Best Of

With the way Starmourn is set up, bashing for more MILs, hacking, captaincy, etc. still feed into each other. As a prime example, gear (and mods, for now) are MIL-dependent.

However, removing straight PVE bashfests from PVP objectives is good. Props to the admin, too, for being incredibly fast with the patches!

Matlkael said:
... In fact, the existence of guards meant that the whole cosmpiercer system revolved around them: how to kill them fast enough, how to ensure your guards survive long enough, or how to kite them together to stop an attack. There was very little (if any at all) player to player combat happening. It was all guards, guards, guards.

I'm quoting my post to highlight the three different ways that cosmpiercer guards were a bad idea. It essentially makes cosmpiercers revolve around:

1. how to kill them fast enough
2. how to ensure your guards survive long enough
3. how to kite them together to stop an attack

Even with making guards immune to movement, the first two still remain. Cosmpiercers would still be PVE objectives. PVP would once again be constrained to bounties and lawlessness.

Divorcing PVE from PVP is, in fact, a step in the right direction. We have plenty of PVE already. It's PVP that we lack, and thus, PVP that we should focus on with the cosmpiercer system.

I like channeled attacks because when interrupted, they do 0 health damage. Essentially, it's an opportunity for your wetwiring to regen your health without issue.

Not sure how faction activity is related to the conversation.

To give some data on the new numbers, we just tried a Level 5 cosmpiercer. With no opposition, we hacked all 6 terminals, and when I bailed with ~1 minute remaining we only had 61.20% capture progress. I assume the points tick around 3.2 seconds, so we actually would have needed 6 terminals (12 pts/3.2 secs) for over 22 minutes to have won. If you factor in the time to land and hack, that's a real slim margin against the 30-min cap.

I still think that the number of terminals needs to be limited to make the mechanic more reasonable, and standardizing would make balancing the numbers a bit easier. But anyway, appreciate the tweaks and attention this is getting!

Thank you,

Rhindara said:

That said, COSMPIERCER WARP is available as soon as the 'dominance' of the cosmpiercer turns from 'N/A' to the raiding party. Because it ticks so damn fast, depending on who's been able to hack what, by the time the defenders can land, it can absolutely be nearly over, but isn't always the case.

That's what I mean - because the tick rate speeds up with every terminal hacked, the majority of the cosmpiercer battle is spend with the defender in 'control' and unable to use COSMPIERCER WARP. By the time WARP availability switches sides, the battle is mostly over and there probably isn't enough time to turn things around. But decreasing the tick rate/increasing the number of points needed would shift things more toward a 50/50 split on WARP availability as well as simply giving the defense more time to muster and counter-hack.

I absolutely agree that the progress bar ticks way too fast. There needs to be some adjustments made in the scaling, and maybe the number of terminals to be hacked for higher ranked cosmpiercers, since having to unhack 8 level 16s as the defending party on top of fighting people is a pretty tough ask. That said, COSMPIERCER WARP is available as soon as the 'dominance' of the cosmpiercer turns from 'N/A' to the raiding party. Because it ticks so damn fast, depending on who's been able to hack what, by the time the defenders can land, it can absolutely be nearly over, but isn't always the case.

In other news, we took a cosmpiercer in around 10 minutes. The overall timers (30 total minutes, plus the amount at which control points contribute to the score) might need retuning to make a takeover longer.

You warp into the cosmpiercer zone so that you can potentially dock and fight/hack on the ground, where before you'd usually have a very long travel time to go to defend wherever the attackers chose. It alleviates a lot of 'oh no are we gathering where are we going/what are we doing panic' that plagued defense before. There just need to be more tweaks made on the capture mechanic to make this change matter even more.

Tried out COSMPIERCER WARP for the first time today, found out that it's only available for the last third of the cosmpiercer progress bar. For low level cosmpiercers, this basically means you have 2 minutes to reverse hack everything - not really doable. But I think if cosmpiercers in general had twice as large point pools, we'd be in a decent place in terms of 'could the defenders plausibly show up and defend if there were defenders around'.