Now what would happen if the game never had Durtanium brackets or Xcharge cells? The only way to get more hull and shields was seasonal mods, NPC mods, mission chain mods and the +% ones all remain.

Immediate consequences include:
-eliminate the ridiculous e needed for high rankers to disable each other
Main issue I've heard people raise about higher ranks?

-PvP efficiency is normalized (remember currently 20k atk vs 20k def does the same %DmgCap as 100k atk vs 100k def).
Treadmilling becomes inefficient and waste of time (you would only survive for about a minute without repairing)
No quadratic amounts of damage needed to take a ship out even if you match them in strength
SSBs get nerfed along with LSBs, but still have the advantage of low damage caps

-exotica is actually takeable even if someone loaded all of the top 50 ships on it and went offline (mostly unimportant)


-Geminis and Gammacrons still function as normal since they are based on total hull and do % damage.


Issues:
Late game at high ranks, because hull is mostly fixed (it can grow based on NPCs, but they have visibliity limits), % dmp cap can become a significant portion of total hull
Quick fix: Include higher tier PvP awards and NPC rewards like the CK69 that give +% hull bonus (will be significant since multiplicative)



Any other ideas? Bit curious how the game would have progressed otherwise?

The biggest issue is it will competently screw new players. who will never have the chance to build up to such massive hulls. Do you want to be the guy with say 15K hull going against the guy with 500K? Also this would make Aegis Capacitor REALLY REALLY good. not for installing but scrapping you can trade a small amount of sheild amps directly for ctp. This may be an additional issue.

How can you have 500k hull if durts brackets don't exist.... Pretty sure you can't even pass 100k with the current mods.
The current problem is as you describe, high ranks have 500k hull BECAUSE of durts.

And it's just a theoretical stand point on the PvP meta, I'm not interested in discussing the economics of the game as part of it.

See the one thing wrong with this is probably the high ranks you've been speaking to, and i try to say that with respect and a straight face.





If there's a high rank player complaining about the energy used to disable a player then;

a) they built their ship wrong in terms of investing into adequate engineers
b) they built their ship wrong in terms of investing into adequate tac officers
c) they didn't build their aph in line with their rank gains

I know of maybe 3 ships out of 20 in my range that have ships that would be annoying to disable, but only annoying in that it might take 800 or so attacks to kill them, without debuffing them so that's at most 4k energy.

Most of my targets, and my targets are true high rank players... all Rank 2400+ most don't have ships that would survive 200 attacks due to their deck sizes and my attack stat.



Now that said, yes PvP will only continue to get more annoying and time consuming without some new aspect introduced in regards to damage calculations & honestly the best idea for that has been the idea of new weapons(max of 2 or 3 per ship, make them super expensive, like 5-10 Bil upkeep per) that have a proc of say 2% each and when they trigger, they do 2% damage to the total shield+hull of your enemy.

That way, if you get a bunch of your mates to help you disable an enemy player on exotica, you can sink them suckers fairly quickly.

All good ideas, my idea would be impossible to implement anyways, but I think would've made for an interesting difference in the PvP meta.

In the end, I'm just hoping one day Dan brings about some kind of interesting change because it's stalled of enough as is.

so am i reading this right?

you want a change in the game cause you failed to build your ship proper and you are getting whacked hard by some of us higher ranks for badges and you know that hitting back is a waste cause of the damage that done differently between the ships and then knowing there atleast 500k to maybe more hull sitting there looking at you and then preying they are not online to defend..


and as to kirks comment i agree i hit almost everything i find on my bt going both directions and there is only 3 ships on my bt i prefer not to hit and it has nothing to do with there hull or strength it is there damn damage cap they have warlord really damn low damage cap then you add his attack and defense making his ship a pure beast. and he just an example

i don't totally disagree with sun, however i think i could fairly state your rank versus power and attack stat may very well be at high end of the bell curve...therefore a statement of a 'well-built' ship in terms of attack and energy means different things to different people.

for anyone at the top of the power pyramid almost all facets of the game are easy in relativistic terms. SAme is true in real life. I think the top layer loses touch with the common day to day people and the average/standard player.

It has been theorized previously that having 150k ap would put someone in a very thin slice of upper echelon ships. I personally have quite a chunk over this and know many others in similar state. Again, i would confirm/agree that no one i know of takes more than 4k e to kill, and most about 25% of that or less--but again in the same state of affairs i would ponder how oft this is the condition.

Perhaps the extentsion of the argument is how much time would a reasonable person want to spend to ensure a kill on the average ships of their bt. If we approach a limit towards several hundred hits on the majority, then factor in friends, alliances, lag, and other such consideration, balanced with cap -geminies-treadmilling...the whole concept becomes, imho, very UNfun.

Think this is where trinity is going-not to put words in his mouth, but trend is towards lack of fun and time expense for the majority.

As an aside, rank is certainly not always an indicator of power...nor is time played. So to say all the high ranks any given ship sees SHOULD be stronger is a miasmic argument at best.

I believe Koolaid may speak some truth. The average player does not get enjoyment out of dropping 2k+ energy in order to get a couple badges. I'm not sure there is a fix to this, but an addition that would be nice would be to at least see what percentage your opponent is at. At least this way you'd know if you were being treadmilled. I think people would be more inclined to hit ships if they knew their efforts weren't fruitless. But what do I know, 70% of my bt is halced so maybe there is no change that will help.

You should reread my posts. I'm doing perfectly fine myself. I don't see why you had to resort to a personal attack. It was just a point brought up along the way during a heated discussion about GL PvP elsewhere on the web in my spare time while talking with someone. As I said, it's high rank vs high rank. If you look at my bright, intrusive and big sig, you'd notice I'm a low rank. And the whole point of the theoretical idea was specifically to avoid the bullet sponginess of endgame ships. It's not a "change" as you say. I'm asking what you thought PvP would have been if since GL started if there never was durts and cells to begin with. the question is, would it have been more successful? It's a big question, and the reason why I brought the topic up, as its kind of an interesting prospect.

But yes I agree anything dies as long as you're willing to kill it. I myself don't know how high rank PvP works other than what I hear a few people complain about, but from what Kirk said, seems like some people are overexaggerating the "unkillable issue".

so much truth to that ...


erk no. treadmilling is perfectly fine. if your bt is congested with halcs .. change your bt.

as for the original idea:

this would have just meant that most ships would have woken up disabled. no biggie for those of us who are willing to play the game that way .. but given the amount of whinging from those already posting on my ship comm from just daily badging .. the loss rate of new players would have been much more than with the way things turned out. ship.building strategy would lose an entire leg of the 4 that currently exist (hull-shield, attack-defense, scan-cloak, damage cap).

lol I have no problem changing my bt, but I'm also not an average player. I'd still think a % health or something of that effect would be a great addition. Just about any other pvp game I have ever played has had some way of telling where your opponent lies with their health.

the mystery is the ONLY thing that makes PvP at all interesting as it is !

This.. I've had people give up on hitting me at 10k health left

I can say this, no xcells or brackets would make modules a lot more realistic and useful. In tandem you would need to curve prisoners and helmsmen as well. OTherwise the endgame are ships with huge attacks fighting ships with obviously limited hull--making pvp easier and predictable. If there were no xcells or brackets, then perhaps making shields and hull expansive/proportionate to some combination of installed items and rank, then you have more of your classic level up for more power.

Doing any of this though, belies the main concept in GL..arti= power. If we took away the resultant effects of what artifacts do and have done for people who built their ships well, then i think the motivation to play would drop immensely. You would get a different and more generic scope of pvp. It would go from sometimes tedious and lengthy to a series of quick brutal and highly frequent deaths with no meaning.

Beating a pack of dead horses..we are too far down the road to fix pvp. Too many people would be pissed off from any change. Its unreconcilable without a major overhaul. Cap is silly, researched modules are mostly worthless, growth is unchecked, hoarding and concentration of ap wealth continues over time--you name it. New players choose from slow ranking to avoid being slapped like a b, or halc like a maddog. Older players lament lack of targets, and content.

When the best advice to players is more ap and dont add decks, the game kind of loses strategy i think. Now saying it and doing it are totally different things, but its not rocket science to know what is there.

Perhaps making crew more flexible then what they do would be a partial answer as well. Perhaps longer lasting traps, artis, etc. that cannot have their effects removed. Would at least make some pvp more intriguing if you can't get rid of a debuff for 2 hours.