Shields in 0.201 Release

[PriZm]

So, i think I'm not telling sth new by reporting the bugs concerning shields in this release. The issues are:
- Damage glitching through shields (mostly AI ships penetrate the shield for whatever reason)
- Shield Regen doesnt stop under fire making for ridiculously tanky shields especially on bigger ships
- Chambers for shields don't work or do not work as intended

for me this made me basically stop actively playing the game (as in actually fly around with it, fight NPCs or do some mutual PVP Battles) for the past 1.5 years or so.

My questions are:
- About when is this going to be fixed and which are the solutions on the dev's minds?
- Why wasnt this at least temporarily "fixed" for such a long period of time? I mean, it's not something minor. It's a very basic mechanic and one that made most of the players either leave the game completely or at least stopped them from playing the game actively.

I know members from Schine literally sayd they don't want more players at this point. If that was the intention, it worked. But is it wise? It definitly wouldn't be wise to advertise the game at this point and get lots of players into it, but in my opinion it would have been wise to at least keep the remaining player base from 2017/2018, since they help finding bugs and test out things. At the moment there is maybe 4-5 players playing online average. Sometimes noone is online at all, on weekends maybe on Brierie there are like 10 players (9 of them only sitting in their homebase building ship hulls).

What are your opinions?And what about the devs? Is there a good reason for why the game was left in a de facto unplayable state for the longest period of time in starmade's dev history?

 

[MChain]

What are your opinions?And what about the devs? Is there a good reason for why the game was left in a de facto unplayable state for the longest period of time in starmade's dev history?

They are preparing universe update, obviously. Doing optimisation, rewriting half the game and creating a new, better and more interesting playfield. Instead of small fixes and crutches to make things work they decided to go for a global fix of most issues. That's why the team is silent, they didn't abandon the game, they are working on it harder than ever.

As for playerbase, they didn't leave, everybody's waiting for the new version since there's not much sense in building anything except hulls, interiors and logic systems (the latter is questionable too). Not much fun in building dead, empty shells xD

 

[PriZm]

Well, i know the universe update is gonna happen and that some players might come back and play more actively then. But some, or rather many i think, might never return again. Starmade never was easy to get into and it always had bugs, was laggy sometimes and it needed experienced server owners and cooperative players to keep a server stable and fun to play at. But since i play the game, i can't remember a time where the game was as broken as it is now and for such a long time (1.5 - 2 years). I think noone would have expected a perfect fix delivered within days. But why not (for the example shields) turn back to the old pre-bubble system - it worked. When you plan to change a lot of core mechanics with universe update, why not give the playerbase (who are basically testers/bugreporters) something that is actually playable? Im really hoping the universe update will bring back some life into this game's community. And hopefully it won't bring too many new problems.

 

[Keptick]

Wasn't the shields regenerating under fire intentional?

Edit:
from the weapons 2.0 patch notes:

Shields now always regenerate over time again and when under fire only lose regeneration when the shield HP goes down. When not under fire, shields will always regenerate at full speed. Any shield starts in its strongest configuration and can be weakened through high damage weapons if it is a recharge focused shield. Or by a steady stream of small weapon fire if it is a capacity focused shield. The config was changed to allow for that and you may end up with a disportionate amount of regeneration vs capacity with your current builds. Make sure to double check if your regeneration is still positive.

However, QuickFire fixes most of the issues brought on by that mechanic (and the last two you mentioned). From the QF design document:

We reduced the potency of shield regeneration and increased its power cost, but did not change the numbers for shield capacity. Due to weapon damage reduction, shield capacity is in effect buffed significantly compared to the vanilla ratio.

Without the broken low-damage chamber, shields were desperately underpowered compared to vanilla weapons, and would tend to disappear rapidly in similar-sized ship combat regardless of how much power was dedicated to them. They are now a fairly strong form of defense in their own right, without broken chambers, while avoiding the potential for regen tanking to make ships invincible.

“For the same power consumption, you will always have more dps than regen, in any weapons combos.
However, due to shields mechanics you still want big alpha weapons to take them down, because their regen is high when they are at 100% and low when they [the shields] are low [in capacity].”

-Scypio

QuickFire was added to the dev build, I strongly suggest that you give it a try.

Note: The AI shooting through shields is definitely a bug though, that'll get fixed eventually. Afaik it's not too common an issue, so shouldn't be as gamebreaking as the other 2 issues you mentioned.

 

[PriZm]

Hmm, you are right, obviously this was intentional... that somehow makes it even worse, since it is a bad design decision in my opinion. Yes, i know of QF and i'm really looking forward to it. The changes sound good so far and if they don't work atm, at least the intention behind the changes is appreciated. I installed the latest dev build a few days ago, but i couldnt find a server with people online.

The "regen tanking", how it is called in the quote, is one of the problems i noticed. Regen can become ridiculously high without proper cost.