Ok, so there's been a lot of discussion about ways to improve PVP, alter the damage cap, etc.. Most of the ways pretty much eliminated SSB's having an advantage (how it should be but.. meh I digress)... So I was thinking about this, how can the damage cap be improved but without totally destroying the SSB build and making them cry?.. and came up with the following proposal:

Currently Damage cap is:

• Decks / 2
  
• (Rank + 19) / 2

Proposed Change:

• Decks
• Rank*2

So Currently if you have 1500 decks your damage cap is 750, under the proposed change with 1500 decks your damage cap would be 1500 or Rank+19, whichever is larger. So if your rank 1000 with 900 decks, your damage cap would be 1800, but if your rank 1000 with 3000 decks, your damage cap is 3000.

Fairly basic and simple change, it still gives an 'advantage' to the smaller ships without being as absurd as it is or can be now and more of a meet in the middle idea..

This would make it extremely hard, both for newer players and also for the highest ranks, who are also generally the ones that have played the longest and already invested the most time into their ships.

At the lower end of the rank spectrum, 1 and 2-shotting ships would become the norm.
At the higher end, what has Shockwave done to you that you'd like to almost quadruple his damage cap?
What would be the inevitable natural result of building in such an extreme disincentive to rank?

As a result, I think the suggested changes are arguably much less balanced than the current system.

This not only punishes SSBs unfairly but gives LSBs a huge advantage over SSBs. This strategy would completely eliminate the usefulness of being a SSB. There are other ways to counter-balance the rather flawed damage cap mechanism for the SSBs, but this is not the way.

Damage cap = rank*2 would punish anyone for ranking up. You'll end up with even more low, slow/freeze-ranking SSBs

another day, another damage cap topic that completely fails.

yet again, for those who are not familiar with the history:

http://galaxylegion.com/wiki/index.php/ ... _%28PVP%29

if the OP had bothered to examine the record, it was clear that from the beginning the dev was completely disinterested in any system which would allow a 1-shot kill. the MINIMUM was 4-shots, and while the damage cap was nerfed a couple times in the first 14 months of the game, it has been stable ever since (month 40 in its current form by my reckoning). this does not mean that the damage cap is never going to change again, but it sure as heck won't be changed in the form that the OP suggests.

the other responders have already indicated how this will ENCOURAGE slow-ranking SSB's even more than the current system. quadrupling the damage cap of existing higher-ranked players is a sure way to see even more of them halc.ing up, choking off even more pvp at those levels.

So Remove the rank portion from it and just make damage cap = # of decks and eliminate rank from it, still bad but not nearly as bad as it is now. and I am totally open to hearing the ideas of all the defenders of the currently backwards broken flawed damage cap system might have to fix it...

And do not say it is not broken, when something like this viewtopic.php?f=7&t=40443&hilit=Shout can happen, it is BEYOND broke, that should NEVER happen in any self respecting PVP game...

It might not have been the best Idea, but it still allows for smaller ship builds to have a slight advantage, but nothing absurd like we have started to see (see link to post above)

Let's take this to a perspective where this idea is immediately applied to the average SSB & LSB:

SSB

-Rank 300 has 319 decks fitted to his ship.
-Damage cap changes according to the quote above
-SSB Rank 300 effectively takes 88.1% LESS damage than before (159.5 damage cap reduced to 19)
-SSB autoranks to 320
-Damage cap loophole becomes discovered and everyone becomes "invincible"
-PvP ruined severely

LSB

-Rank 300 has 1k decks fitted to his ship
-Damage cap changes to the quote above
-LSB rank 300 effectively takes 40% MORE damage than before (500 damage cap increased to 700)
-LSB terribly screwed over by SSBs
-LSB autoranks to 1,001
-Damage cap loophole allows him to become "invincible"
-PvP ruined severely

again from history: http://galaxylegion.com/wiki/index.php/ ... _%28PVP%29


the rank portion was ADDED because of the scout of mass destruction build which folks were then complaining about.

Please stop linking your precious damage cap history page. It's incomplete, and you weren't around for the first change (based on your forum registration, I question if you were even here for the second change).

Now, as for the original proposal here... Seriously bad idea. ANY value based on solely decks or rank is no better than what we have now. The ONLY way to fix things (and yes, it IS broken right now) is to incorporate both rank AND decks, in addition to hull, in one value.

How about this equation, Darth?

No. You can't use a straight hull value. And you DEFINITELY can't use it as a multiplier. That's sorta what the original cap was, and it was changed because adding hull made your ship weaker. That's why I made the (Decks+Rank)/2+(Hull*X%) suggestion. While I do advocate higher caps across the board, using your formula would change my cap from 2999 to 16,475. Which is a bit... Extreme, to say the least. Merely changing the damage cap isn't going to fix PvP, though it's a starting point. The rewards need to improve substantially as well. Among other necessary tweaks. Heck, I'll even support Gaga's crit-hit suggestion if it was part of a general PvP overhaul.

Personally I still think an equation that takes Decks out of it is optimal, Attack and Defense should be all that matters.

If anything to compensate for smaller ships being able to 'manuever better" and in a depreciating % bonus to defense based on ship size, nothing huge, maybe start off at 10% and work down to 0% ..

This was just an idea that I had hoped would meet in the middle somewhere.

That middle is a repaired damage cap. You have to have a damage cap. Attack and defense come into play in the Damage calculation, and without a damage cap there, you end up with one-hit-wonders and completely invincible ships.

we don't basically have those already? well no one shot ships, but..

nope, i was not here for either change. but i read thru EVERY topic that mentioned SSB's and the damage cap, so it is as complete as anyone reading the forum posts can make it. i was a bit more selective on the post-2011 complaint topics, but the gist of the CHANGES previously made (and much of the justification / dev philosophy) to the damage cap is all there.

feel free to point me to a topic that you feel i have unjustly excluded from the history and i will be happy to see what i can kludge in. i am just tired of 'suggestions' that don't take into account the history of what has already happened in the game (as the OP of this topic keeps doing repeatedly).

i would be okay with a nerf of the damage cap as long as other elements of PvP were also adjusted concurrently, but not if that is the only thing that gets nerfed.

I try to stay out of this because in the end, any change (or not made) is going to make some group of people feel like the got the short end.

That said, as with many things in our life, things need to adapt for the times. What was good and made sense 100 years ago might not make sense now. What made sense 2 years ago in this game, doesn't necessarily make sense now. Not changing and adapting for the times, to me, is the worst option.

i would agree with that. but suggestions for change would likely be more successful if they kept in mind what swayed the dev previously. i gave an example of how one might do that here:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=41285&start=65

some of the elements of PvP that need to be adjusted (preferably all in tandem in order for the 'shaft effect' to be minimized):

- damage cap (and perhaps critical hits that can do multiples of damage cap)
- crew effects (add some kind of cost, either in upkeep or in damage cap)
- high-rank combat ranges
- pvp rewards (medals, battle market artis)
- monthly leaderboards (with monthly prizes of GP ?)
- combat rep monthly reset (no resting on your laurels)
- more contested planets (perhaps rank-restricted ?)

One way to consider this is how exactly would we like to rationalize the damage cap concept.
If, for example, we consider deck to be the surface area of a ship and that damage cap is based on the cross section of the ship(which is directly relational to the surface area if the shape is defined).
Then, if we consider hull to be a volume wise increase, then we can rationalize, in extreme examples, a rough two third power increase of cross section from the value of hull. That is to say, 8x hull means 4x cap.
At the same time, as the deck is on the "inside", the bigger the deck amount, the less damage cap increase would be for the first x amount of hull, it only grow the the two third value as the hull get big enough.

For example: If we take the shape to be a perfect cube(for ease of calculation) and deck is exactly 1 square yard each, and that each passive hull is exactly 1 cubic yard:
For a 600 deck ship: the ship itself have a cross-section of 100 square yard and a volume of 1000 cubic yard. Current formula says 300 cap.
If it had 1000 passive hull, the volume increase is exactly 2x, increasing cross section to 2^(2/3)=159%, ~479 cap
If it had 3000 passive hull, the volume increase is exactly 4x, increasing cross section to 4^(2/3)=252%, ~756 cap
If it had 7000 passive hull, the volume increase is exactly 8x, increasing cross section to 400%, ~1200 cap
Specifically, the hull to damage cap relation here is (hull+1000)^(2/3)

For a 2400 deck ship: the ship itself have a cross-section of 400 square yard and a volume of 8000 cubic yard. Current formula states 1200 cap, on par with 600 deck ship with 7000 passive hull.
A 1000 passive hull here, however, is only a 1/8 increase in volume and 8% increase in damage cap, roughly 98 damage to 1298 total, less than the 179 increase on its smaller cousin.
A 3000 passive hull would be 1484 damage cap, a 284 increase as opposed to the 456 of its smaller cousin.

Now, realistically a deck might be more like a square mile(a 6k deck ship is only 31x31x31 miles, it's not terribly big), that'd allow 74,000 times more hull to be fitted for the same % damage cap increase, meaning 74 million passive hull for the 59% on the 600 ship if each hull is kept to one cubic yard. It can be bigger of course but that's something else to consider entirely.

If each deck is one square mile of surface area thou, we can forget about the crew issue. Assume each crew require 100 cubic yard of space for whatever, even a 150 deck ship can support 6.8 billion crews. I don't think anyone is even getting close.

Well, now that I actually did the numbers, I think that realism isn't that bad, even if all things are considered the change would not be that significant... Maybe we really should go for something rational.

I have no issue with there being some sort of damage cap, but I disagree that it should be based upon the size of the defensive ship. How much damage my ship does when I attack should be based on my ship / cannons / attack only. The defense of the ship I am attacking should only determine how well they can defend against and reduce the damage that my ship deals out. I concede that a smaller ship may be harder to hit, and since we have no hit/miss system that this should be reflected in some manner, thus the suggestion of a % bonus to defense based on size of ship.

Any form of damage cap based upon the size of the "Defending" ship is completely backwards and illogical, which is why I am so argumentatively against it.

The damage cap MUST be based on the defender's ship, otherwise there would be one shot kills. I think we can all agree that onesies in PvP would be a reeeaaallly bad idea.