It got nerfed!

When people start using bullshit rumors they hear to try and justify them nerfing me specifically, it kind of gets on my nerves.

I apologize to all the other Admins, that was specifically directed at PaperTiger, you have been quite nice in entertaining my thoughts on the matter.

If you guys would like to continue a conversation based on actual facts and not on silly rumors, I am all for it. If not I'll go back to my fallout shelter and prepare for the blast.

If we took your set up as the "average" and scaled the EFBattleships accordingly, we'd break the game further.

We could adjust the rest of the game to make slave swarms fit the equation, or we could cut the slave swarms instead. Due to manpower limitations we cannot change the rest of the game every time someone comes up with a broken set up.

I understand you feel this is directed against you, but slave swarms have been a growing problem and it should be fixed.

Just like we did with engineer.
*cue demonic laughter*

Yes, adding one AI base, one new skill, and removing another is completely too much work in relation to writing code to make it so ships can only use gear within 10 levels of their hull. Not to mention how much it changes the entire game in a much more drastic way! Nevermind, you likely don;t even know how to code anything ,and just stare at balance sheets.

Please, if you've abandoned all attempts at logic and/or discussion on how to improve the situation, then please show yourself out of the thread.

So, are there any sensible rebuttals to my proposal, or is this just game over for logic?

You solution doesn't work as well, because of the following:

1) It affects the entire playerbase.
2) It will require effort on the part of every player to have to change his skills and in most cases a skill reset will be needed to create enough skill points.
3) It's actually harder to code.
4) It ruins slaves for low level players. Seriously, 50 skill points just so you can have 1 zebucart slave?
5) Doesn't address the problem directly, as low tech swarms with low tech gear will still be more powerful than high tech slaves with high tech gear.


I would like to emphacise this last point, as it is the main problem. Whether we are looking at you killing UZ bosses or a level 100 swarmer killing forgones, swarms are still unbalanced. You get too much for too little.

Heh I wasn't the one who came up with the idea of limiting tech gear on ships by the ship's tech + 10, it was actually a product of our Monday meeting. It won't affect everyone nearly as much as requiring people to do a skill reset and cough up another 500 Skill Points just to get the same level in RC.

As for your "different is not better" arguement, I love variety. Different is good. However slave swarms are still broken. Sustained DPS or burst DPS, they accomplish things that other classes cannot for the amount of credits involved. Hence the nerf stick. I'm probably going to recieve a lot of flame from you, but really, there's not an admin on the team who doesn't think that slave swarms are broken. Really.

As HAL pointed out on the admin forum, while we rebalanced the game, RC follows the same formula as pre-rebalance. So while higher end set ups lost stats (due to the loss of aug stacking and most higher level gear being nerfed), lower end gear was beefed (most people agree that low tech AI base gear is now too good).

But RC still allows you to use the same number of slaves! Because the gap between higher and lower level players has been reduced, a swarm user who was on par with players of the same level before the rebalance is much more powerful now. This is something we hope to fix soon.

I assure you we don't base our decisions on rumours. It'd take more than that to convince all of us that slave swarms are overpowered.

I did not say I liked the tech + 10 limit for slaves, but it's the solution we agreed on. We still debate it by the way, but I would rather have a quick but crude fix than doing nothing for months. In any case, the limit could always be reverted.

And I would love to back up my claims with all the wonderful data we have, but unfortunately that would take too much time. I don't see you making a convincing case for why slave swarms are alright, so lets not ask each other too much, hmm?

You are more than welcome to give your constructive criticism and offer solutions, but I don't view your idea of increasing the cost of RC as viable enough to bother exploring further.

Making it more difficult to obtain, making it even more expensive, adding the ability to require certain skills, etc. Versus screwing up Trading slaves and not much else. Hmm.

For an Administrator you really lack literary skills. I didn't say swarms were alright, I said that I see swarms from my current position ingame as being fine, yes. And you have not given me a single reaso nwhy they are not. If you are unwilling to converse and back up your findings, then as I asked earlier, please remove yourself from the thread. I just hope a more... competent Administrator will take your place.

what if we split the skills up? Trading RC(Which is what we have now) and make a new skill called "Slave RC"

There is no /showmissiledamage command yet, but I read somewhere that a large armor piercing missile does 5500 damage against 0 mining resist if you have the Missile Mastery subskill maxed. I don't know whether that includes the destruction bonus from MFing a mining wep against the target at the same time or not.

So, in theory, a gunner could do 55k dps with an RoF of .1. However, there are some difficulties in actually achieving this:

#1 You have to press the hotkey to launch your missile every time you fire. They don't keep up max RoF like normal weps. Plus, there is time used in opening new crates since nobody could possibly carry that many missiles unpacked. Pressing a hotkey 10 times per second for any amount of time would be difficult, if not impossible in reality.

#2 Missile flight time. In order to attain max dps on missiles, the gunner has to sit close enough to his target that the time it takes to fire 3 missiles (the max a broadsword MK IV can handle at once) is less than the amount of time it takes one missile to fly to the target. However, if the gunner is directly on top of the target, the missile won't fire. So, to attain that max RoF of .1, the gunner would have to position himself so that the center of his ship is within .3 seconds of missile flight time from the target without being directly on top of the target. This would be extremely difficult even with a stationary base and no tractors / grem weps / physical weps firing back at him, and pretty much impossible with a moving base or target. Trying to stay in position would also slow down the RoF due to the human factors I mentioned in #1.

#3 Lag. Lag spikes are inevitible during PvB. When an SD experiences a lag spike while firing a weapon his ship appears to quit firing or all of the projectiles appear to go through the target like misses, but when the lag spike ends he sees all of his past shots hit the target, so he doesn't really lose any dps unless he drifted out of range during the spike. A gunner actually loses the opportunity to fire missiles during the lag spike since he is limited to 3 missiles in the air at one time and his computer thinks the 3 previously fired missiles still exist. A lag spike of a few seconds has a big effect on a normal gunner, let alone one who was trying to achieve 10 missiles per second.

#4. If I have the formula right, achieving .1 rof on large AP missiles would require 8 Broadsword Mk IV missile launchers, which are still pretty expensive and hard to find. 8 of them would take 376 space, which isn't terrible on a dreadnaught, but it does make it more of a challenge to carry them.

#5 Electricity. Each missile requires 500 elec to launch, and that amount is not affected by electric tempering. At .1 rof, that's 5k elec / second if you don't fire your guns for the destruction bonus, use a radar, diffusers, charge a shield, etc. Capships can still get energy banks that are quite large, but not nearly as large as they were before the rebalance. Also, large bank energies take up a lot of space, which compounds the problem of carrying 8 launchers.

#6 Shields. If you have to sit right on top of your target like I mentioned in #2 you're going to take a lot of damage. If your target is a halfway decent base the limited number of diffusers you can carry are going to blow quickly. Capship shield banks are still big, but nowhere near as big as they were before the rebalance. Just as with your energy, you're going to have a hard time fitting in a large bank shield along with enough diffusers to make a difference. It's possible, especially with help from enough ShMs to outheal the base you're trying to kill, but it's just another challenge to overcome in a ship that only has 2 aug slots.

This has turned into a monster of a post, but I hope it's at least comprehensive. In conclusion, I would have to say that while .1 missile RoF, while technically possible, would still be very difficult to get and sustain simply due to equipment requirements. However, my guess would be that due to human limitations and all of the factors I listed in #1 - #3 it would actually be impossible, and you would be extremely lucky to sustain an average of 2.5 missiles per second for any long period of time. That's a lot of DPS, but it would still require support from an ShM and probably an engineer with an energy beam, which brings the gunner in PvB under perfect conditions closer to the type of dps a zerker can do. Of course, that near equality with zerker dps only occurs when the target is very weak to mining damage.

That was said about station slots too.

But in any case when is this glorious band-aid supposed to be put in since we're going to be living with it for the rest of Sonata history?

It hasn't even been started yet since we are still discussing it here and in the admin forums. Until a solution has been found and agreed on both sides we will wait a bit longer.

Just to reiterate, we don't want to make the skills more expensive to justify swarms being overpowered. Rather we'll reduce the overall effectiveness of swarms. Here's your chance to offer us options of nerfing them that won't be too damaging to the rest of the game.



Here is where you and I disagree. I'm sorry, I don't see killing various bosses and doing end-game DGs with tech 15 AI base weapons and minimal investment as "fine". If you want to convince me otherwise you'll have to go into more detail than simply complaining about Gear Glue costs.

Engineers used to complain about drone costs all the time and that argument was more convincing than yours. Regardless, Engineer got hit with a nerfbat. This time we are not going to allow this problem to grow to those proportions. One way or another.



I'm willing to converse, but I think I made my points clear:

1) Slave swarms are overpowered.
2) Slave swarm power needs to be cut back.

I don't think our opinion can be changed here. So rather than beating the dead horse, lets move on. Once again, you are more than welcome to offer solutions, but we won't make RC more expensive just to accommodate you.

One thing that was proposed was to limit the amount of skill bonuses slaves get to something like <ship's tech + 6>. So a tech 0 slave would get a maximum of slave mastery 6, radex 6 for example.

Any comments on that?