Star Citizen - Do item tiers break balance?
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- Опубліковано 17 січ 2025
- Hello Citizens!
This week I want to take a look at item tiers and how they might negatively impact balance in Star Citizen. Enjoy!
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Usually in games the differences between tiers are lower then between completely different items.
dude's never played an mmorpg before
I've planned my fleet around sourcing, creating, upgrading, and selling top tier components, loved this insight into the concept!
Out of curiosity, what's in your fleet? I'm guessing some resource gathering, refinery and a Crucible or similar?
6:39 I don’t think we will be seeing an increase across the board. This wasn’t demonstrated at CitCon (which can change, I have no argument there), but we already see how upgrades might work in the game with mining modules. Some mining modules will greatly increase one aspect of mining and severely limit another, or some will lightly increase a couple of aspects but not touch the others.
With CitCon we saw having high quality materials increase one or two stats while not touching the others, and it’s entirely possible that many base stats will not be modified during item creation.
It'll all end in Tiers
This one almost made me spit out my coffee
There is no balance to break in the first place, yet.
I like the item tiers system.
Everyone is always on about balance, it needs to be about variety, and figuring out opposing counters to strengths. Developing strategies and the room to implement them. There's no millennium falcon without modifications and tuning. Ships should have names and be known.
Making upgrades hard is and having tiers big stat differences would be a huge issue, i hope at max the difference between a tier1 ship and a tier5 ship with besst quality materials is 50% but giving the option to specialize sounds good as well, you cant go to hard on negative effects in my opinion though the it dosnt really feel like an upgrade, more like +10% mobility for -3-5% armor value or so
Let's all hypothetically talk about the theoretical, maybe even get a little upset on potential changes for future game play loops and implementations!
Great video man
I've yet to see an MMO where tiering doesn't break the PVP game.
Unless the tiers provide minuscule improvements or there is a short cap on how many tiers you can have in an item you'll end up with monster builds. Unkillable ships, 1-shot everything guns, or vehicles that break the game on one way or another.
It comes to a point where people just can't play together unless their tiers match because there is no semblance of a level field.
In other MMOs the problem is not as bad because you can opt out of PVP. That's not the case in SC. Fights will be decided in the hangar, rather than in the field. The guy with the most resources will win, regardless of his skill.
Big orgs will have a distinct advantage, so expect to have to bow to them or avoid them altogether.
I think it is a lazy and thoughtless implementation of crafting. Hopefully they will reconsider.
I think that item tiers will bring us away from the sim factor to a more usual mmo style.
I don't like the idea personal, but balance wise idk if this will make things better or worse.
SC should focus more on player capability and skill of players than on just numbers of tiers.
Skill should always be the major factor.
Short thin to consider after my initial post:
We already can upgrade our ships.
I think it's enough of upgrading combined with the engineering capabilities.
The worry i have with this is player made cash black markets. In game player economy is fine, but i dont want players out there farming those rare materials and crafting all the best ships and components just to throw them up on Star Hanger or something.
Very reasonable fear IMO, there are already item market discords so I think we will definitely see something similar appearing for high tier material and items
I have this fear as well, it seems this will certainly happens if player engineers is the only way to access some upgrades...
Tiers in games are usually detrimental to skill. If inevitable, I hope they do it more like Dark Souls and less like Wow. So a good player in a tier 1 ship could still beat a bad one in a tier 5. I remember in the Division if you had less levels than an enemy, you could be shooting your shinny super sniper rifle that was super rare for your level to their head, over and over and over again and you couldn't kill them, because fuck you for having less level than them.
I'm not too big of a fan of this system. It makes participation in crafting basically mandatory if you wish to stay competitive, which won't be very enjoyable with how CIG can give WarThunder a run for their money in terms of sheer grind.
I don't feel like I have the time nor motivation to sink countless hours into farming materials just for an arbitrary stat increase.
I've pledged for the ships that interest me precisely so I could skip the tedious grind of obtaining them, giving me more time to actually play with them instead, but something tells me that even pledged ships will come as Tier 1 base versions.
Equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. If you put more dedication in your ship, you should be rewarded. If enough effort is put inside what you are doing, it is only a matter of time before you get there too.
I am of the opinion having tiers is in general bad for the game, but it depends a lot. I've played enough wow to know that it feels like garbage when you're at a busy time in your life and end up being unable to pvp in the game because you're placed automatically at a massive disadvantage that is locked behind long term grinding.
I fully agree with the upgrade tree idea, it's a much better solution to balance the game for everyone. Obviously there will be metas, but it's not as if you're straight up using the exact same load out as an opponent but yet have worse stats arbitrarily.
Personally I would just like to see craftiing ve more like star wars galaxies. Where items have many performance metrics, which are affected by the quality of material but also a crafter's limited "experiment" points. This could allow drastic item quality differences, and let crafting players choose specific stats in the block to focus on. Like making thrusters with a very high power, but low overheat tolerance, for instance.
This would allow buyers to seek out equipment that favors their playstyle and desired traits without always just straight-up being "better".
@@luistigerfox There can be a possibility that higher tier items that have better stats will have greatly increased maintenance / upkeep requirements, along with the engineering required to keep them in peak operating capability.
@Adjudicator1 I would much prefer that higher tier favors reliability generally, and that crafting itself is flexible enough to allow for preference based decisions. Like you upgrade a chassis one tier, choose between lighter weight for more acceleration, or stronger armor. For instance. Meaningful choices allow build variety that favors play style.
Or another example, tier up on salvage beam, choose between faster collection rate, higher efficiency, wider area, or greater reliability.
🎉🎉🎉
Literally every single MMORPG works like this. Crying about item tiers and their power implications is absolutely childish.
Also at 6:10 the statement is blatantly false. Players will only upgrade ships that have warranty, LTI doesn't matter for it.
LTI gives you a basic warranty
@patrickguerriero5425 nope. Buying a ship gives that ship lifetime warranty irrespective of the insurance attached. LTI just gives Lifetime T1 insurance on top
The game barely works who cares about balance. They literally have sold power creep for years with limited time limited stock fomo ships having ship upgrades that bob the whale who sucks at the game having to come pvp me for upgrades is gravy.
Sorry Space but this POV is very much rooted in the Care Bear universe. If everybody is equal and has no motivation to excel or have aspirations to improve then the game will die quickly. A new player versus a player who’s obviously been in the game longer to grind for components may well have higher skill anyway but it’s not unfair if they have invested more time into crafting their ship in that way. Giving everyone a gold medal has been proven in social experiments to lower performance and effort.
Crafting takes away skill and gets in the realm of pay to win, crafting literally is in carebear land lol, because they can kill lower players without any skill
When your ship goes at 200ms stock but 1400ms at T5, that's literally pay to win, and totally deletes the skill out of the game, now we can only imagine the difference in damage for example
So I understand non skilled carebears wanting pay to win, but it's literally a mobile game move
@ there’s no payment mentioned in crafting so what on earth are you talking about?? And where did you get those speed from. Exaggerate much? You assume there is no skill in crafting but the best blueprints will be accessible only to those who pass the toughest skill checks. So why do you assume no skill involved? Whinging that another player has put more time in the game than you and has an unfair advantage is childish. SC is obviously not for you so go play Tetris where there is no crafting and you’ll be happy 👍
@PsyEm-p1j there is no skill involved and they literally said in video "everyone will be set at a base speed close to our current SCM mode, and through crafting you will be able to hit nav mode speeds
I understand skill frightens you, it's hard, you need to train, get better, understand, think, use tactics, plan ahead, so just buying your way into god mode is easier, but is boring and flat
Of course they will monetize that, is an excellent and proven monetization system, CIG needs an stable and guaranteed way to make money, premium crafting is the way to go, the game is full of unskilled carebears that are also whales, and games target those whales, not the free players or one time buyers
@PsyEm-p1j oh and you need to put a lot more time to git gud than to just simple buy or crafting something, put a DCS pilot with 20.000h vs a DCS vet with only 1000h of gameplay, the latter will learn very quickly why there are only about 20 elite pilots in DCS lol
@ aww who punished you so hard you react in this way to a game?
I worry for how you cope in the real world with the other Care Bears where not everyone gets a gold medal just for participating.
Like I said above, go play Tetris as this game isn’t for you. Bye now
Crafting makese sense from the company point of view, since they can sell premium accounts to grind faster and golden blueprints to quickly upgrade your ship, so is what CIG will do
Crafting speaks hard to carebears whales that suck at everything, but can buy god mode, and most likely are the ones that convinced CIG to go this route, since is the best route financially speaking
In terms of PVP, well it becomes meaningless, since the only relevance in a battle is your components and your skill is meaningless, imagine being in a t0 ship limited at 200ms and 600dps, vs the same ship at T5, moving at 1400ms and dealing 3500 dps, skill becomes meaningless
@@StoneCoolds then either put the effort in to level the playing field or just don’t play. Complaining someone has an advantage that you could have access to also but you just can’t be bothered speaks volumes.
@PsyEm-p1j I know you are afraid due the fear of Skilling up, but making the game pay to win takes away the thrill of the game, just like mobile gaming whales, they buy everything and become top tiers in a day, then they buy protections to not lose anything lol
So it becomes a basic game made for unskilled people, let's say DCS, no matter what you do, an skilled pilot will kill you every single time until you take the time to learn and basically git gud, but if you can buy a plane that takes no damage and destroy all other planes in 1 click, then yes everyone has access to it, and that's what makes it boring and for people with low skill capabilities
Now from the financial point of view, is the best choice, pay to win is a proven model, 90% of people are unskilled and don't have the mentality to train and get better, so by reversing that, now you have a lot of clients ^.^
I think it will break the balance but will instead create a new one in its place.
I also believe that this will be fine in the long run. With the possibility of 100 systems in the long run, Stanton and Pyro will be the starting grounds (maybe include Nyx, Terra, and Magnus) and the farther you go the higher tiers. Will it go this direction? Unlikely, but it’s a possibility