Really? I just thought they were adjusting Hero tiers upward and adding additional low-lvl Morningstar and Silesia clones.
I can't be certain. I'm just repeating what I understood from Tzeentch. If it really is as it seems, this is easily the biggest bonehead developer decision I've heard since the No Man's Sky trainwreck.
As far as I can tell the servers are still offline, so maybe they're just midway through the changes?
I am extremely suspicious of this company now. A total shutdown of the website is a great way to obfuscate the fact that you overnight just ripped off everyone who bought a retroactively gutted founders pack. hopefully this is all just a misunderstanding: http://www.theskjaldborg.com/index.php?threads/dreadnought.9634/page-4#post-268563 I'm not sure what that has to do with promising Tzeentch certain ships when he bought the founders package and then retroactively removing said ships from his account. That is extremely shitty to me. That's not gamer entitlement. That's reneging on a quantifiable business exchange. I can't tell if you are offering that as supportive or conflicting evidence. Last I checked, warframe does great selling ONLY cosmetics.
So the way the game previously was, I paid for the Mercenary package, got 5 hero ships and four "fleet" beta keys each granting 1 hero ship to a friend as well as in game premium currency for myself and the beta key owners. A dreadnought, a destroyer, a corvette, a tactical cruiser, and an artillery ship where what I paid for. Non-hero versions of these ships were unlocked at higher player levels. The benefit of owning a Hero ship was that you could own a ship and weapons/modules that were locked beyond your player rank but you could not customize their weapons loadout or cosmetic appearance. If you didn't buy the mercenary pack and get all 5 at once, and you were in the beta, you could instead pay for and buy these ships individually in the ingame store if you wanted to. So in terms of their availability these are essentially Hero mechs from MWO. With the change to the WoT model of progression, Manufacturer tree > ship/tech type lines, this has changed. The Dreadnought and the.... I think tactical cruiser, are now tier 2 Hero ships and the remaining three are considered tier 4. My account has been retroactively altered that I now only receive the 2 lower tier ships instead of all 5, only a week after giving them my money. They took the Huscarl destroyer I paid for away from me, and that is not okay. This is like Chris Roberts suddenly deciding that the Idris-M is too powerful for players to own with that rail gun it has, so he removes them from people's accounts and gives them store credit instead of their money back... minus the store credit. TL;DR They advertised 5 hero ships and I gave them money. They changed their minds about how many ships I should have after they had my money. They took three ships away and made the remaining 2 lower tier. Riot.
I take back what I said earlier about the server outage. This is apparently all according to plans they already announced earlier: https://www.reddit.com/r/playdreadnought/comments/59dyem/patch_120_on_the_way/
So it is as I thought it was... this is not good at all. It would have been completely acceptable to discontinuing selling the original founders pack as advertised and replaced it with a new one, but they basically gave a giant middle finger to their founders. What the fuck are they thinking?
It looks like, going over this other set of patch notes, that instead of removing the 3 dreadnoughts, I'm keeping all 5 and they're adding 2 lower tier ones so I can play with my friends leveling up who aren't ready for tier 4. So I'm wondering if this big patch with the servers down so they can fiddle with accounts, they are adding the ships they took away from me back in and gave me a scare for no reason beyond poor wording. I hope that's the case.
Matches what they said on reddit: https://m.reddit.com/r/playdreadnou..._quick_look_at_patch_130_the_shipyard_update/ I still think the "manufacturer tech trees" and tiering are trash. They made 36 new reskins of the same ships and created a shitty stat progression. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x9AbCduhhnV15gqxPzngAERrUem0ip9XgMndQ6D7Mso/edit?usp=sharing Because Final Fantasy grind is totally what I want in an arena shooter.
They had a damn good system at launch.... and they seemed to have gone from trying something different to cocking it up in one patch I am hoping that the outcry they are getting from the community will give them a bit of insight into what their players were looking for in the game as opposed to what they thought the players wanted.
Pulling from the official Twitter, here are some previews. Spoiler: Medium Artillery Cruisers: Rurik Tier I https://imgur.com/6Jjulah Tugarin Tier II https://imgur.com/z2u8Yec Vucari Tier III https://imgur.com/gLUE6fy Murometz Tier IV https://imgur.com/ZycuCi6 (Tier V is the Svarog, which you've already seen) Spoiler: Medium Destroyers: Agosta Tier I https://imgur.com/s5s3eXY Otranto Tier III https://imgur.com/iSeX3gO Vigo Tier IV https://imgur.com/s5UvDvM (Tier V is the existing Athos) There are some variations across the tiers, but it's nothing earthshattering.
Hmmm... pretty blatant reskinning. I don't understand why devs think every arena combat game needs to have a tiered system. If I wanted to grind for XP, I'd go play a damn RPG.
Yeah, and the progression... (quoting myself from reddit) Comparing tier 1 ships to tier 5, there seems to be a consistent formula: Tier 5 has 2.5x energy compared to Tier 1 Tier 5 has more than 2x firepower of Tier 1 Tier 5 has more than 2x hp of Tier 1 High Tier ships have access to better modules Low level modules do roughly 2x damage from high Tier ships, along with much lower cooldowns Tier 1 ship top speeds are 2x those of Tier 5 The rise from Tier 2 to Tier 4 isn't quite as extreme, but it's close. That's a pretty steep penalty to low level players trying to start into Veteran - not only less experienced and with a more restrictive module selection, but also handicapped with substantially worse firepower, cooldowns, reactors, and survivability. Their only leg up is a big speed advantage, which I guess means they can spend the match running away... though I think that somewhat undermines any learning opportunity. Just dogpiling so many disadvantages against the lower level players seems... well, really shitty. It puts higher level players in a massively dominant position. The really significant speed drop off in the high Tiers also makes me wonder how those fights would play out... hitting slow targets isn't too challenging, so perhaps mostly static slugging contests? Obviously there's still differences by manufacturers, but I wish I had the speed data on the current ships for comparison.
It appears that my theorycrafting skills remain strong. https://www.greybox.com/dreadnought/en/forum/topic/12813/?page=1
Played one match. Worst gameplay experience I've ever had. Tier 1 Recruit fleets get matched against Tier 4 Veteran/Legendary and the T1 ships are such fucking pieces of trash they can't even damage a T4 at a rate much higher than its hull autorepair. The tech tree is grinding to buy a bunch of shit modules I don't want on a shit ship I don't want so I can eventually get to "research" the next tree up shit ship I don't want and grind through that to maybe eventually tree over to the nerfed shit copy of a shit I might want... but I don't really have the patience to waste that much of my life losing 25:1 matches because my trash ship is castrated and can't do anything except die in one shot. It can't even mount secondary batteries or even the most basic crew orders, either. You guys can give this a try but I really wouldn't recommend it. Really fucking awful patch.
I already detested the 'module' grind in any game. Not only do you require me to grind for each fucking vehicle, that vehicle will suck against other vehicles until you grind and lose with it, and at the point where its finally usable you're now onto the next one. There is literally 0 fun in any of that, hence no longer playing WT, world of ships, tanks, etc. They literally picked the least fun F2P grind progression possible just because its been done by successful companies.
