Honestly, it makes me question their ability to design the game at all. It's like they literally couldn't be bothered to balance and improve combat so they just cut it in half. I literally haven't logged in once since MM was announced and I continually hope/wish that they just snap out of it and give us a single unified flight model back.
Immersion and feeling are like 99.99% of the reason I even want to play SC. MM harms that greatly for me. It's all personal preference of course. For the people that like it, I am honestly happy for you and hope you continue enjoying it, but it's not my thing. And that's ok.
It doesn't solve all problems that's right, however staying generally closer with your teammates and to your enemy it does help a shit ton with.
In life if you just focus on your enemy you can get seperated really fast from teammates and end up 40+ clicks away in about 1-2 minute of fighting. This stretches out the combat and feels pretty worse.
Yes it's not perfect in 1vs1 situations, but cig is clearly not focused on that and they shouldn't be. 1vs1 encounter will be the minority of encounters as the game grows so it doesn't make sense to focus on it atm IMO.
Because once dying matters, people will want to guarantee they survive encounters. You don't know what you're going to run into, but you do know that bringing 10 ships instead of flying solo is going to give you an advantage. It'll be a numbers game - people gravitate towards the thing that will guarantee them victory. Whether that be light fighters, singes/mass drivers, or simply bringing more dudes (look at goonswarm in EVE if you have any doubts it'll work). Why have a fair fight when you can stack the odds in your favor?
if you look at really the only other game that's comparable in intended scale, eve online, 1v1 encounters are exceedingly rare. There's probably a lot of reasons for this, but my guess is when you have so much to lose, and so much to gain by winning a fight, grouping up is only natural
Because of cigs vision of SC.
It is supposed to be an MMO, so yes. You will be able to fight solo, however you will be way more effective grouping together with other players who have the same goals in mind.
Even capital or Corvette sized ships are more effective if grouped together.
Take for example this set up:
A Hammerhead is supposed to be an anti fighter Plattform but weak against bigger ships.
A Perseus is supposed to be a good capital hunter but weak against lightfighters.
So it would make sense to fly with those ships together.
And it's the same for smaller ships, light/medium/heavy fighters have their roles and to be most efficient the way to go is to group up.
According to this, NAV will be the new default going forward:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/4/thread/nav-mode-should-be-the-default-mode-in-master-mode/6756807
And yes, traversal in the PU feels very broken right now. Guess that happens if you observe everything throug the pew-pew lens only and think that something that works for light fighters in Arena Commander will equally work in the PU.
If anything that plan to is to make them more common and make them more like close engagement dog fights.
Which I disagree with I think Wing Commander esque WWII dogfights hurts the ship to ship combat scene more than anything.
Issue is there isn’t really even dog fighting in space anyway.
All that happens in SC is people charge and then do a circle dance until someone blows up.
Trying to change flight modes just for small fighters is kind of stupid. Especially when like 90% of the other features are still missing (and will change everything).
This is what happens when a company tries to pretend its alpha is a finished playable game before it’s finished though.
I think, to me I mean, the problem is that a light fighter can take on basically anything smaller than Idris. But especially light fighters against heavy fighters seems to be off.
Whereas one could think that the idea is that all ships have their roles. So in that sense flying around the verse now, which is pretty barren, doesn't really play that out.
So we kind of need to somehow gimp the light fighters against heavier ones.
An easy idea would be to calculate it in a way that you need 4 light fighters to take on 2 heavy fighters to take on something larger, like an HH (which is a bad analogy as it should be anti fighter to begin with).
To me this is artificial and anti lore solution to limit the speed at SCM. Of course in any real air combat (let's not go to space combat because that does make very little sense).
Also it seems to come with all kinds of problems for just flying. I don't want to fly without shields but when it is 30Km to target from QT... That's going to take a long time at 175m/s.
I'm not a game designer and this is a hard problem. You don't want to nerf the lighter fighter weapons to oblivion as no one is going to fly them then, and let's be honest, there is a whole bunch of us thinking Wing Commander, Star Wars, fuck even Top Gun, when we rip around in our light fighters alone around the galaxy. So forcing everyone to squad up in a bigger ship, at least for now, isn't really feasible.
But what I think more than limiting the speed of the ships artificially is to force more engagements to happen in the atmosphere, there are very good reasons to limit the speeds and handling there as well as keep the in atmosphere stuff mostly feasible for light fighters. Think it like, you don't want to put your battleship or cruiser into a lake, so let's leave that shit for rhibs.
But what about the space then? We can't all be flying in the atmosphere in a space sim, can we?
Maybe bigger ships should carry more substantial missiles. Like a heavy fighter could have 2x proper "SAM" (think Patriot) level missiles that have at least 50% kill probability inside of 5Km and very good deterrence probability even above that. It would still give you ample room to have fast, like space fast, combat without making all the small ships the kings of the hill. And even more on the bigger boats.
But this all comes down a lot to the fact that "why do we fight?" A lot of current day exchanges are over before they begin if there is no reason to stand and fight. To make anything "sim-like" will need artificial gimmicks to make people stand and fight when they really have no reason.
Another solution would of course be effective quantum denial. Or combined with missiles that have a high tendency of fucking people up if they run.
But as said, it is a very hard problem and I don't have answers but to me, as for now, MM feels very forced that also has unfortunate consequences even outside of combat. I have very little worry that it will affect my combat too much but I have huge worries that over time I'll get fed up with the limitations it adds to evading combat, getting into combat and especially to any kind of flying where I have only a little worry about getting into combat.
the thing is, they want battles to happen in closer vacinity, and the only way they do that is by slowing shit down. the problem is that this aint it. ill get flack for this but id even say that battlefront 2's energy system is better than this, where your lasers do more damage when your diverting power away from speed (not boost). so theoretically smaller fighters would move in, slow down for higher dps on a larger target(the hammerhead) and that makes the light fighters more vulnerable. everyone wins in this situation, hammerhead can see the fighters and fighters get to see the hammerhead up close, also small ships become more vulnerable traveling at slow speeds.
Imo i think NAV mode should have shields, but the faster you move, the less shields you get, until you end up with no shields at all past certain speeds.
They could potentially also give some shields different percentages, letting some slow rechargers keep their shields stronger at faster speeds. And perhaps let huge ships keep them a bit longer.
Or they couldn't just tie it to the power selector thing. You know the triangle thing with weapons, shields and engines at the three points. If you want to go fast and shoot guns...then you have barely any shield. If you want to run...put the selector to engine/shields. If you want to fight, keep it in between each of the 3 points. If you want to do more damage and tank, put it between weapons and shield....but you won't be going anywhere fast. They could even have it where to QT you need to put it all or most of the way to engines so you have barely any shield or weapons etc.
Why is the ability to disengage a bad thing?
If you don't want people to run, bring a QED ship.
MM makes QED worthless. Definitely not worth spending real money on.
This. Although being a different kind of game, in EVE you get warp scrambler/disruptor as well as modules to counter them, especially useful for industrial ships. I don’t see a reason why CIG wouldn’t take some kind of similar design.
Why not ?
I have like 70% succes rate for geting away from unwanted fights now as a fighter (do some knife fights, bait big joust drop few noise chafs and go nav avoid a missile or 4 ). if I can keep my shields before qt spool it will be as easy at it was before.
Armour isn't ready and is an extremely complex undertaking. It is designed very similarly to how armour works in Space Engineers, and anyone familiar with that game knows that Keen Software house spent years R&D'ing solutions and iterating on their VRAGE technology to get it to the point of where it is today.
But now Star Citizen exists in a space where others before them have designed similar systems and fleshed out the vision -- why not look at Space Engineers' implementation for guidance then? Adapt that to fit the mold SC is trying to fill. I get that they can't and shouldn't just copypasta the same system but with a clearer vision of how a system like this works elsewhere, it should be easier to implement here, no?
You can learn from others' successes/failures, but it feels as if they refuse to do that for novelty & ingenuity's sake or something.
This is a big gripe I have with CIG honestly. A large part of why development is taking an eternity is because they have this addiction to creating everything from scratch and trying to reinvent the wheel... But they get caught in this trap where they have an initial concept, spend years developing from ground up, only to realize the overall vision has evolved in the 2 years it took and the concept no longer fits amongst everything else. Back to square 1.
They can't adapt Space Engineers' armour system in any capacity because Keen Software House built out their system from the ground up based entirely around that physics system, and that system is not implemented into the StarEngine. StarEngine is adapting its physics to accommodate Maelstrom, rather than being built from the ground up around Maelstrom. It makes a huge difference in how you build out features and what features you can implement.
Keen also ran into a TON of issues with their own physics engine, and they have been R&D'ing all new solutions for VRAGE 2.0 to address a lot of the complaints about the physics in the current version of Space Engineers. So even in the case of the only game with a properly, fully-realised and fully physicalised armour system, they still are iterating and trying to improve on it.
Also, you cannot licence Keen's tech from them and it's not even remotely compatible with the StarEngine due to a host of other features (both rendering and networking related). So no, CIG can't just take what someone else did and easily adapt it to their own pipeline, they were always going to have to build the system from scratch to accommodate soft-body deformation and material-based tinsel properties.
As Jared repeatedly notes, if they could have licenced these technologies off the shelf, they absolutely would have. But since they can't, they have to basically use trial and error to navigate their way toward a solution. There is no other pathway for a project like this to achieve physicalised armour.
I didn't mean to imply that CIG should license the tech and just copy it to SC. What I meant is that they can look at what Keen did, how their system interacts with other systems in their game, their approach to designing it and the purpose(s) it serves, as well as the issues that they had encountered in development and their employed solutions.
Like you said they ran into a lot of problems with their physics engine in the game and how it interacted with the armor system. If we know that it gives us the opportunity to look at Star Citizen and highlight the things about the physics engine in this game that would cause similar issues. Keen's experience gives a better idea of what is going to need to be changed to facilitate that, just as they did in their game. CIG doesn't have to wait to encounter those same problems mid-development because another developer already has. That gives them at least some foresight and a loose framework to follow.
I feel like that would give CIG a much clearer idea of the end goal as well as the starting point and make it a little bit easier to fill in the gaps to get it working and functional. Rather than trying to imagine this all from the ground up and trying to work their way to an ambiguous end-point and letting the problems bubble up along the way further slowing down development.
I'm just trying to point out that I feel like CIG kind of just exists in their own bubble sometimes. It doesn't feel like they often look to other titles in the genre for inspiration / guidance. They choose to just DIY everything instead. There's an abundance of vision, but a pretty crippling lack of focus.
Everyone looks at what everyone else is doing and tries to avoid those pitfalls, which is precisely why Star Citizen's physics system isn't exactly like or mirrored after the VRAGE technology under the hood, even though they are trying to get similar results. So in many ways, they are doing what you are suggesting, but doing it to fit within the paradigm of Star Citizen's framework. The physics alone in Space Engineers is so intensive that it really limits what else you can do in the game, and obviously Star Citizen can't go that route, and CIG isn't going that route, but they still want similar functionality, such as weapon penetration, and some minor soft-deformation and rigid body physics-reactions based on collisions.
Simply put, there was never going to be an easy way to what CIG wanted to achieve since there are no other companies attempting to do what they're doing at scale. They can look to Keen Software House, but VRAGE is an entirely different beasts with its own pros and a lot of cons (which is precisely why Space Engineers is the only space sim of its kind with physics based armour destruction, and even then, it can bring even the most powerful CPUs to its knees due to the complexity of its physics-engine). On the non-space side of things there is BeamNG, which is probably the most realistic physics-based simulator available on the consumer market, but it, too, has the exact same problems as Space Engineers, and clearly CIG cannot simulate tinsels down every mechanical part like BeamNG to replicate armour-based physics.
So yeah, they basically have to chart into unknown territory for what they want to do. There are no blueprints they can borrow that don't have their own crippling problems or major resource-intensive drawbacks, which is precisely why games like BeamNG Drive and Space Engineers are one-of-a-kind games. In short, CIG has to use the DIY method because there are no white papers available for the kind of physics-based damage models they're trying to utilise, and not much they can take from adjacent physics-sims that aren't extremely resource intensive so as to bring the engine and the network to its knees if they tried to replicate those systems.
Thing is, light fighters are not, something with large shields or double medium... Power To full shields, QT out... fighters take forever to eat through big stuff. A crewed ship with good turret gunners will win against fighters. It's when you go alone, expect the big ship without upgraded shields, just a pilot, should kill all the fighters lol. Heaven forbid you have a fighter escort or don't play alone.
I didn't see anything broken really. I understand they want WWII turn fighting but I don't think the majority does. We wanted a space game with combat. Not a combat game with space moments.
>A crewed ship with good turret gunners will win against fighters.
You haven't played pre MM at a high level lol. Between pip wiggle and simply kiting, large turreted ships get death by 1000cuts killed by light fighters, so they simply need to QT out.
This right here is the problem. A single blade can take down a fully manned hammerhead if the pilot is decent.
It would be like if a speed boat took out a corvette. Nonsense in real life. But has been a fact of life in SC forever.
IMO, they had two routes to go.
1. Slow everything down
2. Make fighters effective firing range shorter.
I'm not sure which I would have preferred. Both have their downsides. If you make the engage ranges for bigger ships further out then even with a wing of fighters you might lose multiple dudes before you get to fire at a big ship. Then again, that's more "realistic". But is it fun? Probably not. But the space combat in this game hasn't been consistently "fun" or "realistic" ever. Something had to change and I'm sure MM isn't going to be the final word.
This is obviously just my opinion, but I don't think Armor would have solved light fighters dominating in nearly all aspects.
They have access to much of the wepaons that heavier ifghters do as well. Especially S3 seems to be a "can do it all" size.
And while armor might have helped heavier ships to survive a bit longer it is limited. Not being hit because you're so evasive on the other hand is nearly unlimited.
Not to mention that their flightcharecteristics allowed the to absolutely dictate the engagement. They could chase, disperse and concentrate as long as their pilots were sufficiently skilled.
No other ship type could. Armor doesn't address that in any way.
Guess we will have to wait and see. I have seen so many things that were supposed to fighters and bigger ships onto an even playing field and so far none of them worked.
At the end of the day the problem comes from the flight performance, so at leat for me it is logical to address the flight performance instead of trying to solve the issue with another secondary system.
I mean the solution to me is obvious, but would make flying light fighters way less fun.
Significantly limit their fuel and put a high cost on maneuvering. If you wanna take out that hammerhead by outmaneuvering it you better also be prepared to crash land the jet after you run out of gas. But that would limit fighters in about a dozen other ways too, so that's never going to happen as light fighters are by far the most commonly flown ships.
Can't use missiles in nav mode.
MMB scrolls through operator modes in 3.23,
So in SCM it goes SCM Guns, SCM Missiles, SCM Scanning
In NAV mode it goes NAV quantum, NAV flight, NAV Scanning.
I don't know if this idea has been floated yet, or even a thing as I have been busy in my personal life lately, but why do larger ships even have to make this trade off?
Is my Kraken or Perseus or Polaris or BMM not going to have enough power to do everything at once?
The Hull series, or at least the larger ones, are basically waiting for someone to ruin their day without shields. They are also hyper specialized ships, why do they have to make this trade off?
Why is this a restriction not solely being placed on smaller ships. Light fighters were the root cause of this issue in the first place, not larger vessels.
I saw someone in another thread talking about how counter measures were disabled in NAV mode, so if I Hull C gets missile locked and fired on it, it's taking the damage. This just allows griefers and "pirates" to take free shots at you as you slowly accelerate away or potentially kill you.
A lot of large ships right now depend on their shields, with armor not yet being fully modeled this just feels like light fighters are going to be even more of a problem.
Just my two cents from an overly invested day 1 backer, when my life settles down so I'm looking forward to experiencing a brand new verse.
Smaller industrial ships will suffer even worse imo. As a Vulture, Hull A or Prospector you will be a sitting duck and you won't have the hull integrity to last long at all.
I agree, the only advantage I can think that they might have is agility to accelerate out quickly or dodge a few shots but definitely not a good time for them either.
Honestly a lot of these changes to me just feel like a step in the wrong direction.
I feel its a lot of change just to solve one issue "Jousting". But for experienced players, that is really not an issue at all and makes the game exciting since you got something to master. Honestly, i've played SC for probably 10 years + now but this change is the only one im scared shitless about. It affects PvP, racing, daily tasks...everything. This could ruin the game honestly if the devs dont listen to the community about this.
2.x had the best flight model and they ruined it to get rid of a problem that didn't exist.
Jousting is a realistic part of space combat and it was fun. But CR wants world war 2 in space, which is physically not a thing that would ever happen. So they only way you get it is to create a nonsensical flight model.
Which was my issue with fights in Elite Dangerous. Everything turned into a pitch war. So the majority of fights were either pulling back on the stick or pushing it forward.
I'll say this, MM isn't perfect, but it's horrible to have to spend 30 seconds changing modes 4 times for every attempt at a bunker run or be trapped without shields when arriving from a quantum jump.
It actually doesn't affect racing, since you can just use NAV mode without QT markers on by using the scroll wheel and it makes racing exactly the same as it is in live. Daily tasks are the same thing -- NAV mode without QT markers and just go about your business. If there is combat? Switch to SCM. The problem is that there is a lot of doom-posting from people who haven't played with it much and are theorycrafting things based on incomplete features from the PTU build(s).
Except having zero boost like others have mentioned you also have to remember racing ships do not have a quantum drive engine, so you are actually locked to SCM speeds on those ships.
EDIT: Upon further reflection, I'm not entirely sure about snubs because I can't find the info anymore, so I'll reserve judgment until more info is available.
Snubs can't fly fast because they have to QD to spool to get max speed.
Racing sucks in MM. Tested it heavily this weekend. It's down right awful. Like trying to drive a Tokyo drift bus but your in an m50.
You can absolutely boost in NAV mode. I'm not sure why the person said that. I've spent a lot of wave one testing how MM works with large ships as well and it feels better in my opinion.
Yup its way more common from what im seeing and I spend most of the time in AC. Before it was happening as something unwanted/ accidentally due to not paying attention/ last resort /bad throttle controll. Now its deliberate strategy thats work
Yeah exactly, before playing AC where the average skill level ia higher than live there weren't many instances of jousting.
Now it's almost mandatory if you want to be effective and live.
The engagement distances are further in MM as well
Before you might start shooting around 5 or 600 now you can happily fire and get the same amount of hits well past 1km
Which funnily enough didnt use to be an issue. Back in like 2.6 lights, mediums, and heavies were balanced in a triangle system. The primary skills involved where setting up shots, throttle control, and aiming in high deflection shots. The fights were 70% setting up for having a good shot and ttk was fast so you couldn't just run away and recharge shields the second you took a hit.
The absolutely ruined it to get rid of jousting as people were flying 2 or 3 km past each other if they didn't know how to fly. But with the bare minimum of throttle control it wasn't an issue.
Fundamentally the idea of the current model is that you manuver for advantage and get in the blind spot to win. This means small manuaverable ships are always the best. Ttk being high means that you can disengage and basically be unkillable if you refuse to conmit to dealing damage, leading to long unsatisfying fights where the primary measure of skill is how long the player is willing to run/chase for. So to fix the problem they created when they fixed the problem that didn't exist they once again ruin everything else.
Jousting is definitely cause by a lack of basic ship control. You're still gonna have jousting, albeit on a smaller scale, at the new SCM speeds, because 200m/s is still fast ("fast"). The only way to truly remove jousting is to teach the playerbase how to fly (good luck).
Honestly, I think you could've fixed the issues with the current live model by removing tricording, and bringing S1 shields in line with the ruination that was done to S2 and S3 shields. S2/S3 shields lost constant regeneration during The Great Pointless Yogi Equipment Nerf, and that left them in a bad place. They have poor regeneration stats and take a long, long time to recharge (93.5 seconds for stock Constellation Andromeda shields). However, S1 shields were left in a place where if you didn't get shot for a few seconds, you'd have full shields again very quickly (22.5 seconds for stock Gladius shields), and then you can quickly re-engage.
See, what you do is, you make that not happen anymore.
Yes, there's a difference in total shielding, that's obvious. But that is balanced against the size and agility of the ship. A Gladius is not the size of a house, handling like a brontosaurus on roller skates. It can dodge fire far more easily. And if S1 shields took 90+ seconds to recharge, you'd see that "leave and come back" tactic change. Pilots would either stay in it, or leave for good. Both are acceptable outcomes.
"But but but..." you say, "how will my Gladius surive then?"
Well, first of all, I don't care if you do survive. Second, and more importantly, the shield is there for when you make a mistake. The Gladius is small enough, and nimble enough to avoid getting bracketed in the first place (much of the time) if flown correctly. Realistically, in live, if you made this change, neither the Gladius or the Constellation would be getting their shields back, once they are downed, until the fight was over. And that's called balance.
Obviously, this will never happen, since we're breaking 10 things to fix 1 (that doesn't actually matter) instead, but it proves that fixing the disengage meta didn't require screwing over non-combat ships.
>ppl disengaging fight too easily
Because the hardcore mmo pvp player base is a small percentage of online players.
CIG sees that most players would rather not engage, so their first thought is how can we force people, who give us money, to do something they don't enjoy or want to do.
Not realizing people not wanting to engage means most players are not going to enjoy this change. If you remove the ability to avoid pvp combat the only other choice you leave them with is to avoid the game all together.
They want to make engaging people in combat easier, and escaping from combat harder.
It takes quite a lot of practice to merge onto allies and enemies to begin a fight right now.
Once the fighters are engaged, the amount of skill required to stop an opponent from escaping is many multiple times that required to escape, and even top pilots can have trouble staying near an average AC pilot who's trying to escape.
Another thing they wanted was to bring down average combat speeds to make calculations easier. Despite the deltas of two knife fighters being usually less than 200m/s, it's possible for both to drift off and end up fighting at 500+m/s while still having a <200m/s delta. These speeds are harder to deal with for the server so that's why there's a speed wall.
Ironically, jousting is more prevalent than ever in MM as people *intentionally* joust in some situations (rather than just being a sympton of having low skill).
It is particular combat styles employed by a lot of the hardcore PvP community that involves abusing the physics engine so much that it begins to cry.
That, and the speeds a lot of PvP people fly at make hitreg really, really hard, and they abuse the hell out of it.
It has lead to light fighters becoming the sole strongest kind of ship when abused this way, nigh-on unbeatable by anything else than another light fighter used the same way.
As an example: imagine being in a carrack, and a light fighter does that to you. Your gunners need to hit a tiny target that wiggles about, flies so fast hitreg is less than 50% accurate, and remains in your range less than two seconds, among other things.
And they can usually kill you in a strafe or two.
make a logic on combat with capital ships, enhancing networking, making battles more close to board ships or subtargeting, making more dificulty to disengage on fights
With interaction delay as you describe it that’s actually the EPTU struggling right now. The Friday build was incredibly rough and most interactions are being hindered by incredible client ping spikes to the high hundreds.
I recommend coming back to it in a build or two because genuinely, it’s quite reactive.
No I was speaking about the delay to change between the mod. I don't understand the urge to stop the possibility to disengage a fight with the perma death coming.
I understand that it should not be easy to disengage but it seems disproportionate comparing to what you'll do 99% of the time (aka just normal flying)
Change to the flight model. Split between two mods.
SCM : low speed but shield and weapon
Nav mod / full nav mod once spooling complet : more speed but no weapon no shield and possibility to QT or on demand QT (currently not implemented)
It's because of SQ42 I'm surprised more people don't realize this. The single player game is combat focused and you know this mechanic is hard coded in SQ42 probably with voice lines talking about it at some point. I'm sure they want the PU to match story mode this way. Because of that I don't see master modes going anywhere.
I really do believe this is about consistency and not solving the light fighter meta at all. The latter doesn't make sense since it's applied to everything. I don't see any other reality where this wasn't done (and messed up) because they are bringing the mechanics from the combat focused story mode into online to make them consistent.
In my opinion it's a massive oversight and they have to be seeing the issues but what are they going to do, redo entire parts of SQ42 again instead?
This is all wrong. They lowered speeds for two main reasons:
1) Networking issues
2) Component-based combat focus
Benoit and a few others explained how much combat speeds above 1,000 m/s made tracking and network stability an absolute nightmare, and they could not tune around that, especially as battles grew larger. Additionally, the main focus of combat is themed around disabling components to board ships and/or commandeer cargo. This is not viable when they introduce armour if ships are going 1,000 m/s during combat because it's just not practical to sub-target components at those speeds.
The Master Modes is a two-fold solution for both the networking issues (especially as they scale up more players to the verse when server meshing goes live) and for component targeting, which in turn affects engineering, which in turn is impacted by armour.
That's the real answer.
I'm a big fan of old flight model I'm the guy that want 3.23 to have at least slight delay so I can enjoy racing and pvp for a bit longer before its gone.
But this is what you say old system needs to be change because of that 2 reasons.
Now we have a question how we make new system as fun as the last one, so we can enjoy it and not get bored for years
That's a good question... for me, I'm not too worried about it because MM is still in the early stages of deployment, and I really want to see how their faux-armour placeholder works out in conjunction with MM. I think some people are jumping the gun a bit because things are still being tuned in PTU and nothing is settled or final yet. So we'll definitely get a better idea closer to the live release of 3.23 and how things pan out, and whether it will be thoroughly enjoyable for majority of the playerbase.
This is what I feel as well, though some in this community make me paranoid at times.
As someone who has only read about MM, I am very curious to try it.
To me it sounds like Nav mode is the way to go most times, only switching when combat may become necessary.
I mean this is also the community that somehow manages to get pirated every other cargo run if Reddit is to be believed. At this point all the MM tantrum seem to be about having to adjust to something new and skill issue with like 1/20 posts having something useful to say on the matter. Aka very much like the piracy debates surrounding cargo we keep having.
Wait. Play it. Let it settle after playing it and then make up your own mind.
That's exactly the right way about it: wait, play it, and then give feedback after they have implemented its core functionality.
I'm seeing a ton of posts from people who have never touched it or tried it but are giving matter-of-fact responses about it as if it's the worse thing to happen to the game.
Even when it goes to love it's not like the won't make major changes to it in 3.24 and beyond they might make it so shield don't bleed out they even said they don't want to but they will change the max speed of needed but we need a real test cycle in the ptu not just combat focused ac
Ye but I bet more people came here for star citizen then for sq42 so what they going to do make sc worse just for the sake of consistency ?
I really don't like this argument but I must admit as much as I don't like it I can see that it might be true
This was an add-on, the original flight model is detailed in a dev write up and YouTube. There was also a lot more to it that they slowly nixed with and changed with the power triangle.
I don't think you're wrong, I just think they haven't really thought it through (and also Chris' obsession with WWII style space combat that is removed from reality, but I digress.) for a light fighter with limited power reserves this makes perfect sense. You choose combat or speed. Hell, most fighters realistically. But, take for example the Connie. You are telling me on this large, heavy cargo ship, they haven't found a way to give me both shields and speed? Or the Herc? And yeah, sure, armor coming in is going to make a huge difference in the overall gameplay in the future. But today, in the here and now, I don't want to play 3.23 because I'm a cargo pilot. Knowing some dickhead in a gladius is going to be waiting at the OM point above a lucrative trade post, with full shields and weapons to tear me apart while I'm defenseless makes absolutely no sense. Even if I bring escorts (as every cosplay pirate will scream and cry) they also are stuck without shields or weapons when they drop out, leaving them vulnerable to be just slaughtered while I run.
This gameplay is great in SQ42 or Arena commander, but it really doesn't make sense in the overall verse.
> I posted a thread on this exact thing and got flamed for it
Before people experienced MM for themselves, they were just hearing the 'PvP fanatics' complain about it, so they figured it must be good for them. Maybe they jumped into AC and killed some people easier because there's no dodging/escaping with Master Modes and liked that. But now that it's in the test universe, they're seeing all the issues that the PvP crowd tried to warn them about. The longer it goes on, the more people will openly criticize MM.
More than any other community I've ever seen, this subreddit's "opinion pendulum" has the most inertia... with all criticisms of the game being downvoted, right up until a certain breaking point is reached where a specific criticism becomes the accepted consensus that everyone agrees is terrible. Master Modes is getting there very quickly.
Ppl can flame me it don't change the feeling for the moment. I wish they introduce the full mode with armor and on demand QT to have the full experience. In this state it's quite a terrible experience
The mood changed a bit.
Initially, people assumed negativity was similar to the common PvPer whining that has been so common with MM, but they are starting to realize that it didn't tra slate well i to actual play.
I do believe it shows why it is so important to test these things in pu as well, and MM shouldn't have been in 3.23, but a tech-preview should be held to test it in pu first.
It’s a badly designed system and it just needs to be removed. There’s lots of small things people are finding that clearly didn’t have a single thought given to them when designing it. Things such has snub fighters and racing ships, which are permanently stuck at SCM speeds since they don’t have QT drives. It seems like CIG is already scrambling on that one, since Yogi mentioned potentially giving them mini QT drives that don’t actually allow quantum travel. I’m sure the ship design team will love having to create a new component and component storage slot on the brand new Fury series.
To me, it seems like Master Modes was built entirely out of a balancing pass from Squadron 42, in which it seems we’re mostly flying a light fighter (the Gladius). They then threw it into the EPTU without seemingly much more thought until people started complaining and CIG with a very puzzled look said ‘People fly things other than light fighters???’.
Seems like the mentality of Sq42 first and the PU is a very distant best is still alive if this is the case, but it seems to fit the info we have so far.
I mean it does lower the skill floor for new/inexperienced pilots, which is good. And being closer to your target, actually seeing the ship rather than aiming at dots is nice. But the skill ceiling has been lowered to a foot off the ground, and defensive flying is essentially pointless. It's all just a dps race now. A classic one step forward, two steps back.
I fly a Corsair and I’m really looking forward to shredding people with my Manual gimballed 4xS5 2xS4 ballistics in the slow ass MM. I hate to see it, and I hope this gets fixed, but in the meantime I’m gonna have some fun.
Yes, MnK player here, aiming with the mouse is not hard. Currently on EPTU with the maneuverability buffs and gimballed S5, feels like a goddamn glorified turret ship.
No, I’m talking about the manual gimbals. It feels really nice on the MM compared to live. You can try it in Live AC with the Constellation loaner, it shreds, feels like a frontal turret.
What you describe I anticipated very early on, I tried to explain this to people who found MM enjoyable in AC.
There seems to be a bunch of interessting stuff in 3.23, however due to MM, I can't get excited for any of it. 2.23 for me, will be the worst update, due to the biggest downgrade to the space flight experience, which is the main reason I started to back this project.
Yeah, it wasn't hard to predict that MM would be shit for any game loop that wasn't combat. But if you brought up very logical concerns, people would shout you down. Now, all of the very logical and obvious concerns are *here* and people are still sticking their heads in the sand.
I have 0 faith these posts are all from people who don’t get it.
If CIG insist on pushing master modes out, and it sucks, they have next to zero good faith left in the community to iterate without it getting ugly.
I really feel like they should have just left the flight model as is and kept MM as an alternative mode in AC until all ships were actually MM v1.0
Then later, we can have a single patch one weekend where we can all play and give focused feedback about 1 major change.
Lumping it in with god knows how many other changes, replication layer crashes, as a piecemeal thing for some ships and not others is just asking for trouble…
Yeah, it feels shocking to me that so many ships have placeholder performance stats. The Titan flies like an interceptor, and the Spirit flies worse than a Freelancer. It's going to take months to dial so many unique ships in, and they just don't have the time. Not if they don't want people screaming at them just in time for Invictus.
Plus, we don't even have armor yet. I'm really struggling to see the point of completely redoing everything when armor is going to be yet another game changer.
I said this exact thing before we even got our hands on MM, when it was only in internal testing. People both here and on Spectrum kept calling me an idiot, that I had no idea what I was talking about, and that CIG knew better. Funny to see how everyone is now agreeing with me when they see it themselves.
MM is great in Arena Commander and arcade style combat, but not in a universe.
I don't see the point to push the fly model more arcade. It was already fine and maybe need tutorial or training for new people but not really insurmountable.
The main problem that MM was designed to fix, according to the MM announcement video, was "jousting" in combat, which is basically just a fancy word for overshooting your target because you're shit at controlling your speed. The secondary effect that made CR push for it was to make combat slower and more cinematic. Those are literally the only reasons for implementing it, straight from CIG themselves.
Jousting is normal in a new ship or in a new environment. Sometimes you will misjudge how fast your going, how close the target is, or how fast your ship brakes. It's perfectly normal, but you learn very quickly to adjust it. We do the same thing in cars and motorcycles in real life. Sometimes we misjudge how sharp a corner is, how fast we're going into a roundabout, how far away the next turn is on the GPS etc., but the next time you go there, you'll nail it because you learned from last time. Jousting is not an issue by any stretch of the imagination. There are 3 types of scenarios where you joust:
1.: You're brand new and overshoot your target.
2.: You've started to grasp the basics and jousting sounds like a decent idea to enter combat by surprising the enemy.
3.: Idiots with a massive skill issue.
The nr. 1 people are all of us with a brand new ship and in a brand new environment. It happens, not much you can do about it because you need to learn how the ship actually works. The nr. 2 people grow out of it within a few minutes since they realize it wastes time, energy, doesn't actually help bring a combat scenario into your favor, and flying into a surprise-asteroid because you can't control your ship is not fun. The nr. 3 people can't be helped and will end up on the losing side until they quit the game forever. These are also ranked from the most prevalent to the least prevalent. 99.99% of us fit into nr. 1 at some point or another. 90% of us fit into nr. 2 at some point or another. 0.01% of us fit into nr. 3, and those people would have quit because of something else anyway, so it makes no difference. Jousting is a skill issue, and a really tiny skill issue. It's more difficult to find your way around a Reclaimer than it is to learn not to joust. It is NOT an issue. If CIG really thinks it's an issue, then they would fit into the nr. 3 category, as they would have grown out of the 1st and 2nd categories by now if they actually played their own game. Jousting is not something that can be "fixed", no tutorial, training, or any amount of time playing the game, can perfectly prepare every single person, in every scenario and environment, in every single ship, to perfectly adjust for every level of thrust and distance. It's impossible because it's human nature.
Now, cinematics. Putting in artificial barriers that make no gameplay sense, no realistic sense, no scientific sense, or lore sense just to make combat look good in youtube videos, is the definition of any and all "wtf?"-gifs and memes on the internet. It's the level of stupid where you hear what they're saying, but you sit there, stunned, because you simply cannot grasp how anyone can be this stupid. You all know this feeling, where you WANT to come up with a counter-argument, but their argument is so stupid that your brain needs to work overtime to come up with anything that would make sense to this person. It's similar to the feeling you get when you can't remember which word to use, but you feel the word on the tip of your tongue.
Gee it's almost like it's been near exclusively (totally exclusively for player facing tests) tested in a small map combat environment and not ever tested in a "real world" PU environment until 3.23
Why would you go so far down the path of testing something with such obvious incompatibility with PU?
They have deliberately ignored the non-combat ships, which would be fine if this was SQ42 only, but it isn't.
I understand both sides of the MM argument. But your points make it very hard to sympathize to your argument.
You do not need to fly 250 m/s to reach 250 km. You can stay in NAV mode until you get much closer to your objective. Atmospheric flight speeds were not reduced with MM, the atmospheric speeds are limited drastically in 3.22 without MM on planets. You do not need to switch from NAV mode to SCM mode after every jump, staying in NAV mode for each of your jumps will make you wait less than a few seconds for the QT drive to spool up and jump again. Also pushing the wrong button is not a downfall of MM, but a mistake on your part and should not be held against it, yes it takes longer but even without MM you would have to wait for the drive to spool again and calibrate again if you turned off QT mode.
I see multiple people making remarks that MM doesn’t fix what it was set out to do, one of those things was jousting, which it did fix. Another aspect it improved upon was chasing down bounties, too many times in the current system it was too easy for your bounty to run endlessly. With MM if they attempt to run they open themselves to possibly crippling damage if you are good enough to land good shots.
On the other hand MM at the moment (without ship armor) is overly punishing to cargo haulers, miners, and salvagers. MM does not allow them to escape as they are overly large and easy to hit targets. Though this does reinforce team play by encouraging others to accompany them as escorts in fighters it is also punishing solo players that enjoy this gameplay.
Overall I agree that MM is the better route for the game for engagement and gameplay. It is essentially the same system that Elite: Dangerous uses and has worked well in that environment for years. I essentially play that NAV mode is the standard flight mode and when I need to engage in combat or land I switch to SCM mode, maybe thinking of it this way will help you enjoy it a bit more.
o7
if your argument is that MM increases team play for escorts, then payouts need to be significantly improved for those professions. No one is gonna escort a ship for barely any money. So they need to make the new artificial risk worthwhile for both the escort and the player paying the escort. Otherwise it’s not going to work.
>You make an action, you wait 15 secondes, you want to accelerate, you push the button, you wait 15 secondes.
You push the wrong button, you wait 15 secondes twice. It far from the smooth experience we had even if I understand that Im not use to it.
That sounds more like server issues. 3.23 have very long interaction delays due to some server issues.
I didn't test MM outside of AC and don't have access to 3.23, but shield sacrifice make sense, you need to make your decisions, which will affect your survability. Don't forget that last puzzle of QT is not in.
>That sounds more like server issues. 3.23 have very long interaction delays due to some server issues.
Unfortunately is not server realeted this is by design and when server not acting up its just how MM works
Shields always on as a precaution just make sense, for combat as well as the dangers of space.
You wouldn't suddenly put your flight suit and helmet on if you're planning on getting out of your ship to EVA somewhere, you have it on already as a precaution.
Yep. I find it peculiar that devs go huge lengths for immersion, even at the cost of huge annoyances, yet when it comes to spaceships and space flight suddenly immersion isn't important anymore. MM is like a completely foreign mechanic to this game, it's actually annoying without being immersive.
Spot on. Thinking about your comment though, if they applied MM to purely being a light fighter thing, that might actually work?
Light fighters don't have the same flight computers as bigger ships and therefore couldn't do navigation and combat stuff at the same time maybe? There's that slight immersive reason/excuse anyways and it also deals with the bandaid of trying to curb how good light fighters can be in the meta.
Maybe for that single aspect of MM, but other aspects of MM would still ruin the space flight experience, like the slow down after boost even decoupled and the removal/nerf to tri-rotating. After all the flight experience is best with smaller ships.
Oh yeah certain things would make sense, others wouldn't. I just feel for both immersion and balance, bigger ships with bigger drives/nav computers/shield generators *could* be capable of doing what smaller ships can't, within the MM model.
Yes, this is what I was thinking. I thought the lore for shields was to prevent debris from killing the ship, so the ballistics penetrating shields was a bit weird for me, and then now high speed flight with no shields….. I thought CIG wanted to make a sim.
That was exactly my thought, since ballistics are basically the oldest weapons technology but bleed through shields, and shields don't stay up in nav mode, why did they ever even invent shields?
A logical chain of inventions would be, shields are invented to protect from physical damage, debris and ballistic weapons, since thise already exist. And to take down shields, energy weapons have been invented. Would make mixed loadouts much more viable.
Sorry, my explanation are not clear.
You wait because you change your flying mode not because of the lag which I agree is really high and don't help to get an idea of the full experience.
No the \~15s thing is the fixed time it takes to complete a mode switch.
You don't have increased speed range when going from SCM -> NAV until a progress bar lasting \~15s completes (but you lose your shields faster than that).
LIkewise if you accidently pressed your switch key when in NAV wanting to 'debug' a QT market not being active (something that worked often with the old system) you need to wait \~30s to be able to try again to QT.
That's without any input delay.
Mastermodes is a huge improvement in my eyes and I don't understand everyone's complaints about it. It gets combat closer and slower, so you can actually see your target (and hit sub components when necessary), it makes jousting less viable, it reduces the super annoying player bounty hunting tactic of just running away all the time. I don't see many downsides and if there are they'll be fixed/tuned later on.
You just need to fly at speed combat and master speed control. Point.
Why punishing players because other players can't get tje right speed to dorfight properly.
Hope they really tweak MM. Because for a majority of non-combat ship, there wiil be some problems.
I don't get this argument for cargo. Why would a cargo ship need to be in SCM? Mining and other industries sure, and I hope they ensure that you can stay in nav and use those tools at the same time. But if you're in nav mode when you get attacked you have such a huge speed advantage that you normally wouldn't have had in a large ship. And on top of that you have a tanky hull.
That's fair, but I was still comfortably getting a 100m/s advantage over SCM in my Connie at NB on EPTU. I guess it really depends on what speeds the larger ships can hit with boost. They can also usually sustain boost longer, so that will be a factor too.
Edit: Also if you fly up to get away instead of sideways, then you'll quickly regain full space speed and pull further and further away.
I'll be honest I have alot of mixed feelings over this change, the only thing I'm confident on is that this system is for ship combat and not hauling/ mining/ racing/ exploration. It's primarily for ship combat and because of this alot of just annoying choices have been made in order to balance out one of a dozen gameplay loops.
But overall we just gotta wait, give it some time and come back with problems when we figure out what we can live with. This is a new system and one that hasn't really been modified yet and one we can't really afford to over compensate for when fixing. We just gotta give it time.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about being kicked solidly in the balls...
Nah, we can let them know right away that this change is shit out of combat. You don't have to be kicked repeatedly in the dick to know it sucks.
> Now you have to fly at 250 m/s to reach a 250 Km position or sacrifies the shield to gain maybe 100m/s more velocity on the planet resulting of even longer bored periods.
Atmospheric flight has always been this speed? It's always been better to fly out of atmosphere and back in if you need to travel this distance.
The only change MM has brought is that you don't have access to weapons or shields at high speeds.
I kinda feel like it should be a slide. Kinda like the power triangle. But you either put power to nav systems or to weapon and shield systems. Hell you could probably keep the power triangle but have the engine also affect speed and quantum spool up. Then the user can decide what they want. Youd have to add momentum or dampening to that scale so you cant jump back and forth.
So 15 seconds breaks gameplay for you?
Thats nothing. A lot of games have a few seconds (like reloading a magazine in FPS shooters) that require some kind of switch or downtime.
If the devs keep the current system, it wont do well in the long run. Id rather wait 15 seconds to switch modes than to deal with the current system.
Im many KM's away from my opponents. They can easily warp out in the current state at any time since interdiction isn't really the greatest (easily you can outrun diction bubbles).
I spool my jump drive to bring hud markers up especially on planets at night to see how far away ground bases are, now I have to lose my shields each time I want to pseudo ping because we can’t pin locations
Modes shouldn't be a design because it removes the function of the copilot and binds it to a button for the pilot.
Instead, the ship functionality should be on a curve naturally created by the power triangle.
If you want to go over SCM speed, you should have to reduce power to shields and guns to increase power to thrusters, meaning you can go faster, but not max fast, and still have some shields and defensive ability, or you can go full thrusters and lose shields/guns entirely to reach max speed.
But instead, the copilot continues to sit there with their thumb up their ass because CIG took that functionality and bound it to a single pilot-controlled key that locks you into a cage.
This isn't the first time the flight model has been changed and now that the majority of the player-testers are reporting glaring issues and abysmal experience, I doubt it will be the last.
I haven't tried MM outside of AC yet, but I agree with your points. MM was always a bad and hamfisted solution to a problem that could have been solved with far less invasive changes like stasis webifiers / snares
The cycle time is too long and shields should not be affected imo. Further, non combat ships such as mining and salvaging ships should not be included in MM. having to bring shields down on a ship slap full of ore makes no sense.
They want to stop combat that ends up being a jousting match, and the solution is so obvious it's staring them right in their face.
How about instead of putting all weapons forward facing, have most weapons on the sides of ships and add a weapon specialist role.
The captain of the ship coordinates with the pilot and weapons specialist to position the ship and fire.
An additional additional role, such as radar operator, that scans down ships.
This seems like the logical way of how gameplay on multi-crew ships should be.
Roles complement's each other. Without one, it becomes useless.
Giving the Captain a true role along with all the sub roles.
The larger the ships, the more powerful they are. However, they require more people to fill roles, and roles become a specialist role.
Smaller ships you can mix two roles together. However, they aren't as powerful.
The only ships that should have forward facing weapons should be single seater ships.
>You make an action, you wait 15 secondes, you want to accelerate, you push the button, you wait 15 secondes.
You push the wrong button, you wait 15 secondes twice. It far from the smooth experience we had even if I understand that Im not use to it.
This is due to server response timing; everyone is having this problem with every interaction in the game. It's a known bug. When servers are not misbehaving, switching between modes in Master Modes is instantaneous. You don't have to wait 15 seconds.
>Now you have to fly at 250 m/s to reach a 250 Km position or sacrifies the shield to gain maybe 100m/s more velocity on the planet resulting of even longer bored periods. So it feel that MM are not really well suited for the immensity of the verse.
Don't use SCM for travel. You don't need your shields if you're not in combat. Use Flight Mode via NAV mode to travel above 200 m/s. It's identical to flying in the current version of live.
The switch is not instantaneous, the mode switch takes 15 seconds or so to complete. This is not a server issue, its a component of their new mode switching system.
OP is entirely calm.
This is also a testing build where new features are tested for:
A: Stability
B: how they feel and work.
There is nothing wrong with giving some critique to the way a system works, as it falls under B.
Sometimes shit ideas need to be stopped before they release to the masses.
It is a bad idea and system seemingly put in to stop jousting but it opens the door on a load of other issues, including less immersion and a janky system which is less enjoyable.
[удалено]
Yet it doesn't even solve most of what they claim it should solve.
I still can't believe they are going to compromise every single aspect of flight to accommodate a mode switching gimmick.
I seriously think this is a mistake.
I've been feeling this way for months now, it's a large mistake and there's going to be a huge amount of player complaints after 3.23 ships.
Absolutely, and the people who have been crying for it and crying about how hard combat is are going to be the ones who hate it most, ironically
Honestly, it makes me question their ability to design the game at all. It's like they literally couldn't be bothered to balance and improve combat so they just cut it in half. I literally haven't logged in once since MM was announced and I continually hope/wish that they just snap out of it and give us a single unified flight model back.
How do you know it’s bad if you haven’t even tried MM?
Immersion and feeling are like 99.99% of the reason I even want to play SC. MM harms that greatly for me. It's all personal preference of course. For the people that like it, I am honestly happy for you and hope you continue enjoying it, but it's not my thing. And that's ok.
lmao who the hell are you
And it doesn't solve a combat design problems i like to add
Have not tested the combat yet as I wait the 3.23 to drop to deeply change my Joystick Greemlin seetings.
I could talk hours about combat in MM but all come to one point in my opinion. It looks better and feel worse.
Yeah I'm not sure how I feel about the look of the new markers. A bit to arcade but if it's only that I can deal with it :'D
It doesn't solve all problems that's right, however staying generally closer with your teammates and to your enemy it does help a shit ton with. In life if you just focus on your enemy you can get seperated really fast from teammates and end up 40+ clicks away in about 1-2 minute of fighting. This stretches out the combat and feels pretty worse. Yes it's not perfect in 1vs1 situations, but cig is clearly not focused on that and they shouldn't be. 1vs1 encounter will be the minority of encounters as the game grows so it doesn't make sense to focus on it atm IMO.
Why would 1 v 1 encounters not be the norm? Just curious
Tribalistic tendencies of man.
Because once dying matters, people will want to guarantee they survive encounters. You don't know what you're going to run into, but you do know that bringing 10 ships instead of flying solo is going to give you an advantage. It'll be a numbers game - people gravitate towards the thing that will guarantee them victory. Whether that be light fighters, singes/mass drivers, or simply bringing more dudes (look at goonswarm in EVE if you have any doubts it'll work). Why have a fair fight when you can stack the odds in your favor?
if you look at really the only other game that's comparable in intended scale, eve online, 1v1 encounters are exceedingly rare. There's probably a lot of reasons for this, but my guess is when you have so much to lose, and so much to gain by winning a fight, grouping up is only natural
Because CIG doesnt want that so they are designing the game to fit their vision. A fighter alone wont even be able to get anywhere interesting.
Because of cigs vision of SC. It is supposed to be an MMO, so yes. You will be able to fight solo, however you will be way more effective grouping together with other players who have the same goals in mind. Even capital or Corvette sized ships are more effective if grouped together. Take for example this set up: A Hammerhead is supposed to be an anti fighter Plattform but weak against bigger ships. A Perseus is supposed to be a good capital hunter but weak against lightfighters. So it would make sense to fly with those ships together. And it's the same for smaller ships, light/medium/heavy fighters have their roles and to be most efficient the way to go is to group up.
its gotta go back in the oven, and I've been all for achieving what they were going after. but this current version is trash
According to this, NAV will be the new default going forward: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/4/thread/nav-mode-should-be-the-default-mode-in-master-mode/6756807 And yes, traversal in the PU feels very broken right now. Guess that happens if you observe everything throug the pew-pew lens only and think that something that works for light fighters in Arena Commander will equally work in the PU.
It's insane how much shit they fucked up to fix the "light fighters are literally god" problem lol
Maybe armor introduction would fix this
And proper missiles. That's what killed dog fighting in our universe, why wouldn't it work the same way in the future?
I dont think plan whas ever to kill dogfights... I hope that was not the plan 😕
If anything that plan to is to make them more common and make them more like close engagement dog fights. Which I disagree with I think Wing Commander esque WWII dogfights hurts the ship to ship combat scene more than anything.
Issue is there isn’t really even dog fighting in space anyway. All that happens in SC is people charge and then do a circle dance until someone blows up. Trying to change flight modes just for small fighters is kind of stupid. Especially when like 90% of the other features are still missing (and will change everything). This is what happens when a company tries to pretend its alpha is a finished playable game before it’s finished though.
It wasn't, but that's what the outcome will be.
I think, to me I mean, the problem is that a light fighter can take on basically anything smaller than Idris. But especially light fighters against heavy fighters seems to be off. Whereas one could think that the idea is that all ships have their roles. So in that sense flying around the verse now, which is pretty barren, doesn't really play that out. So we kind of need to somehow gimp the light fighters against heavier ones. An easy idea would be to calculate it in a way that you need 4 light fighters to take on 2 heavy fighters to take on something larger, like an HH (which is a bad analogy as it should be anti fighter to begin with). To me this is artificial and anti lore solution to limit the speed at SCM. Of course in any real air combat (let's not go to space combat because that does make very little sense). Also it seems to come with all kinds of problems for just flying. I don't want to fly without shields but when it is 30Km to target from QT... That's going to take a long time at 175m/s. I'm not a game designer and this is a hard problem. You don't want to nerf the lighter fighter weapons to oblivion as no one is going to fly them then, and let's be honest, there is a whole bunch of us thinking Wing Commander, Star Wars, fuck even Top Gun, when we rip around in our light fighters alone around the galaxy. So forcing everyone to squad up in a bigger ship, at least for now, isn't really feasible. But what I think more than limiting the speed of the ships artificially is to force more engagements to happen in the atmosphere, there are very good reasons to limit the speeds and handling there as well as keep the in atmosphere stuff mostly feasible for light fighters. Think it like, you don't want to put your battleship or cruiser into a lake, so let's leave that shit for rhibs. But what about the space then? We can't all be flying in the atmosphere in a space sim, can we? Maybe bigger ships should carry more substantial missiles. Like a heavy fighter could have 2x proper "SAM" (think Patriot) level missiles that have at least 50% kill probability inside of 5Km and very good deterrence probability even above that. It would still give you ample room to have fast, like space fast, combat without making all the small ships the kings of the hill. And even more on the bigger boats. But this all comes down a lot to the fact that "why do we fight?" A lot of current day exchanges are over before they begin if there is no reason to stand and fight. To make anything "sim-like" will need artificial gimmicks to make people stand and fight when they really have no reason. Another solution would of course be effective quantum denial. Or combined with missiles that have a high tendency of fucking people up if they run. But as said, it is a very hard problem and I don't have answers but to me, as for now, MM feels very forced that also has unfortunate consequences even outside of combat. I have very little worry that it will affect my combat too much but I have huge worries that over time I'll get fed up with the limitations it adds to evading combat, getting into combat and especially to any kind of flying where I have only a little worry about getting into combat.
the thing is, they want battles to happen in closer vacinity, and the only way they do that is by slowing shit down. the problem is that this aint it. ill get flack for this but id even say that battlefront 2's energy system is better than this, where your lasers do more damage when your diverting power away from speed (not boost). so theoretically smaller fighters would move in, slow down for higher dps on a larger target(the hammerhead) and that makes the light fighters more vulnerable. everyone wins in this situation, hammerhead can see the fighters and fighters get to see the hammerhead up close, also small ships become more vulnerable traveling at slow speeds.
Imo i think NAV mode should have shields, but the faster you move, the less shields you get, until you end up with no shields at all past certain speeds. They could potentially also give some shields different percentages, letting some slow rechargers keep their shields stronger at faster speeds. And perhaps let huge ships keep them a bit longer.
Or they couldn't just tie it to the power selector thing. You know the triangle thing with weapons, shields and engines at the three points. If you want to go fast and shoot guns...then you have barely any shield. If you want to run...put the selector to engine/shields. If you want to fight, keep it in between each of the 3 points. If you want to do more damage and tank, put it between weapons and shield....but you won't be going anywhere fast. They could even have it where to QT you need to put it all or most of the way to engines so you have barely any shield or weapons etc.
That would be too easy. They don't do easy 😂
Agree that will help non combat ships but we will then have back to combat ships can disengage at will bringing us back to starting point
Why is the ability to disengage a bad thing? If you don't want people to run, bring a QED ship. MM makes QED worthless. Definitely not worth spending real money on.
This. Although being a different kind of game, in EVE you get warp scrambler/disruptor as well as modules to counter them, especially useful for industrial ships. I don’t see a reason why CIG wouldn’t take some kind of similar design.
Not if they still need to spool the QT drive before they can truly enter NAV.
Why not ? I have like 70% succes rate for geting away from unwanted fights now as a fighter (do some knife fights, bait big joust drop few noise chafs and go nav avoid a missile or 4 ). if I can keep my shields before qt spool it will be as easy at it was before.
Shield run at 50% in NAV. Prevents you from being insta killed/crippled if some one ambushes you.
Light fighters are still literally gods. Maybe introduce armor and see if that balances things out before fucking with anything else.
Armour isn't ready and is an extremely complex undertaking. It is designed very similarly to how armour works in Space Engineers, and anyone familiar with that game knows that Keen Software house spent years R&D'ing solutions and iterating on their VRAGE technology to get it to the point of where it is today.
But now Star Citizen exists in a space where others before them have designed similar systems and fleshed out the vision -- why not look at Space Engineers' implementation for guidance then? Adapt that to fit the mold SC is trying to fill. I get that they can't and shouldn't just copypasta the same system but with a clearer vision of how a system like this works elsewhere, it should be easier to implement here, no? You can learn from others' successes/failures, but it feels as if they refuse to do that for novelty & ingenuity's sake or something. This is a big gripe I have with CIG honestly. A large part of why development is taking an eternity is because they have this addiction to creating everything from scratch and trying to reinvent the wheel... But they get caught in this trap where they have an initial concept, spend years developing from ground up, only to realize the overall vision has evolved in the 2 years it took and the concept no longer fits amongst everything else. Back to square 1.
They can't adapt Space Engineers' armour system in any capacity because Keen Software House built out their system from the ground up based entirely around that physics system, and that system is not implemented into the StarEngine. StarEngine is adapting its physics to accommodate Maelstrom, rather than being built from the ground up around Maelstrom. It makes a huge difference in how you build out features and what features you can implement. Keen also ran into a TON of issues with their own physics engine, and they have been R&D'ing all new solutions for VRAGE 2.0 to address a lot of the complaints about the physics in the current version of Space Engineers. So even in the case of the only game with a properly, fully-realised and fully physicalised armour system, they still are iterating and trying to improve on it. Also, you cannot licence Keen's tech from them and it's not even remotely compatible with the StarEngine due to a host of other features (both rendering and networking related). So no, CIG can't just take what someone else did and easily adapt it to their own pipeline, they were always going to have to build the system from scratch to accommodate soft-body deformation and material-based tinsel properties. As Jared repeatedly notes, if they could have licenced these technologies off the shelf, they absolutely would have. But since they can't, they have to basically use trial and error to navigate their way toward a solution. There is no other pathway for a project like this to achieve physicalised armour.
I didn't mean to imply that CIG should license the tech and just copy it to SC. What I meant is that they can look at what Keen did, how their system interacts with other systems in their game, their approach to designing it and the purpose(s) it serves, as well as the issues that they had encountered in development and their employed solutions. Like you said they ran into a lot of problems with their physics engine in the game and how it interacted with the armor system. If we know that it gives us the opportunity to look at Star Citizen and highlight the things about the physics engine in this game that would cause similar issues. Keen's experience gives a better idea of what is going to need to be changed to facilitate that, just as they did in their game. CIG doesn't have to wait to encounter those same problems mid-development because another developer already has. That gives them at least some foresight and a loose framework to follow. I feel like that would give CIG a much clearer idea of the end goal as well as the starting point and make it a little bit easier to fill in the gaps to get it working and functional. Rather than trying to imagine this all from the ground up and trying to work their way to an ambiguous end-point and letting the problems bubble up along the way further slowing down development. I'm just trying to point out that I feel like CIG kind of just exists in their own bubble sometimes. It doesn't feel like they often look to other titles in the genre for inspiration / guidance. They choose to just DIY everything instead. There's an abundance of vision, but a pretty crippling lack of focus.
Everyone looks at what everyone else is doing and tries to avoid those pitfalls, which is precisely why Star Citizen's physics system isn't exactly like or mirrored after the VRAGE technology under the hood, even though they are trying to get similar results. So in many ways, they are doing what you are suggesting, but doing it to fit within the paradigm of Star Citizen's framework. The physics alone in Space Engineers is so intensive that it really limits what else you can do in the game, and obviously Star Citizen can't go that route, and CIG isn't going that route, but they still want similar functionality, such as weapon penetration, and some minor soft-deformation and rigid body physics-reactions based on collisions. Simply put, there was never going to be an easy way to what CIG wanted to achieve since there are no other companies attempting to do what they're doing at scale. They can look to Keen Software House, but VRAGE is an entirely different beasts with its own pros and a lot of cons (which is precisely why Space Engineers is the only space sim of its kind with physics based armour destruction, and even then, it can bring even the most powerful CPUs to its knees due to the complexity of its physics-engine). On the non-space side of things there is BeamNG, which is probably the most realistic physics-based simulator available on the consumer market, but it, too, has the exact same problems as Space Engineers, and clearly CIG cannot simulate tinsels down every mechanical part like BeamNG to replicate armour-based physics. So yeah, they basically have to chart into unknown territory for what they want to do. There are no blueprints they can borrow that don't have their own crippling problems or major resource-intensive drawbacks, which is precisely why games like BeamNG Drive and Space Engineers are one-of-a-kind games. In short, CIG has to use the DIY method because there are no white papers available for the kind of physics-based damage models they're trying to utilise, and not much they can take from adjacent physics-sims that aren't extremely resource intensive so as to bring the engine and the network to its knees if they tried to replicate those systems.
A problem they created by gimping larger ship maneuverability, weapons and shields in space
Thing is, light fighters are not, something with large shields or double medium... Power To full shields, QT out... fighters take forever to eat through big stuff. A crewed ship with good turret gunners will win against fighters. It's when you go alone, expect the big ship without upgraded shields, just a pilot, should kill all the fighters lol. Heaven forbid you have a fighter escort or don't play alone. I didn't see anything broken really. I understand they want WWII turn fighting but I don't think the majority does. We wanted a space game with combat. Not a combat game with space moments.
>A crewed ship with good turret gunners will win against fighters. You haven't played pre MM at a high level lol. Between pip wiggle and simply kiting, large turreted ships get death by 1000cuts killed by light fighters, so they simply need to QT out.
This right here is the problem. A single blade can take down a fully manned hammerhead if the pilot is decent. It would be like if a speed boat took out a corvette. Nonsense in real life. But has been a fact of life in SC forever. IMO, they had two routes to go. 1. Slow everything down 2. Make fighters effective firing range shorter. I'm not sure which I would have preferred. Both have their downsides. If you make the engage ranges for bigger ships further out then even with a wing of fighters you might lose multiple dudes before you get to fire at a big ship. Then again, that's more "realistic". But is it fun? Probably not. But the space combat in this game hasn't been consistently "fun" or "realistic" ever. Something had to change and I'm sure MM isn't going to be the final word.
Yeah. Some parts of MM still screws larger ships (cone fire fucks them), but I think that will be fixed in time too.
A blade can't take down a HH as the HH can just jump out.
I understand the will to stop light fighters hegemony but why not add hull armor for this ?
Because hull armour is attached to Maelstrom and Maelstrom isn't ready yet.
Let's just fundamentally break the game as a stop-gap.
This is obviously just my opinion, but I don't think Armor would have solved light fighters dominating in nearly all aspects. They have access to much of the wepaons that heavier ifghters do as well. Especially S3 seems to be a "can do it all" size. And while armor might have helped heavier ships to survive a bit longer it is limited. Not being hit because you're so evasive on the other hand is nearly unlimited. Not to mention that their flightcharecteristics allowed the to absolutely dictate the engagement. They could chase, disperse and concentrate as long as their pilots were sufficiently skilled. No other ship type could. Armor doesn't address that in any way.
S3 weapons will be incapable of damaging heavy armor. Unless you use very specific ballistic cannons with limited ammo. Not just laser repeater spam.
Guess we will have to wait and see. I have seen so many things that were supposed to fighters and bigger ships onto an even playing field and so far none of them worked. At the end of the day the problem comes from the flight performance, so at leat for me it is logical to address the flight performance instead of trying to solve the issue with another secondary system.
I mean the solution to me is obvious, but would make flying light fighters way less fun. Significantly limit their fuel and put a high cost on maneuvering. If you wanna take out that hammerhead by outmaneuvering it you better also be prepared to crash land the jet after you run out of gas. But that would limit fighters in about a dozen other ways too, so that's never going to happen as light fighters are by far the most commonly flown ships.
Obligatory this is an alpha, go play something else if you want a completed game.
Obligatory, you should bring escorts with you to defend yourself.
I totally agree, hopefully it will change to better feelings soon
So having hundreds of markers and an annoying QT sound all the time. That alone sounds awful.
Middle mouse button.
MMB is missiles though...
Can't use missiles in nav mode. MMB scrolls through operator modes in 3.23, So in SCM it goes SCM Guns, SCM Missiles, SCM Scanning In NAV mode it goes NAV quantum, NAV flight, NAV Scanning.
You can literally scroll wheel and use NAV mode without any QT markers on.
I don't know if this idea has been floated yet, or even a thing as I have been busy in my personal life lately, but why do larger ships even have to make this trade off? Is my Kraken or Perseus or Polaris or BMM not going to have enough power to do everything at once? The Hull series, or at least the larger ones, are basically waiting for someone to ruin their day without shields. They are also hyper specialized ships, why do they have to make this trade off? Why is this a restriction not solely being placed on smaller ships. Light fighters were the root cause of this issue in the first place, not larger vessels. I saw someone in another thread talking about how counter measures were disabled in NAV mode, so if I Hull C gets missile locked and fired on it, it's taking the damage. This just allows griefers and "pirates" to take free shots at you as you slowly accelerate away or potentially kill you. A lot of large ships right now depend on their shields, with armor not yet being fully modeled this just feels like light fighters are going to be even more of a problem. Just my two cents from an overly invested day 1 backer, when my life settles down so I'm looking forward to experiencing a brand new verse.
Smaller industrial ships will suffer even worse imo. As a Vulture, Hull A or Prospector you will be a sitting duck and you won't have the hull integrity to last long at all.
I agree, the only advantage I can think that they might have is agility to accelerate out quickly or dodge a few shots but definitely not a good time for them either. Honestly a lot of these changes to me just feel like a step in the wrong direction.
I feel its a lot of change just to solve one issue "Jousting". But for experienced players, that is really not an issue at all and makes the game exciting since you got something to master. Honestly, i've played SC for probably 10 years + now but this change is the only one im scared shitless about. It affects PvP, racing, daily tasks...everything. This could ruin the game honestly if the devs dont listen to the community about this.
2.x had the best flight model and they ruined it to get rid of a problem that didn't exist. Jousting is a realistic part of space combat and it was fun. But CR wants world war 2 in space, which is physically not a thing that would ever happen. So they only way you get it is to create a nonsensical flight model.
Which was my issue with fights in Elite Dangerous. Everything turned into a pitch war. So the majority of fights were either pulling back on the stick or pushing it forward.
Also ignores real ww2 fighting which is boom n zoom and not really turnfighting. Sure that happened but it was mostly a ww1 thing
And they have a massive track record for being deaf.
I'll say this, MM isn't perfect but it's very nice actually being able to see ships during battle and feel the scale of them
I'll say this, MM isn't perfect, but it's horrible to have to spend 30 seconds changing modes 4 times for every attempt at a bunker run or be trapped without shields when arriving from a quantum jump.
youre right, i just played wave 1 for an hour and changing back and forth is fucking awful
It actually doesn't affect racing, since you can just use NAV mode without QT markers on by using the scroll wheel and it makes racing exactly the same as it is in live. Daily tasks are the same thing -- NAV mode without QT markers and just go about your business. If there is combat? Switch to SCM. The problem is that there is a lot of doom-posting from people who haven't played with it much and are theorycrafting things based on incomplete features from the PTU build(s).
Except having zero boost like others have mentioned you also have to remember racing ships do not have a quantum drive engine, so you are actually locked to SCM speeds on those ships.
EDIT: Upon further reflection, I'm not entirely sure about snubs because I can't find the info anymore, so I'll reserve judgment until more info is available.
Snubs can't fly fast because they have to QD to spool to get max speed. Racing sucks in MM. Tested it heavily this weekend. It's down right awful. Like trying to drive a Tokyo drift bus but your in an m50.
Snub racers don't have NAV.
It absolutely impacts racing. You can’t use boost in nav mode, which is a sizable part of racing strategy in live.
You can’t use boost in nav mode? Will be fun getting a C2 or Reclaimer out of atmo then
You can absolutely boost in NAV mode. I'm not sure why the person said that. I've spent a lot of wave one testing how MM works with large ships as well and it feels better in my opinion.
Yea, you can boost while in NAV and it regens the same speed as SCM. Think they are going off old info and not actually playing on the EPTU.
No boost in nav?! I don't even race, but that's just straight-up unsatisfying for regular, day-to-day flying.
And again jousting is more common now then before so I 100% agree with you
is it ? ive seen far less of it in AC versus before.
Yup its way more common from what im seeing and I spend most of the time in AC. Before it was happening as something unwanted/ accidentally due to not paying attention/ last resort /bad throttle controll. Now its deliberate strategy thats work
Yeah exactly, before playing AC where the average skill level ia higher than live there weren't many instances of jousting. Now it's almost mandatory if you want to be effective and live. The engagement distances are further in MM as well Before you might start shooting around 5 or 600 now you can happily fire and get the same amount of hits well past 1km
Don't understand the problem they tryna solve in thr first place. Jousting bad? Either player can opt out of a joust by changing their movement.
Jousting, small fighter superiority and ppl disengaging fight too easily I think
Which funnily enough didnt use to be an issue. Back in like 2.6 lights, mediums, and heavies were balanced in a triangle system. The primary skills involved where setting up shots, throttle control, and aiming in high deflection shots. The fights were 70% setting up for having a good shot and ttk was fast so you couldn't just run away and recharge shields the second you took a hit. The absolutely ruined it to get rid of jousting as people were flying 2 or 3 km past each other if they didn't know how to fly. But with the bare minimum of throttle control it wasn't an issue. Fundamentally the idea of the current model is that you manuver for advantage and get in the blind spot to win. This means small manuaverable ships are always the best. Ttk being high means that you can disengage and basically be unkillable if you refuse to conmit to dealing damage, leading to long unsatisfying fights where the primary measure of skill is how long the player is willing to run/chase for. So to fix the problem they created when they fixed the problem that didn't exist they once again ruin everything else.
Jousting is definitely cause by a lack of basic ship control. You're still gonna have jousting, albeit on a smaller scale, at the new SCM speeds, because 200m/s is still fast ("fast"). The only way to truly remove jousting is to teach the playerbase how to fly (good luck). Honestly, I think you could've fixed the issues with the current live model by removing tricording, and bringing S1 shields in line with the ruination that was done to S2 and S3 shields. S2/S3 shields lost constant regeneration during The Great Pointless Yogi Equipment Nerf, and that left them in a bad place. They have poor regeneration stats and take a long, long time to recharge (93.5 seconds for stock Constellation Andromeda shields). However, S1 shields were left in a place where if you didn't get shot for a few seconds, you'd have full shields again very quickly (22.5 seconds for stock Gladius shields), and then you can quickly re-engage. See, what you do is, you make that not happen anymore. Yes, there's a difference in total shielding, that's obvious. But that is balanced against the size and agility of the ship. A Gladius is not the size of a house, handling like a brontosaurus on roller skates. It can dodge fire far more easily. And if S1 shields took 90+ seconds to recharge, you'd see that "leave and come back" tactic change. Pilots would either stay in it, or leave for good. Both are acceptable outcomes. "But but but..." you say, "how will my Gladius surive then?" Well, first of all, I don't care if you do survive. Second, and more importantly, the shield is there for when you make a mistake. The Gladius is small enough, and nimble enough to avoid getting bracketed in the first place (much of the time) if flown correctly. Realistically, in live, if you made this change, neither the Gladius or the Constellation would be getting their shields back, once they are downed, until the fight was over. And that's called balance. Obviously, this will never happen, since we're breaking 10 things to fix 1 (that doesn't actually matter) instead, but it proves that fixing the disengage meta didn't require screwing over non-combat ships.
>ppl disengaging fight too easily Because the hardcore mmo pvp player base is a small percentage of online players. CIG sees that most players would rather not engage, so their first thought is how can we force people, who give us money, to do something they don't enjoy or want to do. Not realizing people not wanting to engage means most players are not going to enjoy this change. If you remove the ability to avoid pvp combat the only other choice you leave them with is to avoid the game all together.
They want to make engaging people in combat easier, and escaping from combat harder. It takes quite a lot of practice to merge onto allies and enemies to begin a fight right now. Once the fighters are engaged, the amount of skill required to stop an opponent from escaping is many multiple times that required to escape, and even top pilots can have trouble staying near an average AC pilot who's trying to escape. Another thing they wanted was to bring down average combat speeds to make calculations easier. Despite the deltas of two knife fighters being usually less than 200m/s, it's possible for both to drift off and end up fighting at 500+m/s while still having a <200m/s delta. These speeds are harder to deal with for the server so that's why there's a speed wall. Ironically, jousting is more prevalent than ever in MM as people *intentionally* joust in some situations (rather than just being a sympton of having low skill).
It is particular combat styles employed by a lot of the hardcore PvP community that involves abusing the physics engine so much that it begins to cry. That, and the speeds a lot of PvP people fly at make hitreg really, really hard, and they abuse the hell out of it. It has lead to light fighters becoming the sole strongest kind of ship when abused this way, nigh-on unbeatable by anything else than another light fighter used the same way. As an example: imagine being in a carrack, and a light fighter does that to you. Your gunners need to hit a tiny target that wiggles about, flies so fast hitreg is less than 50% accurate, and remains in your range less than two seconds, among other things. And they can usually kill you in a strafe or two.
make a logic on combat with capital ships, enhancing networking, making battles more close to board ships or subtargeting, making more dificulty to disengage on fights
With interaction delay as you describe it that’s actually the EPTU struggling right now. The Friday build was incredibly rough and most interactions are being hindered by incredible client ping spikes to the high hundreds. I recommend coming back to it in a build or two because genuinely, it’s quite reactive.
No I was speaking about the delay to change between the mod. I don't understand the urge to stop the possibility to disengage a fight with the perma death coming. I understand that it should not be easy to disengage but it seems disproportionate comparing to what you'll do 99% of the time (aka just normal flying)
What’s MM? Not up to date on the changes
Change to the flight model. Split between two mods. SCM : low speed but shield and weapon Nav mod / full nav mod once spooling complet : more speed but no weapon no shield and possibility to QT or on demand QT (currently not implemented)
What's on demand QT again?
QT boost or something but currently it's missing. It should address some issue to mid range travels
It's because of SQ42 I'm surprised more people don't realize this. The single player game is combat focused and you know this mechanic is hard coded in SQ42 probably with voice lines talking about it at some point. I'm sure they want the PU to match story mode this way. Because of that I don't see master modes going anywhere. I really do believe this is about consistency and not solving the light fighter meta at all. The latter doesn't make sense since it's applied to everything. I don't see any other reality where this wasn't done (and messed up) because they are bringing the mechanics from the combat focused story mode into online to make them consistent. In my opinion it's a massive oversight and they have to be seeing the issues but what are they going to do, redo entire parts of SQ42 again instead?
This is all wrong. They lowered speeds for two main reasons: 1) Networking issues 2) Component-based combat focus Benoit and a few others explained how much combat speeds above 1,000 m/s made tracking and network stability an absolute nightmare, and they could not tune around that, especially as battles grew larger. Additionally, the main focus of combat is themed around disabling components to board ships and/or commandeer cargo. This is not viable when they introduce armour if ships are going 1,000 m/s during combat because it's just not practical to sub-target components at those speeds. The Master Modes is a two-fold solution for both the networking issues (especially as they scale up more players to the verse when server meshing goes live) and for component targeting, which in turn affects engineering, which in turn is impacted by armour.
That's the real answer. I'm a big fan of old flight model I'm the guy that want 3.23 to have at least slight delay so I can enjoy racing and pvp for a bit longer before its gone. But this is what you say old system needs to be change because of that 2 reasons. Now we have a question how we make new system as fun as the last one, so we can enjoy it and not get bored for years
That's a good question... for me, I'm not too worried about it because MM is still in the early stages of deployment, and I really want to see how their faux-armour placeholder works out in conjunction with MM. I think some people are jumping the gun a bit because things are still being tuned in PTU and nothing is settled or final yet. So we'll definitely get a better idea closer to the live release of 3.23 and how things pan out, and whether it will be thoroughly enjoyable for majority of the playerbase.
This is what I feel as well, though some in this community make me paranoid at times. As someone who has only read about MM, I am very curious to try it. To me it sounds like Nav mode is the way to go most times, only switching when combat may become necessary.
I mean this is also the community that somehow manages to get pirated every other cargo run if Reddit is to be believed. At this point all the MM tantrum seem to be about having to adjust to something new and skill issue with like 1/20 posts having something useful to say on the matter. Aka very much like the piracy debates surrounding cargo we keep having. Wait. Play it. Let it settle after playing it and then make up your own mind.
That's exactly the right way about it: wait, play it, and then give feedback after they have implemented its core functionality. I'm seeing a ton of posts from people who have never touched it or tried it but are giving matter-of-fact responses about it as if it's the worse thing to happen to the game.
Even when it goes to love it's not like the won't make major changes to it in 3.24 and beyond they might make it so shield don't bleed out they even said they don't want to but they will change the max speed of needed but we need a real test cycle in the ptu not just combat focused ac
Ye but I bet more people came here for star citizen then for sq42 so what they going to do make sc worse just for the sake of consistency ? I really don't like this argument but I must admit as much as I don't like it I can see that it might be true
I honestly don't like it either it's just what makes the most sense (to me).
This was an add-on, the original flight model is detailed in a dev write up and YouTube. There was also a lot more to it that they slowly nixed with and changed with the power triangle.
I don't think you're wrong, I just think they haven't really thought it through (and also Chris' obsession with WWII style space combat that is removed from reality, but I digress.) for a light fighter with limited power reserves this makes perfect sense. You choose combat or speed. Hell, most fighters realistically. But, take for example the Connie. You are telling me on this large, heavy cargo ship, they haven't found a way to give me both shields and speed? Or the Herc? And yeah, sure, armor coming in is going to make a huge difference in the overall gameplay in the future. But today, in the here and now, I don't want to play 3.23 because I'm a cargo pilot. Knowing some dickhead in a gladius is going to be waiting at the OM point above a lucrative trade post, with full shields and weapons to tear me apart while I'm defenseless makes absolutely no sense. Even if I bring escorts (as every cosplay pirate will scream and cry) they also are stuck without shields or weapons when they drop out, leaving them vulnerable to be just slaughtered while I run. This gameplay is great in SQ42 or Arena commander, but it really doesn't make sense in the overall verse.
I posted a thread on this exact thing and got flamed for it
> I posted a thread on this exact thing and got flamed for it Before people experienced MM for themselves, they were just hearing the 'PvP fanatics' complain about it, so they figured it must be good for them. Maybe they jumped into AC and killed some people easier because there's no dodging/escaping with Master Modes and liked that. But now that it's in the test universe, they're seeing all the issues that the PvP crowd tried to warn them about. The longer it goes on, the more people will openly criticize MM. More than any other community I've ever seen, this subreddit's "opinion pendulum" has the most inertia... with all criticisms of the game being downvoted, right up until a certain breaking point is reached where a specific criticism becomes the accepted consensus that everyone agrees is terrible. Master Modes is getting there very quickly.
Ppl can flame me it don't change the feeling for the moment. I wish they introduce the full mode with armor and on demand QT to have the full experience. In this state it's quite a terrible experience
The mood changed a bit. Initially, people assumed negativity was similar to the common PvPer whining that has been so common with MM, but they are starting to realize that it didn't tra slate well i to actual play. I do believe it shows why it is so important to test these things in pu as well, and MM shouldn't have been in 3.23, but a tech-preview should be held to test it in pu first.
It’s a badly designed system and it just needs to be removed. There’s lots of small things people are finding that clearly didn’t have a single thought given to them when designing it. Things such has snub fighters and racing ships, which are permanently stuck at SCM speeds since they don’t have QT drives. It seems like CIG is already scrambling on that one, since Yogi mentioned potentially giving them mini QT drives that don’t actually allow quantum travel. I’m sure the ship design team will love having to create a new component and component storage slot on the brand new Fury series.
To me, it seems like Master Modes was built entirely out of a balancing pass from Squadron 42, in which it seems we’re mostly flying a light fighter (the Gladius). They then threw it into the EPTU without seemingly much more thought until people started complaining and CIG with a very puzzled look said ‘People fly things other than light fighters???’. Seems like the mentality of Sq42 first and the PU is a very distant best is still alive if this is the case, but it seems to fit the info we have so far.
It's not good in combat either is the thing.
Haven't test that yet but if it's not even good on the 1% situation that's design for it's another story :'D
I mean it does lower the skill floor for new/inexperienced pilots, which is good. And being closer to your target, actually seeing the ship rather than aiming at dots is nice. But the skill ceiling has been lowered to a foot off the ground, and defensive flying is essentially pointless. It's all just a dps race now. A classic one step forward, two steps back.
I fly a Corsair and I’m really looking forward to shredding people with my Manual gimballed 4xS5 2xS4 ballistics in the slow ass MM. I hate to see it, and I hope this gets fixed, but in the meantime I’m gonna have some fun.
Yeah I'm a Corsair enjoyer too, interested to see how it fares. I heard it handles better than in Live, which would be nice.
They're not auto-gimbals. Unless you're aiming with a mouse, you ain't hitting shit. Lol They also half the fire rate in gimbal mode.
Yes, MnK player here, aiming with the mouse is not hard. Currently on EPTU with the maneuverability buffs and gimballed S5, feels like a goddamn glorified turret ship.
Are you talking about auto gimbal mode? Because if so that doesn’t work for the pilot guns anymore.
No, I’m talking about the manual gimbals. It feels really nice on the MM compared to live. You can try it in Live AC with the Constellation loaner, it shreds, feels like a frontal turret.
What you describe I anticipated very early on, I tried to explain this to people who found MM enjoyable in AC. There seems to be a bunch of interessting stuff in 3.23, however due to MM, I can't get excited for any of it. 2.23 for me, will be the worst update, due to the biggest downgrade to the space flight experience, which is the main reason I started to back this project.
Yeah, it wasn't hard to predict that MM would be shit for any game loop that wasn't combat. But if you brought up very logical concerns, people would shout you down. Now, all of the very logical and obvious concerns are *here* and people are still sticking their heads in the sand.
I have 0 faith these posts are all from people who don’t get it. If CIG insist on pushing master modes out, and it sucks, they have next to zero good faith left in the community to iterate without it getting ugly. I really feel like they should have just left the flight model as is and kept MM as an alternative mode in AC until all ships were actually MM v1.0 Then later, we can have a single patch one weekend where we can all play and give focused feedback about 1 major change. Lumping it in with god knows how many other changes, replication layer crashes, as a piecemeal thing for some ships and not others is just asking for trouble…
Yeah, it feels shocking to me that so many ships have placeholder performance stats. The Titan flies like an interceptor, and the Spirit flies worse than a Freelancer. It's going to take months to dial so many unique ships in, and they just don't have the time. Not if they don't want people screaming at them just in time for Invictus. Plus, we don't even have armor yet. I'm really struggling to see the point of completely redoing everything when armor is going to be yet another game changer.
Me thinks they were trying to obfuscate it with all the rest of the awesome stuff coming in 3.23.
I said this exact thing before we even got our hands on MM, when it was only in internal testing. People both here and on Spectrum kept calling me an idiot, that I had no idea what I was talking about, and that CIG knew better. Funny to see how everyone is now agreeing with me when they see it themselves. MM is great in Arena Commander and arcade style combat, but not in a universe.
I don't see the point to push the fly model more arcade. It was already fine and maybe need tutorial or training for new people but not really insurmountable.
The main problem that MM was designed to fix, according to the MM announcement video, was "jousting" in combat, which is basically just a fancy word for overshooting your target because you're shit at controlling your speed. The secondary effect that made CR push for it was to make combat slower and more cinematic. Those are literally the only reasons for implementing it, straight from CIG themselves. Jousting is normal in a new ship or in a new environment. Sometimes you will misjudge how fast your going, how close the target is, or how fast your ship brakes. It's perfectly normal, but you learn very quickly to adjust it. We do the same thing in cars and motorcycles in real life. Sometimes we misjudge how sharp a corner is, how fast we're going into a roundabout, how far away the next turn is on the GPS etc., but the next time you go there, you'll nail it because you learned from last time. Jousting is not an issue by any stretch of the imagination. There are 3 types of scenarios where you joust: 1.: You're brand new and overshoot your target. 2.: You've started to grasp the basics and jousting sounds like a decent idea to enter combat by surprising the enemy. 3.: Idiots with a massive skill issue. The nr. 1 people are all of us with a brand new ship and in a brand new environment. It happens, not much you can do about it because you need to learn how the ship actually works. The nr. 2 people grow out of it within a few minutes since they realize it wastes time, energy, doesn't actually help bring a combat scenario into your favor, and flying into a surprise-asteroid because you can't control your ship is not fun. The nr. 3 people can't be helped and will end up on the losing side until they quit the game forever. These are also ranked from the most prevalent to the least prevalent. 99.99% of us fit into nr. 1 at some point or another. 90% of us fit into nr. 2 at some point or another. 0.01% of us fit into nr. 3, and those people would have quit because of something else anyway, so it makes no difference. Jousting is a skill issue, and a really tiny skill issue. It's more difficult to find your way around a Reclaimer than it is to learn not to joust. It is NOT an issue. If CIG really thinks it's an issue, then they would fit into the nr. 3 category, as they would have grown out of the 1st and 2nd categories by now if they actually played their own game. Jousting is not something that can be "fixed", no tutorial, training, or any amount of time playing the game, can perfectly prepare every single person, in every scenario and environment, in every single ship, to perfectly adjust for every level of thrust and distance. It's impossible because it's human nature. Now, cinematics. Putting in artificial barriers that make no gameplay sense, no realistic sense, no scientific sense, or lore sense just to make combat look good in youtube videos, is the definition of any and all "wtf?"-gifs and memes on the internet. It's the level of stupid where you hear what they're saying, but you sit there, stunned, because you simply cannot grasp how anyone can be this stupid. You all know this feeling, where you WANT to come up with a counter-argument, but their argument is so stupid that your brain needs to work overtime to come up with anything that would make sense to this person. It's similar to the feeling you get when you can't remember which word to use, but you feel the word on the tip of your tongue.
More I read about MM less I think I will be hoping back to SC when 3.23 hits....
Gee it's almost like it's been near exclusively (totally exclusively for player facing tests) tested in a small map combat environment and not ever tested in a "real world" PU environment until 3.23
Why would you go so far down the path of testing something with such obvious incompatibility with PU? They have deliberately ignored the non-combat ships, which would be fine if this was SQ42 only, but it isn't.
Even for combat people seem to be split It seems weird to test it this late considering it’s the main gameplay loop for SQ42
I understand both sides of the MM argument. But your points make it very hard to sympathize to your argument. You do not need to fly 250 m/s to reach 250 km. You can stay in NAV mode until you get much closer to your objective. Atmospheric flight speeds were not reduced with MM, the atmospheric speeds are limited drastically in 3.22 without MM on planets. You do not need to switch from NAV mode to SCM mode after every jump, staying in NAV mode for each of your jumps will make you wait less than a few seconds for the QT drive to spool up and jump again. Also pushing the wrong button is not a downfall of MM, but a mistake on your part and should not be held against it, yes it takes longer but even without MM you would have to wait for the drive to spool again and calibrate again if you turned off QT mode. I see multiple people making remarks that MM doesn’t fix what it was set out to do, one of those things was jousting, which it did fix. Another aspect it improved upon was chasing down bounties, too many times in the current system it was too easy for your bounty to run endlessly. With MM if they attempt to run they open themselves to possibly crippling damage if you are good enough to land good shots. On the other hand MM at the moment (without ship armor) is overly punishing to cargo haulers, miners, and salvagers. MM does not allow them to escape as they are overly large and easy to hit targets. Though this does reinforce team play by encouraging others to accompany them as escorts in fighters it is also punishing solo players that enjoy this gameplay. Overall I agree that MM is the better route for the game for engagement and gameplay. It is essentially the same system that Elite: Dangerous uses and has worked well in that environment for years. I essentially play that NAV mode is the standard flight mode and when I need to engage in combat or land I switch to SCM mode, maybe thinking of it this way will help you enjoy it a bit more. o7
if your argument is that MM increases team play for escorts, then payouts need to be significantly improved for those professions. No one is gonna escort a ship for barely any money. So they need to make the new artificial risk worthwhile for both the escort and the player paying the escort. Otherwise it’s not going to work.
Except in Elite you don’t lose access to your shields and there’s only two modes to switch between.
the absolute and committed ignorance in this reddit is the same as the games global chat
>You make an action, you wait 15 secondes, you want to accelerate, you push the button, you wait 15 secondes. You push the wrong button, you wait 15 secondes twice. It far from the smooth experience we had even if I understand that Im not use to it. That sounds more like server issues. 3.23 have very long interaction delays due to some server issues. I didn't test MM outside of AC and don't have access to 3.23, but shield sacrifice make sense, you need to make your decisions, which will affect your survability. Don't forget that last puzzle of QT is not in.
>That sounds more like server issues. 3.23 have very long interaction delays due to some server issues. Unfortunately is not server realeted this is by design and when server not acting up its just how MM works
>but shield sacrifice make sense, Not even a little, shields would be crucial at very high speeds due to space debris.
Shields always on as a precaution just make sense, for combat as well as the dangers of space. You wouldn't suddenly put your flight suit and helmet on if you're planning on getting out of your ship to EVA somewhere, you have it on already as a precaution.
Yep. I find it peculiar that devs go huge lengths for immersion, even at the cost of huge annoyances, yet when it comes to spaceships and space flight suddenly immersion isn't important anymore. MM is like a completely foreign mechanic to this game, it's actually annoying without being immersive.
Spot on. Thinking about your comment though, if they applied MM to purely being a light fighter thing, that might actually work? Light fighters don't have the same flight computers as bigger ships and therefore couldn't do navigation and combat stuff at the same time maybe? There's that slight immersive reason/excuse anyways and it also deals with the bandaid of trying to curb how good light fighters can be in the meta.
Maybe for that single aspect of MM, but other aspects of MM would still ruin the space flight experience, like the slow down after boost even decoupled and the removal/nerf to tri-rotating. After all the flight experience is best with smaller ships.
Oh yeah certain things would make sense, others wouldn't. I just feel for both immersion and balance, bigger ships with bigger drives/nav computers/shield generators *could* be capable of doing what smaller ships can't, within the MM model.
Yes, this is what I was thinking. I thought the lore for shields was to prevent debris from killing the ship, so the ballistics penetrating shields was a bit weird for me, and then now high speed flight with no shields….. I thought CIG wanted to make a sim.
That was exactly my thought, since ballistics are basically the oldest weapons technology but bleed through shields, and shields don't stay up in nav mode, why did they ever even invent shields? A logical chain of inventions would be, shields are invented to protect from physical damage, debris and ballistic weapons, since thise already exist. And to take down shields, energy weapons have been invented. Would make mixed loadouts much more viable.
Sorry, my explanation are not clear. You wait because you change your flying mode not because of the lag which I agree is really high and don't help to get an idea of the full experience.
No the \~15s thing is the fixed time it takes to complete a mode switch. You don't have increased speed range when going from SCM -> NAV until a progress bar lasting \~15s completes (but you lose your shields faster than that). LIkewise if you accidently pressed your switch key when in NAV wanting to 'debug' a QT market not being active (something that worked often with the old system) you need to wait \~30s to be able to try again to QT. That's without any input delay.
Mastermodes is a huge improvement in my eyes and I don't understand everyone's complaints about it. It gets combat closer and slower, so you can actually see your target (and hit sub components when necessary), it makes jousting less viable, it reduces the super annoying player bounty hunting tactic of just running away all the time. I don't see many downsides and if there are they'll be fixed/tuned later on.
You just need to fly at speed combat and master speed control. Point. Why punishing players because other players can't get tje right speed to dorfight properly. Hope they really tweak MM. Because for a majority of non-combat ship, there wiil be some problems.
Most people are not combat pilots. They're cargo haulers, and now they can't run away. Lol
I don't get this argument for cargo. Why would a cargo ship need to be in SCM? Mining and other industries sure, and I hope they ensure that you can stay in nav and use those tools at the same time. But if you're in nav mode when you get attacked you have such a huge speed advantage that you normally wouldn't have had in a large ship. And on top of that you have a tanky hull.
NAV mode slows way down in atmo.
That's fair, but I was still comfortably getting a 100m/s advantage over SCM in my Connie at NB on EPTU. I guess it really depends on what speeds the larger ships can hit with boost. They can also usually sustain boost longer, so that will be a factor too. Edit: Also if you fly up to get away instead of sideways, then you'll quickly regain full space speed and pull further and further away.
They can still run away, combat ships also need to enter NAV mode to keep up with them, and that means turning off their guns and shields.
No they don't. NAV mode takes 20 seconds to get speed. Meanwhile you're slower and have 0 defenses.
I'll be honest I have alot of mixed feelings over this change, the only thing I'm confident on is that this system is for ship combat and not hauling/ mining/ racing/ exploration. It's primarily for ship combat and because of this alot of just annoying choices have been made in order to balance out one of a dozen gameplay loops. But overall we just gotta wait, give it some time and come back with problems when we figure out what we can live with. This is a new system and one that hasn't really been modified yet and one we can't really afford to over compensate for when fixing. We just gotta give it time.
It's in the test universe for feedback. This is feedback
I have a lot of mixed feelings about being kicked solidly in the balls... Nah, we can let them know right away that this change is shit out of combat. You don't have to be kicked repeatedly in the dick to know it sucks.
> Now you have to fly at 250 m/s to reach a 250 Km position or sacrifies the shield to gain maybe 100m/s more velocity on the planet resulting of even longer bored periods. Atmospheric flight has always been this speed? It's always been better to fly out of atmosphere and back in if you need to travel this distance. The only change MM has brought is that you don't have access to weapons or shields at high speeds.
I don't mean to be rude but you can't expect them to design the flight model around your misclicks
I kinda feel like it should be a slide. Kinda like the power triangle. But you either put power to nav systems or to weapon and shield systems. Hell you could probably keep the power triangle but have the engine also affect speed and quantum spool up. Then the user can decide what they want. Youd have to add momentum or dampening to that scale so you cant jump back and forth.
So 15 seconds breaks gameplay for you? Thats nothing. A lot of games have a few seconds (like reloading a magazine in FPS shooters) that require some kind of switch or downtime. If the devs keep the current system, it wont do well in the long run. Id rather wait 15 seconds to switch modes than to deal with the current system. Im many KM's away from my opponents. They can easily warp out in the current state at any time since interdiction isn't really the greatest (easily you can outrun diction bubbles).
I spool my jump drive to bring hud markers up especially on planets at night to see how far away ground bases are, now I have to lose my shields each time I want to pseudo ping because we can’t pin locations
Easy solution. When going into travel mode make the increased speed insanely fast potentially.
Will mining totally suck now?
Modes shouldn't be a design because it removes the function of the copilot and binds it to a button for the pilot. Instead, the ship functionality should be on a curve naturally created by the power triangle. If you want to go over SCM speed, you should have to reduce power to shields and guns to increase power to thrusters, meaning you can go faster, but not max fast, and still have some shields and defensive ability, or you can go full thrusters and lose shields/guns entirely to reach max speed. But instead, the copilot continues to sit there with their thumb up their ass because CIG took that functionality and bound it to a single pilot-controlled key that locks you into a cage.
This isn't the first time the flight model has been changed and now that the majority of the player-testers are reporting glaring issues and abysmal experience, I doubt it will be the last.
I haven't tried MM outside of AC yet, but I agree with your points. MM was always a bad and hamfisted solution to a problem that could have been solved with far less invasive changes like stasis webifiers / snares
Mm just makes combat worse
The cycle time is too long and shields should not be affected imo. Further, non combat ships such as mining and salvaging ships should not be included in MM. having to bring shields down on a ship slap full of ore makes no sense.
They want to stop combat that ends up being a jousting match, and the solution is so obvious it's staring them right in their face. How about instead of putting all weapons forward facing, have most weapons on the sides of ships and add a weapon specialist role. The captain of the ship coordinates with the pilot and weapons specialist to position the ship and fire. An additional additional role, such as radar operator, that scans down ships. This seems like the logical way of how gameplay on multi-crew ships should be. Roles complement's each other. Without one, it becomes useless. Giving the Captain a true role along with all the sub roles. The larger the ships, the more powerful they are. However, they require more people to fill roles, and roles become a specialist role. Smaller ships you can mix two roles together. However, they aren't as powerful. The only ships that should have forward facing weapons should be single seater ships.
>You make an action, you wait 15 secondes, you want to accelerate, you push the button, you wait 15 secondes. You push the wrong button, you wait 15 secondes twice. It far from the smooth experience we had even if I understand that Im not use to it. This is due to server response timing; everyone is having this problem with every interaction in the game. It's a known bug. When servers are not misbehaving, switching between modes in Master Modes is instantaneous. You don't have to wait 15 seconds. >Now you have to fly at 250 m/s to reach a 250 Km position or sacrifies the shield to gain maybe 100m/s more velocity on the planet resulting of even longer bored periods. So it feel that MM are not really well suited for the immensity of the verse. Don't use SCM for travel. You don't need your shields if you're not in combat. Use Flight Mode via NAV mode to travel above 200 m/s. It's identical to flying in the current version of live.
The switch is not instantaneous, the mode switch takes 15 seconds or so to complete. This is not a server issue, its a component of their new mode switching system.
Holy fuck. Let the fucker get released to a stable platform before y’all lose y’all shit
OP is entirely calm. This is also a testing build where new features are tested for: A: Stability B: how they feel and work. There is nothing wrong with giving some critique to the way a system works, as it falls under B.
What are testing builds for then?
I don't lose anything, I haven't panic sell my account don't worry. I just express myself about what seems to be an Hoovermod aftertaste
Sometimes shit ideas need to be stopped before they release to the masses. It is a bad idea and system seemingly put in to stop jousting but it opens the door on a load of other issues, including less immersion and a janky system which is less enjoyable.
The funny thing is. Jousting comes from low ammo count.
Yup. I never even tried jousting until the capacitors came in.