Star Citizen Ship Customization – Why Is It Gone? When Is It Coming Back?
Welcome to some more Star Citizen. What is happening with Ship & Vehicle Customization?
Why did a load of players have 0aUEC when they logged on? What’s happening with the Ares Starfighter? All that and more will be talked about in this Dev Response piece.
We used to have quite diverse shields and components but now they are largely carbon copies of each other. There was a thread:
Will we ever get our Weap/Shield customization back CIG??
Seriously, it’s been a year. It’s been a year since they removed the interesting and fun nuances from weapons and shields and it’s seriously boring to not have the option of customizing your ship besides your QT speed. It takes SC back several years to the time when components didn’t exist.
I am tired of seeing this. All manufacturers producing the exact carbon copy products of each other kills immersion when it comes to kitting out our ships. “For rebalancing” is a fine excuse for a month, two months, three months, four months, 6 months- it’s closing on A YEAR. Please, bring variety back to weapons and shields.
YOGIKLATT CIG Responded:
I’ll try to explain the state of the customization for the ship components and why seemingly “nothing” has changed in the last year:
When we introduced the archetype tuning (which included streamline all component sizes) it allowed to reset the tuning of all components. The game had quite drastically changed over the years and a lot of moving parts (like ship item balance) couldn’t really keep up over time. Streamlining all components was a necessary evil to regain control over the balance in the game. It also allowed us to get rid of a lot of balance offenders, like shield generators that were just better than others without having meaningful downsides (and remember we want pros and cons for every ship item).
At the moment that state (lets call it the archetype state) is still what we have because our current focus has NOT been on polishing the PU but on getting the core flight and combat experience in a better shape for the future PU and SQ42. That might sound like not much but it is a huge task containing drastic changes. It will also dictate a lot of changes for the components and their balance numbers. Staying in the archetype state for components allows us to iterate faster.
Here is a somewhat simplified recent example: We’re trying out variations combat gameplay where the power triangle assignment has less effects on the shield regen but acts stronger on the resistance to minimize the need for micro-adjusting during combat. If we had a lot of shield generator variances it would mean that in order to test this out we’d need to update the game data of all of our 60 something shield generators. That’s a lot of files to adjust and we’d need to do that for every iteration. Instead we rather deal with only 5 shield archetypes (1 for each size) until we figured out what kind of core changes we want. Creating variations is a follow-up task which should be done once we’re happy with the core gameplay loop.
A similar situation exists for weapons. We’ve known for a while what kinds of properties we want the vehicle weapons to have (we have a big Excel sheet that lists which weapon is supposedly good against X or Y). We could spend a couple weeks to get the weapon data updated to get all the variation. However we also know that the above mentioned other changes will inevitably require a rebalance of application numbers, velocities, fire rates, etc. So instead of updating all items at once and needing to maintain them over every release we opted for the approach of reducing the complexity for the time being as it is more managable.
As to why it has been more than a year: That’s just the reality on how long design and engineering can take. Our above mentioned focus was actually established shortly after 3.14 and a good chunk of VFT’s work that happened since then hasn’t seen the eye of the public yet. You may read the monthly reports to get a few glimpses but that is as much as I can say at this point.
Anyways, to sum it up … this all does of course not mean that the variations will not come back. Of course they will come back … just like you we want meaningful variations with pros and cons, etc. But we have to pick the right time to minimize costs and impacts on the rest of the project. And that time is not now. So the archetype state will have to prevail a bit longer until those bigger things are resolved.
I hope it makes sense.
0aUEC Issues – This was an issue affecting various players over the last few days, the OP said:
So, first players are awarded a huge amount of aUEC for participation only to be reduced, then add 1Mil, and now set to ZERO?
What is the deal? Did I miss something?
This appears to be due to a big of somekind with CI already having fixed it now and saying:
Hello everyone,
I am happy to inform you that the issue has been fixed, and all aUEC bank accounts that were affected by the bug have been adjusted.
So players shouldn’t have any more wallet issues.
Ares Work for 3.18 – The OP of this thread said:
You told us that you are experimenting with the Ares atm.
Can you give is some new info on how that’s going and if it’s intended that at least anything will change about it’s state for 3.18?
YOGIKLATT Responded:
No news I’m afraid. We didn’t have time to resolve the UI issues that were needed for Ion weapons and priorities changed so we’re now focusing on the overall combat experience (flight tuning, gunnery, weapon balance, etc.). That is quite a substantial task and due to that we will minimize further specific ship work until it is done. So the Ares will be looked at again but don’t expect any changes in 3.18.
There was a follow up question:
You mentioned turning on fix assist again, at least a little, would be a thing that takes seconds to activate. Wouldn’t this small fix be worth to test for a cycle? If it turns out to be op again, it can always just be switched off again.
YOGIKLATT Responded again:
Definitely not without further testing internally which hasn’t happened on our side yet (and probably won’t be for a while due to other priorities). We are though currently working on gunnery changes and that includes a review of the nudging freedom of all weapons. I can’t promise that the Ares weapons will change though. S7s are not anti-figher guns, so my gut feeling is that there is a chance that we might just dial back the aim assists for all of them. We’ll see, I am not sure yet.