How do you balance a cheater? With a ban hammer.

[MrGrey1]

Firstly my apologies to @Lord_Latterous. I should not have let my emotions get the better of me and should not have sunk to my petty 2 star spur of the moment review on his ship here . It was uncalled for. I appreciate that Lord_Latterous went to the effort to post and 'reveal' his pvp ship so that we may all get a better understanding of the topics currently being debated around here... and the positions some camps might be coming from. At the very least I should exert the same effort in my review. So...

1. MrGrey1
   
   Version: 1.0 I removed 3960 (36%) stabilizer blocks and increased your stability to 49.8% in a couple of clicks. Hardly what I'd call a META reactor? https://i.imgur.com/R0h5Hby.png ... other systems I'm yet to look at. I sure hope the people 'balancing v2 right now have a better understanding of the power system.
   Yesterday at 9:12 AM Report
   1. 
      Author's Response is this seriously the best critique your 1 braincell could ever manage to make?
      you basically showed me that if you moved some stabs away from my ship that I could increase my stab % but you did not at all increase the reactor efficiency
      so you had 0 effect of making my ship better

No that's not the best critique I could come up with. It's the critique that popped into my head about 10 minutes after looking at your META ship and about 5 minutes after I realized it had just a single reactor plain and one group of stabilizers. That is not a META reactor. It is as far from a META reactor as you can get....literally. And this was after the fact the lag the ship generated had reduced my frame rate by a truly stupid amount for one relatively 'light' ship. I loaded the ship expecting to be dazzled and instead saw the most basic reactor layout possible on a ship that brought my system to a crawl. I was very much unimpressed and that was what prompted my immediate and somewhat hasty critique.

So let me be more thorough in my break down...
Firstly I take issue with you calling this BP a 'ship'. Let's call it what it is. A demonstration of two fundamental exploits in the game.

• The XBB clock exploit to use the B/B combination in a way it was never intended to be used which makes it ridiculously powerful and unbalanced. (nice clock btw. who made that?)
  
• Docked armour abusing clipping so that multiple entities can occupy the same grid location. (yuck yuck and yuck.)

Both of these are well known hacks. They are cheats, this is not a pvp ship. It is a demonstration of hacking techniques in StarMade. You didn't 'beat' anyone in this ship unless of course they were also using the exact same hacks that you are using. I'd love for you to get back to me when you've built this thing with out the exploits... are pvp ships actually being built without exploits? Because if not then I may have just found a problem.
As it is this BP should not be involved in any discussion regarding balance as it is outside of the games parameters. Can't start talking about balance unless there's an example of a ship that doesn't use hacks. If I saw either of these techniques on ships on my server they would be immediately deleted and the owners given a warning if not an outright ban. Don't cheat. Don't base balance decisions on cheaters. That ain't rocket science. It's basic common sense.

"you basically showed me that if you moved some stabs away from my ship that I could increase my stab % but you did not at all increase the reactor efficiency
so you had 0 effect of making my ship better"

My one brain cell aside, this is factually wrong.
An engines efficiency is measured by it's cost compared to it's output. In StarMades case, that's the engines mass (&volume), compared to it's power output.

Your reactor 'cost' 10100 mass at 1,975,000 e sec. This is 195.6 e/sec/mass
after I removed those stabilizers the cost was 9308 mass at the same e/sec... 212.2 e/sec/mass.
195.6 /212.2 gives us about an 8% increase in your engine efficiency.
You can then add the extra stability on top of that for the icing. So yeah, I showed you a way to increase the efficiency of your engine by a not insignificant amount in a couple of clicks... whether or not you believe me or take that on board is a whole 'nother barrel o' worms I'll just leave be...

The lag! Gee wizz what fun that was. I routinely load and unload 300-400k ships around my 800k 5million block hollow station that has dozens of ships floating around of all sorts of shapes and sizes. My frame rate barely stutters from 60. I have my own fairly powerful server with 0 latency and my client is on a year old top end gaming pc. I made the mistake of casually loading this BP in my shipyard sector... Survey says babow. Frame rate went down to about 5-10 when looking at the ship. I had to move it to it's own sector to study it and even then moving around it was an exercise in jerky screen purgatory... Screw that. Yet another reason for server owners to delete this on sight.

I tell you what I really did like about this particular BP is the beam turrets. Perfect coverage and devastating against anything that's not armour... (over a few layers of armour thick and it started to have issues.)

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate this BP is devastating in it's effect. Truly awesome the block destruction it can dish out. I really like the beam turrets perfect coverage and they're devastating against anything that's not armour. (The beam turrets op'ness could be mitigated somewhat by restricting the number of pc's/ entity.) I would actually like to know if anyone's tried shooting a plate of armour that is quite thick or a layered plate with this BP? When I tried it, at a certain number of layers the beams pretty much just stopped doing damage making the ship relatively impotent.

Pro's

1. It's a devastating demonstration of well known exploits.
2. It's got nice op beam turrets.

Con's

1. It uses xb/b
2. It uses clipping exploit.
3. It's ugly as sin.
4. It lags everything.
5. It doesn't have a META reactor.

So there you have it, a more thorough review.That's an unashamed 1 or 2 stars genuine review from me.
It's a great demonstration of bugs in the game. It is however not as advertised, it's not a pvp META ship..

Cheers.
MrGrey1.

 

[StormWing0]

Hence the reason my Base normally has many Bb turrets on it since it's about the only thing that can put a hole in this monster. Pretty sure the only thing making it a threat is the lag it causes and nothing more.

 

[Comr4de]

What does meta mean to you?

Anyone can bring this ship in on a server, anyone can replicate these design principles. The whole point of quickfire is to fix things like this. You’re complaining that someone built the most effective ship possible under the current game config. It isn’t cheating, and it certainly isnt hacking. It’d be hacking if it required modifying the vanilla game files. I or anyone else can replicate this in build mode anywhere. You’re just mad that this thing would dumpster any ship you could ever build. You’ve missed the entire point of why this design was uploaded to SMD, bravo.

 

[arouq]

That is not a META reactor. It is as far from a META reactor as you can get....literally.

For those of us who are casual players, could you demonstrate what a "meta" reactor is?

 

[The Judge]

Personally, I wish that more people were willing to look into all the fancy meta stuff, regardless of if they want to make an effective ship or they're "motivated" to do so. Its not like these things are only available to an exclusive group of people. The only counterargument I can see with these techniques is maybe some lag issues? I wouldn't know, but the fact that you can make a ship more combat-effective with these is not the issue here.

 

[Captain Fortius]

I should not have let my emotions get the better of me and should not have sunk to my petty 2 star spur of the moment review on his ship

I admire your integrity, but your guilt is misplaced.
That's still two stars more than what such hideousity merits, and THREE more than anyone who intentionally mispells every word while acting superior deserves.

Now let me share a fun little story of how I balanced cheaters in the golden age;

Way back, when turrets were still one part, weapon combos didn't exist, and all you had were your cannons and three types of missiles, All the PVP "Pros" were building massive but very short checkerboard cannons, often several layers in front of one another to maximize block destruction for minimum power cost. Their ships were also quite short, so they'd turn better.

So, there was this kid who was taunting the entire server for a while now; "Come and fight me if you dare!" was the gist of it. I was still lacking materials, so my ship had about half it's systems built, but I figured if it'll keep him quiet, I'll fight him for lolz. We determined our ship's mass' are close enough.
He gave me the coordinates, said he'll be waiting there, then we declared war on one another. First thing I noticed, I'm heading straight for a sun. There was no way in hell I'd see him.
Second thing I noticed, all my AI weapons fired a short burst then stopped. There were no taget icons yet, nothing on NAV either.

Suddenly my opponent calls for more time to prepare. Being a gracious host, I pulled back some distance and waited for about ten minutes. I had no word from him, so I figured even grace has it's limits, so let's see what he's up to.
My cannons lit up again, but I keept flying forwards. I reached within drawing distance, and suddenly everything made sense;
There was his first ship, shot full of holes and overheating; The one he was sure could beat the entire server. Reasonably elaborate, but you could tell it was the kind that had hundreds of cannon outputs on the entire front under a single-block hull.

Next to it, he was busy building his revenge, with each click slamming down chunks of systems larger than my entire stockpile. The uncoated mass of blocks floating there was so large, my old PC couldn't render it all, and my FPS was dropping; See, by his own admission he knew how to duplicate blocks and had infinite resources. He also liked using some kind of instant travel exploit and kept all his stuff so far away, no one would notice.
That was definitely unsportsmanlike, so I decided to off the little bugger for good.
He got a few shots off from some monstrous checkerboard cannon on the front which scored up my armor, and truth be told, systems quite a bit, but you see, I like long ships with thick frontal armor, and the core 2/3 the way back. The shots didn't reach it.
I reversed my thrust, and just kept out of his weapon range; Back then, the larger your cannon was, the further it was able to shoot. Something I miss dearly. My cannons were all large, single output pieces. They'd never destroy as many blocks per sec as a checkerboard, but had longer range than my drawing distance. On the other hand, staggered checkerboards had such low range, due to each line not being more than a handful of blocks, he couldn't touch me for the remainder of the fight.

Oh, the screams of his frustration were the sound of justice itself. And I've looted enough blocks to finish my ship.
I'm kinda curious how would such an encounter play out in the present day...

 

[MrGrey1]

What does meta mean to you?

Anyone can bring this ship in on a server, anyone can replicate these design principles. The whole point of quickfire is to fix things like this. You’re complaining that someone built the most effective ship possible under the current game config. It isn’t cheating, and it certainly isnt hacking. It’d be hacking if it required modifying the vanilla game files. I or anyone else can replicate this in build mode anywhere. You’re just mad that this thing would dumpster any ship you could ever build. You’ve missed the entire point of why this design was uploaded to SMD, bravo.

Anyone brings this ship on my server for anything other then looking at they'll be leaving shortly after. Your position is untenable. "Anyone can bring an aim bot onto my counter strike server, therefore have at it? "
No.

I'm a bit old school when it comes to my technical definitions. A 'hack' is to use something in a way that is outside its original intent or purpose. As I understand it, that is the original definition of what it was to be a hacker. The term predates computers. To be a computer hacker you made programs do things they weren't supposed to do enabling you to do things and go places you weren't intentionally supposed to be able to.

xb/b is a hack in that it bypasses the design intent of the weapon and half of it's mechanics in an unforeseen way. Schema never intended for B/B to be used without needing the shield down mechanic and or it being able to fire instantly. Go ask him if you like? You and I both know you'll be wasting his time.

Entity clipping was intended to allow turrets and docked entities such as doors to work properly(?)... whatever, it was never intended or considered to be used as a way to make multiple ships occupy the same physical space in game. I mean come on, really? You're arguing that's not a hack?
"I've got 5 ships occupying the same physical space completely against the design principals and spirit of the game! Who cares it kills everyone's frame rate and makes the server have a heart attack, I'm winnninggggg....!? "
First step to fixing a problem is admitting there is one.

Hacks and bugs are something that need to be worked on and resolved. Some hacks and bugs are better left to the players to sort out, some are better left for server owners to deal with and mitigate and some are best left to the programmers building the game. Knowing which is which is part of being a good game designer.

IMO both these hacks should be left up to the players and server owners to deal with. The general consensus i have been getting, (and I am generalizing, I understand that,) is that most people don't like entity stacking because it's a painful process, makes the ships very difficult to modify and use, is terrible for performance etc etc... but I get that there's also a group of people who like playing with these ships and exploring the hacks in the game. That's fine, i have nothing against hacking at all. It's fun! But I don't want to play my game with hacks... So leave that hack alone as far as 'fixing' it is concerned. Leave it up to the players to decide. Don't however use that hack as a basis to adjust the rest of the game. That's just asinine.


"anyone can replicate these design principles."
"You’re just mad that this thing would dumpster any ship you could ever build."

Your argument... umm which side are you on because it's not quite clear to me? Anyone can do it just not me specifically?
There' is nothing about that design that I don't think... actually that I don't know I could improve on. I just improved the reactor by 8% and doubled it's stability within a couple of minutes of loading it. My builds are here on the Dock for all to see... people can judge for themselves whether or not they think I could build this thing... As a server owner and someone who builds his ships to be as server friendly as possible I refuse to entity stack, this thing is my antithesis. I appreciate the design and ingenuity, I despise the final result for anything other then an exercise in hacking... It's a complete non-starter for me.

For those of us who are casual players, could you demonstrate what a "meta" reactor is?

Spoiler: A short tutorial on META power.

A META reactor is the optimum layout for a reactor.
Reactor efficiency = Reactor Output / Reactor Mass
E = e/sec / mass
mass = # reactor blocks x 0.4 + # stabilizer blocks x .2 . For any given reactor, # reactor blocks is constant R but # stabilizers is a variable S.
E = e/sec / (R x 0.4 + S x 0.2)
With me so far? We want e/sec to be as large as possible and we want R and S to be as small as possible.
So lets make both S&R say 125 and see what happens.


250 module 1:1 ratio 5,17,21 with a 25.1% stability rating.
As you can see a shape like this is efficient but it is a long rectangle which could be argued, handicaps ship shapes that are not long rectangles.
So the idea to split stabilizers into groups so you could build them out into different directions and not be penalized was born and the reactor planes were introduced, one for each dimension, N,S,E,W,Up,Down.


You can take advantage of the reactor planes by splitting your group into 2 by a minimum gap of 3 blocks.
249 module 125:124 ratio 9,17,21 with a 42.5% rating.


Further into 3 dimensions by splitting it again by a minimum gap of 3.
249 module 125:124 ratio 9,19,21 with a 59.2% rating.


You'd think going out to 6 dimension by mirroring the stabilizers on the other side of the reactor increases stability but if you maintain the same total reactor length this is not the case.
240 module 125:120 ratio 9,19,21 with a 52.9% rating.



Making this the ideal meta reactor shape.
As you can see the reactors plains don't actually fix the problem they were intended to fix. They do however offer other interesting design problems of which I enjoy most... the majority however don't.

ps ^ this all pretty much scales linearly and is one of the reasons why I advocate we maintain the current reactor chamber mechanic so as to introduce a natural efficiency spot in the reactor levels. ie. A natural tier in the reactors.

Personally, I wish that more people were willing to look into all the fancy meta stuff, regardless of if they want to make an effective ship or they're "motivated" to do so. Its not like these things are only available to an exclusive group of people. The only counterargument I can see with these techniques is maybe some lag issues? I wouldn't know, but the fact that you can make a ship more combat-effective with these is not the issue here.

I agree with the first part to an extent.
The counter argument to stacked entities is how do you justify multiple space ships occupying the same real time space in game? Some magic parallel dimension tech or what? It doesn't make sense unless specified otherwise... It also happens to cause huge performance hits for both servers and clients.
The counter to having XBB is that it's a ridiculously OP gun that makes all other weapons obsolete... straightforward.

 

[Alphajim]

As I see it, hacking nowadays in game is rare. It consist of tweaking yourself the code to hack, not using a hack. Those who use a downloaded hack are often called cheaters as they don't have a clue of how it works. Calling them hackers would give them too much credit, while a cheater is nothing but a common and uninteresting people.

xb/b and entity stacking to increase the armor can both be called exploit or glitch using (exploit being abusing a functionnality, and glitch being an easy-to-abuse bug like phasing through blocks when you do something).

 

[OfficialCoding]

This is ridiculous. You guys are arguing over terminology. Hack, Bug, Glitch, Exploit, it doesn't really matter. This is a game-breaking ship. It's f*cking horrible. It's ugly AF, exploity AF, and a terrible ship all around. This is why I never go with the meta. It'a awful. First off you gotta cheat by doing docked armor and sh*t. Then you gotta do your XBB clock and then you "win" the fight because everybody else plays by the rules. It's like the boxer who puts a horseshoe in his glove. You "win" only because you used an insanely powerful thing in not the way it was intended to be used. And that's the state of "PvP" if you can even call it that. I think that anybody who uses ships like this or any serious exploit should get permabanned. It's not fair to casuals/players who give a sh*t about rules.

 

[Scypio]

I almost agree with OC. Almost. There is just one fact : there is no "rules". The game is provided as it is and you do what you want with it. If you want to use xbb then please do so. There is nothing written as a rule when loading the game.
Oh and the fact about the ban of course. The game should not allow such things. Whether it is by completely not allowing something or promoting a better solution for everyone. Banning is not a solution simply because moving it away won't resolve the issue.

 

[Alphajim]

I was just explaining for MrGrey1, as he seem to use hack the old way x)

I'll just add that it's not because this game is a sandbox that it has no basic rules. I see no problem with banning a player who's bug / glitch using just to beat others. If you want to be fair, just delete the entity and warn him, track him to watch his actions, and if he do it again while acting like a jerk then ban him for some time. Keep the "good" cheaters to explain how the cheat works, and tell devs about it. The problem here isn't a matter of "rulz or no rulz", it's just about being mature enough to play fair. By fair I mean not using any sort of exploity advantage. Of course these bugs need to be discovered and fixed.

But hey, everybody knows that, right ? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Lord_Latterous]

Anyone brings this ship on my server for anything other then looking at they'll be
xb/b is a hack in that it bypasses the design intent of the weapon and half of it's mechanics in an unforeseen way. Schema never intended for B/B to be used without needing the shield down mechanic and or it being able to fire instantly. Go ask him if you like? You and I both know you'll be wasting his time.

it doesnt matter if he intended it or not, what matters is that it EXISTS.
and the last time i checked quickfire they fixed it, this is the WHOLE POINT OF QUICKFIRE- to stop game breaking exploits like this.

and if i wanted a meta reactor i would make a cube shape ship, but you see, cubes are huge targets, it would be an easy target and more difficult to turn. and i guess you could somewhat make my reactor a little bit more efficicent but you have to remember that this was a 20 min build - i didnt have all day to min max everything, that is something to consider, some shitty thing i slapped together blown up almost all of the ships i encountered in lvd, brierie, and cake

but i guess nothing i say means much to you cuz starmade is "Fair and Balanced".

 

[The_Owl]

>calling someone using game mechanics unintentionally a hacker
>using a different definition of hacking to try and defend calling it hacking

Boys, this is big brain time

 

[Energywelder]

Personally i'm sad i thought i was building to the meta but then some guy went and did the math on reactors.

https://media.wired.com/photos/5933...imit/Screen-Shot-2013-11-14-at-3.33.02-PM.png

 

[Reilly Reese]

This is ridiculous. You guys are arguing over terminology. Hack, Bug, Glitch, Exploit, it doesn't really matter. This is a game-breaking ship. It's f*cking horrible. It's ugly AF, exploity AF, and a terrible ship all around. This is why I never go with the meta. It'a awful. First off you gotta cheat by doing docked armor and sh*t. Then you gotta do your XBB clock and then you "win" the fight because everybody else plays by the rules. It's like the boxer who puts a horseshoe in his glove. You "win" only because you used an insanely powerful thing in not the way it was intended to be used. And that's the state of "PvP" if you can even call it that. I think that anybody who uses ships like this or any serious exploit should get permabanned. It's not fair to casuals/players who give a sh*t about rules.

That is literally why the ship exists.

To show the current meta AND its problems, how this is capable of going over everyone's heads here is in itself incredible.

 

[Crashmaster]

Sometimes you gotta duck under the point or it'll knock your argument over.

Was angling all the stab planes together in a vertical ship changed? I thought that was reactor meta.

 

[kulbolen]

dear everyone here arguing: your mistake was thinking the perfect most optimal most efficient reactor setup is the thing to obsess over. almost no good pvp ship ever had "perfect" power.

 

[Ithirahad]

I'm not going to spend time trying to reply to everything here, but I will say... any comparison between the stuff on this ship and aimbotting is pretty silly. This is all ingame stuff, and with a few tricks you could more or less do all of this in survival without ever touching a creative server.

 

[kulbolen]

Oh, the screams of his frustration were the sound of justice itself. And I've looted enough blocks to finish my ship.
I'm kinda curious how would such an encounter play out in the present day...

probably depends on who youre fighting. there were no pros back then and im pretty sure there arent really any now lol
[doublepost=1566411440,1566411179][/doublepost]

This is ridiculous. You guys are arguing over terminology. Hack, Bug, Glitch, Exploit, it doesn't really matter. This is a game-breaking ship. It's f*cking horrible. It's ugly AF, exploity AF, and a terrible ship all around. This is why I never go with the meta. It'a awful. First off you gotta cheat by doing docked armor and sh*t. Then you gotta do your XBB clock and then you "win" the fight because everybody else plays by the rules. It's like the boxer who puts a horseshoe in his glove. You "win" only because you used an insanely powerful thing in not the way it was intended to be used. And that's the state of "PvP" if you can even call it that. I think that anybody who uses ships like this or any serious exploit should get permabanned. It's not fair to casuals/players who give a sh*t about rules.

words have meaning. and everyones definitions for rules and fair are different. personally i find clipping multiple blocks into the same space cheaty, and yet i dont complain when i fight people who do it. i dont have anything against docked armor; i see it as a clever use of an intended mechanic. etc. we all have different opinions and unless the game developer writes something into the game, its up to server owners to figure out whats cool on their server and what isnt.

 

[Az14el]

Grey, go beat it mass for mass, record it, then put that in the OP, save yourself paragraphs of noticeable half assed theory crafting ya know?
I can promise you you're talking out of your ass right now, pretty much guaranteed 0 of these p2 meta ships are "perfect" and i bet latt got (almost) as lazy as i did building these things, But the entire point is that it's not damn hard to come up with if you think just a little outside the box. Of course ideally they wont last, but just flat out denial of the problem is just perpetuating it.

tl;dr lol no