Says the low rank, slow ranker...
Seriously, just rank up, scan and actually do stuff.
SSBs (of which I am not one) are irrelevant if you know what you are doing.

Probably the most elegant and easiest to implement proposal I have seen to make the SSB choice more balanced

also a bit of delicious evilness to it

uh, what 'balance' ?

the whole point of SSB is to provide a PvP benefit. you remove the benefit ... you remove the entire ship build class. removing choice = loss of players.

balance as in having the advantages matching an appropriate disadvantage.

There is no "point" of the SSB class except what players choose to utilize it as. SSB is highly advantageous for PvP due to the specifics of how the game mechanism works. I wont mention specifics because that's been beaten like a dead horse.
When starting out, SSB is low advantage and highly disadvantaged but over time the advantage gets larger and the disadvantage will virtually disappear.

Balance would be a disadvantage that grows proportional in some way to the advantage over time.

Implement this and two things will happen:

SSBs with plenty of ship bots will whack them on, and add all the mods they couldn't fit before, losing very little.
Lots of people will quit as you essentially shaft over the work and time they put into their ships

So all that would be accomplished would be a loss of players in an already dwindling population... What a wonderful proposal this is.


If you truly want to do something to balance PvP, provide incentives to do it and somehow solve the issue of rampant halcing

We could also talk about lots of people quitting because they are outclassed by a different playstyle that they cannot compete well with.
But both of those statements are a bit of an overreaction.

This wouldnt actually really nerf things. Take a look at some sample numbers, the difference would not make as much of a difference as it sounds in most cases

SSB is not killing the game! the impact these players have on your daily lives is so negligible that it borders on pointless to even bother changing it. Your death counts DON'T matter, and it's perfectly ok not to return badges on everyone who kills you or kill everyone who appears on your tab, life goes on.

It's time to start suggesting ways to discourage slow ranking and educate players properly instead of wasting more time on this debate, put your heads into something useful.

Give less of a sh!t about yourself, and see what good you can do.

I'm not sold yet, but that billik is slowing winning pts with me...oh yeah

that makes zero sense. my ship would go from doing 2000 damage on a high deck rank 1k to doing less than 500 damage, meaning it would take me 4x the number of hits. by taking away the attack power of a SSB build, you make it completely pointless, as every ship will be just as 'tough', wasting all of the effort of those who have spent years to get to the point where they can take advantage of their build. so yeah, people will quit if SSB gets nerfed in this fashion.


yep to both of these. if there is no point to the SSB, then they will add decks, and become the same ship as those already with fat arses. so, the only difference will be time spent in the game. gee, is there any ulterior motive here ?


outclassed ? only in being tougher to disable. someone with more decks has the advantage in hacking, scanning for cloaked planets, taking down heavily defended planets, etc. an attacker who gets frustrated when targeting a SSB on the battle tab just needs to learn to pick better targets. if they quit, it is because they are not willing to put any thought into their ship build ... which is a recipe for disaster anyway.

there are plenty of ways to 'balance' things without fracking around with SSB.s. going with my previous bane crew effect idea, instead of an npc effect, you could have a un.cageable trap that elimiates all crew effects in PvP. make it a battle market arti that burns off blue badges. besides making SSBs relatively weaker than LSBs, it would also 'balance' high rank PvP.

on the module side, have a size 75 cloak module that provides cloak based on a percentage of decks. wow, more crit.hacks for the LSBs ! and force the SSB to make a hard decision about what they would want to give up to install the mod.

Let's face it... The only true advantage SSB's have is that most people are lazy.

And finally we come down to the crux of the whole SSB argument...

People can disable SSBs, they just don't want to spend the energy to do so

hmmmm...could be time to change name to ssb hunter....

But as Cen Dant pointed out, as you gain ranks, the hacking/scanning/attack disadvantage virtually disappears, so over time, you have a ship that is both incredibly hard to disable and able to do everything a larger ship can do (albeit with a bit of swapping).

In the current system, SSB starts out with some major disadvantages that effectively counteract its hard-to-kill nature. This creates options for players, and is a very fair trade off. Unfortunately, over time, the disadvantage becomes smaller and smaller, while the advantages become larger:

• you can fit more "permanent" stuff on your boat
• you deal with less swapping
• you are less vulnerable to crit-hacks
• you suffer less upkeep than ships in your rank range
• every 4 ranks = more planets = more ap = more hull * low damage cap! Nom nom nom!

If you wonder why people are always howling about SSB, it is because of this -- because of the frustration that there is currently no long-term advantage to building a larger ship in GL and no indication that this will ever change, which basically forces everybody who wants a truly "elite" ship into the same exact mold. This is probably the thing I dislike most about this game, tbh. People who just "gotta have" every module, or who want to create monstrous, base-destroying, planet-eating Capital Ships get a small, static bump to their stats (quickly overshadowed by TOs and Helmsmen if they have decent production)... along with a huge daily price tag and the inability to go toe-to-toe with smaller ships. A few thousand extra attack and defense seems like a lot at rank 450, but long term, it's almost nothing, and in reality a net-negative when you take damage cap and upkeep into account. Arti is king, we all know that, but variety is the spice of life, and there should be different ways of building a truly killer ship.

And while Bongo rightfully points out that many PVPers are lazy, the truth is, if everybody starting or resetting today were to choose the SBB path, it would effectively kill PVP in the game. Sure, Koolaid, Flagitious, and Billik would probably still PVP because bloodlust, but once you have your Tri-Blasters and such, the rewards for PVP are fairly uninspiring, and most people don't want to click for several minutes on somebody who may or may not be treadmilling them for a single red badge. You think halcs are bad now (they really aren't)... lol!

I never put it fully into writing, but pongo has just clearly encapsulated the real issue at hand in the game, imho. Very briefly and well written, I could not possibly agree more.

yes, the disadvantage disappears over time. but the bigger ships have had the advantage in attack power, higher scanning, and planet thefts for a longer period, gaining that much more AP per hour. as many before have stated, every ship is a SSB eventually (100% damage cap rating). this means that high-rank PvP is energy-intensive and not really worth the rewards. i get it. but focusing on SSB does not address the real problem. every rank 5000 ship will be a killer ship, and most will be SSB or close enough.

IMMENSE ARTI PRODUCTION at high ranks *IS* the problem as it boosts crew and hull/shield arti effects to a much higher magnitude than ship module effects. so what should be looked at is suggestions that address THAT issue.

> i've already suggested a trap effect which eliminates crew effects for attack and defense (un.cageable so there is a chance for the opponent to take advantage).
> or you could have a module that requires crew members to be sacrificed to operate, say a scan module that has the ability to give a 10% scan boost for 4 hours at the cost of 1000 of each crew type.
> endless hull can be an issue as well, hence one of my other suggestions to have a trap / weapon that will bypass shield to empty hull to zero (and prevent the use of repair nanos for 5 minutes). an SSB that does not carry enough shield and relies solely on hull / nanos to stay alive in PvP will get wrecked.

Exactly this (especially the underlined portion).

Given enough time to rank up, every ship will wind up as SSB - the current low-ranked SSBs just reach that point sooner. Even if you have 5,000 decks, your cap won't matter if you have 200,000+ defense and 1,000,000+ hull to go with it.

Keep in mind that without proper artifact production and time spent on collecting artifacts, low-ranked SSBs are fairly easy to take down. I sometimes eat them for breakfast

I agree with you, in that I do not think SSBs in and of themselves are a problem. I have said this many times: SSBs aren't broken, LSBs are (I have also kvetched many a time about PVP's diminishing rewards-for-clicks ratio as you rank, so I suspect we are generally in agreement there, as well).

So, nothing against SSBs -- if somebody wants to make a high-AP ship that gives other players carpal tunnel, that's great for them. But IMO, the "increase AP, keep your decks as low as you can stand it" model should not be the only path to building a great ship.

Yes, you can point to beastly, existing LSB ships as proof that there are elite ships out there with tons of decks, and it is true -- they are elite. But those ships have also been around for years, often with ridiculously high AP, and chances are they'd be running around with at least 2-3k fewer decks if they had it to do all over again. And very, very few ships have (or will) ever make it past rank 5k or so where "everybody starts becoming SSB," so that argument is kinda silly. Furthermore, at this time, there is almost no current player with a solid understanding of game mechanics who would recommend to a beginner that they view researched weapons, defenses, shields, hull, or energy modules as anything but stop-gap measures. That has to tell you something.

Currently the only golden path is "More AP, Minimal Decks," which is a problem, IMO.

Btw, I have offered amazing, well thought-out suggestions for alternative builds, so I'm not just complaining.

I agree, and have made at least one awesome suggestion to help reduce clickage against endless hull.

the last time the damage cap formula was changed was in early april 2011. there are still players around that started before then. are they the majority ? i think not. so the majority of players have had the current damage cap formula to work with for over 3 years. those who plastered on thousands of decks before then ... have more than likely built up their APH over the last 3 years to become an 'elite' ship. there are 4 ships in the game at 4k rank or higher ... all of them are beasts. 11 are over rank 3k ... none of those are lightweights. damage cap should not be an issue for any of them. is there anyone in the top50 (all over rank 2k) that is a pushover ?


Hallucinations' ship does not fit this model ... and yet he can bid 1 million ctp equivalent on a dyson.

i think you can still build a deck-heavy monster that can throw their weight around in PvP ... look at elerian's ship, for example. you just have to be smart about which objectives you aim for. a ship built for heavy attack at an earlier rank gets to invade nicer planets, get better base drops, uses up less energy in NPC'ing and PvP'ing. you save credits on repairing broken models by avoiding swapping. you can put on the least efficient scan modules to scan to grey at a substantially higher scan value than SSBs. your ONLY weakness is that your damage cap is higher, but you pile on the defense mods that SSBs can not afford, and you can compensate for that.

basically, anyone who puts some thought into their ship build can make any type of ship build work for them. building a SSB makes zero sense if you are not interested in PvP. if you do not go on regular scan runs, a LSB might not be for you. again, the real issue is that at high-ranks, ship modules do not measure up to the crew and hull/shield from artifacts. addressing that issue would allow folks to build their ship however they please.

I can dig that!

thoughts on the following:
making the damage cap rank + 519/2
basing the damage cap off of something besides decks
for example rank and days played and a constant
2r + dp
if(r <= 200) or (dp < 120)
5r + dp
could scale for low ranks

edit: scaling modules with rank?