Meta speed addressed before or after Unity5. Public Opinion. POLL

[Koltes]

Being out there every day sailing solo and "testing" lots of different players and ships I came to a strong conclusion that current speed cap and unbalances in speed made petty much all ships the same. In my personal view we need to have all ships having their unique sailing profile like it was before. Connies should be fast but only in comparison to other 4th rates for example. For the sake of in-game balance between small and large ships as well as playability the speeds needs to be balanced properly.

Speed bonuses from woods, upgrades and skills needs to be re-done.

We see 1st rates among with Connies now sailing 15kn cap racing with such speed boats as Renos and Endys.

What is your view on this question?
Do you think that meta speed issue should be addressed now or after the transfer to Unity 5?
Or maybe you are fine with what we have now?
Please express your vote and opinion.

Cheers

[CaptVonGunn]

Stacking of ANY bonus in each line (Upgrade and Skills) should have a reduction in effectiveness for each after the first... Speed bonuses for the Wood types might need to be tweaked a bit to then remove the cap all together

[Guest]

The 15nt cap isn't actually bad. It's just upgrades are so significant and have no downsides that they are a must while being hard to acquire. Significantly nerf the speed buff from upgrades and apply debuffs too. Make speed a real difficult choice to make.

[Rhodry Heidenrich]

Bring back the unique sailing profiles, kick this idiot speed meta to the curb, and while we're at it get RNG the @$@%@$%@!% out of the upgrade system. 

 

[CaptVonGunn]

39 minutes ago, Flinch said:

The 15nt cap isn't actually bad. It's just upgrades are so significant and have no downsides that they are a must while being hard to acquire. Significantly nerf the speed buff from upgrades and apply debuffs too. Make speed a real difficult choice to make.

It s beyond bad... when 3rd Rates and Connies can catch actual fst ships or what shoud be fast

 

[Rychu Karas]

This is crazy and should be fixed a couple weeks ago, all damn bonus stacking or bonus rebalancing is MORE than necessary. 

I am thinking about 3 different solutions.

1. module stacking penalties.  100/83/30/1 (its an example, there is a lot of already designed module stacking algorithms)

2. Speed bonuses leave as is. but all of them should get a strong negative penalties, to armor, crew, maybe gun size/amount, turning to the integrity of sails ect.

3. Cut all speed bonuses to 1-2% max for each. In this case, also speed penalties like has planking should be adjusted.

 

[Archaos]

Back in November last year around the time of the fine woods fiasco they posted that shipbuilding was going to be reworked and in that thread they stated,

"Definitely will be done

• For example if a shipbuilder wants to increase speed it will increase ship cost AND will have to sacrifice the hull quality
• If they want to have additional slots for upgrades they will have to sacrifice space or increase weight
• If you take more crew you might need to reduce hold
• Cannons and ammo and powder supply will affect cargo hold and will reduce ship performance if you overgun it"

Now I understand that things moved on and they decided this was not the way to go, but they seem to forget that they knew the speed was an issue then and that having a fast ship should have consequences. 

I think they need to revisit the speed issue and if they want to allow people build 1st rates that are super fast then the consequences should be that it becomes almost worthless to have as the sacrifices in other aspects become too great. Each ship should have a unique sailing profile which can be tweaked within limits.

The reason I believe this needs addressing sooner rather than after the port to Unity 5, is that in its current form people will get bored/fedup with the game and leave or give bad reviews, especially with the time scale they expect for the port to take.

I think they should look at a few major issues with the game at the moment and try to solve them before starting the port. A couple of the other issues I feel still remain are the invisibility/speed boost and the Victory/Conquest marks issue. If there is not a satisfactory solution in place for these before the port then they may come back to an empty game.

[Slamz]

Yeah, you know, I think it might have been better without the speed cap.

No speed cap:
Only certain ships are viable solo PvP ships (Endy, Renom, Surprise, mainly).
Wolfpack groups will tend to consist entirely of those.
PvP groups can still be a mix with the lighter, faster ships acting as screeners for the slower, heavier ships.

This is how it used to be.

Speed cap added diversity in a way. ANY ship can be a max speed ship, once you have all the speed skills. So you can solo in a Connie just fine and wolfpacks can just be packs of Connies if they want.

But now it's more like a firepower race. You can wolfpack around in packs of speed Bellonas (or worse) and still not really worry about getting separated and ganked because you're as fast or faster than they are anyway.

With no speed cap I think it actually made things a little more diverse and interesting. Separating that Bellona from her escort was a big deal because she's a slow ship. A bunch of Renoms could just hound it death -- not like today where the Bellona can boom-and-zoom: knock some holes in sails and zip away at a speed the Renoms can't match.

 

Speed cap was supposed to increase diversity in ship selection but it created a lack of diversity in tactics and group makeup.

[Luc]

8 minutes ago, Slamz said:

Yeah, you know, I think it might have been better without the speed cap.

No speed cap:
Only certain ships are viable solo PvP ships (Endy, Renom, Surprise, mainly).
Wolfpack groups will tend to consist entirely of those.
PvP groups can still be a mix with the lighter, faster ships acting as screeners for the slower, heavier ships.

This is how it used to be.

Speed cap added diversity in a way. ANY ship can be a max speed ship, once you have all the speed skills. So you can solo in a Connie just fine and wolfpacks can just be packs of Connies if they want.

But now it's more like a firepower race. You can wolfpack around in packs of speed Bellonas (or worse) and still not really worry about getting separated and ganked because you're as fast or faster than they are anyway.

With no speed cap I think it actually made things a little more diverse and interesting. Separating that Bellona from her escort was a big deal because she's a slow ship. A bunch of Renoms could just hound it death -- not like today where the Bellona can boom-and-zoom: knock some holes in sails and zip away at a speed the Renoms can't match.

 

Speed cap was supposed to increase diversity in ship selection but it created a lack of diversity in tactics and group makeup.

And this effects in tactic makes it very hard for stand alone fighters. Before the new speed meter only certain ships or groups were very dangerous those with surp and trinc f.ex. (If you were in a lgv or surp) now any ship or group could be dangerous because its able to get you. 

Edited July 20, 2017 by Luc

[Slamz]

One more random thought:

What if speed mods were given SERIOUS downsides. Like fir/fir has some pretty damn serious negatives but slapping on a Gazelle figurehead has no downside.

What if Gazelle was +5% speed but -15% mast armor and -15% sail health?

What if Bovenwinds gave you +25% cannon dispersion?

What if Optimized Ballast was -25% maximum crew?

I'm sure we could think of interesting things to do to these speed mods that made them a lot more questionable and this might be the better solution. There will be a point where your Bellona can still go 15 knots but you really don't want to do that because a tanked out Surprise ends up blowing your masts off and sinking you because you piled so many negatives on yourself.

A 15 knot Bellona today is still a really lethal platform that will blow smaller ships out of the water and maybe the problem isn't the speed cap so much as the fact that there is not a serious enough downside to speed.

We could also think about penalizing the +speed woods even more.

[Guest]

Would rather remove the cap and have ships potentially going at wonky speeds (say, 17-18 knots or whatever it's gonna be in its current state until they get rebalanced and tweaked) , than having the current system.

Hunting down ships is terribly unappealing at the moment, with everyone going for the speed cap they all become super-long chase scenes. No wonder why people had to resort to revenge fleet ganking (and let's not even get started on how crazy the super-speed invisibility is now).

And even then, hardly any ship is able to contend with the sailing profile and 4x stern chasers of the surprise, so I wouldn't be surprised if 60%+ of OW PvPers sail just that one ship, and good luck chasing it down with anything other than another surprise.

[Lonar]

Maybe the speedcap could stay if we give every rate a speedcap to avoid the 15kn first rate? like 7th rate 17kn 5th rate 15kn 1st 13kn

[monk33y]

Bring back the old pirate speed bonus. (if needs be reduce reload rate by 5% to ballance it)

Edited July 20, 2017 by monk33y

[Liq]

1 hour ago, Slamz said:

One more random thought:

What if speed mods were given SERIOUS downsides. Like fir/fir has some pretty damn serious negatives but slapping on a Gazelle figurehead has no downside.

What if Gazelle was +5% speed but -15% mast armor and -15% sail health?

What if Bovenwinds gave you +25% cannon dispersion?

What if Optimized Ballast was -25% maximum crew?

I'm fearing that this will then lead to the fact that big blobs will still take as many speed mods as possible, not caring about the negatives, so they could then easily catch solo / small group players (not being as fast), and since they're a big blob, their numbers allow them to take the solo / small group players with ease.

Edited July 20, 2017 by Liquicity

[Captain Lust]

Honestly.... why wait for unity 5? Shouldn't be too hard to fix...  speedmeta with obsolete ships like endymion and renomee and 0.000001% drop chance on copper plating ruined the game more than anything ever...

97.3% in favour of it.... do you really need another hint?

Edited July 20, 2017 by Captain Lust

[Luc]

At least speed cap shouldn't  be a absolute number.  It should be when it is nescessary a relative amount to the basis speed. So 115% or 110%. So the sailing profile of the ships stays. 

Edited July 20, 2017 by Luc

[Bragan Benigaris]

Before the wipe, on testbed, when we didn't have to much high-% speed upgrades which can sum up to nearly 20% the speed cap and the meta wasn't a big issue. So one of the issues is the amount of % every upgrade gives and the stacking of them.

Perhaps a tuning down of the bonus to1-2% per upgrade as already suggested would be helpful - and it reduces the salt about the rng in dropping them, because the boni from the woods (who should stay and are without rng available) will be more important.

The speed cap itself isn't so bad at all, it only renders in its curent state some sailing profiles useless (like the one of the reno). An individual cap per ship (x% of it's base speed) or at least different caps per rating (e.g. 7th rate 17kn / 6th rate 16 kn / 5th rate 15kn / 4th -1st rate 14kn) would be better.

 

Edited July 20, 2017 by Bragan Benigaris
correction

[Zoky]

My only concern is that since people don't know what they want they will whine until devs nerf speed build into oblivion, and then this will lead to mandatory lo/wo for OW PvP. We already have mandatory lo/wo for missions and port battles so can we at least have some diversity in OW pvp? Did any of you try to build lo/wo renno and stack it with speed mods? What about endy? No? And please stop complaining about 15kn connis. While on paper its 15kn in battle is different story. I'm yet to see conni that can keep up with my pirate frigate. Recently my clan captured 15kn aga, which according to many of you shouldn't be possible. Well it is possible. So I suggest for you all to go and try different builds for your rennos and  endys instead of always complaining 

[Captain Lust]

6 minutes ago, Zoky said:

My only concern is that since people don't know what they want they will whine until devs nerf speed build into oblivion, and then this will lead to mandatory lo/wo for OW PvP. We already have mandatory lo/wo for missions and port battles so can we at least have some diversity in OW pvp? Did any of you try to build lo/wo renno and stack it with speed mods? What about endy? No? And please stop complaining about 15kn connis. While on paper its 15kn in battle is different story. I'm yet to see conni that can keep up with my pirate frigate. Recently my clan captured 15kn aga, which according to many of you shouldn't be possible. Well it is possible. So I suggest for you all to go and try different builds for your rennos and  endys instead of always complaining 

Ok, mate.

[Zoky]

I do agree that there is problem with 4 rates and up, but at same time I'm aware that devs will just nerf everything across the board coz they are lazy and that will just create more problems

[Zoky]

7 minutes ago, Captain Lust said:

Ok, mate.

Actually I know exactly what i talk about. And next time instead of posting bs gifs can you please elaborate why do you find my opinion wrong, ty

Edited July 20, 2017 by Zoky

[Captain Lust]

8 minutes ago, Zoky said:

Actually I know exactly what i talk about. And next time instead of posting bs gifs can you please elaborate why do you find my opinion wrong, ty

Is it coincidence that everyone else thinks the current speedmeta is broken / unbalanced and only you unload your  "stop whining" bs here?  Why would you use Renommée over surprise when both can hit 15 knot maximum? Same with Endymion and Constitution... How is it balanced and good game design that every pvp ship has gazelle/ copper plating / bovenwinds / crooked hull? Just think before you post.... The game would be much better if heavier wood builds were more viable in OW PvP. And doesn't the agamemnon tooltip you posted just prove how retarded the speed meta is? Show some class and stop defending a retarded game mechanic, only because you're all set on speedmods and the average player isn't...

[Zoky]

While I agree that endy is crap (due to sailing profile and not due to speed cap), reno is far from it! Speed build reno will be faster then surp upwind (it sound weird but its true) and its cheap. It doesn't even require any speed mods other then gazelle. Speed build surp is fastest beam reach ship in game and has 4 laser accurate stern chasers!!! And answer me this: have you ever seen any good pvper in anything bigger then 5 rate? Now why is that if coni, aga and belona are so OP? And while that aga is 15kn on paper in battle its still a brick. Same with coni same with belona.

[admin]

Lets start with introducing penalties to pure speed mods and slightly reducing the buffs they generate.
If it won't be enough we will rebalance the speed cap. 

[Koltes]

1 minute ago, admin said:

Lets start with introducing penalties to pure speed mods and slightly reducing the buffs they generate.
If it won't be enough we will rebalance the speed cap. 

I will run some data through current builts and see if we can help to rebalance it. We dont need anything changed in the actual crafting or mods or materials. Everything is fine. We just need to balance actual end parameters.
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