Urzas thoughts on ss
The way i see the state of ss, is it has some problems
Class balance drops in general availability of high tier gear grindiness of leveling lack of immediate change when getting a class Drone users cost of death compared to other classes
An item or group of items that arnt being used NEEDs to be changed either in stats, cost, or accesibility.
No items should be useless. No item should continue to drop after its use is done, looking at the the specialized trade goods in particular.
There is not enough uniqueness per char, the state of gear and ships means that at the high level most people are using the same gear, it makes the endgame seem boring and your char not feel unique.
The old advanced t20 gear missions and builds really need a close look at stats, and especially build costs, a lot of those items seem to be really expensive for there tech level.
Class balance is really bad right now there are some classes like seer and speed demon that arnt usually take on runs. Snipers seem to be able to solo much more then any other class.
Part of the problem of gunner to me is im not sure what there playstyle is supposed to be, there designed to use slow and big capital ships so that means that staying at range and not moving too much is what your supposed to do, sort of like a sniper. Problem is doing that makes your missiles suck, to use missiles though you either are practically touching or are about 500 distance away. These two styles seem to conflict with one another. Gunners have problems in availability in gear to use compared to other classes. Gunners seem limited in damage type compared to most other classes, if an ai is highly resistant to mining or physical gunners have a hard time. Efficient missiles are needed for everything other then mining and physical damage. Gunners skills could use work, the big guns skill especially as it only gives a damage bonus to mining damage, if an ai is resistant to mining damage gunners have a hard time doing any damage.
Getting high tech gear is currently way too rng dependent, if you cant kill ubers or do high df dgs its hard to advance your gear.
After about level 500 or so leveling up becomes a pure grind, most players hate mandatory grinds in mmos now days especially for leveling up. More story driven solo content is needed.
The fact that when you get a class barely changes your playing style really is disappointing. The current recommendation i would give to new players is to ignore class skills entirely until they can put a couple hundred skill points into class skills. When you choose a class skill you should immediately get a bonus that makes sense for the skill, for example berserkers would be immediately able to mf 2 weapons.
Drone users at the endgame have a disproportionate cost of death compared to all other classes, a drone user could easily see a cost of death of 10-15 billion credits. High tech drones need to be changed to be either expensive and durable like slaves are or cheap and disposable like missiles and fighters, the current situation of expensive and disposable turns people away from using drones at the high end. This doesnt affect lower tech drones as much as most of them can be either built cheaply, ai bought, or mass extracted from ruins.
Dg drops and uber drops need a big look at what can be done, no one seems to like the current distribution, there has to be some medium between the 90% junk drops and gettign an mfbot every time. There are many bps that are clogging the drop table that could be safely be bought for credits at an ai station i think, the fine tuned bps, much of the station gear bps, and the mercurian bps. DGs and ubers drops should have tech level floors where say a tech 20 uber wont drop tech 5 gear. Ubers hould probably have a shared drop table with stuff that will be useful to all tech levels, maybe things like t1,2,3 commod chunks, sup augs, and things like control bots/things that are wanted by evberyone and are sellable.
Too many items in game arnt used at all, ruin gear sees very little use. I would suspect the problem with ruin gear is knowledge that they exist and difficulty in finding what you need. A better system then the random placement of items in ruins would be to have groups of items like faranji energy ruins or vazaha shield ruins, these ruins would only have those types of items in them, for example a faranji energy ruin would have fe 1 through 9. The ruins would show up as faranji ruins for example when scanned and you would still have to make a colony and wait. Ruin gear pricing is another problem i think a lot of the gear is way overpriced for where the average new char can afford for the tech level.
Ui could use some work. Mission list would be nice to have missions grouped up, related missions should be together, for example all of the strontium 90 missions should be grouped together. You shoudl be able to collapse a group so just the header is showing so you can more easily find the missions your are interested in.
Is it possible to BOLD the start and ending locations in the mission text?
Get rid of or move to the end of the trade list the station, galaxy and jumps, columns?
Add commas whenever a number more then 1,000 appears. It is really annoying to have to count zeros all of the time. Think about making all ai station bought items have nice round prices like 1,500,000 and not the current 1,523,123 it makes it seem a bit random.
The ship dialogue really should have all the base ship info like base resists, speed, hull, etc AND the current values taking into consideration all of your gear. Right now the only way to find this info is either at a player station or look up on wiki.
The wiki
There NEEDS to be someway to automatically update wiki with item stats, some sort of program that takes the game data xml and makes wiki pages and fills in item tables (even for unbuilt items). It really sucks when i have to tell people that the wiki isnt accurate, not having the latest items is one thing, having older stuff be in accurate is another thing entirely.
