Letter from the Game Director: 14 January 2008

[Balneator]

Would probably be the easiest course of action.

shhh! Have to make it seem like it was the devs choice, suggestions take time to make it in game

[Luckyspawn]

I am 100% sure that no matter what the opposing side throws at that team(swap sol with doc and we it can trade some kill power for heals) they will live.

No valley too deep, no mountain too high.
Just wait till Omnis will team up. You might come to realize that you need more than a great team profession wise.

EDIT: Nice patch indeed!

[Ober]

And again on the solo titles, please something else than ranks from the glorified japanese ripoff they call karate

<- hates katana/ninja/samurai fanboys.

[Nuclearsmeg]

Looks like some really good an interesting changes.

Some thoughts:

New Titles: While I don't care for the new titles, I can't think of anything better. I have seen several calls for profession based titles - but I think sided titles would be more interesting. My 2 cents.

New Fixer Debuff: How will this be handled for toons not in pvp range of the towers? Is the new debuff subject to the same pvp rules? If so I see having to have fixersin all ranges at Tower battles to make this possible, As it is now - all levels of toons come out and plant beacons.

New Engi Jamming: I guess the same goes here - is it affected by pvp range? Can engis of all levels use in any tower area?

Permanent Title: As stated...no death penalty means all will eventually have a title. Hmmm I guess that beats what we have now - useless titles.

Death Count: Will have to watch this one. E-peens will probably be measured by this. Luckily the /afk nerf in BS is coming.



As a casual pvp-er, I really like the direction you are moving PVP. Thank you Sil.

[Hacre]

Always open to suggestions These were selected as they denote a personal achievement and we couldn't come up with anything 'cool and sci-fi'ish' that we felt was in keeping with a personal achievement. We also wanted to make the different title lists distinctive and clearly different.

Most definitely open to suggestions though as long as they meet those criteria.

How about...

Chief
Ensign
Lieutenant
Commander
Lieutenant Commander
Captain
Admiral
Vice Admiral?



Some great stuff there. Not sure about giving Engis and Fixers yet -another- job on the tower field. The Fixer nano, how is this going to resolve the issue that some grey can come along and plant with fear of no one and blammo from HQ by a lowb SC?

Love the anti /afk. One other thing: There must be a way to determine who has /afk'd while on the Battlestation zone...take the worst top 20-50 offenders on all dimensions and strip their legacy titles?

Exploiting an FC oopsie is bad mkay especially if doing so to A: further your epeen when titles get locked and B: to deny someone legitimately furthering their progress in that same title system.

[taticu1]

bump

[Cruxx]

· It will no longer be possible to place a beacon while in your PVP grace period.
[...]
· Engineers will be getting a new static pet in the form of a jamming tower. When placed in the game world it will pulse a debuff aura every few seconds that prevents the placement of beacons in its radius.

These both conditions are not enough to handle the problem of placing beacons in "grace time". The system can be exploited by using a lower/higher level toon to place the beacon. He will not be effected by the debuff, at least if it applies pvp level range restrictions to the target. Thus, beacons should be placeable only from characters in pvp level range, just like shield disablers are.
This was already mentioned before, but I felt it was not stressed and discussed enough so far.

[RedWobe]

Does anybody else think that its probably not good that the reward for ganking a total crap player of the same level is the same as ganking the best player of the same level? I think there should be some kind of reward for killing better players. This is just gonna turn into a noob-farming contest on the battlestations.

[psyxor]

Looks like some really good an interesting changes.

Some thoughts:

New Titles: While I don't care for the new titles, I can't think of anything better. I have seen several calls for profession based titles - but I think sided titles would be more interesting. My 2 cents.

New Fixer Debuff: How will this be handled for toons not in pvp range of the towers? Is the new debuff subject to the same pvp rules? If so I see having to have fixersin all ranges at Tower battles to make this possible, As it is now - all levels of toons come out and plant beacons.

New Engi Jamming: I guess the same goes here - is it affected by pvp range? Can engis of all levels use in any tower area?

Permanent Title: As stated...no death penalty means all will eventually have a title. Hmmm I guess that beats what we have now - useless titles.

Death Count: Will have to watch this one. E-peens will probably be measured by this. Luckily the /afk nerf in BS is coming.



As a casual pvp-er, I really like the direction you are moving PVP. Thank you Sil.

There all the things that could ruin the patch in a single post
If these are considered / solved then we ll prolly see a game saving patch that will get a lot of people who left to reconsider
PS omg they DO read the forums

[lazarus]

the logical progression is quite obviously Novice ---> Apprentice ---> Neophyte, as Novice = Nubvice, Apprentice = Epeentice and Neophyte = No Fight (I'm title hugging)

nice one but u just failed it's apprentice -> Novice -> neophyte

[Warhead]

PVP and death

There will be no consequences to death in terms of your new PVP score.

Having a death penalty for PVP, let alone a harsh one, means that it becomes a focus for players more than actually taking part in the action. If it’s imperative you don’t die then you don’t take as many risks, you don’t commit yourself fully to the action, and when you multiply that out over many people taking part it leads to the situation we saw all too often up till now where it was more important to players to very selectively pick their targets and not risk anything. At the end of the day we thought overall that was counter-productive to a more enjoyable PVP environment.

[....]

The New Ranks

Players will now have a series of new stats visible in their character sheet that display the number of solo kills and deaths, team kills and deaths and Duel kills and deaths. Each relevant kill also provides you with a score that is added to your total for that form of PVP (you can look on it as PVP exp as it were) and that score allows you to proceed up the available ranks for that form of PVP.

I take it the kills and deaths will be visible by anyone.
If your aim was to take away the reason for people to not risk much and stay alive at all costs, you'll eventually fail because at some point, people will be stuck in a dead-end with the titles (you can only gain but not lose and there is a final title) and their new (I bet some will focus on it from the get-go) will be to keep their Kill/Death ratio as positive as possible - in other games its called ratio-whoring.

Though, if you tell me the kills and deaths are only visible to yourself, it wont be that easily "abused" for ratio-whoring (people will have to exchange screenshots ).

[Balneator]

nice one but u just failed it's apprentice -> Novice -> neophyte

I said logical, not correct, you fail at reading.

[Synre]

imho there are WAY too many titles now

wont it be better to combine the duel and solo score, and just use the titles from the duel?

I agree those solo titles sound rather stupid in a scifi mmo. It would suit something like a mortal kombat MMORPG or something

[Saevitia]

Awesome news, looking forward to the patch going live =)

The last few weeks of NW on RK1 has been great after such a long period of inactivity, this should hopefully make it alot more fun this year round.

[drluva]

all sounds very interesting and good but i do have one major question which i would truly like a reply to.

the engi aura that prevents laser taggers being placed i hope this does not also remove already planted laser taggers as a few engis would then be able to prevent laser tags on tower clusters they are attacking. Basically with a few engis u could attack a whole base with no fear of Orbital strike.


so please make sure preplanted laser taggers still work.

[Farlath]

I wanna be a ninja! Start as genin, chuunin and then jounin

In the end you will get like the sharingan and stuffz

somebody's been watching naruto too much

[Herkulease]

Each proffesion with its OWN solo tree!!!

now someone only have to figure em out

Best suggestion by far. Would not only give you a unique name. But it would be more of a ladder within your own class 8) Just like Titlelvl names.

[Omigawd]

all sounds very interesting and good but i do have one major question which i would truly like a reply to.

the engi aura that prevents laser taggers being placed i hope this does not also remove already planted laser taggers as a few engis would then be able to prevent laser tags on tower clusters they are attacking. Basically with a few engis u could attack a whole base with no fear of Orbital strike.


so please make sure preplanted laser taggers still work.

Previously planted laser tagging devices should logically be disabled once the engi tower is up... it only makes sense.

[Lumifly]

We are not opposed to only showing kills and have discussed it internally along those lines, so it's something we could remove if we felt it was genuinely going to have that effect.

Unfortunately this will still have a detrimental effect. People already get minorily uppity about their alien deaths, something that is insignificant and often meaningless. Pushing those stats to actual people deaths and kills will see an amplification of this effect.

I'd say keep all of the detailed kill and death stats as a "self" screen that only you can view. People can copy and paste or take screen shots if they want to share. The only time you would want to make these stats readily visible by all is if you implement a ladder system.

And a question (I may have missed if it has been asked already): the dual beacon - will their be a visible indicator of where the range ends?

And a suggestion: people tend to like the cool sounding names. It's a small let down getting a promotion to some rank only to have the name seem less spectacular the previous. In particular, the team rank of "Leader" is just so generic; in the current rank names, I would swap it with Captain.

Praise: overall, this is shaping up to be some very cool changes. I am excited about the direction it is going.

[weyland]

The biggest issue with the solo tree name suggestions is that they look too much like a first name. How about something like this:

Accomplice
Trainee
Initiate
Favored
Accomplished
Aggressor
Judician (or Judicant, or Judicator)
Finalizer
Vindicator
Assassin