Star Citizen Players Voice Concern Over BIG CitizenCon Game Changes
We have some aftermath from Star Citizen’s CitizenCon 2022 event… with players concerned or upset about changes coming to ship combat and quantum travel vs scm modes… where you can either travel fast around the verse but without shields and weapons or move around in SCM speeds which are much slower but you have access to combat systems. Let’s take a look and some threads I saw on Spectrum where Devs Responds and answered the communities questions.
WTF CIG – Why are you disabling shields at higher speeds?? This is just awful. Large ships are at a massive disadvantage.
YogiKlatt_CIG Responded:
we didn’t really have time to cover all aspects of the changes. Here are some details on the shield interaction:
When you swap SCM to QCM, you’re shields will not instantly blink away. I am not sure if that was visible in the videos but they collapse fluently while the quantum drive spools up. So if the mode swap has achieved 50% your shields will be down by 50%. However the shield health you had before is not completely lost but dumped into a reserve pool (the max amount being a property of the equipped shield generators) where it remains while you are in QCM. When you swap back to SCM, that shield health is immediately pumped back into the shield faces. This takes a couple of seconds but unlike normal shield regeneration that process cannot be interrupted by weapon impacts of any sort. So ships get a part of their defensive capabilities back after some seconds. Hope that clears it up.
You just destroyed racing with master modes – signed, one of your pro level racers.
I have to choose between,
A: 250 – 300 m/s with maaayyybe 500 m/s using boost for a short period
or
B: Full speed but no boost?
Has anyone at CIG ever raced before? Do they understand how heavily we rely on boost to pin corners?
Quantum mode sounds out of the question. So cool. Racings going to be real exciting at 300 m/s. How out of touch are you guys, really?
gfg CIG. gfg.
YogiKlatt_CIG Responded:
We had discussions about this internally and we think it will actually better for racing.
From our POV racing is not just about reaching a certain velocity … it’s about finishing a race track in a given time. Speed is important but “feel” of speed is not based on that meters / sec value alone but strongly related how close you fly to the boundaries of that track. You can fly in a fighter jet at Mach 2 at 50000 feet and feel no speed at all or fly with a helicopter 5 meters above the trees at 100 km/h … I guarantee you the latter feels a lot faster. 300 m/s is not slow either, that’s close to 600 knots for the local pilots here and I assume only Tornado pilots can tell how fast that really is at low level.
So yes, a couple of racing tracks might not be suitable anymore but it doesn’t mean that racing does’t work. More than before you have to carefully manage your thruster capacitor as it can now extend beyond your SCM speed, especially in the non-spheric boost space. Also the master modes actually encourage a more interesting track loadout. Parts of a racing track that can adhere to the short range SCM gameplay (where you have to change your velocity vector a lot) with longer legs where you have to go in and out of QCM at the right time to minimize your track times and avoid overshooting. Plus you still have g-forces to worry about.
Racing is important for us and we chat a lot with racing communities. So pls keep your mind open about this … sure it will be a bit different (every big change is) but our goal is still to make it exciting.
The Original Poster then responded:
Appreciate the reply and you trying to help me see from your perspective.
I still can’t imagine switching between scm and quantum mid race as being anything but clunky compared to what we had, which was fluid.
I am doing my best to stay positive about these changes but it sure feels like those changes are hyper fixated on fixing combat at the expense of anything else.
Since I have your attention, even if it was wrangled in a less-than-ideal manner, I ask that you guys appreciate how dedicated your racing community is and that racing not amount to an afterthought for flight model changes.
If you are at liberty to disclose; are there plans for additional master modes specific to different applications, such as racing?
Also, I question why boost is turned off in quantum mode – a mode designed for travel. I can understand weapons, shields and counter measures. Keeping boost enabled solves a lot of problems for racers and it’s difficult for me to see how it negatively affects anything else. Just a thought.
YogiKlatt_CIG Responded:
We’re currently not thinking about additional master modes, it might come in the future. Specifically for racing I don’t see the need for a specific mode as it just uses the normal capacitor / ship stamina systems that are also needed for combat gameplay. Both are mostly about maximizing some part of your ship performance and effectively offsetting your velocity vector.
We don’t allow thruster boost in QCM as we want to make your ship feel very vulnerable during QCM so that the decision to swap into that mode is not made lightly and comes with consequences. That’s why all capacitor systems (shields, weapons, thrusters boost) are inhibited. As a player that means you can pick high speed or high accels but not both … plus the boost button is then used for quantum boost.
Racing is not an afterthought but I feel the requirements for enjoyable combat and enjoyable racing are very closely related. And we also do racing specific things … I could mention that one of our new coders is currently preparing a manual stop watch for the flight HUD.
What about Snub Ships like the P52 and QCM / Quantum Boosting? YogiKlatt Said:
We’re not set on this yet, our feeling atm is that ships like the P52/72 won’t be able to go into QCM. Being Snub fighters we might just give them a higher SCM speed though … but really we didn’t do the numbers for those two ships yet. SQ42 ships first, the PU will follow.
He went onto say theoretically we could also have a tiny q-drive that only allows boosting. We’ll discuss that all internally.
My concern with light/medium/heavy fighter “roles”
The OP’s concern here is how the balance of fighters actually plays out and will light fighters just fly better causing imbalance.
YogiKlatt Responded here:
All ships will get a rebalance for the master modes. In general we’re aiming to lessen the relative agility differences between the light, medium and heavy fighters. A lot of their current tuning has been done to account for the speeds you could reach before.
With master modes we can now look at the problem in just the lower SCM velocity range and it allowed us to buff the agility of the medium and heavies by quite a lot without making them all feel the same. In our internal playtests with the master mode tunings, our medium archetype (F7CM) is definitely competitive against the Gladius … it’s not the perfect choice but you have a much better chance compared to the live builds. Whether that holds up later in public builds we’ll have to see ofc but I am optimistic it will work.
Will there be ANY balance to Turrets to offset the new speeds and capabilities?
Independent of the new master mode system we’re iterating on the gunnery system (which includes turrets). Once all changes are in and master modes have been enabled we will have to take a pass on the auto aim capabilities of turrets. Atm they are quite exaggerated because of the high speeds so it is possible that we will adjust a few values. It’s nothing surprising here, balance adjustments are often necessary when parts of the gameplay system change.
There was some annoyance at discrepancies in the Spirit’s Specs. CI are investigating that… I’ll be covering the ship in some detail once we have the Q&A and confirmed specs for all the variants.
Where is Alpha 3.18… CIGs Zyloh said:
We’ve been actively working to get 3.18 out the door and on to the PTU nearly every single day. We’re definitely close and will continue evaluating the build daily this week.
Boom, that’s it for this times community concerns & dev responses.