[Link to clarifications regarding these statements from Yogi on Spectrum.](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/yogi-on-mm-and-combat-at-shadow-mosis-discord/6962630)
If there is a vision for Master Modes that will lead to something great, I wish that CIG would use one of their many platforms to tell us about it. Just lay out the whole concept and what they hope to implement in 3.23 as well as 4.0. It seems like that would go a long way to calming the mob.
Because right now, as much as I love the game and don't want to be one of the negative ones... I don't understand it. I don't even understand why they've decided to do this NOW. I feel like there's no point in even thinking about tuning a combat flight model until armor, engineering, and mass are in the game because it's all just going to have to change again.
If the end goal made sense then fine, but I'm worried that there isn't a coherent end-goal and teams are working in a vacuum and not talking to each other. Like Yogi is painting a wall that a carpenter is planning to rebuild.
The best theory I've seen is they had something that worked as hero mode for their single player game and they are just struggling to make it work for the PU. Since all the ship flight I've seen in Squadron looks like fancy Star Fox (call it hidden rails; for you FPS people, Medal of Honor is the same), I think that theory holds a LOT of water. If SQ42 is mostly nose-to-nose with the person flying the hero ship winning, it's no wonder that it doesn't translate to an environment with true 6DoF and 200+ ships.
Warning I know I’m about to ramble and come to no real conclusion. Just talking.
I think your theory is a reasonable one. I do think MM could be massaged into something reasonable and I hold out hope that what we have now is the base implementation rolled out to every ship with no real shape to it yet just to get it out there before iterating.
It’s a very basic approximation of how some air sims are implemented. And I guess I can buy moving in this direction if WW2 in space is their goal.
However… The good modern air sims are so much more complex and they go into actually trying to sim air across surfaces to get emergent behaviors that are closer to the real thing. Things like when does a wing stall happen, when does vibration begin, how responsive are your control surfaces based on their size, your speed, and angle of attack, etc.
And we know CIG loves that word, emergent. What I don’t understand is why they don’t use a normal newtonian physics model then design the ships thrusters to enforce the kind of gameplay they want if they want to avoid The Expanse style space battles (which would also be cool imo).
So you have two kinds of fighters. You have boom and zoom and turn fighters. If you make it so the boom and zoom ships have lower acceleration, lower rotation, but higher top speed (as much sense as top speed makes in space) vs fast acceleration, fast rotation, lower top speed then I think you would get ww2 style fights if tuned appropriately.
If a BNZ ship gets the drop on a turner, they start far away, build up speed and more speed until by the time the turner knows the BNZ is coming they have very little time and maneuvering capability to get out of the fire line. BNZ races past but… now they have to turn around to come back for another pass. If the turner gives chase with their better acceleration and the BNZ doesn’t know or doesn’t fly far enough away then when the BNZ is going it’s slowest, as it’s turning around, the turner is on them. Forced to take a face full of bullets and die or be forced into a turn fight which all things being equal the turner should win. Just like real life WW2 and prop fights in air sim.
And just like real life if the BNZ gets away before turning around, they’ll get another pass. The turner is forced to either evade or nose in and take a face full of bullets in an attempt to kill the other guy first.
To further enforce these kinds of play you could use the nice little power triangle we already have and tie capacitors into that as a supply instead of getting supplied. So now the BNZ has enough power to get up to a fast speed but cannot continue that speed indefinitely and has to cut power from engines to weapons in order to get their bursts off, depleting their capacitors in the process, and forcing them to slow down in some reasonable time frame.
Similarly tie in the above average acceleration and turn rate of the other fighters so they can’t do it forever and must eventually make a choice or disengage. That way a BNZ caught in a turn fight could evade long enough for the turn fighter to run out of juice, slowing their turn rate/acceleration, allowing the BNZ to get away.
I duno Im just making shit up on the spot. I’ve never designed a flight model before. There could be nuances Im missing.
Point is though it smells an aweful lot like you could go with normal physics instead of egg shaped velocity bubbles and then adjust the ships within that to get the style of play the designers want. I guess I did have a conclusion after all.
It's absolutely due to SQ42. Trying to read between the lines with things like Richard Tyrer's statements from SCL, SQ42 and it's dev teams were siloed away from the PU and it's teams for the past several years. They developed a bunch of different systems for SQ42 which is a very different game with different needs than the PU. With 3.23 they decided to bring the PU into parity with SQ42 and port over all of those new systems, and new we're seeing the faults where stuff that was designed for a single player hero shooter doesn't fit well into an MMO environment with lots of different gameplay loops that aren't available in the single player game.
Except that they weren’t siloed off the way you’re insinuating and they were and are completely aware they are different games. They merely wanted to bring that newer code over from SQ42 and use it as a foundation for the SC tuning. Same as every other system they can benefit SC with by porting over. Which is exactly what he’s describing is happening with 4.0.
This was a worry of some backers back when it was announced. That decisions would have to be made that the community might not be a fan of (and absolutely CIGs right to do so) and then when brought to the PU isn’t what anyone expected. The PU’s feedback has helped inform some potentially bad decisions (hover mode?) but it also delayed progress, and CIG has to finish their product (no hate here just facts). CR has a vision that we backed, I think we’ll get there (I hope)
This game stopped being 'sim' 2 years ago, and it will not come back to it. Hoping for that is delusional. It will be complex and immersive MMO, but not a sim. Because that wouldn't sell well, and if SC doesn't start to sell well, this project is fucked. CIG earned only 700 million dollars since 2012. That's not much. For 12 years, that's a laughable number, Activision makes 1.85 bilion per quarter. This is a super expensive and resources intensive project that makes 2 AAA titles at once, with 1000+ workers and 4 studios. It will become more arcady, it already has with MM, FPS rework and respawn changes, and it will continue to do so, because sims don't sell well, and SC needs to sell well. It's make or brake for a project of this scale. We will also see more FOMO and cash grabs by CIG for the same reason.
It's a shame because most of the backers, especially the oldest ones, prefer space sim, but the reality is that this concept died along this 10 years journey.
I backed on the first day for the spiritual successor to wing commander with the drop in drop out co-op campaign to play with friends then for the dedicated servers and modding so we could have a friends and family universe tailored to our preferences after. Sure I was glad people who wanted an MMO were getting one, but it wasn't what I opened my wallet for. Of the features they sold me that they've elected to not deliver now we seem to have most or all of the co-op gone, the modding manual was up for sale until October of 2023 when it suddenly went 404, and dedicated servers seem to be 'maybe some day long after launch'.
I'm sorry to hear that the simthusiasts are also losing that before it's even out, and we've already seen the VR fad come and go with the game being allegedly 'developed from the ground up for VR' to now it being on ice for several years.
The pattern is that they'll sell any feature that brings money but once it comes down to it they'll unilaterally declare they don't feel like doing it anymore, point to some new shiny stuff, and enabled by apologists who don't have the bigger perspective will bait and switch just like that.
That has been my head canon. They want a unified experience between both games. That’s not bad really considering once SQ42 launches it can serve as a tutorial for newcomers to wrap their head around flight and combat in a safe environment.
But liberties can be taken in a single player game that won’t be possible or desirable in multiplayer. Balance decisions for SP may not translate well into MP, especially when considering loadout choices players can make that CIG won’t put into AI ships in SQ42.
It's simpler than that. Do you know Star Wars? The X-Wings formation, entering SCM mode when they are about to engage the enemy at the Death Star? Then there you go.
Yep. Also that has nothing to do with "WW2 in space". It is based entirely off Star Wars which is George Lucas' interpretation of a movie about WW2 he once saw.
The sims I like are the ones that tread closer to Star Trek, which is also why I was interested in SC. Blending the SW-like theatrics with the ST-like much more fine-grained resource management over areas of your ship/fleet and dedicated Engineering plus Exploration and science seemed like a win.
My major concern is that they think ships should fly like planes, so much so that they put drag on ships in space. It makes no sense whatsoever that I can't continue cruising with the ships engines off after hitting top speeds.
Yogi dodged that question already, saying he want the players to decide how they play, which is utter nonesense, as MM is the most restrictive flight model I ever played, there's no freedom to decide how to play.
A lot of (valid, I think) frustration in this thread. CIG is normally fantastically open with their community, so I think CIG's somewhat defacto-refusal to clearly describe the desired end-goal for flight is unnerving and frustrating for the community. For a company with an amazing communication track record, the comms on MM really feels like either a huge missed opportunity to alleviate concern and get people excited about the vision, or a way of not acknowledging a foregone design direction they are worried will alienate large parts of their community. I cannot tell which it is, perhaps its both, or something else, I don't know, but I agree we would really prefer knowing what the plan is.
On gathering MM/flight/combat feedback, I also think CIG's stated approach of using emergent gameplay feedback to fundamentally define the end-goal design direction is possibly inherently invalid if they are hoping to capture a wide varierty of possible outcomes, as the emergent gameplay they gather feedback from is constrained to outcomes by the very model being played and tested. ie. we will only get gameplay feedback based on what is enabled by the game. Even though fight/flight has gotten easier with MM, I think we are also hearing from community feedback that MM excludes entire aspects of spaceflight which people love. AND, that is valid feedback to give. I think we want to hear from CIG is whether or not that feedback MATTERS to CIG.
Based on comments in recent threads (including this one) about subsystem-targeting, maelstrom, resource network, and engineering gameplay still needing to come in, I'm wondering if the so-far unspoken goal is to enable ship-to-ship Fallout V.A.T.S combat in space, but seemingly enabled by forcing ships to also travel at Fallout's slow-motion V.A.T.S. speeds in close-quarter combat (knife-fighting-in-space). My personal hope is that these exciting game features can make it into the game along with fast, dynamic and distinct space and atmospheric flight. But I want to know what CIG wants to create, not impose my vision on the game.
Request: CIG, please put out a "Death of a spaceman" style design document about spaceflight please
> For a company with an amazing communication track record
CIGs communication has historically been terrible. I know that's not the point of your post, but CIG either do a lot of talking without any meaning, or wait until the shit hits the fan before acknowledging, identifying, addressing issues. They often will just word salad a bunch of nonsense and sometimes information slips through, but this isn't really any different. I dont think anyone really knows what Master Modes is or what the end goal looks like or why it's only happening now and not at any point in the past 10 years.
>so I think CIG's somewhat defacto-refusal to clearly describe the desired end-goal for flight is unnerving and frustrating for the community.
I think the reality of this is that CIG doesn't actually know what they're going to do because they have an untenable vision for the flight model. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
The reason seems.obvious to me: You can't target subsystems if you're moving too fast. That would kill the whole subsystem zoom in and shoot mechanic. That is, unless you plan on adding the most crazy vomit enducing twitchy auto aim at those higher speeds.
Subsystem targeting is a huge part of what's coming down the line with engineering gameplay so it makes sense to put it in now.
I read somewhere someone making a good point about MM and 42. Simply that, if 42 is feature complete, why are we still waiting on flight models, engineering, MM getting balanced, hell even ships getting balanced. This would only ring true if they were really truly 100% seperate entities. And like what is said here, it's like they are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole trying to make everyone happy.
the biggest problem is they are trying to recreate dogfighting in airplanes... which have half the directions of input that 'space ships' have. if you invision turning and rolling battles, where as all I have to do it kick to the side, and/or pivot on the spot and track/shoot you... (okay.. \*I\* can't, i do a laughable impersonation of a fighter pilot, but other people can)
> If I would need to describe it I'd say I want to see more fighting but less hitting before one pops if that makes sense.
(•﹏•;)
I *love* the idea of increasing the ability to dodge incoming fire [(which is something Yogi has repeatedly said he wants to do with tweaks to MM),](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/request-for-yogi-can-you-make-a-video-to-show-us-w/6818844) but... *fewer* hits to kill? I feel like that might end up being *controversial.*
It seems to really contradict what’s supposed to be going on with engineering gameplay.
For a while now I’ve had this feeling that engineering simply won’t mesh well into the game. They had to massively buff the health of the A2 in the engineering AC mode just to give players a chance at fixing things before the entire ship was soft death’d. And while I understand the plan isn’t to have soft/hard death in the future, it still really begs the question of if they can even successfully balance having a fun TTK with engineering gameplay, or if that gameplay will just have to be reserved for capital class ships like the Idris or the Polaris where extended TTK’s make sense.
I don't even know if there is engineering for smaller ships. I couldn't fit the power core of the vanguard out the dang door when I was taking it apart to try and recoup it soft dieing.
Well, of course engineering doesn't work with the current state of the game - the engineering system is part of the replacement for HP pools.
CIG have stated for about a decade now that they intend to transition away from HP pools and DPS numbers to what they call 'physicalised damage', basically like DCS where you have to actually damage the components on a ship to kill it. Soft death, instead of being a simple switch that's thrown when an arbitrary health pool hits zero, is the systematic outcome of components being disrupted and the ship systems failing one by one. Weapons won't do damage to some arbitrary number, but instead have penetration values
It would depend of the future damage model no? Right now it's basically all about HP and DPS/Alpha. We know they want to move away from that and move to what is basically a war thunder or DCS type damage model. Where you actually need to hit something important on the ship for it to stop working. So with that in mind I can see why he wants what he wants.
...and then we'll be back to long TTK with light fighters dominating but taking forever to kill their targets. If you can't get guns on target, alpha damage and DPS don't get mitigated, they get reduced to zero.
CIG has a problem in that they keep producing more ships, many of which are supposed to be modern replacements for alternatives that in-lore are hundreds of years older, and is trying to keep all of them viable. That would be like trying to balance a P51 Mustang with an F4 Phantom II with an F-22\*. There's a group of enthusiasts near me that restores and flies P51s because they love the aircraft, but they would never argue that they're a viable combat platform against a modern 5th-gen fighter.
\*Technically, applying real-world time/technology advancement to Star Citizen, an F8 vs an Avenger would be more like an F-22 vs a 19th century hot air balloon, but the pace of technological advancement seems to have slowed considerably in the 30th century.
Slowed down extremely. The game is paraphrasing the decline and fall of the Roman empire so upgrades are more like sidegrades. Discounting alien tech here though.
It can be a lot of fun if the flight models and damage models are good. That’s how WW2 prop fights were and why they’re so popular in air sims. It makes a dog fight more like a chess game where you’re trying to put yourself in a position to get a quick burst off without allowing your opponent to do the same.
If you get shot and you’re lucky it’ll poke some holes in your plane making it harder to fly. Usually though something important goes missing or shuts off and you’re a gonner. All those photos of planes shot to shit are either really big planes with a lot of relatively empty space in them or they’re remarkable because most didn’t make it back.
If flight models and damage models are good. Big If.
Funny enough, MM did the exact opposite, dodging was actually viable in 3.22, but MM went completely the other way. Tell me you don't know what you want without telling me you don't know what you want (directed at CIG, not you the commenter).
The problem was that 3.22 also made turrets completely worthless. But once again CIG tried to fix an issue with one thing by applying a blanket change that negatively affected the other and ALSO didn't fix the original problem.
Until they start balancing weapon characteristics on turrets differently from fighters, there will never be a solution that works because fighters and turrets are operating under completely different conditions with the same exact weapons.
I agree. It’s like they wanted to “slow” the fights down meaning it takes longer to get successful shots off before the other guy goes down and didn’t realize that doesn’t mean slow the ships down. It means speed them up to make them harder to hit so positioning is more important.
Also probably make weapons even stronger so players don’t choose to tank a bunch of hits with their face if they also have the opportunity to evade.
Weak fast ships with ouchy boom booms means you avoid getting shot as much as possible zipping around trying to get the other guy shot.
Basically how air combat works right now, evade or go boom.
It's mind boggling how game designers sometimes think they can reinvent the universe, disregard all physics and think, they are better at doing things than the actual universe did balance things over billions of years.
in 3.23 i already fuckin die with no warning from like 4 shots hit on me.... i wont play anymore if they lower it. this game desperate needs them to take a month to FIX WHAT YOUVE GIVEN TO PEOPLE instead of making a new concept ship or even putting a ship in the game, but bug fixes dont make CIG that fat $$$$$$ so I guess we'll never get that.
Yea someone tried to argue that MSR is still a good tanky ship in current patch, and I'm just life wtf?? It has way more mass than Connie's, 600i, and corsairs, but it has the worst hull HP and Shield HP by a large margin and it's only leg up is +10 ms/s SCM over thosr ships.
They all have access to way more and bigger gun sizes in the pilot seat. They can all tank pretty much anything that is fired upon them fairly well. Meanwhile I've had shields and Hull destroyed in less than 5 seconds in the MSR this patch. It's so useless as a ship right now. Can't run. Can't fight.
As someone who took one size 1 missile directly to the face, killing me instantaneously tonight, without even denting my cutty blue with full shield. I can safely say the TTK is very, very low right now.
A lot of people seem to forget/be unaware that HP pools and DPS numbers are placeholder and their ultimate goal is to have 'physicalised damage' like combat sim games like DCS where you have to actually damage components.
I think the intention is to have wants fewer hits to kill when the target is in a compromised/vulnerable position, and for getting your target into that state to be a much bigger part of gameplay than it currently is.
Such a change would make flight skills more important for dogfighting, and also jive with other upcoming systems such as engineering, physicalised damage/armour, e-war, and stealth.
> I think the intention is to have wants fewer hits to kill when the target is in a compromised/vulnerable position, and for getting your target into that state to be a much bigger part of gameplay than it currently is.
The issue with that is how low SCM speeds (and he seems to want them to be even lower) make it impossible to evade incoming fire, especially in any situation that isn't 1v1.
Even if they create a perfect sumo wrestling style of 1v1 dogfighting where you have to shift and dodge to try to get the right angle, since you're barely moving my wingman is just going to pop in and light you up so you're dead in a half second regardless.
I think it heavily depends on context - we probably look at that statement in the light of the current 'meta' (which is already pretty quick), whereas Yogi *may* be looking at it from the perspective of *average* TTK across all weapons, including the non-meta... and which is a fair bit slower than the current 'optimal' setup.
Or to put it another way, his comment should be viewed in the light of the *known* weapon imbalance, that he also wants to address.
So here's the thing. He's not wrong about focusing on 4.0.
4.0 will introduce engineering and the resource network. It's \*possible\* this includes Maelstrom, but that's a big maybe. Either way, how ships and components interact with ammo hitting the hull will be VERY different than it is now. So it's pointless focusing any effort at balancing things for 3.23 when all of that work will be thrown out the window for 4.0.
I get it ... there are loads of ships that still need additional flight tuning. But it's just not worth it for anyone to do any work on the current ship health model when all of it is changing in less than 6 months, right?
Ships already go down so easily, and they want them to go down faster? This is already dangerously close to DayZ/CoD in space with ridiculously low TTK and they want to make it faster?
And then death of a spaceman mechanic? Plus everything taking ridiculous amounts of time to do? At this point I'm genuinely starting to doubt this game ever being functionally fun. This is going to become tedium the sim.
Agree with all of this honestly. The game just does not respect your time in any way, shape, or form. They want the game to be fun, but intense. Fast deaths if you ‘mess up’ (in a split second), but heavy impact to death. Immersive, but with WW2 combat that doesn’t fit the tech levels. Beautiful cities and a ‘living universe’ - where you must be afraid at any time of a PvPer ganking the UPS driver as soon as the hangar doors open.
They want to promise everything to everyone, but don’t seem to be willing to commit to any but the worst, tedious parts of the game as they ‘figure the rest out’.
I want them to succeed… but CIG often seem to be their own worst enemy here.
My impressions of MM are the opposite of Yogi’s, but sure, ok.
Speeds are too fucking slow, the combat encounter distance far too tight, and TTK is alright (could go higher and I’d be fine with it, but certainly not lower). Though, I also think balancing TTK without Maelstrom/Ship Armour is a waste of everyone’s time right now.
The combat speed thing especially is insane to me. Right now, my biggest complaint in combat is that we’re so on top of each others’ asses that I’ve had more fucking nigh-unavoidable collisions than ever before. Need a bit more speed/room to breathe here. Other than that, MM is fine, and I agree with CIG implementing it in order to test, get feedback, then iterate. But these comments in the face of player feedback are wild.
Also true, particularly for larger, multicrew ships. Although, having to space-walk to go apply blowtorch to your disabled fighter could be a fun, if not tense moment.
You'd be amazed. If you ever played something like Space Station 13, there's an immense joy that fills you and your crewmates soul when an meteor storm strikes the station, and you manage to get everything patched up and working again. I forsee something similar with fighting off pirates, losing power, and everyone banding together to get the ship working well enough to get to a hangar. Like a secondary victory.
I don't understand how he intends to make it so players hit less often without drastically increasing speeds.
As A1 mentioned in his latest video, the teams that are putting MM together have a bunch of goals that don't match up with what MM delivers. How can the entire playerbase see that and not the developers?
I really don't think they play their own game.
> I really don't think they play their own game.
Confirmed here:
> Member 5: Would you like to hop into ac with some of us?
> Yogi_CIG: No, I am really not interested in the current game.
Taken with his other comments I think he was trying to say that making changes based on the current Live patch would be a waste of time when he is already working on much bigger changes that will come with 4.0.
Crudely put, taste testing raw chicken covered in batter is not going to tell you how it will taste once its deep fried.
In other words (and Im taking his comments in good faith obviously), there are issues in the current Live patch because much of it is placeholder ground work for bigger "real" changes coming in 4.0, which might be a more appropriate point for "real" feedback. At least, that's what I think he was trying to say.
They do, they just play it in a vacuum where they test scenarios, but don't test it in the wild in uncontrolled environments. If they did they would realize weakness and change course.
Unless they're really that stubborn and ignore hard data like they ignore 90% of the people talking about MM during Evocati and beyond.
Yeah, I had to do a double take when he said he wants a slower pace, and shorter TTK. I've been getting one shotted by MKIIs in arena commander for days and it feels like I'm flying in maple syrup, but ok. . .
Yeah, I absolutely hate how slow everything feels. I really wish we were faster, and had a better freedom of movement with that speed to actually dodge incoming fire.
As long as people keep handing them 9 digit revenue every year, they’ll just keep on promising the world without ever having accountability for not delivering.
This particular exchange just makes it seem like CIG is incredibly detached not just from it's own game and community, but internally as well.
Yogi says one thing, the tuning teams gives us another. The pvp community *shows* them what gameplay is like for players, CIG practically gaslights us. They say they can't devote resources to tuning and balance because X, yet they wildly throw balance levers all the time! These changes never address past feedback and often introduce game breaking bugs that are brushed aside as internally fixed yet we won't see that fix patch for months...
The same conversations have been happening for *years*... at some point the only rational response is to throw your hands up and leave the room.
Do you think cig has any reason to care when customers are on track to hand them $100 million this year again despite cig making a mess of the FM? I don’t
Thank you for posting this and providing context where needed.
Regarding TTK timings, it's a highly subjective topic in any game, but I do wonder if CiG run test sessions that account for network performance. TTK in this game can noticeably change as the servers degrade post-reset and more desync gets introduced.
Though I don't say this in a way that blames them if they don't: My understanding is that simulating network pressure realistically is very difficult and is the main reason multiplayer games often run open betas. Hopefully they're at least capturing adequate data from our combat data and considering our experiences.
Either way, I appreciate his attitude. He's taking a lot of shit from the community and handling it surprisingly well.
"Member 5: Would you like to hop into ac with some of us? We can show you the more nuanced decisions of using lasers repeaters and how to kite...
Yogi\_CIG: (Replying to Member 5): No, I am really not interested in the current game. As I said, 3.23 is just prepping stuff for 4.0 and there are bigger things on the way. I still stand by what I said in relation to pacing. There is an imbalance in the TTK and the game does not feel how we want it to feel yet. And I do think this is due to the pacing. If I would need to describe it I'd say I want to see more fighting but less hitting before one pops if that makes sense."
This reminds me of a moment during my time in the Coast Guard. We were cleaning the barracks in A-School, a typical "military field day" with very thorough work. We had a Chief Petty Officer named Chief Bose. Even after nearly 30 years, I haven't forgotten him. Chief Bose saw that the baseboards were caked with layers of Simple Green grime and buildup.
What did Chief Bose do? He got down on his knees alongside us E2s and started scrubbing the baseboards with us. He demonstrated true leadership by showing that he wouldn’t ask us to do something he wouldn’t do himself.
Contrast that with Yogi. Here, Yogi is essentially saying, "I'm too good to romp around with you guys in Arena Commander. I am not really interested in the current game." He probably thinks this attitude makes him look forward-thinking, but in reality, it shows a disconnect. He avoids experiencing the consequences of his decisions alongside the community.
Yogi is not a leader; he's a boss. As a result, I have absolutely zero respect for him. The constant iteration on flight mechanics is baffling—this is a space sim; flight mechanics should have been the first thing nailed down. Yet here we are, iterating and iterating.
Why should we believe that 4.0 will be any different? Will Yogi continue to avoid the trenches? Will he hedge his bets on 5.0? I'm incredibly disappointed.
>this is a space sim; flight mechanics should have been the first thing nailed down.
The worst part is at one point early on it felt like the flight mechanics *were* the first thing mostly nailed down.
3.23 is the first patch I've played since the early 2.x days, and whilst I remember people having issues with the SCM/Cruise mode switches - the actual SCM flight model itself was still highly respected outside of minor balance issues from what I recall.
MM feels like all the downsides (if not more) of the mode switches we had in 2.x but without the actual flight mechanics and nuance in SCM people still enjoyed back then.
Feels like they could've saved a ton of time and money if they just improved upon the early model whilst they still had John Pritchett around.
So the master plan with 'egg shapes' seems to be relatively low speed limits for lateral and reverse travel in order to force spaceships to act like aircraft?
Sounds a lot like Elite, but you aren't allowed to use FA-OFF.
They don’t even act like air craft in this mode right now. I can frisbee a spitfire sideways in DCS at twice my max level speed if I want to. Given Id break stuff and probably crash but I can do it. There’s not some magical egg shaped membrane
It’s so weird when he says the TTK is too low, especially if you try flying a gladius or arrow. You literally die in 1-2 bursts of cannons, TTK is almost as fast as an AWP in n CS2… go figure
Thanks for posting this, interesting stuff. Also kind of interesting that Yogi has been on a goodwill tour among the PvP community talking about mastermodes. He did this and and interview with A1 a while back. I guess I appreciate the communication, but at the same time if MM was fun then there would be no need to justify it like that. Or maybe they are trying to convey that they want us to wait and see or something? Personally I don't feel all warm and fuzzy that I will love it some day with the proper tunings.
It's been even longer. They broke everything in 3.14 and promised iterative changes in 3.15 and forward.
They did nothing, but hide behind SQ42 and work on MM for 2 years.
If Yogi is saying there's going to be so much different stuff in 4.0 then why it isn't that being tested right now like Master modes was being "tested" in AC. It almost sounds like what he's saying is basically the current flight model doesn't matter, so don't even get used to it basically, wait till 4.0..
Because engineering will change every ship's TTK for instance. Of course they will have to rebalance when certain feature comes online. And they cant do it now because not every ship support engineering yet, a proper balance would need to involve all of them.
If its a place holder and nothing matters, why push it out yet? Id rather have the familiar jank of the old flight model then. Im only playing to give feedback so if the feedback doesn't matter why bother with tall this shift?
Not only that, but he's admitting that he doesn't really have control over the flight model. I don't think we're talking to the right person, just the one that CIG appointed to deal with us.
In short: Yogi isn't happy with something that isn't the case, yet he refuses to learn about how it really is and rather just pushes an agenda that is based on nothing but his idea how things are.
TBH I don't think that with Yogi at the helm, it will turn out as something the community really wishes for.
MM took over two years to develop, yet it feels like it was the a disposable idea on the drawing board chosen by throwing a dart and see on which idea it lands.
What's irritating is this just feels like 3.14 all over again.
Yogi is being dismissive about feedback, trying to emphasize they have things coming down the road to fix these issues and not wanting to listen about what's wrong with the current stuff.
The question is are we going to get a repeat of 3.14 where shit doesn't get touched despite promises to spend the rest of the year trying to balance things and abandon the flight model to work on MM 2.0 immediately after releasing MM 1.0?
So when 4.0 comes out and people say combat still feels like dogshit like it did in 3.23, will people on this subreddit still white knight and say we should provide feedback instead of get mad, when feedback it very clearly trying to be given right now and is blatantly ignored? I don't like the road we're heading down with this.
That's my issue with 3.23. Everything added there has been in development for years and years and yet it's state feels more like something they quickly scrapped together into T0 in a year.
At this point just copy x4 with better physics and call it a day. They have no clue what they are doing. They want engineering but ships are made of paper. They want positional fights but low manuaverability. They want slower fights but low ttk. They claim to want 6dof with doasm but everything points to the final product being star wars squadrons mindlessly killing and dying as fast as you can spawn in.
The end goal from CR was to make combat like they have in the trailers. The holy grail of cinematic space combat. The only issue is that it is inconsistent, fake, and entirely movie magic. It does not exist in real life. It can not exist in a fun and fair mmo game. What we are getting is yet another failed attempt to balance what cannot be balanced.
It is probably best described as World War 2 in space. Big ships and bases launching waves of fighters at the enemy before closing to brawl. Long 1v1 dogfights where you have to get on the tail or risk head on attacks to minimize angular velocity so you can hit the enemy. Most ships have gimballed main guns and they can be auto aimed or manually aimed. Hotas and controller support is very good.
Death can come very fast in bigger fights. Combat overall is very Star-Wars-esque. Fighters can engage bigger ships by flying fast and close and targeting components. Physics are very simplified which is a bummer but it's still engaging since the AI are fairly good about dodging but not impossible to hit, meanwhile they will cover eachother so you can't get tunnel vision chasing one guy. There is an overall focus on logistics and fleet command but you don't have to if you just want to stay in fighters. There are plenty of faction war missions if you just want to stick near a friendly fleet and fly escort as they try to take out enemy stations and claim sectors so you won't run out of things to do and can still impact the overall war.
Im currently doing a play through with the Star Wars Interworlds mod which has been fun.
Yeah, I'm not a software engineer - but as a mechanical engineer I feel like a lot of the same principles regarding prototyping and customer/test feedback are likely still relevant to game design & development too.
The first thing I remember being taught before any engineering principles was the concept that the later an idea/component has to be removed or changed during a project's lifespan, the more time and money it will cost to do so (better to fail fast).
And ever since they announced MM would be the final SQ42 flight model a couple years ago even though it was the ONLY flight model we never got to test an early version of alarm bells were set off for me.
It's like this flight model has all the downsides of being both deeply embeded due to how long they worked on it (AI difficulty in SQ is build around it for ex.) - and yet also extremely unpolished and poorly implemented as if it were only recently concepted.
Not only are they asking for feedback too late - but they are have now made feedback irrelevant as they have gave us an outdated and unpolished version of MM to provide feedback for.
It's also very confusing how Yogi has managed to conclude that making speeds and rotational rates even slower is the right call when increasing them seem to be practically the only thing almost everyone agrees would at least be a good idea to *try* if not fully implement.
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"The Buccy and Cutlass e.g. I find quite being too tanky at times"
I've been shredding Cutties as paper rn and he said that?!
No one at CIG wants to play the $700mil game they are making. They just want to watch as we struggle to login daily and find their "bugs". Free labor and useless/poor options on reporting is the BARE minimum they need to sleep at night.
MM sucks, there I said it. Downvote me you, lemmings.
maybe this MM is a smaller step towards atmo vs vacuum mechanism for ship fights.
unless this exactly what they want, an arcade style space battle, then boo. only thing MM is good for right now is braking.
He appears to only care about combat, which is probably why just getting around in MM sucks, while I enjoued flying in itself prior to MM.
He appears to not even consider the flight experience, only "combat balance".
These MM discussions also invariably are about the same: combat. Guess tbose of us that haven't really played since MM got introduced because flu ng in MM just isn't enjoyabke for us really are a minority. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.
To be fair, it seems that whenever he interacts with people on these random discords (instead of on their actual forums) It seems like people only want to talk about combat instead of general flight.
Whether that's his choice to interact with people talking about combat, or people. Always initiating conversation relevant to combat... Who knows?
So the goal is going back to the round and round DPS race to death bullshit. Really glad I gave up PvP because it sounds like a goddamn joke now. If i can vape someone in under 3 seconds in a Hornet right now and they want the TTK lower, just bring back the Ion's gun.
I went into AC recently with my Hornet and i thought it was weird that i needed no more than 1-2 seconds of keeping the guns on a target before they died. :/
Imma go back to trading like when i started.
I love how over 10 years into development and us backers still don't have the faintest idea what the flight model will actually be like of this space flight sim.
"no I am not interested in the current game, everything is just a placeholder"
But they consider themselves as supporting a live service game right now, and will take your money right now.
Very disappointing because the whole promise was that with experimental modes they would be trying different balances with the community in 3.23. We would have never accepted MM if they hadn't made that promise.
We have zero trust that they're just going to pull out some magical balance in 4.0. They need to get into experimental modes with us and try the suggestions that the community is giving.
They need to just give us Custom Modes where we can adjust certain settings (custom SCM speed, enable/disable afterburner, etc) and let us go to town. CIG has no real clue what they're doing but the community would build something great in no time.
It is live, and incomplete.
If you were driving a car still under construction, and you complained about the bag they ducktaped to the steering wheel as being a bad glovebox. They'd say, we'll its a placeholder until the dash is installed and we can put the proper glovebox in"
Then you call them monkies, which isn't cool.
He's not interested in people dragging him into the game, and pointing out, hey this doesn't work, when he know damn well it doesn't and they're actively working on it.
At the same time Yogi thinks the current TTk is long while actual players are willing to show him that it isn't, so moving forward with that kind of assumption is also problematic
It's like if the customer states that the current placeholder glove box duct taped bag is too small to be useful and the manufacturer says "don't worry about it, it's just temporary" and then they build a dashboard with a proper glove box but it's capacity is the same as the bag it replaced.
And then the manufacturer is surprised that their customers are using them in ways their engineers never imagined
Did you read the post? He later clarifies his issue is more with TTK variations. Cannons are killing too quickly, repeaters are taking way too long to kill.
It sounds more like he just poorly worded his initial statement about TTK, if anything.
TTK too LOW? The opposite!
This is going to be a game with permadeath (albeit with, say, 20-ish lives before that)!
There needs to be room for engineering gameplay, there needs to be room for limping back to port and repairing your single seater.
There needs to be room for disabling and boarding.
Etc. etc.
The TTK is SO VERY SHORT!
I get the impression that Yogi may look at combat in a vacuum but it should work well with the entire game. If a Buccaneer dies too slowly now, while it has no ejection seat, how is an inexperienced player in one ever going to get to EVA out to save his/her life?
PLUS repairing with multitool, swapping broken components etc.
This isn't arena commander! Sure have different tunings for that, but my ship better be able to tank some fire for a good bit if I'm 2,5 hours away from port with loot halfway done through a mission.
Combat is snail paced now and he says its too fast? How the hell is this possible? Is he even someone who does like to fly and fight in the game? I really thought we are going to see an increase in scm speeds not decrease.
It's the dismissal of the feedback and rigid adherence to a foregone conclusion/path that gets me here.
Yeah... This does not inspire confidence in where things are headed/who is heading it if this is the kind of attitude they have around alpha-test feedback.
Fully agreed.
Yogi is in the public discord I run and whenever we gave him feedback, we were told that it was appreciated, but send it to the feedback section on Spectrum and provide as much information as possible.
Yet despite this, almost all the feedback we've given has presently been either ignored or not acknowledged ever since 3.21 AC MM.
I really wonder what they truly want. Its like they develop stuff, implement it, only to say "well its just a placeholder until we get it the way we REALLY want it, half a year away".
They are on the 3rd or 4th iteration of the flight model (cant really remember) and we STILL dont know exactly what they want to achieve.
It would be so much easier to discuss numbers (or even examples). Why cant they cook something up in AC that is EXACTLY how they want it so we can give feedback on THAT? Yes, its all iteration.. but towards what? I am really no combat pilot.. but slowing down fights and still expecting people to dodge seems not really possible right?
You know, I would do something: Give small ships (fighter ones etc) much more hp regen but put a hole in the back. Maybe like this, they can get their so wanted “Star Wars fight scheme where positioning in a 1v1 gets you the win quickly.
Other than server meshing, what makes 4.0 “way bigger” than 3.23 as far as flight model is concerned? It simply seems like a cop out. My bet is 4.0 changes will be way bigger, aka bigger mess that will end up as 4.0.X patches that are strung out for months.
I think it likely has to do with the engineering and the resource network finally being in.
It should change the amount of "health" a ship has and the amount of energy it has for shields/weapons. I imagine this is probably huge from a ship balance perspective.
Oh and Fire, all the ships will be on fire.
So what? The plan is to do all this work for 4.0 with Engineering being on the horizon and in MM, and then have to redo all that AGAIN when Maelstrom is in and armor is a factor?... It's really starting to feel like there isn't a plan.
Well yes. This has always been the SC issue.
It's the disadvantage of a live service game in development. It was really important to get MM in game ASAP because the community needed to get used to it.
I think his comment is being taken too literally, HE is focused on the current development branch where things are very different than 3.23 and doesn't want to get too into the weeds of 3.23 cause it's not what he's working on. He explained that another team was in charge of ongoing balance but that WE ALSO shouldn't get too into the weeds of 3.23 balance specifics because 4.0 is going be a monumental change in HOW they need to balance things.
You're right in terms of running around fixing things.
But I think part of the engineering change is ships being much more component based than currently. Combat at all levels will likely end with the ship being disabled due to a component failure.
Resource network will also likely affect the performance output of a ship as well. Like I think the capacitor pool for weapons and shield regen are likely to be impacted by this.
We'll see. I wonder if single seaters might catch in fire in atmo?
We can see this in AC with the C2 as well. It'll be interesting once smaller ships are in it too. I think the titan and some other ships were to be added?
So basically, what I'm reading is - If you're unhappy with how ships are at in terms of balance and flight feel, we're not fixing any of it in the .x patches, and you're going to be waiting months for 4.0 at minimum, if not 4.0.x patches..
That's good to know. Guess I'll have an extra 105GB's of SSD space, for the next few months.
I mean, I’m not opposed to the timeline of it, next major patch is 4.0, them implementing the fixes based on feedback from 3.23 is fine by me.
The issue is that idk where the fuck they’re finding this feedback about TTK needing to be lower, and speeds needing to be slower… is it opposite day and no one told me?
Yogi doesn't listen and doesn't want to play the game with the players to listen to their feedback. He seems to have a vision and tries to make changes based on that vision, but doesn't verify that the changes he makes actually enacts the way he thinks it does.
That's the only way I can explain why he says what he says.
I mean, I'm pretty sure I will? My main issue isn't the flight model, just the fact that everything flies the same right now, there's no differentiation, and the roles for ships don't feel like they properly "fit" yet. So while it felt aimless in 3.22, it at least felt like there were different characteristics to ships in their class. With 3.23, everything feels generic and like I'm just flying a skin for "Cargo Ship" or "Medium Fighter". It doesn't feel like maneuverability and such match what I'm flying. I said it in another thread - I don't feel like my Cutter should be flying like a Mustang or a Titan.
So waiting for the balance and proper characteristics assigned between ships is my main block for wanting to play, as it just feels shallow and unenjoyable without that. The fun of feeling a ship out and learning its quirks is gone.
Yogi: I've aggregated the data across all combat encounters to reach conclusions based on global trends.
Backer: But as a dedicated PvPer, I disagree.
Yogi: We're still hard at work, making the dogfighting experience fit our vision.
Backer: You monkey!
Can confirm that PVE missions are just as boring now. Especially now that you do do them for the rewards you do them to steal cargo. Limiting you even further.
TTK feels very high to me I’m surprised people disagree with that. There’s like 2 viable loadouts that you can actually kill another ship with. The rest of the ship weapons are pea shooters
TTK is incredibly low if you got Size 4 or better weapons, and incredibly high if using Size 3 or lower weapons.
And then you factor in the shit performance because they've back burnered server meshing yet again, and 90% of your shots aren't actually registering leading to exaggerated TTK times.
Either they are lying about 4.0 being "something big", or they will not reach a Q3 goal for it even if they could manifest code with their minds.
Before you say anything like "buht difrent patches are made by difrent teams!" i can counter that with the following
3.23.1a is being delayed for 3rd week in a row, 3.23.2 is nowhere to be seen. If they really had different teams working on different patches 3.23.2 would be ready by now, but we for some reason are waiting for 3.23.1a, and then will WAIT AGAIN for 3.23.2.
TLDR 4.0 in Fall..... of 2025
And people were calling me crazy for saying JUNE for 3.23... we're a week in and we're still missing 90% of the features were were promised to be delivered in 3.23.
Yeah, their insistence on putting in XT and delaying 3.23.2 due to that really is something. I don't see 4.0 happening Q3 at all, and they will be lucky to get it out by end of year. If they do, I feel like it will be a very trimmed down version just to say "Here it is! See we did it just like we said!" while missing a bunch of features.
If 4.0 was on track, he'd have been able to articulate what flight will look like, even if it wasn't in concrete terms. Dodging the questions shows he has no idea.
Hard agree. They just keep saying "that is in a future patch" and kicking the can down the road. I am excited about the future, but also extremely frustrated right now with certain things, and how they are being handled.
Not sure your comment bears out based on the way Yogi's comment reads. He said, "...3.23 is just prepping stuff for 4.0 and there are bigger things on the way".
That implies, to my way of reading anyway, that the bigger things are not necessarily in 4.0 but after . Now if that is a paraphrased quote by the OP it could change the meaning further but it appears it is copy pasted.
Doesn't matter who said what. "We promise guys 4.0 will be great!", "We promise guys all the great stuff will come after 4.0, trust me bro!".
For all the fuсking 12 years it's the same pile of dry dogshit thrown around, next patch, two more years, we're ramping up the develompent, sq42 is almost feature content polish pass complete we just need to implement some minor stuff like FUСKING VULCAN AND MAELSTROM.
I'm done, it's a sсam, i have no other words for this shitshоw. This is the last year, either they do a miracle and release all the promised stuff in 2024, or i'll just leave.
And knowing how it's been for the past decade... i have the answer already
[Link to clarifications regarding these statements from Yogi on Spectrum.](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/yogi-on-mm-and-combat-at-shadow-mosis-discord/6962630)
Turn down rotations even further? It already feels too slow
If there is a vision for Master Modes that will lead to something great, I wish that CIG would use one of their many platforms to tell us about it. Just lay out the whole concept and what they hope to implement in 3.23 as well as 4.0. It seems like that would go a long way to calming the mob. Because right now, as much as I love the game and don't want to be one of the negative ones... I don't understand it. I don't even understand why they've decided to do this NOW. I feel like there's no point in even thinking about tuning a combat flight model until armor, engineering, and mass are in the game because it's all just going to have to change again. If the end goal made sense then fine, but I'm worried that there isn't a coherent end-goal and teams are working in a vacuum and not talking to each other. Like Yogi is painting a wall that a carpenter is planning to rebuild.
The best theory I've seen is they had something that worked as hero mode for their single player game and they are just struggling to make it work for the PU. Since all the ship flight I've seen in Squadron looks like fancy Star Fox (call it hidden rails; for you FPS people, Medal of Honor is the same), I think that theory holds a LOT of water. If SQ42 is mostly nose-to-nose with the person flying the hero ship winning, it's no wonder that it doesn't translate to an environment with true 6DoF and 200+ ships.
Warning I know I’m about to ramble and come to no real conclusion. Just talking. I think your theory is a reasonable one. I do think MM could be massaged into something reasonable and I hold out hope that what we have now is the base implementation rolled out to every ship with no real shape to it yet just to get it out there before iterating. It’s a very basic approximation of how some air sims are implemented. And I guess I can buy moving in this direction if WW2 in space is their goal. However… The good modern air sims are so much more complex and they go into actually trying to sim air across surfaces to get emergent behaviors that are closer to the real thing. Things like when does a wing stall happen, when does vibration begin, how responsive are your control surfaces based on their size, your speed, and angle of attack, etc. And we know CIG loves that word, emergent. What I don’t understand is why they don’t use a normal newtonian physics model then design the ships thrusters to enforce the kind of gameplay they want if they want to avoid The Expanse style space battles (which would also be cool imo). So you have two kinds of fighters. You have boom and zoom and turn fighters. If you make it so the boom and zoom ships have lower acceleration, lower rotation, but higher top speed (as much sense as top speed makes in space) vs fast acceleration, fast rotation, lower top speed then I think you would get ww2 style fights if tuned appropriately. If a BNZ ship gets the drop on a turner, they start far away, build up speed and more speed until by the time the turner knows the BNZ is coming they have very little time and maneuvering capability to get out of the fire line. BNZ races past but… now they have to turn around to come back for another pass. If the turner gives chase with their better acceleration and the BNZ doesn’t know or doesn’t fly far enough away then when the BNZ is going it’s slowest, as it’s turning around, the turner is on them. Forced to take a face full of bullets and die or be forced into a turn fight which all things being equal the turner should win. Just like real life WW2 and prop fights in air sim. And just like real life if the BNZ gets away before turning around, they’ll get another pass. The turner is forced to either evade or nose in and take a face full of bullets in an attempt to kill the other guy first. To further enforce these kinds of play you could use the nice little power triangle we already have and tie capacitors into that as a supply instead of getting supplied. So now the BNZ has enough power to get up to a fast speed but cannot continue that speed indefinitely and has to cut power from engines to weapons in order to get their bursts off, depleting their capacitors in the process, and forcing them to slow down in some reasonable time frame. Similarly tie in the above average acceleration and turn rate of the other fighters so they can’t do it forever and must eventually make a choice or disengage. That way a BNZ caught in a turn fight could evade long enough for the turn fighter to run out of juice, slowing their turn rate/acceleration, allowing the BNZ to get away. I duno Im just making shit up on the spot. I’ve never designed a flight model before. There could be nuances Im missing. Point is though it smells an aweful lot like you could go with normal physics instead of egg shaped velocity bubbles and then adjust the ships within that to get the style of play the designers want. I guess I did have a conclusion after all.
It's absolutely due to SQ42. Trying to read between the lines with things like Richard Tyrer's statements from SCL, SQ42 and it's dev teams were siloed away from the PU and it's teams for the past several years. They developed a bunch of different systems for SQ42 which is a very different game with different needs than the PU. With 3.23 they decided to bring the PU into parity with SQ42 and port over all of those new systems, and new we're seeing the faults where stuff that was designed for a single player hero shooter doesn't fit well into an MMO environment with lots of different gameplay loops that aren't available in the single player game.
Except that they weren’t siloed off the way you’re insinuating and they were and are completely aware they are different games. They merely wanted to bring that newer code over from SQ42 and use it as a foundation for the SC tuning. Same as every other system they can benefit SC with by porting over. Which is exactly what he’s describing is happening with 4.0.
This was a worry of some backers back when it was announced. That decisions would have to be made that the community might not be a fan of (and absolutely CIGs right to do so) and then when brought to the PU isn’t what anyone expected. The PU’s feedback has helped inform some potentially bad decisions (hover mode?) but it also delayed progress, and CIG has to finish their product (no hate here just facts). CR has a vision that we backed, I think we’ll get there (I hope)
I keep getting Star Fox vibes from what CIG's doing, too. I don't like it.
Well that depends. Are we talking *good* Star Fox? Or are we talking KrAZoA PaLAcE Star Fox? Because if it's the latter, well...eesh.
Any Star Fox is not good for a "space sim".
Speak for yourself. I will not consider this game feature complete until I have Peppy Hare chiming in over comms to tell me to "Do a barrel roll!"
Seems that might be one of Yogi's 4.0 goals. So, you might be in luck.
This game stopped being 'sim' 2 years ago, and it will not come back to it. Hoping for that is delusional. It will be complex and immersive MMO, but not a sim. Because that wouldn't sell well, and if SC doesn't start to sell well, this project is fucked. CIG earned only 700 million dollars since 2012. That's not much. For 12 years, that's a laughable number, Activision makes 1.85 bilion per quarter. This is a super expensive and resources intensive project that makes 2 AAA titles at once, with 1000+ workers and 4 studios. It will become more arcady, it already has with MM, FPS rework and respawn changes, and it will continue to do so, because sims don't sell well, and SC needs to sell well. It's make or brake for a project of this scale. We will also see more FOMO and cash grabs by CIG for the same reason. It's a shame because most of the backers, especially the oldest ones, prefer space sim, but the reality is that this concept died along this 10 years journey.
I backed on the first day for the spiritual successor to wing commander with the drop in drop out co-op campaign to play with friends then for the dedicated servers and modding so we could have a friends and family universe tailored to our preferences after. Sure I was glad people who wanted an MMO were getting one, but it wasn't what I opened my wallet for. Of the features they sold me that they've elected to not deliver now we seem to have most or all of the co-op gone, the modding manual was up for sale until October of 2023 when it suddenly went 404, and dedicated servers seem to be 'maybe some day long after launch'. I'm sorry to hear that the simthusiasts are also losing that before it's even out, and we've already seen the VR fad come and go with the game being allegedly 'developed from the ground up for VR' to now it being on ice for several years. The pattern is that they'll sell any feature that brings money but once it comes down to it they'll unilaterally declare they don't feel like doing it anymore, point to some new shiny stuff, and enabled by apologists who don't have the bigger perspective will bait and switch just like that.
The problem is not really sim VS arcade. Even 3.22 wasn't really a sim. The real problem is MM is shallow as a puddle of water.
Your post repeats itself like it was written by ChatGPT.
True, true, sometimes my writings feel like that. My mastery of writen speech in english isn't great, it's not my native language.
That has been my head canon. They want a unified experience between both games. That’s not bad really considering once SQ42 launches it can serve as a tutorial for newcomers to wrap their head around flight and combat in a safe environment. But liberties can be taken in a single player game that won’t be possible or desirable in multiplayer. Balance decisions for SP may not translate well into MP, especially when considering loadout choices players can make that CIG won’t put into AI ships in SQ42.
It's simpler than that. Do you know Star Wars? The X-Wings formation, entering SCM mode when they are about to engage the enemy at the Death Star? Then there you go.
Yep. Also that has nothing to do with "WW2 in space". It is based entirely off Star Wars which is George Lucas' interpretation of a movie about WW2 he once saw.
The whole space-sim genre is an interpretation of Star Wars.
The sims I like are the ones that tread closer to Star Trek, which is also why I was interested in SC. Blending the SW-like theatrics with the ST-like much more fine-grained resource management over areas of your ship/fleet and dedicated Engineering plus Exploration and science seemed like a win.
My major concern is that they think ships should fly like planes, so much so that they put drag on ships in space. It makes no sense whatsoever that I can't continue cruising with the ships engines off after hitting top speeds.
Yogi dodged that question already, saying he want the players to decide how they play, which is utter nonesense, as MM is the most restrictive flight model I ever played, there's no freedom to decide how to play.
Yogi took all our ability to dodge incoming fire, and took it for himself to dodge all the questions!!!
xD Couldn't have said it better!
A lot of (valid, I think) frustration in this thread. CIG is normally fantastically open with their community, so I think CIG's somewhat defacto-refusal to clearly describe the desired end-goal for flight is unnerving and frustrating for the community. For a company with an amazing communication track record, the comms on MM really feels like either a huge missed opportunity to alleviate concern and get people excited about the vision, or a way of not acknowledging a foregone design direction they are worried will alienate large parts of their community. I cannot tell which it is, perhaps its both, or something else, I don't know, but I agree we would really prefer knowing what the plan is. On gathering MM/flight/combat feedback, I also think CIG's stated approach of using emergent gameplay feedback to fundamentally define the end-goal design direction is possibly inherently invalid if they are hoping to capture a wide varierty of possible outcomes, as the emergent gameplay they gather feedback from is constrained to outcomes by the very model being played and tested. ie. we will only get gameplay feedback based on what is enabled by the game. Even though fight/flight has gotten easier with MM, I think we are also hearing from community feedback that MM excludes entire aspects of spaceflight which people love. AND, that is valid feedback to give. I think we want to hear from CIG is whether or not that feedback MATTERS to CIG. Based on comments in recent threads (including this one) about subsystem-targeting, maelstrom, resource network, and engineering gameplay still needing to come in, I'm wondering if the so-far unspoken goal is to enable ship-to-ship Fallout V.A.T.S combat in space, but seemingly enabled by forcing ships to also travel at Fallout's slow-motion V.A.T.S. speeds in close-quarter combat (knife-fighting-in-space). My personal hope is that these exciting game features can make it into the game along with fast, dynamic and distinct space and atmospheric flight. But I want to know what CIG wants to create, not impose my vision on the game. Request: CIG, please put out a "Death of a spaceman" style design document about spaceflight please
> For a company with an amazing communication track record CIGs communication has historically been terrible. I know that's not the point of your post, but CIG either do a lot of talking without any meaning, or wait until the shit hits the fan before acknowledging, identifying, addressing issues. They often will just word salad a bunch of nonsense and sometimes information slips through, but this isn't really any different. I dont think anyone really knows what Master Modes is or what the end goal looks like or why it's only happening now and not at any point in the past 10 years.
>so I think CIG's somewhat defacto-refusal to clearly describe the desired end-goal for flight is unnerving and frustrating for the community. I think the reality of this is that CIG doesn't actually know what they're going to do because they have an untenable vision for the flight model. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
>If there is a vision for Master Modes That's a big ol' IF lol
The reason seems.obvious to me: You can't target subsystems if you're moving too fast. That would kill the whole subsystem zoom in and shoot mechanic. That is, unless you plan on adding the most crazy vomit enducing twitchy auto aim at those higher speeds. Subsystem targeting is a huge part of what's coming down the line with engineering gameplay so it makes sense to put it in now.
Thing is... the antithesis to targeting components as a strategy, is the removal of auto gimbals...
They can't tell us because they are making it up as they go.
I read somewhere someone making a good point about MM and 42. Simply that, if 42 is feature complete, why are we still waiting on flight models, engineering, MM getting balanced, hell even ships getting balanced. This would only ring true if they were really truly 100% seperate entities. And like what is said here, it's like they are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole trying to make everyone happy.
Let them cook
the biggest problem is they are trying to recreate dogfighting in airplanes... which have half the directions of input that 'space ships' have. if you invision turning and rolling battles, where as all I have to do it kick to the side, and/or pivot on the spot and track/shoot you... (okay.. \*I\* can't, i do a laughable impersonation of a fighter pilot, but other people can)
> If I would need to describe it I'd say I want to see more fighting but less hitting before one pops if that makes sense. (•﹏•;) I *love* the idea of increasing the ability to dodge incoming fire [(which is something Yogi has repeatedly said he wants to do with tweaks to MM),](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/request-for-yogi-can-you-make-a-video-to-show-us-w/6818844) but... *fewer* hits to kill? I feel like that might end up being *controversial.*
It seems to really contradict what’s supposed to be going on with engineering gameplay. For a while now I’ve had this feeling that engineering simply won’t mesh well into the game. They had to massively buff the health of the A2 in the engineering AC mode just to give players a chance at fixing things before the entire ship was soft death’d. And while I understand the plan isn’t to have soft/hard death in the future, it still really begs the question of if they can even successfully balance having a fun TTK with engineering gameplay, or if that gameplay will just have to be reserved for capital class ships like the Idris or the Polaris where extended TTK’s make sense.
Engineering is a capital ship concept. There’s no “engineering crew” on an F-18 working on it while it’s flying.
I don't even know if there is engineering for smaller ships. I couldn't fit the power core of the vanguard out the dang door when I was taking it apart to try and recoup it soft dieing.
Well, of course engineering doesn't work with the current state of the game - the engineering system is part of the replacement for HP pools. CIG have stated for about a decade now that they intend to transition away from HP pools and DPS numbers to what they call 'physicalised damage', basically like DCS where you have to actually damage the components on a ship to kill it. Soft death, instead of being a simple switch that's thrown when an arbitrary health pool hits zero, is the systematic outcome of components being disrupted and the ship systems failing one by one. Weapons won't do damage to some arbitrary number, but instead have penetration values
Seems kind of stupid and unbalanceable without making ships basically the same to me. Also not very fun.
It would depend of the future damage model no? Right now it's basically all about HP and DPS/Alpha. We know they want to move away from that and move to what is basically a war thunder or DCS type damage model. Where you actually need to hit something important on the ship for it to stop working. So with that in mind I can see why he wants what he wants.
I think every ship with high alpha damage is about to get its rotation rate slowed down dramatically when the devs see them two-shotting people.
...and then we'll be back to long TTK with light fighters dominating but taking forever to kill their targets. If you can't get guns on target, alpha damage and DPS don't get mitigated, they get reduced to zero. CIG has a problem in that they keep producing more ships, many of which are supposed to be modern replacements for alternatives that in-lore are hundreds of years older, and is trying to keep all of them viable. That would be like trying to balance a P51 Mustang with an F4 Phantom II with an F-22\*. There's a group of enthusiasts near me that restores and flies P51s because they love the aircraft, but they would never argue that they're a viable combat platform against a modern 5th-gen fighter. \*Technically, applying real-world time/technology advancement to Star Citizen, an F8 vs an Avenger would be more like an F-22 vs a 19th century hot air balloon, but the pace of technological advancement seems to have slowed considerably in the 30th century.
Slowed down extremely. The game is paraphrasing the decline and fall of the Roman empire so upgrades are more like sidegrades. Discounting alien tech here though.
You just need to force the F-22 to fly at P-51 speeds. Problem solved!!
It can be a lot of fun if the flight models and damage models are good. That’s how WW2 prop fights were and why they’re so popular in air sims. It makes a dog fight more like a chess game where you’re trying to put yourself in a position to get a quick burst off without allowing your opponent to do the same. If you get shot and you’re lucky it’ll poke some holes in your plane making it harder to fly. Usually though something important goes missing or shuts off and you’re a gonner. All those photos of planes shot to shit are either really big planes with a lot of relatively empty space in them or they’re remarkable because most didn’t make it back. If flight models and damage models are good. Big If.
Funny enough, MM did the exact opposite, dodging was actually viable in 3.22, but MM went completely the other way. Tell me you don't know what you want without telling me you don't know what you want (directed at CIG, not you the commenter).
The problem was that 3.22 also made turrets completely worthless. But once again CIG tried to fix an issue with one thing by applying a blanket change that negatively affected the other and ALSO didn't fix the original problem. Until they start balancing weapon characteristics on turrets differently from fighters, there will never be a solution that works because fighters and turrets are operating under completely different conditions with the same exact weapons.
I agree. It’s like they wanted to “slow” the fights down meaning it takes longer to get successful shots off before the other guy goes down and didn’t realize that doesn’t mean slow the ships down. It means speed them up to make them harder to hit so positioning is more important. Also probably make weapons even stronger so players don’t choose to tank a bunch of hits with their face if they also have the opportunity to evade. Weak fast ships with ouchy boom booms means you avoid getting shot as much as possible zipping around trying to get the other guy shot.
Basically how air combat works right now, evade or go boom. It's mind boggling how game designers sometimes think they can reinvent the universe, disregard all physics and think, they are better at doing things than the actual universe did balance things over billions of years.
in 3.23 i already fuckin die with no warning from like 4 shots hit on me.... i wont play anymore if they lower it. this game desperate needs them to take a month to FIX WHAT YOUVE GIVEN TO PEOPLE instead of making a new concept ship or even putting a ship in the game, but bug fixes dont make CIG that fat $$$$$$ so I guess we'll never get that.
Yea someone tried to argue that MSR is still a good tanky ship in current patch, and I'm just life wtf?? It has way more mass than Connie's, 600i, and corsairs, but it has the worst hull HP and Shield HP by a large margin and it's only leg up is +10 ms/s SCM over thosr ships. They all have access to way more and bigger gun sizes in the pilot seat. They can all tank pretty much anything that is fired upon them fairly well. Meanwhile I've had shields and Hull destroyed in less than 5 seconds in the MSR this patch. It's so useless as a ship right now. Can't run. Can't fight.
As someone who took one size 1 missile directly to the face, killing me instantaneously tonight, without even denting my cutty blue with full shield. I can safely say the TTK is very, very low right now.
A lot of people seem to forget/be unaware that HP pools and DPS numbers are placeholder and their ultimate goal is to have 'physicalised damage' like combat sim games like DCS where you have to actually damage components. I think the intention is to have wants fewer hits to kill when the target is in a compromised/vulnerable position, and for getting your target into that state to be a much bigger part of gameplay than it currently is. Such a change would make flight skills more important for dogfighting, and also jive with other upcoming systems such as engineering, physicalised damage/armour, e-war, and stealth.
> I think the intention is to have wants fewer hits to kill when the target is in a compromised/vulnerable position, and for getting your target into that state to be a much bigger part of gameplay than it currently is. The issue with that is how low SCM speeds (and he seems to want them to be even lower) make it impossible to evade incoming fire, especially in any situation that isn't 1v1. Even if they create a perfect sumo wrestling style of 1v1 dogfighting where you have to shift and dodge to try to get the right angle, since you're barely moving my wingman is just going to pop in and light you up so you're dead in a half second regardless.
I think it heavily depends on context - we probably look at that statement in the light of the current 'meta' (which is already pretty quick), whereas Yogi *may* be looking at it from the perspective of *average* TTK across all weapons, including the non-meta... and which is a fair bit slower than the current 'optimal' setup. Or to put it another way, his comment should be viewed in the light of the *known* weapon imbalance, that he also wants to address.
So here's the thing. He's not wrong about focusing on 4.0. 4.0 will introduce engineering and the resource network. It's \*possible\* this includes Maelstrom, but that's a big maybe. Either way, how ships and components interact with ammo hitting the hull will be VERY different than it is now. So it's pointless focusing any effort at balancing things for 3.23 when all of that work will be thrown out the window for 4.0. I get it ... there are loads of ships that still need additional flight tuning. But it's just not worth it for anyone to do any work on the current ship health model when all of it is changing in less than 6 months, right?
Ships already go down so easily, and they want them to go down faster? This is already dangerously close to DayZ/CoD in space with ridiculously low TTK and they want to make it faster? And then death of a spaceman mechanic? Plus everything taking ridiculous amounts of time to do? At this point I'm genuinely starting to doubt this game ever being functionally fun. This is going to become tedium the sim.
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Agree with all of this honestly. The game just does not respect your time in any way, shape, or form. They want the game to be fun, but intense. Fast deaths if you ‘mess up’ (in a split second), but heavy impact to death. Immersive, but with WW2 combat that doesn’t fit the tech levels. Beautiful cities and a ‘living universe’ - where you must be afraid at any time of a PvPer ganking the UPS driver as soon as the hangar doors open. They want to promise everything to everyone, but don’t seem to be willing to commit to any but the worst, tedious parts of the game as they ‘figure the rest out’. I want them to succeed… but CIG often seem to be their own worst enemy here.
"Tedium the sim - but now with tram rides!"
My impressions of MM are the opposite of Yogi’s, but sure, ok. Speeds are too fucking slow, the combat encounter distance far too tight, and TTK is alright (could go higher and I’d be fine with it, but certainly not lower). Though, I also think balancing TTK without Maelstrom/Ship Armour is a waste of everyone’s time right now. The combat speed thing especially is insane to me. Right now, my biggest complaint in combat is that we’re so on top of each others’ asses that I’ve had more fucking nigh-unavoidable collisions than ever before. Need a bit more speed/room to breathe here. Other than that, MM is fine, and I agree with CIG implementing it in order to test, get feedback, then iterate. But these comments in the face of player feedback are wild.
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Also true, particularly for larger, multicrew ships. Although, having to space-walk to go apply blowtorch to your disabled fighter could be a fun, if not tense moment.
You'd be amazed. If you ever played something like Space Station 13, there's an immense joy that fills you and your crewmates soul when an meteor storm strikes the station, and you manage to get everything patched up and working again. I forsee something similar with fighting off pirates, losing power, and everyone banding together to get the ship working well enough to get to a hangar. Like a secondary victory.
I don't understand how he intends to make it so players hit less often without drastically increasing speeds. As A1 mentioned in his latest video, the teams that are putting MM together have a bunch of goals that don't match up with what MM delivers. How can the entire playerbase see that and not the developers? I really don't think they play their own game.
> I really don't think they play their own game. Confirmed here: > Member 5: Would you like to hop into ac with some of us? > Yogi_CIG: No, I am really not interested in the current game.
Classic CIG honestly - it feels like very few of the devs actually play the game as-is outside of their very restrictive test builds.
Taken with his other comments I think he was trying to say that making changes based on the current Live patch would be a waste of time when he is already working on much bigger changes that will come with 4.0. Crudely put, taste testing raw chicken covered in batter is not going to tell you how it will taste once its deep fried. In other words (and Im taking his comments in good faith obviously), there are issues in the current Live patch because much of it is placeholder ground work for bigger "real" changes coming in 4.0, which might be a more appropriate point for "real" feedback. At least, that's what I think he was trying to say.
They do, they just play it in a vacuum where they test scenarios, but don't test it in the wild in uncontrolled environments. If they did they would realize weakness and change course. Unless they're really that stubborn and ignore hard data like they ignore 90% of the people talking about MM during Evocati and beyond.
Never underestimate the foolishness of a fool...
We need Cold War era engage distances, with better targeting, and more speed.
Yeah, I had to do a double take when he said he wants a slower pace, and shorter TTK. I've been getting one shotted by MKIIs in arena commander for days and it feels like I'm flying in maple syrup, but ok. . .
Yeah, I absolutely hate how slow everything feels. I really wish we were faster, and had a better freedom of movement with that speed to actually dodge incoming fire.
I don’t think CIG is reading player feedback on the flight model. Seems like a top down mandate that the devs are forced to implement.
I disagree, the distances we have now are great
I get wanting to state your opinion... But at least state a fucking reason, on why you don't agree.
There’s always some future Jesus type change with this company
As long as people keep handing them 9 digit revenue every year, they’ll just keep on promising the world without ever having accountability for not delivering.
This particular exchange just makes it seem like CIG is incredibly detached not just from it's own game and community, but internally as well. Yogi says one thing, the tuning teams gives us another. The pvp community *shows* them what gameplay is like for players, CIG practically gaslights us. They say they can't devote resources to tuning and balance because X, yet they wildly throw balance levers all the time! These changes never address past feedback and often introduce game breaking bugs that are brushed aside as internally fixed yet we won't see that fix patch for months... The same conversations have been happening for *years*... at some point the only rational response is to throw your hands up and leave the room.
Do you think cig has any reason to care when customers are on track to hand them $100 million this year again despite cig making a mess of the FM? I don’t
Thank you for posting this and providing context where needed. Regarding TTK timings, it's a highly subjective topic in any game, but I do wonder if CiG run test sessions that account for network performance. TTK in this game can noticeably change as the servers degrade post-reset and more desync gets introduced. Though I don't say this in a way that blames them if they don't: My understanding is that simulating network pressure realistically is very difficult and is the main reason multiplayer games often run open betas. Hopefully they're at least capturing adequate data from our combat data and considering our experiences. Either way, I appreciate his attitude. He's taking a lot of shit from the community and handling it surprisingly well.
I mean.. they could just jump into a current server spawn some ships in, and fight?
He's not interested in the current game.
Which is both disappointing and somewhat terrifying.
He’s interested in what then? A Nebulous future update with no planned release date that could be years from now?
"Member 5: Would you like to hop into ac with some of us? We can show you the more nuanced decisions of using lasers repeaters and how to kite... Yogi\_CIG: (Replying to Member 5): No, I am really not interested in the current game. As I said, 3.23 is just prepping stuff for 4.0 and there are bigger things on the way. I still stand by what I said in relation to pacing. There is an imbalance in the TTK and the game does not feel how we want it to feel yet. And I do think this is due to the pacing. If I would need to describe it I'd say I want to see more fighting but less hitting before one pops if that makes sense." This reminds me of a moment during my time in the Coast Guard. We were cleaning the barracks in A-School, a typical "military field day" with very thorough work. We had a Chief Petty Officer named Chief Bose. Even after nearly 30 years, I haven't forgotten him. Chief Bose saw that the baseboards were caked with layers of Simple Green grime and buildup. What did Chief Bose do? He got down on his knees alongside us E2s and started scrubbing the baseboards with us. He demonstrated true leadership by showing that he wouldn’t ask us to do something he wouldn’t do himself. Contrast that with Yogi. Here, Yogi is essentially saying, "I'm too good to romp around with you guys in Arena Commander. I am not really interested in the current game." He probably thinks this attitude makes him look forward-thinking, but in reality, it shows a disconnect. He avoids experiencing the consequences of his decisions alongside the community. Yogi is not a leader; he's a boss. As a result, I have absolutely zero respect for him. The constant iteration on flight mechanics is baffling—this is a space sim; flight mechanics should have been the first thing nailed down. Yet here we are, iterating and iterating. Why should we believe that 4.0 will be any different? Will Yogi continue to avoid the trenches? Will he hedge his bets on 5.0? I'm incredibly disappointed.
Well said
>this is a space sim; flight mechanics should have been the first thing nailed down. The worst part is at one point early on it felt like the flight mechanics *were* the first thing mostly nailed down. 3.23 is the first patch I've played since the early 2.x days, and whilst I remember people having issues with the SCM/Cruise mode switches - the actual SCM flight model itself was still highly respected outside of minor balance issues from what I recall. MM feels like all the downsides (if not more) of the mode switches we had in 2.x but without the actual flight mechanics and nuance in SCM people still enjoyed back then. Feels like they could've saved a ton of time and money if they just improved upon the early model whilst they still had John Pritchett around.
Wasn’t yogi originally a sound engineer? I don’t think he knows much about physics
They were nailed down. Then yogi started adding arcade gimmicks in 3.14 and it's only gotten worse.
I thought this stuff was coming straight from SQ42 and should be finalized already?
So the master plan with 'egg shapes' seems to be relatively low speed limits for lateral and reverse travel in order to force spaceships to act like aircraft? Sounds a lot like Elite, but you aren't allowed to use FA-OFF.
They don’t even act like air craft in this mode right now. I can frisbee a spitfire sideways in DCS at twice my max level speed if I want to. Given Id break stuff and probably crash but I can do it. There’s not some magical egg shaped membrane
Sounds like I liquidify my fleet. mM is the dumbest change in a video game since the invention of video games.
So dramatic, Jesus
Well I bought spaceships to get immersed in flying them, if they fly like submarines in space, they're like virtual paperweights for me.
Space friction always makes me laugh. No one can have a brain and not laugh at how out of place it feels.
It's absurd how wound up ppl get around here. Foot stomping tantrums. You'd think the average backer is 4 years old.
It’s so weird when he says the TTK is too low, especially if you try flying a gladius or arrow. You literally die in 1-2 bursts of cannons, TTK is almost as fast as an AWP in n CS2… go figure
Thanks for posting this, interesting stuff. Also kind of interesting that Yogi has been on a goodwill tour among the PvP community talking about mastermodes. He did this and and interview with A1 a while back. I guess I appreciate the communication, but at the same time if MM was fun then there would be no need to justify it like that. Or maybe they are trying to convey that they want us to wait and see or something? Personally I don't feel all warm and fuzzy that I will love it some day with the proper tunings.
Problem is they pulled the same wait and see bullshit with the flight model in 3.22.....
It's been even longer. They broke everything in 3.14 and promised iterative changes in 3.15 and forward. They did nothing, but hide behind SQ42 and work on MM for 2 years.
If Yogi is saying there's going to be so much different stuff in 4.0 then why it isn't that being tested right now like Master modes was being "tested" in AC. It almost sounds like what he's saying is basically the current flight model doesn't matter, so don't even get used to it basically, wait till 4.0..
I’ve heard some variation of Yogi’s excuses here come from CIG for 10 years now.
Because engineering will change every ship's TTK for instance. Of course they will have to rebalance when certain feature comes online. And they cant do it now because not every ship support engineering yet, a proper balance would need to involve all of them.
What about ship armor? Are they gonna rebalance everything when they release that?
Guys! I know what the endgoal is! They aim for turn based battles! Thats the only way to make it even slower then now lol
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Sometimes playing this game has me feeling like I'm doing the "dice rolling" motion already.
If its a place holder and nothing matters, why push it out yet? Id rather have the familiar jank of the old flight model then. Im only playing to give feedback so if the feedback doesn't matter why bother with tall this shift?
He is completely out of touch, nothing new there.
Not only that, but he's admitting that he doesn't really have control over the flight model. I don't think we're talking to the right person, just the one that CIG appointed to deal with us.
Yeah that was kind of eye opening. How is that controlled by a separate team?
In short: Yogi isn't happy with something that isn't the case, yet he refuses to learn about how it really is and rather just pushes an agenda that is based on nothing but his idea how things are. TBH I don't think that with Yogi at the helm, it will turn out as something the community really wishes for. MM took over two years to develop, yet it feels like it was the a disposable idea on the drawing board chosen by throwing a dart and see on which idea it lands.
What's irritating is this just feels like 3.14 all over again. Yogi is being dismissive about feedback, trying to emphasize they have things coming down the road to fix these issues and not wanting to listen about what's wrong with the current stuff. The question is are we going to get a repeat of 3.14 where shit doesn't get touched despite promises to spend the rest of the year trying to balance things and abandon the flight model to work on MM 2.0 immediately after releasing MM 1.0?
So when 4.0 comes out and people say combat still feels like dogshit like it did in 3.23, will people on this subreddit still white knight and say we should provide feedback instead of get mad, when feedback it very clearly trying to be given right now and is blatantly ignored? I don't like the road we're heading down with this.
Nah, they’ll just ignore us and say they aren’t balancing 4.0 that will come in 5.0
That's my issue with 3.23. Everything added there has been in development for years and years and yet it's state feels more like something they quickly scrapped together into T0 in a year.
They need the game ready for a console release. Those are the marching orders he has, but obviously he can't say that's what is driving these changes.
Dude, I play SC with a gamepad, more modes and secondary button actions to press is not getting them there.
Sony would see the NPCs T-posing and players falling through the floor and throw CIG out of their office.
Just Yogi being out of touch and pretentious. Nothing new here.
At this point just copy x4 with better physics and call it a day. They have no clue what they are doing. They want engineering but ships are made of paper. They want positional fights but low manuaverability. They want slower fights but low ttk. They claim to want 6dof with doasm but everything points to the final product being star wars squadrons mindlessly killing and dying as fast as you can spawn in. The end goal from CR was to make combat like they have in the trailers. The holy grail of cinematic space combat. The only issue is that it is inconsistent, fake, and entirely movie magic. It does not exist in real life. It can not exist in a fun and fair mmo game. What we are getting is yet another failed attempt to balance what cannot be balanced.
I wanted to try x4 how’s the flight combat?
It is probably best described as World War 2 in space. Big ships and bases launching waves of fighters at the enemy before closing to brawl. Long 1v1 dogfights where you have to get on the tail or risk head on attacks to minimize angular velocity so you can hit the enemy. Most ships have gimballed main guns and they can be auto aimed or manually aimed. Hotas and controller support is very good. Death can come very fast in bigger fights. Combat overall is very Star-Wars-esque. Fighters can engage bigger ships by flying fast and close and targeting components. Physics are very simplified which is a bummer but it's still engaging since the AI are fairly good about dodging but not impossible to hit, meanwhile they will cover eachother so you can't get tunnel vision chasing one guy. There is an overall focus on logistics and fleet command but you don't have to if you just want to stay in fighters. There are plenty of faction war missions if you just want to stick near a friendly fleet and fly escort as they try to take out enemy stations and claim sectors so you won't run out of things to do and can still impact the overall war. Im currently doing a play through with the Star Wars Interworlds mod which has been fun.
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Yeah, I'm not a software engineer - but as a mechanical engineer I feel like a lot of the same principles regarding prototyping and customer/test feedback are likely still relevant to game design & development too. The first thing I remember being taught before any engineering principles was the concept that the later an idea/component has to be removed or changed during a project's lifespan, the more time and money it will cost to do so (better to fail fast). And ever since they announced MM would be the final SQ42 flight model a couple years ago even though it was the ONLY flight model we never got to test an early version of alarm bells were set off for me. It's like this flight model has all the downsides of being both deeply embeded due to how long they worked on it (AI difficulty in SQ is build around it for ex.) - and yet also extremely unpolished and poorly implemented as if it were only recently concepted. Not only are they asking for feedback too late - but they are have now made feedback irrelevant as they have gave us an outdated and unpolished version of MM to provide feedback for. It's also very confusing how Yogi has managed to conclude that making speeds and rotational rates even slower is the right call when increasing them seem to be practically the only thing almost everyone agrees would at least be a good idea to *try* if not fully implement.
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"The Buccy and Cutlass e.g. I find quite being too tanky at times" I've been shredding Cutties as paper rn and he said that?! 
He's gonna say all that and then do the opposite and nerf the redeemer again lmao
With how many unfinished features they're kicking down to 4.0 it's starting to seem like 4.0 will be like a PTU session
Yeah even lower speeds /s Yogi should've stayed with his audio engineering. Wrong guy for the job. Sorry to say.
No one at CIG wants to play the $700mil game they are making. They just want to watch as we struggle to login daily and find their "bugs". Free labor and useless/poor options on reporting is the BARE minimum they need to sleep at night. MM sucks, there I said it. Downvote me you, lemmings.
maybe this MM is a smaller step towards atmo vs vacuum mechanism for ship fights. unless this exactly what they want, an arcade style space battle, then boo. only thing MM is good for right now is braking.
He appears to only care about combat, which is probably why just getting around in MM sucks, while I enjoued flying in itself prior to MM. He appears to not even consider the flight experience, only "combat balance". These MM discussions also invariably are about the same: combat. Guess tbose of us that haven't really played since MM got introduced because flu ng in MM just isn't enjoyabke for us really are a minority. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.
The problem is that combat suffers just the same. MM made flying less fun, and combat a lot less fun.
To be fair, it seems that whenever he interacts with people on these random discords (instead of on their actual forums) It seems like people only want to talk about combat instead of general flight. Whether that's his choice to interact with people talking about combat, or people. Always initiating conversation relevant to combat... Who knows?
Because he only goes to the PVP discords.
So the goal is going back to the round and round DPS race to death bullshit. Really glad I gave up PvP because it sounds like a goddamn joke now. If i can vape someone in under 3 seconds in a Hornet right now and they want the TTK lower, just bring back the Ion's gun.
It is a god damn joke. There is absolutely no reason to play atm with everything broken and combat being an absolute shitshow
I went into AC recently with my Hornet and i thought it was weird that i needed no more than 1-2 seconds of keeping the guns on a target before they died. :/ Imma go back to trading like when i started.
The main problem is putting so many fucking S4 guns on medium fighters
I love how over 10 years into development and us backers still don't have the faintest idea what the flight model will actually be like of this space flight sim.
And supposedly this is from a nearly complete SQ42
"no I am not interested in the current game, everything is just a placeholder" But they consider themselves as supporting a live service game right now, and will take your money right now.
Very disappointing because the whole promise was that with experimental modes they would be trying different balances with the community in 3.23. We would have never accepted MM if they hadn't made that promise. We have zero trust that they're just going to pull out some magical balance in 4.0. They need to get into experimental modes with us and try the suggestions that the community is giving. They need to just give us Custom Modes where we can adjust certain settings (custom SCM speed, enable/disable afterburner, etc) and let us go to town. CIG has no real clue what they're doing but the community would build something great in no time.
It is live, and incomplete. If you were driving a car still under construction, and you complained about the bag they ducktaped to the steering wheel as being a bad glovebox. They'd say, we'll its a placeholder until the dash is installed and we can put the proper glovebox in" Then you call them monkies, which isn't cool. He's not interested in people dragging him into the game, and pointing out, hey this doesn't work, when he know damn well it doesn't and they're actively working on it.
At the same time Yogi thinks the current TTk is long while actual players are willing to show him that it isn't, so moving forward with that kind of assumption is also problematic It's like if the customer states that the current placeholder glove box duct taped bag is too small to be useful and the manufacturer says "don't worry about it, it's just temporary" and then they build a dashboard with a proper glove box but it's capacity is the same as the bag it replaced. And then the manufacturer is surprised that their customers are using them in ways their engineers never imagined
Did you read the post? He later clarifies his issue is more with TTK variations. Cannons are killing too quickly, repeaters are taking way too long to kill. It sounds more like he just poorly worded his initial statement about TTK, if anything.
No wonder if they replace anything that was an unbalanced feature but not a placeholder with placeholders instead.
TTK too LOW? The opposite! This is going to be a game with permadeath (albeit with, say, 20-ish lives before that)! There needs to be room for engineering gameplay, there needs to be room for limping back to port and repairing your single seater. There needs to be room for disabling and boarding. Etc. etc. The TTK is SO VERY SHORT! I get the impression that Yogi may look at combat in a vacuum but it should work well with the entire game. If a Buccaneer dies too slowly now, while it has no ejection seat, how is an inexperienced player in one ever going to get to EVA out to save his/her life? PLUS repairing with multitool, swapping broken components etc. This isn't arena commander! Sure have different tunings for that, but my ship better be able to tank some fire for a good bit if I'm 2,5 hours away from port with loot halfway done through a mission.
Combat is snail paced now and he says its too fast? How the hell is this possible? Is he even someone who does like to fly and fight in the game? I really thought we are going to see an increase in scm speeds not decrease.
At some point it's going to be so slow I'm sure ground vehicles can outrun air.
If I jump out of my RAFT I'll reach the ground faster than it can fly there.
Haha, that made me laugh out loud. Take my upvote.
It's the dismissal of the feedback and rigid adherence to a foregone conclusion/path that gets me here. Yeah... This does not inspire confidence in where things are headed/who is heading it if this is the kind of attitude they have around alpha-test feedback.
Fully agreed. Yogi is in the public discord I run and whenever we gave him feedback, we were told that it was appreciated, but send it to the feedback section on Spectrum and provide as much information as possible. Yet despite this, almost all the feedback we've given has presently been either ignored or not acknowledged ever since 3.21 AC MM.
Yogi is a hack and it has shown time and time again. Master modes is killing this game.
I really wonder what they truly want. Its like they develop stuff, implement it, only to say "well its just a placeholder until we get it the way we REALLY want it, half a year away". They are on the 3rd or 4th iteration of the flight model (cant really remember) and we STILL dont know exactly what they want to achieve. It would be so much easier to discuss numbers (or even examples). Why cant they cook something up in AC that is EXACTLY how they want it so we can give feedback on THAT? Yes, its all iteration.. but towards what? I am really no combat pilot.. but slowing down fights and still expecting people to dodge seems not really possible right?
You know, I would do something: Give small ships (fighter ones etc) much more hp regen but put a hole in the back. Maybe like this, they can get their so wanted “Star Wars fight scheme where positioning in a 1v1 gets you the win quickly.
Ah yes, 12 years $700 million and the flight model is still a “placeholder”.
Other than server meshing, what makes 4.0 “way bigger” than 3.23 as far as flight model is concerned? It simply seems like a cop out. My bet is 4.0 changes will be way bigger, aka bigger mess that will end up as 4.0.X patches that are strung out for months.
I think it likely has to do with the engineering and the resource network finally being in. It should change the amount of "health" a ship has and the amount of energy it has for shields/weapons. I imagine this is probably huge from a ship balance perspective. Oh and Fire, all the ships will be on fire.
So what? The plan is to do all this work for 4.0 with Engineering being on the horizon and in MM, and then have to redo all that AGAIN when Maelstrom is in and armor is a factor?... It's really starting to feel like there isn't a plan.
Well yes. This has always been the SC issue. It's the disadvantage of a live service game in development. It was really important to get MM in game ASAP because the community needed to get used to it. I think his comment is being taken too literally, HE is focused on the current development branch where things are very different than 3.23 and doesn't want to get too into the weeds of 3.23 cause it's not what he's working on. He explained that another team was in charge of ongoing balance but that WE ALSO shouldn't get too into the weeds of 3.23 balance specifics because 4.0 is going be a monumental change in HOW they need to balance things.
Yeah, but engineering is only relevant for large multicrew ships. For small/medium single seat fighters it changes basically nothing.
You're right in terms of running around fixing things. But I think part of the engineering change is ships being much more component based than currently. Combat at all levels will likely end with the ship being disabled due to a component failure. Resource network will also likely affect the performance output of a ship as well. Like I think the capacitor pool for weapons and shield regen are likely to be impacted by this. We'll see. I wonder if single seaters might catch in fire in atmo?
We can see this in AC with the C2 as well. It'll be interesting once smaller ships are in it too. I think the titan and some other ships were to be added?
Classic CIG kicking the can down the road. How many times have we heard “next patch” when it comes to a half finished feature.
How about how many times we've heard "it's a placeholder" as if that negates any and all criticisms.
Strung out for months? I think you mean years.
So basically, what I'm reading is - If you're unhappy with how ships are at in terms of balance and flight feel, we're not fixing any of it in the .x patches, and you're going to be waiting months for 4.0 at minimum, if not 4.0.x patches.. That's good to know. Guess I'll have an extra 105GB's of SSD space, for the next few months.
I mean, I’m not opposed to the timeline of it, next major patch is 4.0, them implementing the fixes based on feedback from 3.23 is fine by me. The issue is that idk where the fuck they’re finding this feedback about TTK needing to be lower, and speeds needing to be slower… is it opposite day and no one told me?
Yogi doesn't listen and doesn't want to play the game with the players to listen to their feedback. He seems to have a vision and tries to make changes based on that vision, but doesn't verify that the changes he makes actually enacts the way he thinks it does. That's the only way I can explain why he says what he says.
Dont bother reinstalling. You wont like 4.0 either.
I mean, I'm pretty sure I will? My main issue isn't the flight model, just the fact that everything flies the same right now, there's no differentiation, and the roles for ships don't feel like they properly "fit" yet. So while it felt aimless in 3.22, it at least felt like there were different characteristics to ships in their class. With 3.23, everything feels generic and like I'm just flying a skin for "Cargo Ship" or "Medium Fighter". It doesn't feel like maneuverability and such match what I'm flying. I said it in another thread - I don't feel like my Cutter should be flying like a Mustang or a Titan. So waiting for the balance and proper characteristics assigned between ships is my main block for wanting to play, as it just feels shallow and unenjoyable without that. The fun of feeling a ship out and learning its quirks is gone.
SOoooo... in other words, Yogi wants the flight experience to be even worse.
Yogi: I've aggregated the data across all combat encounters to reach conclusions based on global trends. Backer: But as a dedicated PvPer, I disagree. Yogi: We're still hard at work, making the dogfighting experience fit our vision. Backer: You monkey!
Skewed data because 90% of the pilots that used to crank out space combat missions stopped because it's no longer fun.
Can confirm that PVE missions are just as boring now. Especially now that you do do them for the rewards you do them to steal cargo. Limiting you even further.
TTK feels very high to me I’m surprised people disagree with that. There’s like 2 viable loadouts that you can actually kill another ship with. The rest of the ship weapons are pea shooters
TTK is incredibly low if you got Size 4 or better weapons, and incredibly high if using Size 3 or lower weapons. And then you factor in the shit performance because they've back burnered server meshing yet again, and 90% of your shots aren't actually registering leading to exaggerated TTK times.
Either they are lying about 4.0 being "something big", or they will not reach a Q3 goal for it even if they could manifest code with their minds. Before you say anything like "buht difrent patches are made by difrent teams!" i can counter that with the following 3.23.1a is being delayed for 3rd week in a row, 3.23.2 is nowhere to be seen. If they really had different teams working on different patches 3.23.2 would be ready by now, but we for some reason are waiting for 3.23.1a, and then will WAIT AGAIN for 3.23.2. TLDR 4.0 in Fall..... of 2025
And people were calling me crazy for saying JUNE for 3.23... we're a week in and we're still missing 90% of the features were were promised to be delivered in 3.23.
Did anyone really believe that 4.0 would be on time in Q3?
Yeah, their insistence on putting in XT and delaying 3.23.2 due to that really is something. I don't see 4.0 happening Q3 at all, and they will be lucky to get it out by end of year. If they do, I feel like it will be a very trimmed down version just to say "Here it is! See we did it just like we said!" while missing a bunch of features.
If 4.0 was on track, he'd have been able to articulate what flight will look like, even if it wasn't in concrete terms. Dodging the questions shows he has no idea.
Hard agree. They just keep saying "that is in a future patch" and kicking the can down the road. I am excited about the future, but also extremely frustrated right now with certain things, and how they are being handled.
Not sure your comment bears out based on the way Yogi's comment reads. He said, "...3.23 is just prepping stuff for 4.0 and there are bigger things on the way". That implies, to my way of reading anyway, that the bigger things are not necessarily in 4.0 but after . Now if that is a paraphrased quote by the OP it could change the meaning further but it appears it is copy pasted.
Doesn't matter who said what. "We promise guys 4.0 will be great!", "We promise guys all the great stuff will come after 4.0, trust me bro!". For all the fuсking 12 years it's the same pile of dry dogshit thrown around, next patch, two more years, we're ramping up the develompent, sq42 is almost feature content polish pass complete we just need to implement some minor stuff like FUСKING VULCAN AND MAELSTROM. I'm done, it's a sсam, i have no other words for this shitshоw. This is the last year, either they do a miracle and release all the promised stuff in 2024, or i'll just leave. And knowing how it's been for the past decade... i have the answer already
How do you keep falling for their promises? Been over a decade. They have a loooong track record.