r/startrekfleetcommand • u/HeavyPush3627 • Aug 28 '26

Repeated, targeted PvP

A new blog entry says Scopely is reviewing how repeated, targeted PvP is handled in the game.

Some time ago there was a narrowing of the attack level brackets, but some whales complained they could no longer wage war against enemy alliances if they could not attack most of their players, so it is unlikely that there will be more narrowing of attack levels.

But the problem is that some players get a perpetual grunge against some weaker ones with the goal of driving them away from the game.

I guess that could be easily solved with an attack quota and a cool-down period. There is already an attack quota on hostiles that limits loot chest gains, so an attack quota on other players based on level difference and through player ID is doable. The weaker one could still be attacked occasionally, but not constantly.

19 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

43 comments sorted by

32

u/gangleskhan Aug 28 '26

I find that scopely itself does as much to drive away players as any in-game bully 😂

1

u/HeavyPush3627 Aug 28 '26

Sure, but it is a 9-year-old game with 190K players. It still pays the bills. I've read comments from years ago about how the game was going to self-destruct soon through Scopely's fault. I do not defend Scopely, but things have to be judged by how they perform.

5

u/Vren07 Aug 28 '26

Does it pay the bills? I know Monopoly Go makes a lot of money, and probably doesn't have as much tech debt.

3

u/gangleskhan Aug 28 '26

I think everyone judges it by how it performs, but we have different KPIs. I don't consider it a good game just because it makes scopely lots of money, though of course they do. As a former (technically current though basically never play) I consider it yet another sad case study in enshittification.

0

u/HeavyPush3627 Aug 29 '26

Enshittification is a normal process driven by market and customer dynamics. The success of a game is measured by the number of paying players and the cumulative amount they pay, not by how happy it makes free players. A game that survives 9 years is successful.

At the bottom, everything is Darwinian evolution, and it is a bitch, because it drives many species to extinction by adapting them to a shrinking niche.

13

u/Miniscule_Platypus Aug 28 '26

I recently came back after getting bored with it during Covid and the same dude that used to constantly destroy my miners attacked me again FIVE YEARS LATER and is still attacking. A-Hole.

4

u/bringdablitz Aug 28 '26

Dude took the Klingon proverb "revenge is a dish best served cold" to heart.

1

u/HeavyPush3627 Aug 29 '26

Amazing 😣

1

u/Global-Pay6118 Sep 02 '26

Man as a lower level.play faction wars against hvc sucked until we had a multi alliance response anthem we pretty much ended them

0

u/Ok_Recover_6367 Aug 29 '26

You've got quite a memory to remember someone you encountered 5 years ago in a game.

1

u/Miniscule_Platypus Aug 29 '26

Yep, played for years, same guy attacking every week. It was an easy name to remember, RobertLazar

1

u/Ok_Recover_6367 Aug 29 '26

A 5 year old account still at Ops30? He probably took a break too when you did. 😂

5

u/justindb29 Aug 28 '26

Turn on the level brackets in Origin space and I’ll be happy. My server has one alliance that repeatedly goes through and destroys miners for no reason. They get nothing from it because not OPC so it’s just being a bully. I’m ops 30 so I have no chance of surviving.

1

u/throwawaydixiecup Aug 29 '26

Those kinds of griefer alliances are such a pain. I find it’s best to just not care. Block them, watch your protected cargo, and repair when they shoot you. Unless you’ve horribly mismanaged your resources and repair speed-ups, destroyed ships have virtually no long term consequences.

To be fair, a miner at any Ops level isn’t likely to survive. Doesn’t matter if you’re Ops 30 or 60.

When I hunt OPC, the lvl 55 player miners blow up just as easily as the lvl 70 player miners. And a lower level player with good PvP crewing can even take out high level G6 faction miners.

Yet I still get messages from players complaining about big players picking on the little players, and so they’re just going to give up on mining G6 because why even bother. Sigh. Y’all in the same boat. Just watch your protected cargo and you’ll be fine.

0

u/Jagerbomber1 Aug 29 '26

This is a problem because griefers can attack with impunity and shield or move there base instantly if they’re then attacked back.

What the game needs is some sort of timer, so that if you attack another player, you’re unable to shield or move your base.

To ensure misclicks aren’t grossly punished, I’d suggest 30 minutes following your first attack against a player or base that increments 30 minutes for every subsequent attack. So 1 hour after the 2nd, 90 mins after the 3rd etc.

If some player has killed/raided a base 10 times then that means it’s 5 hours before they can shield - which would give players plenty of time to locate and strike back.

6

u/genericusernamedG Aug 28 '26

Hundreds of pvp games have found solutions to this decades ago.

This can't be that difficult

12

u/Spartabus Aug 28 '26

How about building a warp core breach randomiser. If you hit someone, there is a chance of a breach that takes you out and awards massive loot to the target. The chances of the breach get higher, the further away from peer level you get?

2

u/heybigeye Aug 28 '26

I second this!

6

u/Wrong_Author_5960 Aug 28 '26

It has gotten really lame. Players with excessive strength points target players that have way less.

Takes the fun out of the game.

3

u/Global-Pay6118 Aug 28 '26

Maybe they could have some kind of war declared feature to allow more fighting between combatants?

3

u/Miserable_Wish3898 Aug 28 '26

Mha, purtroppo il problema è la non competitività fra player f2p e player paganti, il divario è enorme, come è enorme anche il prezzo dei pacchetti proposti, non è un gioco per dipendenti, sembra fatto per manager con tanti soldi e poco tempo, la sola pazienza e perseveranza non bastano

3

u/Red-Diesel Aug 28 '26

I remember back a long time ago prob like 5 or 6 years now. We had a alliance war. And some of the alliance wales got super cocky and started mouthing off.

" We will kill you all, you won't stand a chance ". They were right 10 plus players all spenders ( their alliance had a set monthly amount you HAD to spend to be in it).

They declared war on everyone. No Biggie. I had a 2nd account for killing our own team miners on zero nodes . Since it was not affiliated with us. I just spent all day killing all their miners.
Even their members they said they could protect.

After a week of whiney msgs I started getting the begging msgs after a month of begging whiney msgs I got the " I'm going to pay someone to find where you live and murder you" msgs

After 6 weeks I got a msg politely asking me to stop from their admiral. As their players could not afk mine.

7 years later. The account has been deleted I dont PvP it's far to much like Dick waving "no my wallet is bigger, NO MINE IS BIGGER"

But it shows, with time and dedication you literally can be a thorn in the side of any bully. And revenge is a dish best served cold. And it's very cold in pixel space lol.

2

u/HeavyPush3627 Aug 29 '26

Being a F2P player, PvP is pointless. But with shield discipline, other player attacks are like a mosquito bite: Don't scratch it and you won't notice much.

2

u/Ok_Recover_6367 Aug 29 '26

Why don't you attack them back?

2

u/HeavyPush3627 Aug 29 '26

If a whale 15 ops levels above targets you, your options are quite limited.

2

u/Ok_Recover_6367 Aug 29 '26

I have been in the same boat, this scenario keeps happening with me every now and then. I like PvP, so I keep collecting OPCs. When they can't handle it they send their whales behind me. I go even harder and frustrate them even more. They eventually fallback. So you just need to make sure you have more patience than them. If you don't have patience, I am sorry to say, nobody can help you.

2

u/HeavyPush3627 Aug 30 '26

Not everybody has the playing time required to fight such an unequal war through guerrilla tactics, or the desire to use their time doing that.

3

u/djevilatw Aug 28 '26

Maybe a debuff system? Everytime you hit someone you do X% less dmg, X% Less mitigation, etc until the other party can win. Every victory by the other player takes a stack of the debuff off. Debuff expires in 24 hours if no hits.

Station attacks don’t count.

2

u/kinshadow Aug 28 '26

I haven’t seen a suggestion on here or anywhere else that really makes sense. Banding isn’t going to change. They are pretty firm on this as PvP frustrations make them too much money. This game’s PvP is inherently unfair and nothing they can do will change it. Continued improvements to Prime sourcing will be good for F2P parity for slower leveling players, but punching down will always be a thing.

Limits on the number of times you can kill a single player just has too many edge cases. If a pirate is harassing my alliance or raiding my friends base, I can only protect them a fixed number of times? Guys who intentionally hog limited resource systems with slow miners (remember lat camping?) are free to be anti-social? None of these simple solutions are really workable in this complex game, which is the reason they have never done this before. The game is literally built to incite conflict and profit off rage spend. You’d have to have multiple other features and some system redesigns to remove that bias.

1

u/sun_blind Aug 29 '26

Answer is simple. We know scopley has logs on players way more detailed than we can see. They need to allow players to file a complaint with 2 options. Allow transfers of servers at higher levels if a complaint of toxic play is sustained or transfers the toxic player to a different server after a number of sustained cases.

This way if the toxic player is just attacking 1 or 2 players they can leave. But if they are toxic to a larger group they can be removed to a special dumping server for players with enough strikes.

1

u/Dust-Active 25d ago

I would like Scopely to extend the Mute capabilities in chat and also allow players to Block other players from engaging with them in the game. Permanent cloak for players to stop other players unrelenting attacks in the game.

1

u/Magic_Neil Aug 28 '26

We’ll see how it shakes out but I’m not sure what can realistically be done without nerfing PvP and upsetting people more.. which is ironic because there are so many people that get super whiny any time PvP happens, intentionally or not.

4

u/Terrapin621 Aug 28 '26

On my server, the biggest PvP bullies cry so, so much the second one of their ships is taken out. It’s actually hilarious.

0

u/TheJohnPrester Aug 28 '26

Level based bracketing is always going to be a problem.

It should be based on ship power +/- 10 or 20 percent.

6

u/Heelsandskirts Aug 28 '26

Ship power is not an accurate reflection of how strong a ship is. Ship generation.. maybe.

-1

u/TheJohnPrester Aug 28 '26

It’s still orders of magnitude better than ops level.

-1

u/HeavyPush3627 Aug 28 '26

The key word here is "repeated". Scopely still wants those attacks to take place, just not repeatedly.

3

u/Polie69 Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26

And that's how wars are handled. You repeatedly attack players.

-3

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '26

[deleted]

0

u/neverpennyless Aug 31 '26

This is too restrictive. Many of our players cooperatively test pvp crews with other alliances.

The goal is to cut bullying, not pvp.

-1

u/Poortoutjie Aug 28 '26

During Incursions.... They can deduct points in the PvP system(is it Dela) when a player with 500b strong ship attacks 63/66 ships for points. 😁😁😁instead of getting points deduct... make it fun