Zabrak! wrote:
A few thoughts:
First, agreed that your last thread devolved astonishingly quickly into crazy schemes, where a simple stat change would have sufficed. People, you've got to understand that making suggestions to the devs is like trying to feed a fussy toddler: even though it's good for him, you're going to wrestle for a long time, something's probably going to get broken on the first pass, and there's no point in trying to do something fancy.
Nicely put.

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Second, agreed that combat grinding is going to reliably generate more influence per hour than cargo missions. However, I don't think it's as enormous of a difference as is often complained about. I won't bog down this post in the numbers (though I'd be happy to run through them for the curious), but certain crazy spots like Romeo/Juliet aside, it works out to about 25% better inf/hour to grind than run even a fairly optimal set of three cargo missions.
I would be interested in those numbers. I was going to point out Sinshlad, but Sinsh is doing a lot of his grinding on Romeo/Juliet, if I recall correctly. That pair is a very special little situation, and I think I'm going to just scoot those over to 'outside the scope of this thread'.
My main concern about combat grinding basically comes down to memories of Acero. His automatic domination of the board made it significantly less fun to compete--normal people had basically no hope of taking first place. For all the problems last round had, I managed to hang onto the top spot entirely by being smart with my mission tetris and being on top of my landings, and the competition I had was tight and really well fought. That much of last round was really fun. For me, at least.
Sinshlad has said, I believe, that he has three days a week where he can grind--basically, he's a determined person with a pretty normal schedule. Someone without anything better to do might have twice the influence that Sinshlad has by now and, of course, we are on the internet; there is no shortage of people without anything better to do.
Just to boil it down to honest selfish motivations, I want to be competitive for the top spot. I don't want to have my chances for that be linked unlimitedly to how much time I have to spend on the game--I would play WoW if that's what I wanted a game like that, and there is no shortage of other games that work that way.
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Third, I definitely believe that while real balance would be nice, if there's going to be one consistently better than the other, I'd prefer cargo to combat missions. I enjoy that this is a sporadic game and as much as I dig combat, the puzzle of cargo missions feels much truer to the spirit of it. I mean, it's called grinding for a reason.
Agreed on all points.
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Fourth, I would suggest rather than combat getting nerfed, that cargo missions get buffed -- specifically to the tune of an across-the-board increase by 25% of inf/km. I wouldn't be averse to more, but I would appreciate a numbers-based counter-argument as opposed to emotional fingerpointing at us grinders. In general, I prefer buffs to nerfs; they feel more like rewarding the downtrodden than punishing the logical gamesperson.
I agree with buffs being preferable to nerfs. I like the 25% inf/km buff for one major reason: it's something a dev could implement with a couple hours in one evening, and therefore much more likely to get done. It may or may not be a complete solution, but it might be Good Enough.