Intro

The point of this post is to inform the playerbase that the way Tractor Strength works is going to change, and I am approaching the playerbase for their feedback in regards to these changes. I do not want to make any changes that are going to drastically undo all of the time and effort you have put into your Tractor Ships (I want you to enjoy the game, honest... Even though I am known as Hoberestus the Nerf, bringer of Nerfs and herald of Broken Content. Hober giveth and Hober taketh...) In order to understand what is being proposed and why, there are a few pieces of background information I think are important.

1. The way tractors work is similar to Hooke's Law. The basic gist of it is that the closer a target that is being tractored is to the maximum length of the tractor beam, the stronger the push or pull effect. In other words, the further someone is from you the stronger the effect of the tractor beam.

2. Tractor Beams are currently affected by a lot of scaling multipliers, they are affected by Tractor Power, Tractor Range, and Tractor Efficiency, Graviton Research, Quantum Reach, Beam Mastery and Civil Engineer, Fleet Focus and the Tractor Strength augmenter modification. All of these effects interact with each other in ways that cause tractor beams to be extremely powerful when people fully invest in them.

3. Tractor Strength, as an augmod, gives +Range and +Strength. Because of Hooke's Law, and because of all of those scaling bonuses, and because of the amount of Tractor Efficiency you can potentially acquire, this results in insane amounts of range and tractor strength on Tractor Beams that have low base ranges and low electricity costs (Reindeer Harness Tractor is a very good example, it has a baseline strength of 930 and an electricity cost of 21. You can get multiple thousands of range with this tractor beam rather easily, and it is sufficient for manipulating the position of assets and players in combat situations).

Proposal

Understanding all of these points, here is my proposal to you. Tractor Strength aug mods would no longer give +Tractor Strength and +Tractor Range, it would only give +Tractor Strength. We would simultaneously add/adjust some tractors so that they inherently have more range with (significantly) less strength. I am envisioning Tractors that have, at a baseline, 2-3k range. Possibly more. I would even be willing to design some Tractor Beams that are Engineer locked with even more range. The reason for this is that getting 5k+ Tractor Range on a 300 range tractor beam is completely unacceptable. The meta game should not revolve around creating ships that have invested heavily into end game gear and augmenters, only to use very low tech tractor beams to manipulate the battlefield.

In addition, I also think we should buff baseline tractor beam strength by a significant amount. I do not know what this amount would be, but I'm thinking something like a factor of 5 or 10 would be interesting to play around with on the test server. This would also increase the amount of electricity required to turn them on and maintain them, but it would make tractors much more useful and impactful outside of Engineer gameplay (And help to address the issue of them becoming weaker due to us reducing range because of Hooke's Law). This would apply to tractor beams that do not get large amounts of range.

Possible Criticism

Quote:

All current tractors will become complete garbage/You're going to nerf Tractors

• The current tractors do not need their range nerfed. In fact, I would say that higher tech tractors should get more range than lower tech tractors being that they are a higher tech level and usually cost more electricity and are bigger. I envision higher tech tractors getting a range buff, especially if they have less than 500 range or so. If you want to use tractors in PvB or BvB I think there should be various types of tractors introduced that are high range but not as high strength as the shorter range tractors. I also think Engineer should be able to build/acquire class locked Tractors that are specifically designed to let them manipulate targets at range.

Quote:

You're going to hard cap tractor range which means if we want x range we need x range tractor beam, which promotes cookie cutter setups

• There is a hard cap on tractor range right now, which is about 9k (I think). Nothing I'm doing is changing that. The problem with the current system is that you can get insane amounts of range with short range+efficient tractors. Which is even further compounded with how tractor beams work thanks to Hooke's Law. Maybe the skills that give +Tractor Range/Efficiency/Etc could be given more levels so that people can still scale their tractor ranges up up, but we should never ever get to the point where people are using really short range tractor beams and pulling people/assets from multiple thousands of distance away with little to no concerns about electricity at all.

Feedback

We need your feedback to make this the best possible adjustment it can be, we would rather not constantly tinker with the way tractors work and so any criticism or commentary you can think of is greatly appreciated. I just want to highlight something very important:

The same way I expect you to challenge my arguments, I will be challenging your arguments. Your personal feelings about what is or is not fun are just as important to me as your logically reasoned points. If you want to talk about how something feels and whether or not something is fun I'm going to discuss that differently than I am going to discuss stats. That requires a different value system, and I'm more than happy to switch the system I'm using in this conversation. Just be sure to be clear with me about what your feedback is primarily concerned with.


EDITED: Added Fleet Focus to the list of things that give +Tractor Strength.

Occam's Razor man, be careful. its a complicated system and you could screw up peoples expensive tractorships. I'd like to see new tractor beams and better higher tech ones not sure you need to nerf the augs though until you have the new tractors in place. i see this as an aug nerf to make us change to newer beams of higher tech to achieve the same results we currently have

I'm having a hard time following your assumptions. You seem to be concerned that its too easy to get uber tractoring ability that you can infinitely power while only using low tech tractors.<---To the best of my knowledge this only applies to engies.

I have an endgame FC. On my main ship I already use multiple tractors, flaming snow reign and valutda's wrench for exactly the purpose you describe: I need one for a longer range, then one for closer more powerful range.

On my tractor ship I have what I consider to be a pretty end-game expensive FC tractor ship setup that can tractor 9k away, but can only sustain 5k away. It cost me 30b for the flaming snow reign tractor, required me to build an exotic small avekseka energy, required me to spend hundreds of billions pumping my pocket universe up to 15 so my super small tractorship would have room for everything. I also had to made tradeoffs on the aug setup and sacrifice a tractor aug for a saluna psu so it could power. ONLY THEN, am I achieving the stats you mention.

Zerks, snipers, gunners, FCs, seers and SDs are not building super cheap, low tech tractorships that can achieve the stats you were stating. It is costing them a lot of creds and resources to do that, which is the way it should be.

Your proposed changes make sense if the assumption and underlying problem you are citing for such changes is legit, but I dont think they are. If your real concern is really just something that only applies to engies, Im not sure it really warrants such a dramatic change. Maybe just do a little tweaking around the edges in those extreme cases that are causing the situation you cite.

PS. BTW - I do like this format of proposing big changes for the community to weigh in on and discuss before just enacting them. I hope more posts like this are forthcoming in the future. Thanks.

The idea of this is not horrible but there is some flaws I think.

First I'd like to start with the tractors in affect. This appears to apply to all tractors but there are more then just Push and Pull tractors. They're are tractors that deal with ELC, shields, resistances and a few others. On this topic I think tractors are something that are often overlooked since there is so many different things you can do with them but so little is done with them.

Second I'd like to point out that DM's use there tractors to manipulate the field doing content to. Holding ubers still or over bosses. Keeping certain AI away and if this is done incorrectly then this will hurt the DM's and it'll become a soft nerf. This should be avoided.

Third is I agree with tractors having OP ranges at low energy costs. It is crazy and I agree with Hober on this topic, but I would like to point out that most of the player base uses DM's to build there tractor ships so I think the way around this isn't quite being nailed on the head here. It was said that higher tech tractors will require more elc with a higher base line of tractor range. I think this is the incorrect way to do this. I agree that tractors should have base line ranges in accordance to there tech level but at t20 or t21 tractor range should stop increasing and energy should be lowered and strength should go up. Why? This will lead more people to use the t22 tractors and not find the best tier where they can get the most range and strength and still be able to sustain elc. Tractors are mainly about sustain and having tractor range and elc steadily being increased will leave us in a similar situation where high end tractors arent used and mid range and low range tractors are all that is used.

For example:

T20 tractors baseline at 2-3k range, using X elc with X strength
T21 tractors still baseline at 2-3k range but use less elc.
T22 tractors still have baseline 2-3k range use the same elc as T21 but have more strength.

This way T22 tractors are viable, sustainable, and considered "the best" with the most range for the least amount of elc and the most strength.

two questions. One, will you be fixing the GIANT HOLE between tech 6 and tech 16? (Yes, three inbuilts and a mission item IS a giant hole), and include hithhiker tractors in this fix?

Two, Have you considered dividing the tractor augs between range and strength? So people have the choice?

so do you want the same level of fun with tractors to cost more or do you want to tone down the level of fun with tractors. The danger is you just make it not possible to have the same amount of fun with tractors which would go along with the current "make everthing as shit as each other" dev theme.

@Tom

You should not be using an endgame stealth sniper, only to use an Ion Peashooter because you can get to endgame levels of dps and range, but only use 1% the energy that actual high tech weapons use, because of how the scaling works.

if you cant power a high tech weapon then yes, as thats no fun.

what normally happens now is a wise one will swoop in and say you augged badly if you cant power it

And why the fuck shouldn't they? Because you just decided 5 minutes ago that you personally don't like it? Hate to run with the "let's hate Hober because he's bad" crowd, but this is exactly why they exist. There is no fucking reason to make this change, it is spurred literally only by your personal preference at this moment, and offers no positive gameplay features. Shit like this is exactly why I've left this game. There is no fucking direction, it's just a bunch of volunteer devs in a circle jerk with too much power because there isn't any fucking oversight so whatever halfbaked reason someone can come up with for huge changes is always enough.