Star Trek Online announces Federation as PvE faction, then proves it.

[patience]

I can't believe so many self professed nerds didn't state the other obvious thing besides that treaty the Feds signed.

It's the Klingons! Most Klingon ships are a joke without cloaking. Feds vs Klingons is like a rogue vs a paladin and a warrior rolled into one with access to hunter's mark and flare.

If the Jem hadar were playable as depicted in universe then the game would have its broken pvp race.

[Jade Falcon]

This shouldn't be all that hard to balance out and stay within the lore.

Federation ships have faster self repair times to shields/hull due to their skilled engineers or cloaked ships uncloaking have a delay before they can raise shields or reduced power to cloaked ships phasers due to the amount of energy needed to cloak a ship.

[Mrbloodworth]

According to lore, the Federation would never get initiative in pvp, right?  That breaks any kind of pvp game immediately.  
 

Not during war time.

[kildorn]

It's very difficult but it is possible to balance stealth in a PvP game (see: PlanetSide). However in a Star Trek universe game balancing is going to be a nearly impossible as cloaking devices were fitted in top-of-line warships rather than just being limited to, say, Scout-class ships.

Yeah, that is the big question. There are possibilities; cloaked ships might move really slow, cloaks and shields might be mutually exclusive with some 'switch over' time so that you're also very vulnerable yourself to someone's allies as you decloak, etc. The hard part isn't thinking of ways to balance it, really, it is tweaking those variables to a point where there actually is balance. I suspect they'll have to have the biggest Klingon ships not able to cloak in order to pull it off. That's probably less of a lollore failure than giving cloaks to Starfleet.

That or making weapons/locking have a 5-10s delay on decloaking, which would make it a movement tool instead of an attack tool. It would be murder to decloak a group and just stand there for 10s looking like idiots.

[WayAbvPar]

EVE handles it pretty elegantly. Nothing cloaked can target or attack while cloaked. Ships that can warp cloaked are almost completely useless in combat. Anyone can stick a cloak on any ship that can handle the power/cpu requirements, but they come at the cost of adding other useful items. It is tough/impossible to track down a cloaked ship, but it also impossible to be killed by one. Compare that to getting one-shotted by a stealther in Shadowbane or WoW (and maybe DAOC- didn't play a stealth class high enough to gank anyone like I did the other two  ).

[Azaroth]

I can't believe so many self professed nerds didn't state the other obvious thing besides that treaty the Feds signed.

It's the Klingons! Most Klingon ships are a joke without cloaking. Feds vs Klingons is like a rogue vs a paladin and a warrior rolled into one with access to hunter's mark and flare.

If the Jem hadar were playable as depicted in universe then the game would have its broken pvp race.

Nerf Defiant class.

[Toonces the Driving Cat]

We have cloaking in Starport, and it is balanced vs. other ship capabilities. We are a heavy pvp game, and we are just launching a new 20-minutes instanced version of the game featuring a cool skill rating system that awards points only for team victories.

Please check it out and let me know what you think of the game. www.Starportgame.com

Thanks,
Toonces

[schild]

We have cloaking in Starport, and it is balanced vs. other ship capabilities. We are a heavy pvp game, and we are just launching a new 20-minutes instanced version of the game featuring a cool skill rating system that awards points only for team victories.

Please check it out and let me know what you think of the game. www.Starportgame.com

Thanks,
Toonces

That. Was not subtle.

[Toonces the Driving Cat]

We are talking about Star Trek Online, should we really be worried about subtleties?

BTW, the new instanced galaxy is called "Blitzkrieg Beta" if you do log on.

[Lantyssa]

Chris Dane Owens is a red name now?

[Rishathra]

Chris Dane Owens is a red name now?

Fuck.  I need a new keyboard now.  Good one.

[Evildrider]

I can't believe so many self professed nerds didn't state the other obvious thing besides that treaty the Feds signed.

It's the Klingons! Most Klingon ships are a joke without cloaking. Feds vs Klingons is like a rogue vs a paladin and a warrior rolled into one with access to hunter's mark and flare.

If the Jem hadar were playable as depicted in universe then the game would have its broken pvp race.

Nerf Defiant class.

I totally want a Defiant!   

[Simond]

Pah, there is no honour in flying some chief engineer's upgunned wet dream. True warriors need only a K'tinga-class and courage! 

[kildorn]

This game will be lore-nerdier than LOTRO. That's amazing.

[schild]

This game will be lore-nerdier than LOTRO. That's amazing.

And as such, entirely unplayable without a neckbeard growing neckbeards.

[Venkman]

And in regard to cloaking, the Federation will not have free access to the technology. If we gave the Federation access to cloaking, it’s all anyone would use, and that’s not the type of gameplay we envision when we think of Star Trek. Klingons, of course, will have access to cloaking, and the Federation will have access to cloak detection. Science vessels will be very good at detecting cloaked ships, so if you’re in a PvP situation, you’re probably going to want really good science vessels on your team. You won’t feel like you’re missing out on the Federation side just because you can’t cloak.

I wish I could unpack all the layers of fuckstupid in that one paragraph about cloaking ("everyone would use it"...REALLY?  WHAT DOES THAT TELL YOU ABOUT HOW POWERFUL IT WILL BE FOR KLINGONS, NUMBNUTS??).  Whoever wrote that pretty obviously had never even heard of PvP until he was told to write that.   

Late to the thread, but Triforcer's post stuck out at me.

What makes you think this has anything to do with game design? The Federation has cloaking tech, they just aren't officially allowed to use it. Outside a few edge cases for whatever book is being written, or when they need to escape from inside an asteroid.

So yea, dumb from a PvP standpoint. But I doubt it was a decision that came from Cryptic, or at least them alone.

[patience]

This game will be lore-nerdier than LOTRO. That's amazing.

And as such, entirely unplayable without a neckbeard growing neckbeards.

Honestly no. The MMO could deviate a lot from the universe if the devs understood the cultural, narrative and technological factors that made up Star Trek that annoyed fans to a very large degree (e.g. the role of replicators in post scarcity society, warp speed, and time travel resets respectively speaking) and made something that wasn't anything unlike Trek that we know but was better for it, because it tossed out the bad parts.

It's too late in the development cycle though to do research of this sort and undo the influence of Berman and Braga.

[Triforcer]

Since this PvP whine of mine is the newest STO thread, here is a tidbit about beta for those who don't read the Champions thread:

http://www.champions-online.com/preorder

Ordering either a lifetime or six months CO sub gets you into the STO closed beta, which begins "later this year."

[sinij]

I wish I could unpack all the layers of fuckstupid in that one paragraph about cloaking ("everyone would use it"...REALLY?  WHAT DOES THAT TELL YOU ABOUT HOW POWERFUL IT WILL BE FOR KLINGONS, NUMBNUTS??).  Whoever wrote that pretty obviously had never even heard of PvP until he was told to write that.

You are probably 100% right, and these people have no place designing mmorpgs with PvP in it. From sounds of it Federation will end up being "PK me" faction.

The only way it will not end up being huge clusterfuck is if Federation gets grossly overpowered, build to be non-aggressive but by default dominant... but balancing uneven PvP is even harder than already impossible task of balancing PvP.

[Ratman_tf]

[01101010]

Yeah, he's fucked. He should have picked blue or tan. And I feel dirty now just knowing that.

[schild]

Everyone knows about redshirts. It's not even a nerd thing anymore.

[Hoax]

Everyone knows about redshirts. It's not even a nerd thing anymore.

Someone should really tell the Nortenos.