What happened to the PvP scene?

[GRHayes]

The PvP scene in the game is dead. Nothing happens. No events, no wars (unless you count the flamewars going down on the forums), no battle mode servers... nothing.

Why?

That's a good question with a complicated answer. I'd like to ask the cummunity, those who also noticed this, to add to my reasons or hell, contradict me.

Reasons I found so far that killed the PvP in Starmade:
1. No wars, because there is no enemy to fight. When I was in Odium, we always had something going on - but we were portraid as the villains and eventually, I couldn't stand the hate and villainy, and left.
However, the new Eurocorp is a lot less militant, so no one is there to fight.

2. Buy with blocks made obtaining ships a lot harder.
To spawn a ship and take it to battle, you used to need only the credits, which were easy to obtain, and you had your ship, and you could fight. If you lost it, no biggie.
Now, you need hours to manufacture the correct amount of blocks for your ship. The more detailed the ship, the more different blocks you'll need. Ships are a lot harder to create now, and they are a lot less expendable. No one wants to spend 2 hours filling the BP and then risk losing the ship in 10 minutes.

3. Resources are hard to come by.
Processing raw resources can prove tedious enough. You either need to wait for the factory or spend a lot of resources to build up one producing blocks you need fast enough.
But mining just got even more painful.
In fact, so painful, survival mode servers had to boost the resource multiplier to make it liveable. And people still don't do anything other than going on mining runs, building ships they'll never use in a battle and sitting in their invulnerable homebases.
And in the middle of this, hit the new feature of asteroids no longer respawning. Some of them (like larimar asteroids holding the crucial resources for shield caps) were already extremely rare and required special conditions to spawn at all (like, one out of 16 systems were eligible), now they became even harder to obtain.
Combined, you spend a week even to get a capital ship, irreversibly draining systems dry, of course you're not willing to actually risk losing that ship.

All these combined make sure no one's willing to risk their fleets in a battle, and this kinda removes the option of any war or pre-arranged battle between factions in a survival environment.

There would be alternatives, like Battle Mode. Problem is, there are absolutely 0 servers running battle mode, and neither are there servers open to the public hosting regular battle events, where people could show off both building and piloting skills.


So, I ask all players, Council members and Schine staff members, how would you solve, or at least improved on, this situation?

Add to that changes that force you to gut and remake your ship.
Battles are drawn out a lot longer and far more of a ship is likely to be damaged/destroyed.

 

[cyberus111]

On PvP in general, besides the cost, IMO much has to do (like always) with the behavior of a few, PvP doesn't have much luster when it involves getting obliterated a couple sectors from spawn in your stick ship by someone is a kilometer long titan, losing everything plus a % of your credits.

While 'war' isn't fair, in a game setting the community has to do some self policing to make it something people not already established on a server want to join the server and work towards including themselves in PvP

 

[Lecic]

1. No wars, because there is no enemy to fight.

Not true. Thryn and Helkan wanted to fight on Hypercore. Not as enemies, of course, but as rivals. Because being enemies in this community inevitably leads to shitflinging.

2. Buy with blocks made obtaining ships a lot harder.

This wouldn't be a problem if shipyards functioned properly.

3. Resources are hard to come by.

Everyone says this, but no one seems to be considering that people are building ships that are too damn big. We've all based our ideas of how big ships should be from a time when it was easy to get infinite resources. I mean, seriously, how many shells alone are from that time period?

Servers with massively inflated resources aren't helping with the transition to smaller, specialized ships in a fleet instead of everyone running a massive battleship.

 

[Matt_Bradock]

No faction really wants to be the faction that started that shit flinging war.

Except Odium.

Hell, not even Odium wants to be the villain any more. All they gained was bad reputation, prejudice from the rest of the community and bans from servers. No one wants that.

 

[Daro_Khan]

Not true. Thryn and Helkan wanted to fight on Hypercore. Not as enemies, of course, but as rivals. Because being enemies in this community inevitably leads to shitflinging.



This wouldn't be a problem if shipyards functioned properly.



Everyone says this, but no one seems to be considering that people are building ships that are too damn big. We've all based our ideas of how big ships should be from a time when it was easy to get infinite resources. I mean, seriously, how many shells alone are from that time period?

Servers with massively inflated resources aren't helping with the transition to smaller, specialized ships in a fleet instead of everyone running a massive battleship.

I agree. and its been proven smaller ships that add up to the mass of their target will kill it. not even factoring in turret placement and avoiding spinal weapons.

I plan on finishing my 200K mass ship or so. then just making smaller stuff after that. it shall be a long term project testing how easy or hard it is to build my ship line all the way up. But that's something any military has to figure out logistically. Man power, Time, Design and weight of its ships. And the Fighting style it wants for each ship. One Frame? that can be adjusted quickly with different weapons? modular?. Makes build ships rather fast. if you plan it all out before hand

 

[doubleminus0]

Hell, not even Odium wants to be the villain any more. All they gained was bad reputation, prejudice from the rest of the community and bans from servers. No one wants that.

 

[Lecic]

and its been proven smaller ships that add up to the mass of their target will kill it.

Not even equal mass. Multiple ships need way less mass than what they're trying to kill.

 

[Daro_Khan]

Not even equal mass. Multiple ships need way less mass than what they're trying to kill.

as-long as their weapons are hefty and you know how to fly. Player controlled over AI controlled :D but i guess even AI ships that are built right can still do it.


Still need the dps and good volly to overcome shields. Then you can shred turrets off buh bye big ship

 

[Matt_Bradock]

as-long as their weapons are hefty and you know how to fly. Player controlled over AI controlled :D but i guess even AI ships that are built right can still do it.


Still need the dps and good volly to overcome shields. Then you can shred turrets off buh bye big ship

It actually boils down to smaller ships individually being more power efficient. Think about 10K mass, softcapped power generation, each can easily field 30-40K DPS main guns (without effect) while still stay maneuverable (1.1-1.3 turn ratios) and have a good thrust/mass ratio and permajammer. Their added DPS can easily outgun a single large ship. You definitely don't need 10 of them to take down a single 100K mass ship, as the big ship probably won't even get to bring its own main guns to bear, and only its turrets will ever be able to fire on the small ones if the pilots have even the most basic skills. Those turrets probably won't be able to take them out before the big ship's shields drop below 50% and the turrets are blown off, rendering the big one a sitting duck.

 

[Panpiper]

Buccaneer: 1000 mass, 1000,000 damage

Wouldn't be hard to scale up. A dozen faction members flying small, disposable ships could easily ruin a titan's day.

 

[shadowcrusnik]

Idea:


Instead of building the blocks with limited resources, you instead use blocks to "encode" a blueprint into a shipyard. You use the shipyard as it is used normally, but when you are finished you can click a confirmation, and the total number and variance of blocks is consumed to provide the energy needed to encode that specific setup of matter into the shipyard. The shipyard then creates the blueprint (For the sake of ease, coolness, and the fact that I love destiny, we'll call them engrams). These engrams can be put into shipyards, and when activated, the shipyard will consume massive amounts of energy to create the matter in the specific pattern of the complex, invaluable irreplaceable, high-energy density matter engram installed. This way, resources are still needed, but their value is shifted into items held in shipyards, rather than the ships themselves.

This puts a focus onto designing ships for the purpose of using them, as well as good base design and base defense (you can't have every shipyard at the same location, so good design and actual defense of the bases in mandatory, thus provoking the use of the ships!).

People love to design ships, and with this system, those designs are solidified as in-game items that took craptons of resources to create (for the larger designs) and time and base energy to construct. I can think of plenty of reasons why people would want to defend their designs from theft and assaults.

Naturally the system is not perfect, and though I have already seen plenty of flaws, I'd rather address them as they are brought up.

 

[Dire Venom]

One of the reasons:
Theres little incentive to pvp and the rewards for winning are generally quite low.
All the stuff worth raiding would be stored at their invulnerable base.
There also needs to be SOMETHING to fight over.
As said above, if you think you'll lose, you don't fight because you have nothing to gain only (weeks worth of gathering) to lose.
Its a tough problem to solve

 

[BDLS]

GLORY is the only reason you need for PvP!

Also, I think the current bugs (mainly shipyards?) are kinda hurting the current playerbase.

 

[PizzaPress]

I haven't played multi-player in a while, and wasn't far enough into it to PvP, so I'll be a broken record here, but; I think the max viable size of ship needs to be turned down. Don't just let people grind themselves to death, or they will(See: Hax's hand injury, SSBM).
If people can build ultra-titans, you don't want to risk anything that has little chance of success against it.

And please don't make drama. If you make drama whilst in a faction, you should get the boot. If you lead the faction and make drama, people should leave.

Buccaneer: 1000 mass, 1000,000 damage

Wouldn't be hard to scale up. A dozen faction members flying small, disposable ships could easily ruin a titan's day.

Gathering a dozen people at once might be more difficult than gathering the resources for a titan...

 

[Ithirahad]

I guess I'll join the contradicting side. I am actually surprised people say PvP is dead given that from what I recall people talking about, most of faction politics still sooner or later turns into warfare. The difference is, I suspect, that people still think of it and build up to what was before changes.

"Most of the faction politics" just leads to flame wars, the inevitable resulting bans, and cold "wars" on servers in my experience.

Of course that ships are hard to make and require resources if every pilot of your faction and their dog expects to get their personal dreadnought. That's actually fair and reasonable, since now the time when one built ships en masse, being limited only by pilots are gone. That's the problem right now - there are no "weight categories" and everyone goes for the biggest since it's nearly always the best - and if that's what they want to, fine, but it's also them who should pay up for it.

Weight categories are artifical and unfluid; we just need feasible roles for smaller ships to go along with our big damage-dealing, damage-taking dreadnaughts. E-War systems that don't require large masses of blocks, feasible compact bombing systems, better warheads, fleet control... In any case, though, it seems people want to fight in great big frigates, cruisers, and battleships anyway; there's no reason why they can't be balanced so that fighting with them AND with smaller ships actually happens.

I've done some small PvP with current shipyards and resource demands being on and I had absolutely no problem with building small fleets of fighters with artillery support. I expect there's no dead PvP, people just need to change expectations. Every fight shouldn't be a fight of battlecruisers unless all participants are able to afford them - and affording them should be a challenge.

Yes, but what "should" and "shouldn't be" doesn't apply here. If it's even possible that the enemy will retaliate with cruisers and battlecruisers, I'm certainly not going to send out corvettes and fighters; I'd just lose resources. In those cases, I would have to send out my own cruisers and battlecruisers, and seeing as there is still a risk of losing even more resources this way, and seeing as winning would be of minimal advantage to me, I'll just camp in my base until the enemy stops bothering us. :\

 

[Matt_Bradock]

http://starmadedock.net/threads/ares-mod.20999/page-3#post-237836

I think this guy is actually on to something. A bit like battle mode mixed with some objective control, and the end goal is making it possible to run IN ADDITION to your normal survival environment. (ofc server still would need to enable some stuff like buying ships with credits) No one loses resources, you can upload and purchase your own designs, and tactics and team play are a very important parts of winning as objective control, fleet distribution and even boarding play important roles in there.

And the best part? You can duke it out without sacrificing any of your own resources.

 

[Edymnion]

One thing that I actually find sort of telling about PvP is how many people cried over the ability to just jump away from combat if you weren't winning.

Apparently nobody wanted the glory of the win, they just wanted the savagery of the kill. You forced the enemy to retreat, thats a victory in any combat situation. But no, we had to have jump inhibitors because that wasn't good enough. You didn't just have to win, you had to completely and utterly vaporize your enemy.

Aka, these people didn't care about winning, they only cared about hurting the other guy.

 

[Winterhome]

One thing that I actually find sort of telling about PvP is how many people cried over the ability to just jump away from combat if you weren't winning.

Apparently nobody wanted the glory of the win, they just wanted the savagery of the kill. You forced the enemy to retreat, thats a victory in any combat situation. But no, we had to have jump inhibitors because that wasn't good enough. You didn't just have to win, you had to completely and utterly vaporize your enemy.

Aka, these people didn't care about winning, they only cared about hurting the other guy.

To be fair, most of the time I've been in combat, it's because someone *else* came out and attacked *me*. By doing so, they're giving me permission to destroy their entire ship, rather than allow them the chance to come out of it with only a couple blocks lost. Coming out and disrupting my activity is more annoying to me than having their shields dropped is to them. It's not a "victory" if they aren't annihilated, because every single time I've had that happen, they've come back five to ten minutes later with their ship completely intact. It's not about the battle, it's about the grief factor they generally want to put out.

Not to mention two vs. one scenarios. I've been in a case where I would shoot at one person and drop their shields to 10%, then they'd jump out of sector with a one block emergency JD while the other person fought and they recharged their shields and jumpdrive. They went back and forth on that until I died, solely because I was unable to disable their jumpdrives by any means whatsoever. Mind you, I did have an intact and functional jumpdrive, I just refused to use it because I'm not a buttmunch.

Usually it's the people *using* the mini jumpdrives who want to hurt the other guy, not the other way around.

 

[Edymnion]

What you're describing is actually solid military tactics on their part.

They were fighting smart, you were just being stubborn.

 

[Winterhome]

What you're describing is actually solid military tactics.

Of course.

But the endless harassment bit is detrimental to the game. If you're going to fight, then fight. If you're designed to be able to just go in and piss people off without actually taking damage, then do that. But there needed to be a counter to it, because otherwise the entire game was literally nothing but "jump in, alpha missile dump, jump out". Everything needs to be possible to counter, which was not the case until jump inhibitors came into play.

Regardless, it's not the people who want to avoid fights that complained about jump inhibitors and used mini jumpdrives. It's the people who want to ruin others' fun without risk that jumped out of fights early.


I think the biggest problem with the PVP scene is that you have to intentionally go out and kill a specific person, or else you don't find PVP combat at all.