On 2012-02-18 03:10, Defiance{CM7} wrote:
if i may be so bold, I think you guys (devs) are trying to change too many things at once.

- Standard and Ablative Armor HP reduced by 5% and 7.5% respectively.
- All weapon damage (minus missiles and fighters) have had their damage reduced by 10%. Falloff on cannons has not been reduced by 10%, so as a result, UGTO and K'Luth cannons will not be as effective at long ranges.

this skews the balance between ICC and UGTO and Kluth. (skewed != not ballanced) This alone would be a handful to test. but then you add;

- Implemented new cloaking system -- Cloaked ships can no longer be detected with ECM/ECCM pinging, instead cloak energy usage is based on the amount of signature being masked by the cloaking device. Additionally, if the cloaking device is engaged and energy level reaches zero the ship will begin taking internal damage to the device.

- New ECM/ECCM Variants

In this you alter both the intended target of Ewar (Kluth vs humans) as well as how the devices themselfs work.

and then;

Defense Mode: No longer a shield mode - now comes on automatically when the ship is out of combat but without energy penalty.
- Active Shields: 5% hp increase.
- Reactive Shields : 5% regen increase.

- Added out of combat mechanic. Taking or inflicting damage will reset the combat timer to 30 seconds, which will then count down to 0.

When out of combat, the following will occur:
Repairs will be increased by 50%.
Shield regen increased by 400%.
Cloak energy cost decreased by 25%.

This coupled with the ugto armor changes, as well as gauss changes makes for alot of grey area. Things that used to be balanced now may be totaly out of wack.

- AI will now dodge incoming fire.

Now, not even the AI can be used as a controle.

In short, there is no longer a baseline. To compare beta to release is no good. Also there are no base line stats to go on inside of beta. Basicly you changed everything about combat... and you want to test everything at once, rather than changing one thing at a time so you can pinpoint exact causes of imbalance.

All this combined is holding up bug fixes that actualy need to be pushed to live asap;

- A certain elite has lost it's interdictor device. All may be fair in war, but nerf bat beats all

- Fixed issue where the source wormhole wouldn't be created/displayed on the client that initiated the device.

- Interdictor fields have been reverted back to landmark objects from local, meaning all clients will know where one is at all times instead of only when within 5,000 gu of one. This will solve the issues where some clients would jump some way into the fields before being stopped

- Fixed client lag/hitching issues caused by assets getting loaded in the foreground thread.

- Fixed issue with the beam weapons jittering on low-frame rate machines.

- Ship trails are no longer visible past 500 (wish it wer 1000) gu. This was done to stop a exploit.

- Enhancements may be scrapped instead of removed, which costs zero credits but the enhancement is destroyed.

- Fixes to the client asset cache.

...In closing, bug fixes should always take precedence over feature releases... as feature releases always come with more bugs.

Jus trying to help you guys not feel so bogged down.

On 2012-02-18 23:24, Fattierob wrote:
All these numbers are up in the air, and i'm still trying to find a happy balance between regen and energy rate and base hp and resistences and cornflakes