If they are scared to scare novices out of the game like Eve tends to do, which I fully agree, then they can perfectly offer various levels of matchmaking, layered experience zones, etc. It works well.
Ugh, please no more matchmaking and layered zones and what not. Them implementing any at all is already really quite silly and is the thing about SC that annoys me the most, as it destroys real dynamic gameplay. An EVE-like system with higher to lower security zones would have been a much better direction to go, rather than "I want to avoid all PvP, so I'll just set my PvP option to zero so I only get ambushed by NPC pirates while hauling!" Ugh. Gives me flashbacks to Pirates of the Burning Sea when, "There is no crying in the red circle," got patched into, "There are only smiles in the red circle! Don't worry about piracy in a game about pirates, traders!"
Also, JtL seems to have changed a lot. When I played that broken thing, the gameplay was so dumb and simple that you just had to have a better PYR agility module than your opponent to win, since all decent weapons meant a direct kill at the first hit. That was a complete joke.
Actually, it barely changed at all. That was one of the biggest problems with it as the developers ignored it for years--major JtL bugs would remain unfixed for half a decade, for example, if they were fixed at all. But as far as flight model goes, what you're seeing there is the same JtL that you played.
And what you're showing here is
precisely the point I was making about certain damage models discouraging new players. With the damage model that SWG had, where it was very high damage with no assisted targeting, new players came under the assumption that they could not compete because they were so quickly destroyed by a single shot from the enemy's weapon, and couldn't hit anything themselves. They felt powerless and didn't know what they did wrong, which made them tend to blame the equipment rather than their own abilities (while equipment was certainly a factor, that's like saying that using officer mods on a pvp ship in EVE will guarantee that you win. Everyone here knows that isn't the case). The reality was that with the right choices and an understanding that those weapons were only dangerous if they could hit you (and thus that speed, size, and active evasion were vastly more important for defense than armor or shields), you could achieve success even with weaker equipment. When I started flying, higher PYR was at the time considered the be-all-end-all, but I and a few other bomber pilots deliberately said "fuck you" to them and favored a jousting speedy flight style, which ended up revolutionizing the standard loadout for larger ships and bombers and made higher speed lower YPR the go-to for those ships. It largely discredited the PYR-is-everything belief as an interceptor with a super high YPR engine couldn't do anything against a bomber that refused to engage in a turning fight with it; the interceptor's engine's lower speed meant that the bomber was the one dictating the range of the engagement. Sound familiar? People often say that games like EVE and flight sims have nothing in common, but many of the same tactics and strategies apply in both. You maximize what your ship is good at, and avoid fights that it is bad at. In JtL, as in EVE, you wanted to be the one to dictate range, you wanted to increase your own angular velocity while limiting your opponent's, missiles countered those high-transversal opponents that couldn't be easily hit by turret weapons, you slingshotted enemies that were otherwise difficult to get into a vulnerable position (in JtL we called it the pancake turn or the joust), and higher quality equipment helped but didn't make you a god (choosing the wrong
type of equipment for your ship, however, would ruin your chances. Like EVE, you can't just throw everything and the kitchen sink on it and expect to do well). The main difference between the two games is really just that one had 0% aiming assist and the other has 100% aiming assist (and one had 100% manual flying and the other has 30% manual flying <.<).
What JtL needed, while perhaps not aiming assist (though a high accuracy/speed low damage weapon type would have been nice, both for newer players and old ones), was definitely more attention to the new pilot experience. They did nothing to teach or prepare new pilots for the PvP environment (with the biggest flaw being nothing that taught players how to use droid commands, which were the JtL equivalent of Overheating and even more important there than it is in EVE), resulting in players giving up when they tried and felt like they couldn't compete.
Back to the pros and cons of aiming assist. It is a fallacy to say that they are skill-less, or are 'just the computer killing your enemy for you'. Again, you're considering the aiming assist separately of the damage model, which is inappropriate. A good aiming assist system is absolutely based on the damage potential of the weapon. In games where good aiming assist exists, higher values are reserved for lower damage weapons while higher damage weapons have reduced or no aiming assist (in Halo, for example, the sniper rifle has a 1 degree auto-aim range, requiring it to be basically on the ball, while the needler, a weapon with very weak individual shots but high damage if all hit, has a 7 degree. Other weapons fall between those two). As such, the idea of an aiming assist is that it lets you apply a level of damage consistent to that of a large single shot, but over a slightly longer period of time. Thus, instead of being a binary hit or miss, it becomes a 'hit for full, hit for some, or hit for none'. Hits become graduated. It is, in essence, a DoT, which requires the player to keep their targeting cursor in a defined, if relaxed, area of space to deal full damage. This is a different sort of skill, but still skill. It is a skill in that in order for you to deal damage to your opponent, you must present yourself as a target to the target or their wingmen. Without aiming assist (and with a corresponding increase in damage-per-shot), a pilot can keep at constant movement, relying on snap shots. This makes it much more difficult to hit them. Using the JtL example, this allowed good interceptor pilots to sometimes survive for 20 minutes or more against a dozen pilots while still scoring some kills, because all they had to do was get a few good snap shots in during their evasive manuevers. With a weapon with high aiming assist but low damage, to kill something, you must line up, set up your shot, and hold it there for a few moments, exposing yourself to anyone nearby. In essence, with an aiming assist damage model weapon, scoring kills requires you to make a risk-vs-reward assessment. Can you afford to sit there, in a straight line, to deal your damage? This is the same assessment you make with missiles, though missiles trade partial damage while locking for a full, guaranteed damage if the lock is achieved.
Ultimately though the big benefit of aiming assist damage models is that it gives newer players (or even just less precise players, IE people with disabilities) the ability to feel like they are competing even if they're still ultimately dying. They still hit a few times, which gives them the feel of having some kind of agency. They might still "suck", but they accomplished
something. And in low damage with aiming assist models they know they're being shot at and can react to it before they actually die. That's an option not afforded to them in high damage no assist games where they will die in one or two shots and where spatial awareness and proactive evasion are the keys to survival, both things that are not easily learned due to being skills that are built on reflex and instinct--it is like muscle memory. This is a difficult thing to learn without an instructor. Most players don't have that, and so feel they can't compete and thus quit.
That's really what it comes down to, proaction versus reaction. In a game with high damage and no aiming assist, it favors pro-active skills which thus benefits experienced players and hurts newer players as they don't have the pro-active "muscle memory" and can't react because they're already dead. In a game with lower damage and aiming assist, it can accomodate reaction instead of just proaction.
Now aside from aiming assist, there are other mechanics that gives the same potential. That would be refire rate and spread. Machine guns with extremely low damage but high rate of fire fulfill the same purpose as aiming assist in allowing a player to hit otherwise difficult targets with minimal effort. Shotgun-type weapons are similar, basically being high alpha versions of the machine gun.
I don't consider either of those options to be either superior or inferior to aiming assist. They are all good options. All are quite realistic for the setting of the game (aiming assist being targeting computers with automated weapon mounts), and all fulfill the same necessary function.
Now then, if they plan to add various levels of assisted targeting depending on the power of the weapon you use, that might be better, though I don't like it either. It will just mean that the higher the damage output is, the more they will be used by good players, where low damage easy weapons will be used by low skill players. It kills diversity in terms of weapons to instead push that diversity not between weapons and various gameplays anymore, but between player skills.
I see it offering quite a bit of diversity, actually.
Yes it is likely that higher skilled players will gravitate to the high damage low tracking weapons, while newer players are likely to stick with the lower damage high tracking ones. That's a good thing. It gives newer players something that makes them feel like they're competing, while offering something with greater power for when they decide to try taking the training wheels off.
However, this doesn't render those lower damage weapons useless. They are not 'newb-only' weapon choices. Those low damage high tracking weapons will be the go-to weapon even for vets for fighting small, highly evasive ships. This is called 'counter play', and is the same reason why missiles are very important. Yadda yadda "but if I'm highly skilled I should be dodge/evade everything!", I've heard that argument a million times by people upset that there was something to actually counter the powerful tool they themselves were utilizing (a super small, evasive, and fast interceptor in this case, that without proper counter can be virtually impossible to destroy). A highly evasive interceptor is built around evading fire. To have proper counter play, there needs to be weapons that can counter extreme evasion. In JtL, that was missiles. Missiles couldn't be evaded, but they could be chaffed. Once the interceptor ran out of chaff, or if they were too slow on their chaff, they were completely at the mercy of the missiles. In a game that has weapons with tracking capability, those weapons will be the counter to difficult-to-hit opponents. Of course, any ship that loads up the low damage high tracking weapon to counter evasion-tanking ships will become vulnerable to ships equipped with the high power low tracking weapons, because the ship with the low damage high tracking weapon has to line up in a straight line and maintain that for a lengthy time to deal damage--which makes it the perfect victim for the high damage low tracking weapon, which no longer has to worry about making deflection shots and can unleash its full damage potential against that ship.
That is diversity.
Some good videos to watch on this topic are
here and
here.
And I'm afraid I can't compare with War Thunder as I haven't played it.
Author
Topic: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander (Read 131162 times)