please balance the gsf for new players....

[Kahldor]

So let's just admit GSF is not meant for new or returning players unless they want to get 2 or 3 shotted for a few months while trying to find equal footing to the vets. As a returning subscriber and purchaser of GSF, I think it is a fun addition when I get in a game versus equals and there is some back and forth (that is extremely rare). But I would be bored if I was winning 1000 to 200 every match. So until it plays more like the warzones for equality, then I it is not getting any CC from me.

[DanNV]

GSF is better than normal pvp, in that because you can miss shots, and dodge around, the skill of a person plays a larger factor. However unfortunately gear still does play a huge role, some ships more than others, but it is still a strong factor. You can easily see this on servers where one side completely dominates the GSF, one side won more, so got better gear, so started winning even more, causing the other side to quit...now its just highly geared ships cutting through ships, who have weapons which only tickle them back....its not fun for anyone

 

^^^^^ THIS in spades.

[DanNV]

This is just worthless whining from someone who doesn't want me to play. If this went in to effect, I would just have to stomp you and him on an endless series of fresh alts. It wouldn't take very long for serious players to write the game off if they could never get matches.

 

If something doesn't change, and change drastically and soon, you aren't going to get any matches because the people you enjoy stomping are going to stop playing. My server is down to mostly 8v8 and 3 out of 4 will be Rep v Rep. And the 1000 to 100 or less is the norm in the Rep v Rep matches. How long do you think the people who keep getting stomped are going to keep playing? It's pretty obvious a lot of them have already stopped or we'd get 12 v 12 and we'd still be getting Imp v Rep.

 

Just played a match that was 1000 to 128. MY team won. Talk about a boring, terrible match. And it was better than most I've played recently.

 

The problem is the OP mods that stack with stupidly designed abilities to make a REALLY OP ship. If the devs don't step back and fix that, the GSF expansion is going to continue to shrink until you can't get a queue to pop at all.

 

I won't even get started on the stupidity of death matches.

[Danylia]

FYI: Number of ships a player has access too is a representation of how much money someone is prepare to spend to play GSF, not their skill level.

You misunderstood (or I didn't express myself clearly enough). The numbers represent overall "quality" of players (5 best, 1 worst), no matter if "quality" means number of ships, number of Requisition spend, win/loss ratio, ship mastery or whatever. Also my point wasn't talking about what makes one player better than another, the point was my theory how the matchmaking works - that it first creates group A on one side, then completely independent on it group B on another, and only then tries to match the groups against each other.

 

Upgrades are NO substitute for experience. This gets proved time and time again when vet players take a new Alt with stock standard ships into matches and clean up.

Clean up in matches where everyone else is using stock standard ships, too. Yes, in matches where the gear is equal for all, the experience will be the deciding factor. What about matches where the opposition has maxed out Flashfires? Well, you could argument that in such case the opposition has experience as well - but that only means that upgrades and experience come hand in hand. You simply can't have fully maxed but inexperienced ships in a match.

 

gieb cross-server GSF!

Yes please

[dancezwithnubz]

Clean up in matches where everyone else is using stock standard ships, too. Yes, in matches where the gear is equal for all, the experience will be the deciding factor. What about matches where the opposition has maxed out Flashfires?

 

Upgrades, with very few exceptions, aren't the be-all and end all factor and, seriously, people need to stop thinking they are.

 

most of the 'essential' upgrades to components are in the first two or three tiers (the cheap upgrades), for example the 100% Ignore Armor upgrade for Rocket Pods is a T1 upgrade. Once you have that, it's only once you hit the T5 upgrade that you get any further boost to rocket pods damage output. A Slug Railgun only 'needs' the first three tiers of upgrade to be a walloping weapon.

 

There are exceptions. Targeting Telemetry, for example, only seriously shines when fully upgraded. While on the other hand, Booster Recharge is perfectly serviceable without any upgrades.

 

upgrading a ship from 'stock' to 'pretty much as capable as it'll get' only costs a couple thousand ship req. you'll get that in three or four days if you're only playing the Daily quests.

 

Put me in a stock ship up against a complete nub in a capped out ship, i'll still blow them out of the sky.

[PeterKannNix]

if i see heavily biased matches i simply leave. Sorry to my fellow comrades but i don't enjoy beeing farmed for 7min.

 

GS will be more or less a dead birth if they didn't add some balance control in.

[HoloGrinder]

I agree totally that it needs to be balanced. Either make experience brackets for people to play in so that new players play new players and aces play aces or award way more req to the underdogs in a slanted match so that they can catch up and be competition. I have been preaching this on here for a while now and I am so thankful that some one else has come forth to acknowledge the problem. It is a problem and it is killing GSF. The devs need to step in right away before it fails... This is coming from a mastered sting pilot by the way who has been complaining about it since he was a rookie.

[Danylia]

Upgrades, with very few exceptions, aren't the be-all and end all factor and, seriously, people need to stop thinking they are.

 

most of the 'essential' upgrades to components are in the first two or three tiers (the cheap upgrades), for example the 100% Ignore Armor upgrade for Rocket Pods is a T1 upgrade. Once you have that, it's only once you hit the T5 upgrade that you get any further boost to rocket pods damage output. A Slug Railgun only 'needs' the first three tiers of upgrade to be a walloping weapon.

 

There are exceptions. Targeting Telemetry, for example, only seriously shines when fully upgraded. While on the other hand, Booster Recharge is perfectly serviceable without any upgrades.

You have a point there. But at the same time, let's look at three components which are most often discussed in this forum:

 

Distortion Field: Double Duration/Missile break - Tier 3 Upgrade (to be fair, one could argue that while these are nice, they aren't essential)

Burst Laser Cannon: Shield Piercing/Armor Ignore - Tier 4 Upgrade

Ion Railgun: AoE/Disruption - Tier 4 and 5 Upgrade

 

Put me in a stock ship up against a complete nub in a capped out ship, i'll still blow them out of the sky.

I believe you. However, what I wanted to point out is that such situation is artifical; in general, anyone in a capped out ship won't be a complete newbie, because capped out ship requires requisition -> enough matches played -> experience.

[ChroniKill]

THe older BF games had the right idea for this. Before 5000xp you could either fight against experienced players, or could go up against the "public". GSF could easily implement something along those lines, although I suspect the reason it hasn't been implemented is simply numbers. I don't think there are enough players to make it work well.

 

On a different note, it doesn't take too much to become competitive. I rolled a new sniper last weekend and was still coming in the top 3 without any upgrades in a basic scout. Yes, there is a learning curve, and yes, it is steep, but if you don't give up you'll actually find that you progress a lot more quickly than you expect.

[PeterKannNix]

Sure you can also be valid in a stock ship as the difference isn't handleable by skill but if your always fighting 1v4 or even more because all of your team mates are still clueless or .. dead .. you won't be able to do anything. That's the problem. I don't have a problem going against more experienced player but if my team is mostly newbie filled and they are mostly vets it's simply a waste of time. You can do anything as you always have one or two guys ****** your behind. Most times you can't take off the shield of your target before your display flashes red with incoming fire from all directions. (Or you simply pop because you got sniped.)

[dancezwithnubz]

in that case, just do the best YOU can do.

 

you can still walk out of a thumping great defeat with north of 1,000 requisition, provided you play smart.

grab a scout and go Bunker Busting. Smash as many turrets as you can.

 

i've had matches where I was almost the only one on my team to get any kills, and I still finished top 3 with 40k+ damage.

 

giving up and leaving the nubs to get slaughtered helps no-one, least of all the nubs.

 

we were ALL nubs once. my first half dozen or so matches were a trial. I got flogged.

 

stick with it. you won't get better sitting in Fleet waiting for what you consider o be a 'fair' match.

[Zohkar]

so, you'll desert your teammates if you think you won't win?

you'll leave a bunch of nubs without an experienced pilot (i'll assume you're experienced) to help even the odds?

 

This isn't EvE Online where running away from a superior opposing force is ALWAYS the right move (as they say in EvE, if you find yourself in a fair fight, you went in under-prepared.)

 

and FYI: ships are mirrors across factions. the NovaDive and Blackbolt are, for all intents and purposes, exactly teh same ship, just with a different graphic. what you're seeing, if anything, is a difference in component choices. A Blackbolt with %DR armor will be a LOT easier to hit than a NovaDive with %Evasion armor.

 

1 veteran verse 8 veterans won't make a difference for my team to win, it's not gonna happen and I am tired of being frustrated with matchmaking. Just the same if my side has more veterans then the opponents I will walk out of a match or just sit there doing nothing to demoralize opponents (sitting on a sattelite guarding, flying around giving newer players something to practice on or trying to take out the enemy capital ship). Sitting there typing into chat for people to do this and this has proved useless time and time again. The chat system for GSF is near uesless once you launch and are moving across the battlefield. The only time you can even attempt to chat is either waiting for a re-spawn or when your sitting under a satallite calling out instructions of where enemy movement is going. I know I have countless tried this for the first month before it just became to frustrating to play.

 

As far as mirror ships I do agree that they are the same from faction to faction, but when you have two ships on both sides equally geared and I fire at a Imperial version ship for some reason I can hit them easier then if I fire at the same version on the Republic side. Call me crazy but I am not the only person to have knowticed this when we play on both sides on my server. Alot of Imperial pilots have switched over to play the Republic side now making it even harder for Imperial players to win. A person can only be farmed so many times before they either give in and change sides or quit all together hurting the population even more.

Edited February 2, 2014 by Zohkar

[Salakast]

Too tired to read the thread. Did anyone mention making the game harder for the winning team if they have a 400+ point lead? Because I feel like that would be more interesting than upping my queue times to half an hour as the game tries to find people with KDRs and W/L ratios and whatnot similar to mine.

 

This, absolutely, 100%. 3-cap murder-fests are (to my mind), no fun whatsoever, no matter if you are on the side of the murderers or murderees. As I play both factions I see both sides of that equation, the fun games are those decided by less than 100 points. Unfortunately these make up less than 20% of the games I'm in, the vast majority the losers total less than 200 points.

 

An increasing bolster system where the side that is losing gets an increasing boost to damage taken and damage reduction as the points differential increases would have several advantages:

 

Reduce need for matchmaking

No need to separate pre-mades & pugs, advantages of VOIP & teamwork lead to increasing 'god -mode' for newbs

New pilots will find periods where their survivability increases to the point that they actual survive long enough to learn a few things and improve.

Greater challenge for the better team

As it's easier to defend 2 sats than to flip them the newbs would have a chance to hold on to their possessions as their point stotal increased and their damage advantages came back down.

Better and more fun experience for all, more people queing, more games etc.

 

Surely it can't be too hard to programme such a system in, trouble is it's too late now for the free player influx and so many of them are gonna get turned off in their initial experiences:(