Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Drifter gun

/thread

Drifters are those OP-Sleeper battleships that say hello if you are on disagreement with Circadian Seekers scanning your boat. Those battleships have an extra blue-ish shield layer that activates a doomsday gun that vaporizes everything you have before and if you don't move your escape pod, they will loot your corpse.

This Drifter doomday thing is like a gate-gun and doesn't have tracking and poof, you're toast.

He is asking for a battleship doomsday gun. I say nay.

Based on what I understand from the client-server relationship...

Gun effects are purely visual and on the client-side. The sever only sees grouped guns firing and acting as "one"... as this lessens sever load.
Source: DEV Blog from 2008



If I understand you OP... you are looking to make all your weapons fire at the same time... or at a more visually more consistent rate... correct?

If I remember correctly... there used to be a time where the guns would visually fire all at the same time. The DEVs got rid of that in favor of randomized "staggered firing" effects because they thought the latter would be more visually stimulating.

It actually offers a ton of utility across all weapon systems. Being able to stagger dps among guns results in more overall dps if the targets would perish mid volley.
The negative is that you are not using your full firepower ASAP and thus losing out on the first volley.
It's kinda close to the way drones work as they do not usually waste volleys and yet fire ASAP.
A continous fire mode that would alpha initially and stagger guns afterwards if target does not need full volley to die would be neat, but potentially tough to implement.

Forget implement can you imagine if the server load of two fleets of missile boats showed up?

Currently when you group your weapon the server treats it like one entity this drastically reduces server load even for turrets

uummm, whatever.
Maybe you'd like to bid on this bridge in New York City I got a good deal on. Brooklyn I think its name was.



There are two standpoints here. One is visual, for peeps that like that sort of thing i suppose, though the visual isn't what I'm after. I actually like broadsides and I have the impression most people do. I am sort of surprised CCP thinks a random firing pattern is prefered. I did not know that and darn I would have like to have seen proper broadsides from the BB's in game.

Your quote from Ytterbium also surprises me. My impression was that the ToHit and damage for each weapon was done as an individual. I can't supply any quote for you but I've read it enough times when people ask if grouping weapons hurts their hit chance if one 'die roll' misses for all weapons. The answer is always the same. Each weapon has it's own roll. Maybe doing the calculations for all the weapons in the same server tic helps the latency even if each weapon is rolled for individually. Since the ships are also moving I can definitely see a group fire button would be plus from CCPs point of view even it it only looks like a quality of gaming life from the player's point of view (pressing one button instead of many). If that is the case then what I am asking for would be a problem as spreading the die rolls to different server tics is what would happen if I got my request. Thank you for your reply.

The second standpoint is the one I'm after. Spreading the weapons fire across more capacitor recharge 'tics' (for lack of a better word). You can already do this by just not grouping your weapons and trying to space their fire manually. Since my impression of the group fire button was that it existed simply for the sake of the player's convenience, asking for a ripple fire button didn't seem unreasonable. Maybe the newer server hardware would have a better time of it.



Since the first 2 out of 5 peeps to reply didn't understand what I wrote, I have to wonder, is it my composition that was bad or their reading comprehension? Inquiring minds what to know!!!

A ballsy move would be to have guns working like mining lasers with long/infinite cycles.
Animation over time guns shooting like crazy in a much more "realistic" manner applying the dps.
But that would probably be a thing of distant future. But it already works for mining.

This is a very important observation. Before we got gun grouping, it used to be exactly like this.

The following weeks after that the new oversized armor / shield fittings began to rise since it felt (and was) there was more damage on the field than ever before.
You had to tank much more incoming damage at once. There not many people left from this era but back in the day we used to press F1-F8.
That's the reason, I am mocking knobbhhs when I say they press "FONE", as in zero effort, intelligence or tactic required.

The new fighter mechanics are the same thing, the only difference is they need one pilot to launch fighters to let the server fight for it.
All drone pilots let the server fight for them, they just don't see it.


And for your curiosity, I am not native in colloquial or the English language for that matter, even though it may seem so. Some things just get lost in translation and your first sentence reminded me of another thread from someone who wanted a mechanic where you would nuke your capacitor for a one-time overcharges gun cycle.

That "broadside" you speak of would be just like that, hence it got lost in translation.

What do you mean "was like this"? I do not know a single person that groups their weapons because of the chance to hit thingy. Real or not none of us take the chance and fire each weapon separately. Also we fire them separately simply because the staggered damage does not give as much time for your opponent's local or remote reps to counter the damage. Only lazy pilots who want the server to do it all for them group weapons.


Getting past that basic level of no one really fights in this game the server does the fighting for all of us there are a few things I take issue with in this.
The only drones pilots that have less work to do are the ones that launch drones and then assist them to another ship. But then this mechanic is bad on so many levels that the lazy factor does not even make the top 10 list.
A smart drone pilot will select his targets and fire accordingly in the same way a missile or turret pilot will.
In a fleet fight when the FC calls for drone damage on a specific ship the pilot has to target and tell his drones to attack that ship so there is no more or no less work than missiles or turrets. In fact there may be more work for a drones pilot what with managing your drones and your ship.