and JS classes and do play both. For the PP With L9 shields and high reactor, perhaps allow the PP to have a damage split skill? Basically, this new skill allows the PP to extend his/her shields around a single target (within the group only), thereby taking a maximum of 50% of the damage that target would normally get. It's reactor use is similar to how cloak works in that it consumes reactor for as long as it's active, and prevents other skills and devices from being used until the extension is turned off. It has an initial energy use for the activation and then a reactor/second consumption as well. Any target may also only have one of these buffs at a time, and activation is prevented until the skill is turned off fully. This is to prevent multiple PPs from chaining/overlapping the activation of the skill. So for the duration of the skill, the PP must rely on natural recharge (plus buffs if you have a JS/JE in group). This would make the skill easy to balance around recharge times so that a solo PP couldn't keep the extension up all the time and won't be able to turn it on/off to throw a recharge between activations. This should be a 5-tier skill where each tier allows the PP to take more of the damage, starting at 10% for tier 1. This would allow lowbie PPs to be part of high level combat groups, but be "gimped" for raids. This is to prevent lowbies going into raids for freebies by effectively hurting the groups. In this scenario, if you have a PP in the group, they won't be healing, but will be doing damage mitigation. You'll still need a TT/JS to augment and top off the tank (presumably the PW) and the PP as well as a JE to constantly top off the PP's reactor. This allows groups with more healing/mitigation potential (and therefore less dps) to be able to handle mobs more safely, but take more time. Groups with superior dps will take down mobs faster, but with more risk. Seems like a good trade off. For the JS With level 8 shields as max, it's hard to give the JS a new heal related skill based off of shield cap like the PP, but with his/her superior reactor, perhaps a small heal over time makes sense. Again, like the PP's skill, it's initial reactor use to activate, and then constant reactor drain while it's in effect. The amount healed depends on the skill level (assume this is your typical 5 tier skill) and needs to be investigated/balanced more carefully than I can come up with right now. Suffice it to say, it should not be more efficient than Shield Recharge. It can heal more, but should cost a lot more reactor to do so. The benefit of using this versus Shield Recharge is that it's a consistent amount of heal to the group, whereas Shield Recharge is a large heal to one target, with much smaller group heals (using Area Shield Recharge). The negative is that it should be a huge drain on reactor, but the JS can afford it. This type of heal would allow content devs to create some interesting environmental/area damage skills for mobs. For the TT The major problem I have with my own suggestions is that it makes both of the above classes seem more interesting/fun (at least to me) than the TT. I know it would be a major break with canon to change the TT, but perhaps the community and dev team could come up with some workable middle ground to freshen up the TT. Both of the proposed skills prevent the PP/JS from continuing to do anything other than heal. They can add dps... but with the ongoing reactor drain, it's probably not prudent for them to do so. Perhaps this could be an area of improvement for the TT? Perhaps use of the Shield Charge skill imposes a self-buff that gives them some combat benefit, thus elevating their role in a group? I'm not sure, I don't play a TT, so it's hard for me to know how my PP/JS suggestions would impact the TT class. Anyways, just some thoughts, not complete ones either... Any feedback is appreciated.

@wootage You haven't really argued that the class in particular has a weakness, just that you personally feel it's harder to level combat-wise relative to other traders during some points of your leveling process. And while it's not necessarily ideal to balance around L150 (may be re-balance at the major hulls, 30, 75, 135), worrying about combat balance when you're level 3/4 guns is just as pointless. Even if you don't powerlevel (does this even work?) or multibox, solo combat for a JT is pretty darn easy, just don't be stupid about it. A TT may be able to one/two salvo mobs that take a JT several rounds to kill, but the nature of Jenq gameplay pretty much puts you right next to the corpse. JTs can farm non-stop and loot as well without breaking a sweat. If you need to thrust to the corpse to loot it, you're doing it wrong and also probably why you're having such trouble as you're gimping your dps due to range. TTs (and PPs to some extent) almost universally have to impulse to the corpse to loot, thus wasting time and overall evening out in the long run. I've said this before as well, if YOU find that YOUR level 5 guns/kit versus a TT's level 5 guns/kit are equal, then it's a gear problem for level 4 guns/kit. If you find that your level X kit versus a TT/PT's level X kit is weak at all stages, then that's a definite problem. Do you have evidence that says it's hard at all comparable gear levels or only within certain tiers?

In and of itself, creating a starbase in the game somewhere and filling it up with NPCs, terminals, etc, isn't hard to do, but it's a content thing and not really something that could be dynamically generated at a whim. As far as I understand it right now, it can be done with developer tools, which ultimately require patch updates to the clients. I don't see that as being scalable to the degree that a guild can do build their own. Something that might be doable (and palatable to the devs and community) is rotational "ownership" of some station somewhere. Winning rights to that station happens through some currently unavailable content, and the winner may get to designate some features/aspect of the station and have bragging rights for a period of time. That could easily be something handled as flavor content through in game contests etc. Might even be fun for the devs. But deploying it would definitely fall in the category of "patch update." When I made my comment, I thought you were referring to how in EVE, a corporation could build a starbase out in space (assuming they had the right EVERYTHING ELSE in place) without intervention by devs. In EVE, starbase building is part of the core game, so anyone could do it at any time without patching clients.

Not to be "that" guy... But I believe the game you're looking for is EVE Online.

@Tyran I do understand a little of where you're coming from, but at the same time, many of those perceptions are simply illusions. I think you're giving too much credit/emphasis to the idea of large guilds. There's no real difference between folks in a guild versus folks that aren't OTHER a tag and a private chat channel in game. There are no other benefits gained from being in a guild right now, no guild vaults, etc. However, having the private chat channel is incredibly empowering. It makes communications very easy, and there is some automatic inclusion into activities by mere fact of being in the same guild, but that's down to personalities, not something about guilds that's good or bad. Some folks simply prefer the relatively less chatty guild channel than newplayers/ooc/market/general chat, and you can't blame them for personal preference. Really though, anyone can create their own private channel and invite folks to it. Or folks can simply use general/market, etc as long as the chat nazis don't complain. Being in a guild doesn't currently auto-assign loot rights or anything like that, so again there's nothing here that prevents folks from different guilds/solo players from participating in group hunting/raiding. Give you an example. On Orion there were MANY publicly organized raids. Some of the most well respected raid leaders were from the big guilds, sure. They had the experience and organizational skills, but they never barred anyone from joining the raid, regardless of guild tag. It was simply that PERSON that was a good raid leader, not his/her guild. They gained respect as an individual by participating in market channel and helping others. Guilds aren't inherently good/bad. There's no reason for any kind of extra development to create a pseudo-guild.

@cpwing You seem to have missed the spirit/point of this weapon. It's not meant to be entirely comparable to your current line up of guns, nor be a one shot WMD. Of course firing only one gun at a CL60 won't work. Why should it?

People aren't necessarily meant to be accepting combat missions that are at the top of their range. For example, just because you can accept L50/L75 jobs (assuming you're L35/L60), it doesn't mean it's going to be a smart thing to do. Also, just because a JT may take longer than a TT to kill something of the same level might not mean anything. A TT may not be able to go as long as a JT non-stop when farming due to reactor constraints. Balanced in different ways, no? Something else to keep in mind. If there are difficult periods during the leveling process, but it gets better, that's fairly indicative that it's not a class-wide problem, but more likely something that can fairly easily be fixed with gear/mob balancing.

The difference in dps you're seeing isn't a class skill issue, it's an item issue. If you look, most Jenquai beams are kind of low in damage when compared to their missile counterparts. You can get higher by using an energy beam, but then you lose the innate plasma bonus against shields. Or... you could over-power the difference by getting yourself some Novaflash energy beams and use a Manticore/Tatsu device. That should give you the boost you need to compete with a TT using Oguns. Edit: Forgot to mention, try to engage at 50% of beam range or less. There used to be calculations in the system that reduced the effectiveness of beams beyond 50% of their listed range, not sure if that's still in the system, but doesn't hurt to check it out.

Doing more than an equally geared TE / PW consistently was probably a true statement only for very specific mobs (due to debuffs, resists, etc) and conditions. More than an entire group though is inappropriate, and probably why there were nerfs (balance fixes) to the JDs and turbo and such in Live. No one class should ever outdps an actual group that's got more than one player shooting. In a straight shootout, no solo warrior of any class should outdps any combination of two warriors. In all cases, the two warriors should always win regardless of class breakdown.

Of course, JE's being able to dual-wield (WoW term) Phoenix 9 devices were a big help too.

Agree with the take more part, but not the deliver more part. Making a class that can both take a ton of punishment and be the superior class to dish it out is exactly how you get single class populations. That's completely opposite to what you're trying to say in the first sentence. Who would want to play a TE or a JD if PW's own both in tank and dps roles? Even by modern military standards, "tanks" aren't the dps kings. Bombers are. I'm not sure if this is how folks played in live, but PWs did have a skill called Enrage. It's skill description would seem to indicate that PWs are supposed to use this skill to maintain aggro, and that simple damage done wasn't the only mechanism for determining who had aggro. Was this how it was in live? I don't know, I'm sure others could tell you. It would be great if this was true as it would solve a number of issues/concerns and remove the misconception that PWs need more dps than any other class in order to hold aggro.

You're right that there are instances when increased activation time and/or cooldown timer makes sense, but only if the incremental benefit from the higher level is significant enough to overcome the negative. Now it becomes a question of do you allow folks to swap downrank the skill while the higher level one is on cooldown. This is just as much a potential problem and also more housekeeping for the server. I do understand the issue with accidental triggering of DR, but I think those are opportunities for re-education of the player(s) in question. Mess it up a few times and you tarnish your own reputation. I agree that the griefing issue is significant, but again this can be handled even with a DR scenario by simply capping the lowest the DR can go, or allow the DR counter to decay or fall off. If you really dislike the idea of DR, then go with a percentage rather than a fixed number. That's a natural DR without the grieving conditions as it simply means you affect whatever is left on the mob at the time you activate the skill. Big problem with this is make sure the server code applies the math once the activation cycle is complete and not at the start of the cycle. I'm simply in favor of ways that don't mess with cooldown timers too much as that tends to make things worse for solo players (at least in my opinion.) Did you happen to notice what was the mob's starting shield values? And what they were when you activated the Sap?

In my coding experience (client/server code, etc) "timers" of any sort tend to be very bad things and take up lots of server resources. It's also counter-intuitive for a skill to take longer the higher you level it. That just makes folks spend less points into the skill which isn't what skill progression is about. There's already much math in the game, some more math that's cheap and easy to implement on the server shouldn't be an issue for players. And I never mentioned DR on weapons, just skills. Weapon damage shouldn't change as it's a static element in combat that already has baked into it some randomness (misses/crits/range). It's been said in other threads that skills shouldn't be 100%. DR is one way to make a skill not perfect. Chance is another (which sucks to be honest.) Long timers is the final way. Of all these, I think most folks hate the long timer the most as it hurts solo players the most. Chance is okay for certain skills, but in a group situation makes for very spiky combat and also removes fun. DR is really the only way to balance skills while providing players some strategic choice as to when to use a skill. If you use a skill too often during the course of a battle, it's reasonable for your enemy to get smart to your ways and for the skill to lose it's effectiveness. You can apply this same thought process to other skills. Think Hack and Biorepress. If the chance was removed and replaced with DR, would you use them more as a Terran? As a primarily solo player due to my RL schedule, my personal opinion is that long timers would make it less fun for me as I'd simply never use the skill(s) unless I absolutely had to. The majority of my combat would not include the use of this skill and it'd be back to the boring fire, fire, fire.

Some questions/comments: 1. With respect to having any tie to the player's CL. Do you mean this as a modifier depending on the mob's CL in comparison to the player's? Such that someone fighting an equal or lower CL mob would get the full tooltip benefit from the skill, while fighting a higher CL mob would take a penalty on the amount drained? If it's simply this then it would be okay, even for JEs, to tie the skill to CL is some fashion, if only in this fashion. 2. A per mob timer, which seems more strategically interesting in a group, seems to be punishing while solo. It also seems to be an overly complicated set of bookkeeping in the server if you need to track all these little timers and feels like something that could have a profound impact on lag. Doesn't seem like much of a gain for the players, sorry. 3. How hard would it be to code in diminishing returns on the skill and have it based on the mob? An example: - A group of OL150s engage a multi-spawn mob group consisting of a CL50, 52, 54. These levels are deceiving as this is a raid spawn and these are million hp mobs. - Everyone in the group is doing their normal jobs (dps, heal, debuff). At some point the JE notices Trader's reactor is half (thanks to the group reactor level command) and hits Group Shield Leech on the CL50 (single target, provides reactor to the group). It works per the tooltip and tops everyone off with X reactor juice. - CL50 mob still not dead, some time has passed, reactors are low again. JE does it again on CL50, but as the CL50 has been drained once already, the next application only gets 90% value. Everyone in the group gets some reactor, but only 0.9 * X. - CL50 mob still not dead, there's another JE in the group. They go to do the Shield Leech on the CL50, but it's already been drained twice before, so further DR (diminishing return) is in effect, this time it only takes 80% of the tooltip value. Some reactor gained is now 0.8 * X. etc. etc. - CL50 dead, now CL52. As Area Shield Leech wasn't used, this mob has no DR on it yet. First application of SL takes (X * (1.0 - ((mob CL - player CL) / 20))) = X * 0.9 due to the level penalty. The next application of SL takes DR into consideration and it becomes (X * 0.9) * 0.9 = X * 0.81. With the combo of DR and mob level taken into consideration, you can balance the tooltip base amount and cooldown timer a little better, without having to worry about per mob/per player timers. This method would make it more palatable to have a shorter cooldown timer so that solo players aren't penalized for using the skill, and in group it doesn't become an all powerful tool either. The rate of DR can be tweaked for balance, my numbers are purely for example. DR becomes a debuff counter and takes into account all JEs using the skill, so in a group it's strategically important to communicate and choose which mob to SL, not just willy-nilly use Area SL without consequence. I believe a variant of this could be applied to PW Shield Sap as well. Thoughts? Sorry for the algebra, without real values in front of me, I can't give explicit examples, but I think you get the idea.

Edit: @Lot, I meant the bit about coding in race/class restrictions on what can be pulled from a corpse only. It seems harsh to make it so only the class that can use an item can pull it from the corpse. Restricting who can loot what by leveraging SERVER code seems like overkill and unnecessary. Wouldn't simply giving groups the ability to assign loot rights be the right way to go? No one said loot right assignment would be raid boss only, did they? I would hope that all mobs would be subject to the loot rights code. This would effectively cover all aspects of the game, not just raid zones/encounters. The only question becomes, who got the rights in the first place? (Note, this is a hint for someone to look at the borked credit kill code.)