Annihilator wrote:

once you see AoE damage on medium weapons (or multi-target-hits), you have to engage with mechs, just to be able to carry them.

Actually, just this afternoon I put a Med lazer on my Baph assulat bot. I had to spend about 10k EP in reactor and get a coreactor module, but the only thing I had to remove was the plate to clear up a leg slot and remove 1 small lazer. This was with standard med lazer and coreactor. If I had access to t3 small and med lazers I would probably be able to get (2) med and (3) small lazers fitted.

During field testing the Med laser was still missing +30% against other assualt bots because precision is still only 6, but once I get that toto 10 that should be negliable.

But on topic, light bots dont even have med slots, so yeah.

3,702

(268 replies, posted in General discussion)

... than agin, it can't hurt to have a few billion NIC to buy kernels to help that along either.

3,703

(268 replies, posted in General discussion)

There really should be a post limit on threads, after a few pages all the good comments are in and all that is left is rhetoric and rehashing.


This post is a pefect example.

3,704

(21 replies, posted in General discussion)

Jita wrote:

Inter corp pvp? With 800 sequers? Spin more pls.

I wasn't spinning sheet. I meant intercorp as in destroyed by someone within their own corp for fraud purposes...

but you bring up another good point that I was making in the Mech vs. Assualt thread, which is most mech pilots can't get any practice because the bots are too expensive to lose.

So another advantage, in addition to the healthy NIC return, was being able to practice PVP and actually get paid for it!

Even if the target mech was empty, as it would have to be for profit, the attacking bots would still get the benefit of using terrain and such; if the target bot was being actually being used and not just sitting there.

3,705

(268 replies, posted in General discussion)

What Shadey is saying, is that the PVP action is slow. The Bot market was artificially enhanced by blowing up bots for insurance. That loop hole was closed a couple of days ago when Ins. was turned off, but there was still spare NIC floating around for Corps to continue to purchase materials. Those corporations will now just increase their own mining ops, and alpha miners will have a very very small market to sell ore to, which will drive prices down, even though resources are more scarce.

Lack of Ins. is also going to put a hurt on 'casual' PVP as many players will not be able to afford to lose bots just 'roaming' around.

All around, the exploit, and the response are going to reshape the game.

3,706

(5 replies, posted in Feature discussion and requests)

Mudder -

Right around launch it was really easy to make money selling low level kernals to NPC buy orders, but it was better selling them on the market. Dev's dropped the buy order amount and the lack of new players dried up the player market. The EP method of skilling also stops anyone from creating alts; basically the majority of the player base has moved beyond needing what new players can supply.

The starting experince really needs to be looked at again based on current subscription rates.

3,707

(268 replies, posted in General discussion)

Attacking the exploiters isn't productive.

Taking away the lesson that working in the spirit of the mechanics is more important than pointing fingers.

The Perpetuum game community is just too small for 'Malicious Compliance' with the rule set.

3,708

(21 replies, posted in General discussion)

All the exploited bots were blown up in PVP, it was just inter-corp PVP.

I don't see how they could tell the difference unless.

1) they track the time from when the bot was produced til it was killled, even then you 'could' have been waiting to do a roam on that batch, so the time could still be short even for a valid PVP death.

2) If they track who gets the killing blow on each bot. They do keep track of the 'number' of killing blows, but do they track which bot was blown up by which character.

Even if they did track that, they would have to cross reference thousands of bot kills to corporate rosters to see if you were killed 'internally'. They would also need to know alliance members and NAP just incase.

And, tehcnially, it doesn't matter if the bot died in PVP or exploit, the 'profit' from losing the bot was unintended. Since some corps exploited this greatly, now anyone who got some profit has to pay for it; or payback for it.

No, the exploitation didn't do anyone any favors.

3,709

(268 replies, posted in General discussion)

I was reading on the archived Beta forums about players and corps that would exploit bugs to exaggerate and highlight those errors to encourage the Dev's to fix them as quickly as possible.

In this thread, I'm reading that this was a known issue for some time, but no action was taken by the devs to corret it.

The difference now however, is this is not beta, the game is live. Exploiting bugs, even with the intention of making the game better, ruins the active game balance. Beta wasn't a problem because everything was going to be reset when it went live anyway.

The devs had no choice but to 'reset' the exploit.

I 1000% agree that they should have done SOMETHING about it much much sooner, even if it was to suspend insurance until they could work out a better system. But large scale exploitation of the bug did not help the game.

The real losers are the smaller corps that 'dabbled' with the exploit, and not the mass exploiters, that probably didn't need the NIC anyway.

Directly at the devs - being 'honest' with us doens't change the fact that you too should bear some of the burden for not being more PROACTIVE. I was just thinking about how very little actual information is flowing from you to us about the game.

I think even a blog post like "Hey, we know about the Insurance thing and we are working on a resolution. We are watching for this activity, so please don't exploit it or we will be forced to take action against you."

would it be so hard to acutally open discussions with the community about these things? What are forums for anyway!?!

You can't please everyone; I really like this point, because now that the PVE players have left because they weren't listened to, the PVP players are now segmenting and leaving because aspects of the PVP are not what they want.

So, while you can't please everyone, you can however please no one.

Players are continually answering Container's issue with the game directly, he just doesn't care.

Let me boil it down so we can move on.

Roaming is a player initiated activity, there's no game mechanic that requires or directly rewards roaming; looting players is part of killing a bot not particular to roaming.

Up until this last patch, there was nothing that required any one to 'answer' the roam. The most effective answer to roaming is to watch the gates and retire to an outpost until the roamers left the Island. Even with the patch, and the new plants, your better off NOT guarding the plants to keep the location secret.

So, to counter the 'dockup' issue, players use fast bots to get onto the Island and catch group before they can get back home safe.

Fast Bot roaming becomes the defacto PVP activity in Perpetuum because its the only way to get any PVP action unless there is an Intrusion; I'll add that civil wars generate more and better PVP than either intrusions or roaming, but they are unpredictable smile

So, Container, I fully understand WHY you want mechs to be viable in roaming, its the ONLY consistent PVP action there is in the game.

The reason you are getting so much Anti-mech change pushback is because the state of roaming developed natuarally from the current game mechanics, but you want the devs to change game mechanics simply because you WANT to use a mech to roam.

Roaming with mechs isn't going to generate MORE PVP.

What you should be asking for is the devs to generate more opportunity where mechs do generate MORE PVP.

I fully expect container to ignore this post and continue his campaign. You see this type of thing in WoW all the time, where someone comes up with a totally crappy Rogue spec than generates any and alll arguements on the forums for why the devs need to buff the spec because its not viable. Not every bot is, or needs to be, useable for every activity.

nm

3,713

(26 replies, posted in General discussion)

Way to turn that frown upside down!

Redline... agreed.

I'm going to wait for this dev blog post that is supposed to be coming soon. Because we are just spinning around and rehashing but getting nowhere productive.

You CAN roam with mechs, I saw a group doing so last night. The issue is getting someone to actually engage you with said mech group.

What I think you keep envisioning is SOLO roam in a mech. Solo roam are only to try and gank some miner or catch another solo npc farmer, which you can do with a light bot.

The trouble with group mech roams is, no one is going to stick around to fight you, and why should they. Most players will try to get away from any roam, regardless of composition, if they don't think they can win.

3,716

(3 replies, posted in Q & A)

logarithmic scale

This is still just a bandaid for trying to get a mech into a 'roaming role'.

I agree with what you want, which is a mech that is more useful, but whats needed are more opportunities to use a mech, not changes in the mech itself.

Game is 99% roaming at the moment, so yes if you want to use a mech your are SOL sad

Maybe some objective that has the capability of 1-shotting light bots?

Something is getting lost in all the 'mechs can't roam' noise.

The majority of PVP at the moment are roams, so its understandable why players are trying to jam mechs into role.

If there were more non-roaming opportunities for PVP we wouldn't be discussing how to make a mech viable for roaming.

POS may change that, or may not. Is there going to be some incentive for actually attacking the POS other than just denying the POS (destroying it) to the owner?

Denying resources to your enemies is a good tactic, but if it doesn't have a direct effect on any strategic outcome, you again have to fall back to a motivation base on 'do it because we're supposed to destroy things'.

For instance if there was a POS that mines ore. Destroying it would stop your opponent from getting those ores, but why? If they can just buy the ore on the market you havn't weakened them at all. And further, why are you even trying to weaken them?

Currently the PVP intrusion events are not won or lost by game resources, but by numbers of players that can be fielded during the event.

Give corporations an objective that actually means something when it is denied to them; but not something they have to try to protect 24/7 (at least not while server pop is so low).

I think learn-2-play is actually a major component of the problem.

Taking your mech out to farm NPC's is not the same as using them in a PVP situation.

It has been agreed that Mech's are designed for specific uses in PVP, which are fairly rare.

Mechs bots are not too expensive, but fully PVP equiped mechs are too expensive for most corporate stooges to just practice with. An officer or ranked member may not get 'talked' to for destroying 10 or so mechs on the learning curve, but joe member isn't going to be allowed to do so. While insurance covered the cost of the bot (while it was active) it didn't do anything for the millions of NIC's worth of equipment; even standard equipment.

Yes, corps will give members mechs during intrusions, but they are too few and far between for players to acutally learn how to use them.


We need more incentive to 'train' players on mechs to make them more useful.

Campana wrote:

You're saying "99% of the pvp in this game are roams. Therefore roams should use mechs."

It ought to be "99% of the pvp in this game are roams. More different kinds of pvp should be introduced that favour mechs."

Perfect summation.

The OP is wrong in that this is not an 'equipment' or 'level' progression game, its a wealth and power progression game. Trying to measure your advancement by the bot you drive is doomed to failure.

Additionally, this is not a single player game. Not that solo players can't find a niche and have some fun, but the development and content is going to be aimed at corporation base play.

I think the game launched too early though. If things like player owned structures were in the game from the start corps would have had much clearer long term goals other then 'get and hold an outpost'. It will be much harder to get the people that left back, then it would have been to keep them.

3,721

(26 replies, posted in General discussion)

Alpha is very quiet, but there's still some life out in the beta islands.

POS... yes please.

But, what about green eggs and Ham. I hear Sam likes them.

Wraithbane wrote:

Well, the problem with that is, that as EVE has demonstrated, there are a lot more of us "fluffy, cuddly" CareBears than there are PvP types.

There is a well written thesis paper, which I don't have here at work, about player killers in MMO's. The summary is just what you would expect, although the author goes into some great detail about why, games can only support a limited number of player killers.

Now, the difference between this paper and Perp is that he is talking about gankers. Perp PVP is not truely or fully ganking; which in the context of the paper is non-consensual PVP. By entering the beta islands players are by default agreeing, or at least acknowleding they could be the target of PVP; even if they are trying to avoid it.

Eve has the issue where players can be ganked, the ganker just needs to be willing to accept the penalty of the action. This works because there are relatively few PK'ers/gankers in relation to the population as a whole; that is the Thesis paper predicts that Eve will support this because of a sustainable ratio.

If Perp were to implement a non-consensual PVP mechanic, that is open PVP, then I would agree that the current server imbalance of gankers to carebears would result in an immediate departure from the game of all non-pvp aligned players.

As it stands now, it simply the lack of pve content that is reducing the Carebear population, and not the PVP aspects.

Edit: the thesis paper is not mine, felt it needed clarification as I reread the post

There is also the yet to be implemented AOE damage when your bot blows up as well as artillary which should also cause AOE damage; and suicide bots.

The changes aren't to stop large scale encounters, just to stop them from all standing in the same area; which is how I describe blob.

I think the term is now however being used for ANY overwhelming use of force, which I don't think is appropriate. Its is totally possible to have a large army being controlled by squad and not be a unthinking blob of bots.

hehe... of course, give an inch ...

Seriously though, there was a change to the way minerals are distributed, its not uncalled for than to look at the way another aspect of mining is implemented.