Fair enough, I will explain what I mean. From what I saw LCY module owners were very upset they were losing the ability to run 4 protections. So naturally many players started thinking of ways to made a 4-way version of the new system. The goal was just keeping a 4-way system for the sake of keeping a 4-way system. But I did not read every detail because.... It is fun to talk about game theory but there is little point to getting into the nitty gritty details. The devs are not going to create software based on a forum post. Generl concernes will filter thjrough over time. Sometimes the suggestions appear in odd ways. The new drones system in short brings a way to manipulate the basic DA/DD/SB/M/RK supplies system. That is a simplistic system. Drones add a level of complexity to that. So in a sense these Drones might be considered a response mades two years ago for a more clever way to use Supplies. But did anyone say the way to do that is make these hear drones? No. A lot of other specific designes were suggested. But we ened up with a dev idea: drones. Well thanks. One side of the coin is you gotta do what you're good at doing. Maybe not as often tho '''''''' As far a drone ideas go I was thinking in the defensive category an anti-drone drone. Y'know, it zaps a nearby enemy drone disabling it for awhile.

I just logged out my vulcan / asp acct and saw this... It is more a right tool for the job thing than an OP thing. All turrets should have a role, As the two posts below mentions too. Vulcan earned a rep after the nerf as a broken turret.. In reality it is quite strong. From one location you can pour hell fire into any enemy tank you see. If you are already fiuiring at tank 1 shifting fir to tank 2 tanes a plit-second. No you can just hose down enemy after enemy. OTOH if I am up against a vulcan in a maneuvering situation wit Smoky I recon he is toast I can almost always throw off its bullet stream long enough to kill it first. If in Isida or Vulcan I need to circle-strafe it but that often works too, I killed a sniper across the length of Massacre yesterday with two missiles. Both were shot at full SB speed moving across the rough terrain. The 2nd shot was off a hillside jump with turret aim done in mid-air. e was on the side near teh far back corner. I shot form the low ridge near our base tarmack then from the hillside near the DA pickup. I gotta say even I was impressed. Neither shot was a sure thing in my book. The point being not so much I an great (a little) but mostly that iit can indeed land shots rated difficult for any turret. Once the player has the light bulb go off it's DPS becomes niiiice. I do miss a lot of shots but consider it gives you a lot more shot opportunities than most turst. I am doing recopn-by-fire if I do not see any visible enemie. I was in this exact situation with my vulcan Wasp. In ASL mode. TWo vulcan / mamoths sitting my thei tarmac. My in a wasp. They had 4x the HP and 2X the DPS. And they swatted me any time they saw me. This is just a "checkmate in three" situtaion. Unless you have the right nix if team mates in the random mix there will not be much to do in that mode on that map. I miss old Massacre

Amen. I neer heard so much whining from a group of players that routinely kill my tank in 1 shot. Even my Titan accounts. Bot to mention it has the impact to flip a Titan under teh right circumstances. This is not a valid reason to make a design mistake. This was exactly the point of the re-design as you illustrate. Actual experience in the field tells me railgun does not need a buff. It is commonly used, No weak turret is commonly used. I find myslef reaching for the Rail protections in a lot of battles. Because rails are common and they can kill you from across the map. If rail really needed a buff you'd see it about as often as you see Striker.

There are few if any kits worth buying anymore with the new MU cost structure. It almost always cheaper to buy the hull turret and modules you want on sale.

U am guessing this was a stealth nerf of Magnumn but it hits SkittleWillie hard. It self-destructs due too vulcan overheating and from Wasp tipping... I guess 25% to 33% of all its deaths are SDs.

You now lose 10 points for a self-destruct not just 5. This has a negative effect n Wasp. Wasp is easy for enemies to ti over. It is hard to see why this weakness of Wasp was made even more severe/

I think you are on a lot of solid ground here. The biggest module collections that returned zero batteries were probably bought for cash to a large extent. TO wants them to have something to buy. That seems plausible. But they could have still developed a logarithmic scaled payback curve. .... 100x the trae-in value returned only 2x the Batteries. So everyone would have gotten something and been much happier. That job is taken. And I'm not looking for an assistant. Not it's not. There are only 8 players on a team. With only 3 modules all it takes is one duplicate weapon for a 3-pack to give protection against 50% of the enemy force. If the enemy force has more than one duplicate a three-pack can give protection against 75% of all enemy tanks .. even more. The module system wold be the #1 factor is team balance most likely Add a 4-pack system and in 8v8 battles every team could mount protections against the majority of the enemy team, every battle. Why should protections be given such a predominant effect in the game. What issue would this solve? I've never read you give a reason for the 4-pack system other than Basic Guy Theory: More / Bigger Is Always Better.

Thanks for the test drive report. That is interesting. It seems fair enough that you can turn it off (un-equip) but then needto wait out te cool down to re-equip. The tick box is a fine example of Little Things that could make the interface so much smoother. In the case of batteries it is very important to prevent unwanted abttery consumption. Not user friendly with TT's tick box suggestion in response to that issue. I know I will buy a drone sometime to check it out. Right now my hunch is those things will remain a marginal help ... until MUed to full or close to it. Then maybe we will be having to watch out. Cumbersome system regardless. Posted 10 Jun 2018 - 13:05 LittleWillie, on 08 Jun 2018 - 11:02, said: The MM system deos work out better for me. Thje module changes are due to the module update not to the MM update. So I don't see your point. I don't really are if you cry or not. The point is it makes no sense for the conversion process to be a major boon to one account and a major impediment to a different account. And the game designers should understand that the rank ladder is rather barren in the General Officer section. Most young players like you do not have the attention span to wait out a 9 month period with no development options. But hell it's not my game. And I am used to planning n year long of multi=year periods.

If players were not so aghast at the OP Magnum issue the OP Twins issue would be the #1 gripe.

I have not thought through the whole drones thing yet because I have not bought any to see 1st hand how they work. I have looked at teh MU tables and done some cost value comparisons as you saw. So any opinions I have now are subject to change as new info arrives. :) But so far I agree with your basic strategy for free players. You keep the drone back in the garage except for key moment when a little extra something -something might make a difference. In those situation you burn up the free mission batteries, thus converting them from a warehoused item into cash. {ching!} Unless you convert your batteeries into battle performance you are not getting full value from your weekly payouts. Fortunately the drone buy-in cost is small. For 20k you ca buy a drone. For about 16k more you can buy 20% of it's MU potential. IOW for 1.6% of the cost you can buy 20% of the total. So for 36k or so you can have a drone to use up the batteries yu do not want. That is a low cost way to get something from the drone system. I want to see what teh re-equipping cool down will be for Drones. Can I equip it, then un-equip it just 1 minute later? Or will I be forced to keep it active for a 5 minute cool down window? If the is a 5 minute minimum that is another reason to look at your 'last 2-3 minutes of a close battle' criterion for useage. :)

I will gladly bet you a frosty cold Coke they do not remove them. The only real flaw is in the costs. Mostly the problem is in the battery costs. Why remve the system when it can be made viable by adjusting te cost structure? I agree that drone sounds pretty good for DM. I try to avoid DM but for people that like it this seems pretty good .. at mu 20/20. Even at that level yo have to stay alive for at least 5 seconds longer than the free drug boost or else it will not work next re-spawn. 20 sec cooldown mean tis drone can work a max of 3 times on one battery. That's 45 seconds of all 3 basic power ups costing 50 C each. So that's a 140 C value. But 35 seconds is 150% the normal 30 sec duration. So one 300 Cry Battery can give this done a max of 225 Cry equivalent drug use. The healing drone has a 30 sec cool down so that is a max of 2 uses / battery. Max effect is to add 500 HP to the instant heal which is a 50% bonus.So two 50% bonuses per battery equals one RK effect. This drone gives 150 Cry max value per each 300 Cry Battery. (It is much more complicated than that depending on the situtaion but let's start simple.) The assault drone OTOH has only a 10c scool down so it can be used 6 times per battery. This drone can in theory have a tremendous impact. Assume the ideal situation. You have been hitting an enemy and know one more shot will kill it. At time - 0 you press shift to activate your Overdrive. All three power-ups go active w/30 seconds remaining. At time = 1 second your drugs hace 29 seconds remaing. You shoot, destroying your enemy. Your power ups now have 39 seonds remaining. If you destroy an enemy tank every 11 seconds exactly, your Overdrive will last for five and one half minutes! That is 11 times the duration of a power up. For al 3 power ups going that is 150Cry times 11 complete cycles for a Cry value of 1.650. This would come from burning 5.5 batteries worth 300 Cry each for a total of 1,650 Cry! So the extreme situations the Cry value from the Batteries is actually somewhat in line for what you get for the money. BUT BUT BUT, in actual game play you will not see anything close to the maximum scenarios. If DD. DA. SB last 40 seconds and a Battery lasts 60 s... perhaps a battery should be worth about 100 Cry? And the missions payouts should reflect that?

I agree drones are a P2W addition ... except do they really lead to winning? They might be a Pay To Earn Less feature. Look at the healing type drone. It adds 100 HP to the 1000 instant repair amount. At full MU it adds 500. So for a million MU invested you gt the chance to spend a 300 Cry battery to get one-half the power of a 150 Cry RK. So 300 Cry buys you 75 Cry worth of performance. That is after spending a million to MU the drone. At mu 0/20 the 300 Cry battery buys only 15 Cry worth of performance. For that million spent to MU the drone you could buy 6,667 RKs.plus several thousand more from the batteries you do not have to buy. Which investment is going to be more useful more often?

TO has created a situation I imagine never crossed their minds. I have two accounts that face more than a half-year of ... well let's call it mundane boredom. BrittleWillie Isida/ Hornet/Viking is MajGen about 25k from promotion. Owns all 14 m2 modules. Everything owned is mu 10/10. About 265k cash hand BrittleWillie Vulcan/Wasp is Brigadier about 5k from promotion. Owns all 14 m2 modules. 4 modules are mu 9/10. Everything else is 10/10. About 140k cash on hand BW has little to spend Cry on until it reaches Marshal rank. SW has the 100k on hand needed to mu the last 4 modules to 10/10. After that SW is in the same situation as BW. I will probably spend 50k from each account to but it the m2 alteration, just to have it. I do not see any of the Vulcan or Isdia alterations as being very useful. But for 50k I may as well get them. That leaves buying drones and MUing them. But I do not see Drones as being very cost effective in terms of ROI. So the bottom line here is these two accounts will have nothing to do for the months it will take for them to reach Marshal. For all that time they will be saving Cry to pay for the massive MU drain caused by having hull, turret, and 14 protection modules all convert to m3 at the same moment. That will suck up hundreds of thousands in days. So my objectives for the next 6-8 months is ... nothing. Just throw money on the pile. You see before the conversion I had chosen my triple modules so some converted to m3 at LtGen, some converted at Gen, and some converted at Marshal. That way I did not have one massive massive outlay all at once. That way I had shorter-term objectives to hold my interest. Now the rank gap from Colonel to Marshal is a big empty hole. It is hard to understand why these ranks are even needed. None the less these two accounts are massively better off than a 3rd account. WhittleWillie is one rank back from SW. But that one rank meant it had not yet earned enough to buy the last 3-4 triple modules modules needed for full coverage. I usually buy these at te Brigadier rank. So now it need to buy 6 more m2 modules and mu them up from scratch. In order to catch up to the account only one rank ahead, WW will have to invest 2.5 MILLION Cry just to equal what SW has right now. One rank behind, 2.5 million Cry behind. These are a couple of the problems with the conversion. It's left a big hole in the General officer ranks. And it has treated different accounts so drastically different no honest person can all the results "fair" or "wise"

OR./... there just weren't enough players of the right rank looking to play that mode at that time. [eye roll] The fact I was "doing something" i.e tediously clicking on game after game after game is not an improvement. Try to wrap your tiny tiny brain around this concept: MM works better for WHAT I WANT from the game. You have a different opinion? Fine.

I wait ;less in the MM system than I did in the previous system. People ignore how long it took to sort though the lists looking for a game that was not going to be a blowout loss fr the only open team. Spending more than 5 minutes happened al the time ... we just did not have a closck to state at ticking up the seconds. Sometime I'd have to log off and try again later in the day. So yeah, if I have to wait 5 minutes one game out of a whole week I will take that trade. 99 of the posts here point out some flaw with MM. As if to to say if MM has an y imperfections it is a bad trade off. That is not enough. The comparison is between MM's shortcomings and the old system's shortcomings. In this measurement MM wins, IMO.

The one that added Magnum.

The longest I've waited was 5 minutes. Another time I waited ~3. I'd estimate 95% of my attempts started in less than 2 minutes and 50% in less than 1 minute. But I often play Quick Start. I join new battles 90% of the time. Seem like people here are finding their worst possible example and implying that happens 100% of the time.

I am 99% sure the modules were removed in this latest server reboot because of this XT skins thing. They are used as turret alterations. All my turret alterations were removed not just my module resistances. I figure it is just some sort of effct from the XT update.

No new missions either.

I agree. I have tons of the regular supplies. I just think TO would be smarter from their own point of view to ensure most players got some batteries to try out after teh conversion..Give them a taste 0 then charge them. :)

Skylark, Deathtrack, Parma all big open maps where a Wasp can really gt around town. Hose down the enemy from one spot, zip to another .... wide firing lanes. Well not so much Parma. Parma was great for hiding among the wall fragments on the bottom and raking enemy tanks on the raised border. That was probably he best wasp/viking map for me a least.

I did not say you said that. I was just sayin. Conversation yes?

The sudden delivery of an un-requisitioned superabundance of dihydroxene to the lower decks.

Context context context. My entire post was about teh module to battery conversion equation. "not a thing" in that context means "zero batteries".

Yes I understand you co not like Striker so you have not put in the time to use it well. OTOH I can hit enemies very accurately and instinctively with it. My concern is if it were made significantly more powerful then players who have climbed the learning curve would be rekking machines. I agree Vulcan and Isida m1 alts are beneficial only for players in the learning phase. That's the point. It is not the way I'd go but if it helped more players learn Striker than it;d be worth the dev time. It'd be better than having no alteration as we have now.