Some good ideas Jace.

On the quote ^: ATM if I wanted to kill pantalones low lvl's I could simply make a low lvl alt, and kill all the low lvl players, without even having to fear retaliation. With the team lvl, a lvl 1000 would be able to attack a lvl 100 pantalones, but at least the team mates would be able to defend their team mate now.

The paradox that makes this unsolveable is: we want people of very different power levels (ships, weapons) to compete for exactly the same resource (galaxies). This can obviously never work.

And by that I don't mean "we can come up with a system if we just make the rules complex enough" (like some previous suggestions in this thread), I mean exactly that, it cannot work. It's just logic, not my opinion.

So what can we do? We have to remove one of the parts of the paradox: either make player power levels within roughly the same range of each other, by making the most powerful players a maximum of maybe about 2 times as powerful as a noob. That would nullify the huge effort invested in making equipment and ships and AI's and bases and other content of very varying power levels, and would also make the ladder players climb much smaller. It probably won't work for SS.

The other way is to not make players of different power levels compete for the same resources. This can be done in a number of ways. One way is to reserve some galaxies for building by some level ranges, in effect giving each player powerlevel their own sandbox to play in. These sandboxes can indeed be cramped to encourage player competition (like we do it today), but each sandbox has to be isolated from the rest of the game, both upwards and downwards in power level.

So, I think we need to not compete for the same resources anymore, if we want a full game for various levels in the same universe.

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Another problem we have is that the level of a player doesn't accurately describe how powerful that player is in terms of combat. You can be level 1300 and the toughest merchant around, but a level 500 sniper can toast you. Then there's also ship fighting tactics, which are sort of rock-paper-scissors (only with more variables). Speed demon with mining weapons beats slow multifire pax, multifire pax beats bases, bases beat speed demon with mining weapons, and so on. If you have the right weapons and augs, you can kill a level 1300 in a pax in your hotrod at level 300. And if anyone in a pax happens to have no weapons at the time, he obviously can't kill you, regardless if he's a level 1000 sniper or not. And a level 150 base alt can give a level 1300 sniper a run for his money with some tough bases, but dies in one second in ship-ship combat. Augs (both on ships and bases) introduce even wilder swings in power level, even if we were to compare directly on the tech level or some similar factor. And then player skill comes on top of everything, so good dogfighters can probably be much more efficient than noobs in the same ships.

So the whole "level is a good indicator for how combat capable you are" I think needs to go right away. We need a new way to calculate it.

(Just to clarify, I'm not bringing this up to solve the first paradox up top, if we want players to have a long power ladder to the top (which I think we do), regardless of how well we define combat capability, we still need to let kids of similar ages play, the toddlers still can't armwrestle the college students. This topic is a different one, but still linked to PVP, so I put it here instead of making a new thread)

If we are to in any way associate the combat level with the equipment you have installed at the time (on a base or in a ship), that means that to avoid trouble, you can just remove that equipment. So if you're attacking a base in an attempt to take over a galaxy, they can throw their laser into space and be safe. Sounds a bit strange.

A similar situation could be players removing their weapons to fly past some bases that would be able to fire on them normally, then installing new weapons (or even getting in a new ship) once they're past the guardians. So to sum up, I don't think we can associate power level with the ship or the equipment you're currently using. It would allow people to vary their combat rating too much.

Another idea is to link it to the combat related skills you have. People can get a combat rating, maybe Piloting + Shields + (Weapons+Elec) / 2 + (Sniper+(Multifire*4)) / 2 + (Engine+Items+Radar+Cloaking) / 4 or some such, with a total of 100. Such a rating doesn't change as much, and only goes up. On such a scale symmetrical PVP between ships would be much more fair.

For bases, to make bases and ships be able to fight each other, having similar ratings would be useful. Leaving equipment out of it for reasons outlined above means what we have left is tech level and skills of owner. Maybe something like (station mastery * 3) + (tech * 2), again total of 100. The exact figures and formulas would of course have to be evaluated.

The "level" is really more of a measure of how long you've been playing, not what you put your skill points in or what you're capable of combatwise, and thus should not be used for comparing, well, anything really.

this is a bad idea

many uber teams have war with each other or aggression

this team lv thing will mess up a high lved person's lv 100 alt that makes bases and is solely used for bases

if another high lved team comes they can attack all the bases and that would be chaos

This idea is teh pwnzors! Now if Chester gets attacked i can protect him!

Thats kinda what we are trying to solve Kunta. High lvl's shouldn't be able to protect their low lvl base alts behind lvl protection.

I have said it before and I will say it again: At team like pantalones (in my oppinion), shouldn't be able to hide bases behind lvl protect at all. A team lvl will help to this effect. This might mean that my lvl 400 base alt will get pwned by another player, but at the same time it means, that I can send my MF pax after that same player, RAWR, and it also means that I can send my same MF pax after teh same players Team. Thus this means that diplomacy, not lvl protect is required for a team.

You wont say that when all pants bases go bye bye...

Bases are not strong enough to stand up to a team on their own and so until they are, then they should alter anything, bear in mind a person who attacks a base will possibly lose a bit of glue(but not necerserily) whereas a base owner could lose hundreds of hours work + a few hundred mil at the least,

~ferret

If my team mate attacks some one else can that other persons team attack me also?

Yes. With the new system , both yourself and your team mate would have the same PvP lvl.

yes rawr!!!!

if team levels were introduced, i would like to see the PvP range increased aswell.

Any particular reason? Should the lvl 850 cap still be there?

Bump.

It seems there are more people on favor of this idea, then there are people against. I believe that 90% of the current playerbase is against the current system, so Team Lvl's would at least be progress.



Side note: With team lvls introduced, remove the fact that a Station Owner gets aggro because his bases shoot a player. The reasoning used to be, that a lvl 150 base could shoot a lvl 500 player, and the marking of the base owner and the base allowed people to fire back.
With team lvls this won't be necesary any more. If the base can attack the player, the player can attack the base (and the rest of the bases/team). Its not fair that the station owner gets agro on account of this.

Where on earth do you get a figure of 90% from? I'd say in my experience the game is a lot fairer than it used to be.

The current system only allows people of similar levels to compete against each other. The only problem I can see witht the current system is that more people can rip each off and get away with it.

Try going on to a small team and then say its fair for a bigger team to come take your stuff because they were bored.

~ferret

Im with Ferret on this one, its very nice to have a big team to protect your lowlevel alts, but if you have a small team thats not gonna happen.
If one or two people is online during a takeover, good luck.
[Ace Corp] lost 2 and 2/3 of galaxies last uni, and the only thing that saved us was diplomacy. There is no way a small team can muster the strenght to withstand a hostile takeover with the rules you want Junkie. Its a good thing to be able to defend your mates, but not at this cost. Sorry.