Go through and balance GSF. Tired of getting 1 shotted RIGHT AFTER SPAWNING!!!!!

 

Kind of BS and ruins the game.

Go through and balance GSF. Tired of getting 1 shotted RIGHT AFTER SPAWNING!!!!!

 

Kind of BS and ruins the game.

If you are getting one-shotted 'right after spawning' this is something you can learn to avoid, and has little to do with game balance.

 

I will assume you are in TDM, because it is highly unlikely to happen in Dom.

 

If this is happening:

• At the START of a TDM match...
  
  • Watch at the start of a match for red text to say <Player Name> has Damage Overcharge
    
  • This is your signal to AVOID THAT PLAYER until DO runs out or someone kills them
    
  • Hit TAB or use E and your cursor to go through the visible enemy ships that are within sensor range to find the one named in the announcement
    
  • Gunships are the most likely ship to one-shot you in this circumstance, so if you are advancing, look for cover and get behind it until you have a clearer view of the battlefield
    

  [*]During the MID-MATCH

  • If your team is being beaten badly, they are likely to be pushed back to your center spawn.
    
  • You have TWO other spawn points, pick one and spawn there.
    
  • Do not fly directly at the enemy
    
  • Go grab some nearby powerups and attack from the edge or behind
    
  • It is often very difficult or impossible to overcome a significant team-strength defecit, so learn to take something positive from the match in terms of your personal performance.
    

  [*]Learn

  and get them first yourself!

_

There are many situations that arise when you are taking fire from multiple sources simultaneously, particularly if you have left yourself out in open space or get caught without your Shield/Engine maneuver.

 

Everyone gets blown up in GSF at one point or another. Games between skilled players often feature many player deaths, because the margin for error is slim.

 

Start getting better by learning solid techniques

.

 

- Despon

I never understood why the flagship/battleships are not firing in TDM, compared to Dom, which works as some sort of protection against spawncamping. Is it because the devs feared it would encourage over the top defensive play (camping with gunships behind the flagships once you have a solid lead ...)?

I never understood why the flagship/battleships are not firing in TDM, compared to Dom, which works as some sort of protection against spawncamping. Is it because the devs feared it would encourage over the top defensive play (camping with gunships behind the flagships once you have a solid lead ...)?

 

Because teams would get a one or two point lead and then just hide behind the cap ships for the entire game.

 

They used to behave like this, and people abused it.

Actually, from my own extensive personal gsf experience....no team with a lead ever reverted to their spawn points for protection. At least in my 13.5 k matches i have played in.

 

What they tended to do, because one team overwhelmed another....the weaker team tended to use the cap ships as protection.

 

Thus, extending the match a bit more. And making it difficult for the dominant team.

 

Since..it is a total death match..i mean come on. It's in the name. People convinced the devs to remove the turrets in TDM. So, the weaker teams cant hide behind those blasters.

 

That is why they removed them. No other reason.

 

Little bit of real history of gsf there for ya.

 

Actually, from my own extensive personal gsf experience....no team with a lead ever reverted to their spawn points for protection. At least in my 13.5 k matches i have played in.

 

What they tended to do, because one team overwhelmed another....the weaker team tended to use the cap ships as protection.

 

Thus, extending the match a bit more. And making it difficult for the dominant team.

 

Since..it is a total death match..i mean come on. It's in the name. People convinced the devs to remove the turrets in TDM. So, the weaker teams cant hide behind those blasters.

 

That is why they removed them. No other reason.

 

Little bit of real history of gsf there for ya.

 

 

Nope it actually was because teams were abusing the Cap ships after they got a lead. This actually happened daily on The Bastion for the couple of months they were still on.

Actually, from my own extensive personal gsf experience....no team with a lead ever reverted to their spawn points for protection. At least in my 13.5 k matches i have played in.

 

I'm glad they fixed it early enough for you to have never seen it. It was ludicrously exploitative behavior. Getting a small lead and turtling hardcore is a strategy of some concern today, but may have some counters with powerups and stuff, and is both very rare and legitimately difficult to pull off. But when you had cap ship turrets backing you up, it was truly ludicrous, trivial to exploit, and made for much more degenerate games than anything we see on live today.

 

Thus, extending the match a bit more. And making it difficult for the dominant team.

 

There's problems with that too. Broadly, the powerups are simple not good enough to compensate in these situations, and I don't really think a game where a team is being capship farmed is such an excellent example of a game that it needs to go on indefinitely.

 

That being said- I was never in favor of the unilateral disabling of capital ship turrets. The devs made other good changes to try to help truly new players- such as making it so that if you never selected a spawn, you would spawn randomly- but a system-wide warning if the score delta grew to more than, say, 10, followed by the enabling of capital ship turrets wouldn't be the end of the world. Even if there was a powerup that would spawn that would disable them again for a period of time. Basically, any system set up to break the camp and allow a meaningful regroup, without giving a huge tactical reward to the losing side, would be better in the games where there's a huge difference in skill gap.

 

But if the choices are "capship turrets on" and "capship turrets off" for TDM, I choose off, and I'm glad the devs did too. I just wish there was a better middle ground.

Let me preface this by saying that I'm ok with the system as is until a better alternative that allows for regrouping without exploiting is implemented. Baddies like myself will get farmed and I don't think turning on capship turrets is the way to help me get better at the game. That being said, in a "real" Star Wars space battle, I'm not sure that retreating to the defense of a capital ship isn't a valid tactic... but the enemy would have tactics of their own if that happened, like advancing their capital ships closer to engage, or sending in heavier fighters/bombers to hit the armored targets. I don't think this idea is feasible in GSF though. because at the very least no one wants this to become NPC vs NPC battles. I'm also not sure of the range on cap ship turrets, though it almost seems an ideal role for the tier 2 gunship using slugs and protons. But I digress.

 

I think the real problem is that some people just don't like deathmatch. Probably the same people who dislike arenas on the ground. I think the voice overs do a reasonable job at setting the stage for the TDM battles, and I'm excited to learn what this Iokath TDM will be like. But with 50% of maps being deathmatches after GU5.6, I think what GSF needs next content wise is another objective based game mode. (After some tutorial improvements along the lines of what has been proposed by many smarter pilots than myself.)

I'm also not sure of the range on cap ship turrets

 

10km. But after "capship dentistry" back on Bastion, where we could meaningfully destroy enough turrets to farm food ships on spawn, the devs correctly upped the health of them. They are still destroyable, but a team of gunships will have a hard time destroying even three in an entire match. If the turrets were meant to be an interactable mechanic, they would have much lower health, lower damage and armor piercing, and the ability to group respawn after a time.

 

I think what GSF needs next content wise is another objective based game mode.

 

GSF could really use a new game mode, that's for damned sure. I wonder if there's a game mode that could be played on the existing maps- otherwise the price tag for a new game mode will include at minimum two maps, and probably be put into the "never ever" bucket instead of the "just maybe if we are lucky" bucket.

If the turrets were meant to be an interactable mechanic, they would have much lower health, lower damage and armor piercing, and the ability to group respawn after a time.

 

That's not a bad idea for a supplemental soft anti-camp mechanism in TDM.

 

Some additional changes I'd make are upping the range on the turrets to at least 15.5 or 16 km. You wouldn't want gunships to be able to just plink away from outside of cap ship turret range. You'd probably also have to give them EMP and Ion AOE immunity, or at least resistance to the disables.

 

You could even stack different types getting creative. 16 km railgun drone clones, 8 km range missile drone clones, and 5 km interdiction clone drones. Maybe all with the health of bombers?

 

If they counted for requisition, turret kill achieves, and were reasonably balanced in difficulty (no kill points of course) beating up the Cap ships might be a nice change of pace from farming noobs. If getting super fancy, you'd even increment range, damage, and health with each respawn.

Edited November 1, 2017 by Ramalina

TYou wouldn't want gunships to be able to just plink away from outside of cap ship turret range.

 

Yes you absolutely would. Railgun dps is low, and a gunship out there doing that would be presenting himself pretty well. You'd tune the whole thing around that event. In a world where you go into capship range and die in seconds, while the turrets don't have much health, this is a problem. But standing outside an area sniping is a great way to get in trouble, especially if flying through the capship fire is an intended mechanic for a ship, and not a one-way ticket to becoming dust.

 

You'd probably also have to give them EMP and Ion AOE immunity, or at least resistance to the disables.

 

Again, you wouldn't do this either- you'd just make them spread out enough and have a bit of armor, armor that a couple EMPs or ion hits wouldn't be an instant win.

 

You could even stack different types getting creative. 16 km railgun drone clones, 8 km range missile drone clones, and 5 km interdiction clone drones. Maybe all with the health of bombers?

 

Hrm, I see your direction here. I was thinking things with like 20k hit points or whatever, you're thinking like a 10th of that.

Hrm, I see your direction here. I was thinking things with like 20k hit points or whatever, you're thinking like a 10th of that.

 

Specifically I was thinking 4 Dronecarriers with railgun drones as a baseline, uptuned a bit to account for GSF aces being ravening monsters and the fact that turret AI is going to be pretty weak in the evil and devious departments compared to a skilled human pilot. A first pass design would be 3 rail turrets, 2 missile turrets, and 1 interdiction turret per cap ship. At something like 2750 health and maybe 35% DR. Damage as per the bomber drones. Increment health and damage by say 15 - 25% per respawn. Respawn timer I think would need play testing, but call it 1 min to start with? Maybe 90 seconds?

 

It's reasonably probable that with the existing turret/drone targeting rules at 16 km range gunships wouldn't get shot at much because all of the turrets would be busy shooting at strikes, scouts, and given a sufficiently stompy stomp of a match, maybe even bombers. In at least in theory though, you want to discourage them from just sitting there and killing newbs just as much as you want to discourage the strikes and scouts from doing so. Depending on the time span of target acquisition and charging for the turrets, a GS might get in, shoot, and get out, without getting hit very hard by return fire even if there aren't shorter range ships to draw away fire.

 

TDM turrets of this nature would have to be an entirely different nature of beast compared to the current DOM turrets which seem to be fine in DOM.

 

Slightly tough and chewy targets that moderately discourage camping on the spawn, vs instant obliteration of trespassers.

 

In terms of balance I figure I'd aim for modest misery for a single solo carry pilot, or even a pair, but that a team of 4 coordinated or more might be entertained by taking on the turrets. The incrementing idea pops up because tuning the turrets to be amusing for a fairly casual group of 4 coordinated pilots and also amusing for a 12 person super serious team that caved to miserable matchmaking after the nth time of drawing a PUG opposing team, is probably too wide to be handled by a single strength of turret. Incrementing because I assume that's the maximum sophistication that would be likely, possibly borrowing stacking boss buff type mechanics from Ops designs.

 

I suppose you could also add AOE buff auras to turrets. Evasion, shield healing, and shield capacity might be reasonable to try. If the pilots can't perform in their ships buff the ships, but only if they stick to typical buff ranges in GSF, meaning 2500 to 5000 m. Making huddling slightly less painful is ok, but I wouldn't want even combined effects to be enough to encourage turtling

 

In a perfect world, in that sort of lopsided game the turrets both give the weaker team partial, but not total respite, and also make things more fun for the attacking team which is clearly not being challenged enough.

Edited November 1, 2017 by Ramalina

Spawn camping is an unfortunate thing. But it seems to be part of any video game when the teams aren't balanced. I don't think GSF is any different, and I wouldn't want Bioware to jeopardize the balance of the game as a whole in order to alleviate these frustrating one sided games. They would be better off putting effort into a system that makes more balanced teams, and I think the server merges are a step in the right direction.

Some additional changes I'd make are upping the range on the turrets to at least 15.5 or 16 km. You wouldn't want gunships to be able to just plink away from outside of cap ship turret range. You'd probably also have to give them EMP and Ion AOE immunity, or at least resistance to the disables.

 

Not that we should give the idea too much steam, but since we are in the realm of hypotheticals, let's give it a whirl. A gunship, regardless of type, gives up a lot to be in what (at least in the two TDM maps we have) is pretty much open space, with no LoS easily accessible. Besides not being near LoS, the gunship would be of course stationary (no real point in charge-strafing if there is no object to strafe behind.) So, they become easy targets for the team turtling behind these hypothetical cap ships, at least for those who chose to spawn at one of the alternate points. Therefore, there would be no benefit to having turrets as a targetable objective, to discourage, uh, whatever behavior we are trying to discourage, if the range was greater than that of railguns or post 5.5-gunship torps. So I think that if, hypothetically, cap ship turrets were to become an objective of sorts, then the range should probably be less than 13km. I mean, that may not be lore-appropriate for a turbolaser, but for the sake of gameplay, the gunship has to have some range advantage over them, since the turrets can one-shot most ships.

 

Regarding the immunities ... I don't know. Ignoring my above discussion, if we were to follow lore, so-called snub-fighters (x-wings, i.e. space superiority fighters) were so small that they could evade the Death Star's turbolasers. The strike is TOR analog of the X-wing and the scout class is likely smaller than the strike fighter class. So, the existing platforms for EMPf/m delivery, except the T3B, ought to be small enough to evade cap ship turrets, if they are flying evasively. Perhaps to mimic this, the hypothetical turbolaser has a tiny firing arc and/or poor accuracy. I guess if its bad enough it might even be reasonable to extend the range as you say. Thus, given its strength as a one-shot and long range, I'm not sure it should have immunity to ships that supposedly should be able to evade them.

 

But, this is all just hypothetical and lore/canon isn't exactly sacrosanct in GSF.

Gunships ruin GSF, the same way Line and Escort ships ruined BSGO.

 

We want to dogfight, not suddenly explode for no apparent reason.

Gunships ruin GSF, the same way Line and Escort ships ruined BSGO.

 

We want to dogfight, not suddenly explode for no apparent reason.

 

Gunships and bombers are far more vulnerable than they were pre 5.5. Strikes can survive against gunships and bombers much better. There is a lot more dogfighting going on. Have you been in a match since 5.5 came out?

Edited November 3, 2017 by phalczen