If it helps, think of a fantasy RPG - at the beginning of the game I have level 1 armor, and I work hard and get level 2 armor, then level 3. A lot farther down the road, I get level 10 armor. I'm not mad that my level 3 armor isn't as useful to me anymore, even though I worked hard and spent a lot of time to get it. I understand that the challenge and reward of obtaining level 3 armor allowed me to tackle the challenge of getting level 4 armor. Then, having level 4 armor helped me to get to level 5 armor.
Similar to that example, this is not a game in which you get to the end-game and every piece of tech or hull you ever owned is useful to you for end-game content. If that is your expectation, you're going to be frustrated when it continues to not be reality.
I'm a lover of fantasy and I spent years playing D&D.
If I can steal that analogy, maybe then YOU can understand what it is like for some of us on the other side of the trench.
You get level 1 armor. Great. You go into the cave and fight goblins with it, only to find that they have weapons that bypass level 1 armor. So you grind and fight to be able to afford level 2 armor from "Tim the Wizard's Magic Store". You get the armor and head off into the cave to show those nasty goblins who's the boss. Except, they're not goblins anymore. Magically, overnight, the goblins have transformed into ogres, and guess what? Their weapons bypass level 2 armor. So you beat down on the ogres and say "You know what? I'm going to save my coins and buy me an "Ogre slaying sword!". You get the sword, run into the cave of ogres, except the ogres now have magic resistance, so your "ogre slaying sword" is now also useless...
By now, if this was an actual D&D game, the Dungeon Master would be pummeled to death with players throwing their dice at him in frustration.
Basically, pivoting the power curve the way Kixeye did with T6, opened Pandora's box.
For those of you who don't get the math terminology, here's a crude drawing to explain it.
So a good power curve should be either the one on the left (linear), or the one in the middle (increasing costs for higher power result in smaller power gains the higher you go).
This is how every game since 1st edition pen and paper D&D has handled progression- as you go up in level, you have to work harder to get to the next level, and each level gives you either an equal (left graph) or smaller percentage boost in power (middle graph).
Since T6 breaks this trend, our power curve is like the one on the right... meaning it actually gets easier ans easier to skyrocket in power as you advance.
Linear progression at least means that if the lower level players grind harder, they might close gap over time. In the middle curve (the preferred model) as you get higher in level, the gap to end game gradually gets smaller by virtue of the curve, and no one gets a ridiculous advantage unless they put in an almost unimaginable amount of effort/coins.
In the model we have (on the right) you get issues akin to income disparity in the US- the top end players are literally playing a different game than the middle or low end players. Once the top tier players take off, there's no parity.
If you think about it- the ludicrous prices for coin deals makes sense in this model- at the top end you get more and more progression for less and less effort (the opposite of how gamin is supposed to work!), and puchases accelerate this curve even more, so the crazy high prices for the package deals is the only way to throttle progression- lowering prices would mean that more people could boost themselves into that easy exponential progression zone more easily. If you stuck to the middle curve- you would actually be encouraging players to spend more often as they progress into higher level since their progression is leveling off without expenditure. But since we have the power curve on the right, you need to keep prices high to try to limit the supergamer population to a manageable level and keep the power curve from running away even more (if that's even possible). So you have what we know to be true- a very small high end population that pays large amounts....
Basically, the point where the curve on the right passes up a linear progression is the tipping point, at that point advancing the next step becomes easier the higher up you go. Prior to that point, progression starts out harder than linear, and gradually gets easier until it catches up with a linear progression (then shoots past it and never looks back). I'd estimate that the tipping point is somewhere around the time you get firmly entrenched in DC equipment and get to the point where you can get it all marked up and using infernal weapons and alien swarms.
Now when we talk bases, we have somethign different. Bases have not been messed with much since the rebalance- they progress on the middle curve- after a point they level off and we see that the difference between say a l45 base and a l50 base is not very great at all. The problem here is that bases don't compete against each other, they compete against fleets, and the progression for fleets is the graph on the right (exponential)- so as bases go up in level, they gain a diminishing amount of power per level, while fleets gain greater amounts of power per level, creating a huge disparity. Basically, you can't have it both ways, both fleets and bases have to conform to the same power curve if you're going to set gating wide open like you did.
So you can either nerf the crap out of fleets to make them confirm to a normalized asymptotic power curve, or you can unchain the bases and have them move to an exponential curve to gain parity. Or you can gate bases to a reasonable level, because combat between the highest level base out there and a L90 Xeno fleet is completely pointless, and mathematically equivalent to allowing a player to pick how many medals and resources they want once they develop an L90 fleet without bothering to fight for it (again, progression getting easier as you climb the curve!)
SO I don't think you can really do either of those things- if you nerf fleets, your cash cows will be upset, and maybe stop being cash cows, and if you open the floodgates for improved base tech that gets easier to acquire as your base gets more powerful, the cash cows will also be angry that they can no longer stomp all over everyone with impunity like they paid for the privilege of doing.
This is why games void exponential power curves. It cannot end well. Base power progression is the last thing that seems to be following a reasonable progression- bases have gained a few things (a few new weapons, increased modules)- the biggest things have been FB13 and Bridge 7 - which do more for enabling the exponential fleet curve than they do for the base power curve. The difference here is that these items do not give an exponential bump in base effectiveness- and their cost is so astronomically high in terms of resources that the fall right into the normal middle curve- small increase at large expense- basically slowing down progression as you gain levels...
So again, we've adopted one progression model for bases and a completely opposite one for fleets. An impassable disparity between the two should be expected in this model, which is again, why most sensible game design avoids exponential power curves in favor of diminishing returns... Again, T6 ships were just far too large of a bump in power for the cost in time/effort/coins to acquire them.
It comes down to Xeno usability in PvP situations. While Xeno's usability was designed for NPC targets, PvP is still considered as part of the whole. We want to make sure there's uses for it in that context.
When we re-tuned Fleet XP on Xeno ships, it bumped most fleets with Xeno content in them over level 60 (a full fleet of Xeno-only ships lands around 70+). If we had released this re-tune with the gating rules as they were at the time, players who had the latest Xeno content would pretty much only be able to use them on bases over the gating cap (level 60). So how many of those bases exist? Well, none. Additionally, when we looked at our total population, only a handful of players had/have bases over level 50. So the reality was very restricting. If you had the latest Xeno content you couldn't use it on any player base whatsoever, and very few fleets.
From a design standpoint, there's a real problem with that situation. Xeno content takes a lot of effort to acquire, it also takes a good chunk of time to build. NPC content is a big part of the game, definitely, but most people love PvP and for those who put in the effort to acquire the latest content to then have zero other places between Alien activities in which to use that brand new tech - that would kind of suck (and believe me, back when we originally upped the gating level, we heard exactly how much those players thought it sucked). It's not a great reward experience for what someone just worked hard to obtain and build. They should be able to use it right away in lots of situations. So we needed to loosen those restrictions if we were going to also jack up Xeno's XP value (which was viewed as essential).
So while we recognized that full Xeno-fleets were going to be more powerful than bases could handle currently, we had to make that change. It corrected the reward value issue, and committing to getting bases a few power boosts in the near future requires less resources than forfeiting the Xeno season to overhaul PvP entirely.
TL;DR we'll be taking steps to even the playing field - but in the meantime we'd prefer to default to more PvP options rather than fewer.
Dear CM Chris ^^
Every players who flies with a mk5/6 punisher fleet has barely made a finger crooked.
They have used coins and not just a little.
Which is also their good right.
But the one with a lvl 80+ xeno fleet an lvl 45 base or lvl 55+fleet attack seems to me somewhat paradox, as the xeno class usually only for the alien events thought and not for pvp so is it totally futile 80+ xeno fleet on lvl 45 bases or lvl 55+ feets to rush where is the callenge ?
@CM Chris said:
It comes down to Xeno usability in PvP situations. While Xeno's usability was designed for NPC targets, PvP is still considered as part of the whole. We want to make sure there's uses for it in that context.
When we re-tuned Fleet XP on Xeno ships, it bumped most fleets with Xeno content in them over level 60 (a full fleet of Xeno-only ships lands around 70+). If we had released this re-tune with the gating rules as they were at the time, players who had the latest Xeno content would pretty much only be able to use them on bases over the gating cap (level 60). So how many of those bases exist? Well, none. Additionally, when we looked at our total population, only a handful of players had/have bases over level 50. So the reality was very restricting. If you had the latest Xeno content you couldn't use it on any player base whatsoever, and very few fleets.
From a design standpoint, there's a real problem with that situation. Xeno content takes a lot of effort to acquire, it also takes a good chunk of time to build. NPC content is a big part of the game, definitely, but most people love PvP and for those who put in the effort to acquire the latest content to then have zero other places between Alien activities in which to use that brand new tech - that would kind of suck (and believe me, back when we originally upped the gating level, we heard exactly how much those players thought it sucked). It's not a great reward experience for what someone just worked hard to obtain and build. They should be able to use it right away in lots of situations. So we needed to loosen those restrictions if we were going to also jack up Xeno's XP value (which was viewed as essential).
So while we recognized that full Xeno-fleets were going to be more powerful than bases could handle currently, we had to make that change. It corrected the reward value issue, and committing to getting bases a few power boosts in the near future requires less resources than forfeiting the Xeno season to overhaul PvP entirely.
TL;DR we'll be taking steps to even the playing field - but in the meantime we'd prefer to default to more PvP options rather than fewer.
Basically Chris is saying, yes xeno is crazy OP. Yes it is unfair. But hey, got to sell the coin delas for xeno tech. No reason you cant keep fleet gating at 60. To keep a fleet under 55 you cant use a full fleet of vega, vsec, or dc. Lame.
This should bring some balance back in the Tiers with rebel, vega, vsec fighting each other with a little crossover from ISC and demon corps in the mid range, and Xeno fighting itself and high end Demon Corps.
Then extend the gating branches to fall between where the factions merge
Then maybe mix in another calculation based on dps and durability to get a proper fleet match up going
The problem with this game is the power curves. Just look at the graphs I made. Said no vega conflict player ever
I really do think that Kixeye thinks we players are stupid and haven't a clue, amount of people complaining about gating for the right reasons just gets swept under the carpet and we get answered 'working as intended'. I tell you what the answer is above everything else.....coins!
Like I been saying for a LONG TIME You really want to fix Bases getting eaten up Esp. by new Xeno...MAKE MINES INVISIBLE and hitting one blows any ship up.(maybe have higher upgrades on them) also maybe give us 2 more mines
the last Civil war , my 48 base was 100% by a 79 xeno fleet ( it wasn't auto but it was super simple attack ).... Which made me decide not to do CW as i had a 24 hour bubble and my Command Center needed 20 hours repair ,,,,, It's turned into "what's the point " ? the 79 xeno fleet hit everyone everyone in my alliance with base over 45 ,,,,We actually laughed about all the coins "they" spent from the damage "they" took , the Domination into the mines was a high light
have all bases get a cool down system to delay the base being attack for 20 sectors until its open again but if the base is too heavily damage then a bubble from the standard time.
Are there any plans to sort this mess out or do we simply have to put up with it and watch the game deteriorate further as more and more tech is added to the game
Regarding the XP values, as we've stated already in the April WIP we are re-tuning those to be a more accurate reflection of fleet power.
Regarding older tech you have no longer being useful...this is a game of progression. If you have reached the Tier 6 stage of the game, then you should largely only be building Tier 6 tech. You've passed the point in which Tier 4 tech would still be relevant to the level at which you're competing. Do you know for whom Tier 4 tech is useful? People who were just at Tier 3.
If it helps, think of a fantasy RPG - at the beginning of the game I have level 1 armor, and I work hard and get level 2 armor, then level 3. A lot farther down the road, I get level 10 armor. I'm not mad that my level 3 armor isn't as useful to me anymore, even though I worked hard and spent a lot of time to get it. I understand that the challenge and reward of obtaining level 3 armor allowed me to tackle the challenge of getting level 4 armor. Then, having level 4 armor helped me to get to level 5 armor.
Similar to that example, this is not a game in which you get to the end-game and every piece of tech or hull you ever owned is useful to you for end-game content. If that is your expectation, you're going to be frustrated when it continues to not be reality.
If, however, your concern is truly only that it's a poor experience for early and mid-level players, then the XP re-tunings should help take care of that in some part. And something more constructive to advocate for would be making all content up through T5 more accessible, so that early players can make their progression up to end-game faster. That is something that - I'm more than happy to inform you - is certainly on our list of things to do.
@CM Chris, For your fantasy RPG game comparison the fact that you have the tier 6 in your game hitting tier 4 tech is truly unbalanced. The gate in most RPG's is -/+ 5 to 10 levels (with WoW being the exception, and even then if you kill a player 10 levels below you, you get no points for the kill).
Attempting to get the needed tech to get to the next tier is difficult with the power creep and players intentionally down grading the builds on xeno tech to simply farm tier 4 and 5 fleets. Add the level 45 base gate cap and it gets even worse when a xeno fleet can clean out lower players res in seconds. Especially when they are trying to build their first fleet of punishers. I understand there is no real and easy fix to the xeno tier fvf and fvb issue but for most who are getting stagnated because their bases are getting hammered by xeno fleets it becomes an unplayable game. even with coins it is still unplayable. This is why you are seeing players leave and will continue to see them leave. Yes you will have those hare headed players like me out there who are going to continue to farm with our old tech to build t6 fleets but we are becoming fewer and fewe
From a design standpoint, there's a real problem with that situation. Xeno content takes a lot of effort to acquire, it also takes a good chunk of time to build. NPC content is a big part of the game, definitely, but most people love PvP and for those who put in the effort to acquire the latest content to then have zero other places between Alien activities in which to use that brand new tech - that would kind of suck (and believe me, back when we originally upped the gating level, we heard exactly how much those players thought it sucked). It's not a great reward experience for what someone just worked hard to obtain and build. They should be able to use it right away in lots of situations. So we needed to loosen those restrictions if we were going to also jack up Xeno's XP value (which was viewed as essential).
So, to make it simple, whatever your fail in the Vega game management,
your prioritary objective is to feed your coiners with our fleets. This is a very short term vision.
You acknowledge there is a problem (first sentence in citation above). Good beginning. And then, the very (and only) interesting part : how do you solve the problem ? You do not solve it. Just play with it. Good luck guys.
@CM Chris said:
It comes down to Xeno usability in PvP situations. While Xeno's usability was designed for NPC targets, PvP is still considered as part of the whole. We want to make sure there's uses for it in that context.
When we re-tuned Fleet XP on Xeno ships, it bumped most fleets with Xeno content in them over level 60 (a full fleet of Xeno-only ships lands around 70+). If we had released this re-tune with the gating rules as they were at the time, players who had the latest Xeno content would pretty much only be able to use them on bases over the gating cap (level 60). So how many of those bases exist? Well, none. Additionally, when we looked at our total population, only a handful of players had/have bases over level 50. So the reality was very restricting. If you had the latest Xeno content you couldn't use it on any player base whatsoever, and very few fleets.
From a design standpoint, there's a real problem with that situation. Xeno content takes a lot of effort to acquire, it also takes a good chunk of time to build. NPC content is a big part of the game, definitely, but most people love PvP and for those who put in the effort to acquire the latest content to then have zero other places between Alien activities in which to use that brand new tech - that would kind of suck (and believe me, back when we originally upped the gating level, we heard exactly how much those players thought it sucked). It's not a great reward experience for what someone just worked hard to obtain and build. They should be able to use it right away in lots of situations. So we needed to loosen those restrictions if we were going to also jack up Xeno's XP value (which was viewed as essential).
So while we recognized that full Xeno-fleets were going to be more powerful than bases could handle currently, we had to make that change. It corrected the reward value issue, and committing to getting bases a few power boosts in the near future requires less resources than forfeiting the Xeno season to overhaul PvP entirely.
TL;DR we'll be taking steps to even the playing field - but in the meantime we'd prefer to default to more PvP options rather than fewer.
level the field?
this wasnt hard. just SLOW DOWN and stop power creep
might as well stop buying xeno deals bc the faction will be obsolete in 2-3 months with tier7
Priceless
lol
So a good power curve should be either the one on the left (linear), or the one in the middle (increasing costs for higher power result in smaller power gains the higher you go).
This is how every game since 1st edition pen and paper D&D has handled progression- as you go up in level, you have to work harder to get to the next level, and each level gives you either an equal (left graph) or smaller percentage boost in power (middle graph).
Since T6 breaks this trend, our power curve is like the one on the right... meaning it actually gets easier ans easier to skyrocket in power as you advance.
Linear progression at least means that if the lower level players grind harder, they might close gap over time. In the middle curve (the preferred model) as you get higher in level, the gap to end game gradually gets smaller by virtue of the curve, and no one gets a ridiculous advantage unless they put in an almost unimaginable amount of effort/coins.
In the model we have (on the right) you get issues akin to income disparity in the US- the top end players are literally playing a different game than the middle or low end players. Once the top tier players take off, there's no parity.
If you think about it- the ludicrous prices for coin deals makes sense in this model- at the top end you get more and more progression for less and less effort (the opposite of how gamin is supposed to work!), and puchases accelerate this curve even more, so the crazy high prices for the package deals is the only way to throttle progression- lowering prices would mean that more people could boost themselves into that easy exponential progression zone more easily. If you stuck to the middle curve- you would actually be encouraging players to spend more often as they progress into higher level since their progression is leveling off without expenditure. But since we have the power curve on the right, you need to keep prices high to try to limit the supergamer population to a manageable level and keep the power curve from running away even more (if that's even possible). So you have what we know to be true- a very small high end population that pays large amounts....
Basically, the point where the curve on the right passes up a linear progression is the tipping point, at that point advancing the next step becomes easier the higher up you go. Prior to that point, progression starts out harder than linear, and gradually gets easier until it catches up with a linear progression (then shoots past it and never looks back). I'd estimate that the tipping point is somewhere around the time you get firmly entrenched in DC equipment and get to the point where you can get it all marked up and using infernal weapons and alien swarms.
Now when we talk bases, we have somethign different. Bases have not been messed with much since the rebalance- they progress on the middle curve- after a point they level off and we see that the difference between say a l45 base and a l50 base is not very great at all.
The problem here is that bases don't compete against each other, they compete against fleets, and the progression for fleets is the graph on the right (exponential)- so as bases go up in level, they gain a diminishing amount of power per level, while fleets gain greater amounts of power per level, creating a huge disparity. Basically, you can't have it both ways, both fleets and bases have to conform to the same power curve if you're going to set gating wide open like you did.
So you can either nerf the crap out of fleets to make them confirm to a normalized asymptotic power curve, or you can unchain the bases and have them move to an exponential curve to gain parity. Or you can gate bases to a reasonable level, because combat between the highest level base out there and a L90 Xeno fleet is completely pointless, and mathematically equivalent to allowing a player to pick how many medals and resources they want once they develop an L90 fleet without bothering to fight for it (again, progression getting easier as you climb the curve!)
SO I don't think you can really do either of those things- if you nerf fleets, your cash cows will be upset, and maybe stop being cash cows, and if you open the floodgates for improved base tech that gets easier to acquire as your base gets more powerful, the cash cows will also be angry that they can no longer stomp all over everyone with impunity like they paid for the privilege of doing.
This is why games void exponential power curves. It cannot end well. Base power progression is the last thing that seems to be following a reasonable progression- bases have gained a few things (a few new weapons, increased modules)- the biggest things have been FB13 and Bridge 7 - which do more for enabling the exponential fleet curve than they do for the base power curve. The difference here is that these items do not give an exponential bump in base effectiveness- and their cost is so astronomically high in terms of resources that the fall right into the normal middle curve- small increase at large expense- basically slowing down progression as you gain levels...
So again, we've adopted one progression model for bases and a completely opposite one for fleets. An impassable disparity between the two should be expected in this model, which is again, why most sensible game design avoids exponential power curves in favor of diminishing returns... Again, T6 ships were just far too large of a bump in power for the cost in time/effort/coins to acquire them.
I've rambled too much, but you know I'm right
Dear CM Chris ^^
Every players who flies with a mk5/6 punisher fleet has barely made a finger crooked.
They have used coins and not just a little.
Which is also their good right.
But the one with a lvl 80+ xeno fleet an lvl 45 base or lvl 55+fleet attack seems to me somewhat paradox,
as the xeno class usually only for the alien events thought and not for pvp so is it totally futile 80+ xeno fleet on lvl 45 bases
or lvl 55+ feets to rush where is the callenge ?
Basically Chris is saying, yes xeno is crazy OP. Yes it is unfair. But hey, got to sell the coin delas for xeno tech. No reason you cant keep fleet gating at 60. To keep a fleet under 55 you cant use a full fleet of vega, vsec, or dc. Lame.
Fusion 3 is currently 6967
Lets say for arguments sake we assign
Rebel 1
Vega 1.5
Vsec 1.6
ISC 2.2
Demon Corps 2.5
Xeno 3.7
And multiply them over
Fusion 3 XP becomes
Rebel 6967
Vega 10451
Vsec 11147
ISC 15327
Demon Corps 17418
Xeno 25777
This should bring some balance back in the Tiers with rebel, vega, vsec fighting each other with a little crossover from ISC and demon corps in the mid range, and Xeno fighting itself and high end Demon Corps.
Then extend the gating branches to fall between where the factions merge
Then maybe mix in another calculation based on dps and durability to get a proper fleet match up going
with a good hellfire or vigi fleet you can keep a punisher fleet at a distance and if you can
even cause serious damage.
but in any case you can not win.
i hope kix finds there a just solution, which is the least what can make.
if the pvp ratio is not in balance makes pvp also no fun and that is not in
their opinion.
I really do think that Kixeye thinks we players are stupid and haven't a clue, amount of people complaining about gating for the right reasons just gets swept under the carpet and we get answered 'working as intended'. I tell you what the answer is above everything else.....coins!
the 79 xeno fleet hit everyone everyone in my alliance with base over 45 ,,,,We actually laughed about all the coins "they" spent from the damage "they" took , the Domination into the mines was a high light
@CM Chris, For your fantasy RPG game comparison the fact that you have the tier 6 in your game hitting tier 4 tech is truly unbalanced. The gate in most RPG's is -/+ 5 to 10 levels (with WoW being the exception, and even then if you kill a player 10 levels below you, you get no points for the kill).
Attempting to get the needed tech to get to the next tier is difficult with the power creep and players intentionally down grading the builds on xeno tech to simply farm tier 4 and 5 fleets. Add the level 45 base gate cap and it gets even worse when a xeno fleet can clean out lower players res in seconds. Especially when they are trying to build their first fleet of punishers.
I understand there is no real and easy fix to the xeno tier fvf and fvb issue but for most who are getting stagnated because their bases are getting hammered by xeno fleets it becomes an unplayable game. even with coins it is still unplayable.
This is why you are seeing players leave and will continue to see them leave. Yes you will have those hare headed players like me out there who are going to continue to farm with our old tech to build t6 fleets but we are becoming fewer and fewe
A new 6 second tier will counter the xeno division and keep balance in the game but yeah the stats are Jack up and need to be adjusted
So, to make it simple, whatever your fail in the Vega game management,
your prioritary objective is to feed your coiners with our fleets.
This is a very short term vision.
You acknowledge there is a problem (first sentence in citation above). Good beginning. And then, the very (and only) interesting part : how do you solve the problem ? You do not solve it.
Just play with it.
Good luck guys.
make gating 50
farming is stupid. eliminate troll fleets and thats all. open pvp fun, farming stupid
level the field?
this wasnt hard. just SLOW DOWN and stop power creep
might as well stop buying xeno deals bc the faction will be obsolete in 2-3 months with tier7