Exchangeable Ship Pilots aka make Ships great again!
Hello fellow Cantina Fighters
To be honest, ships aren't that much fun right now. To less diversity and no real use except the ship arena. But the biggest downside is the fact that you often have to farm and gear up toons that have no use exept of this ship that you might use for a time in ship arena. Lets say you you want Cassian's ship for you new shiny Milenium Falcon lineup. So you need to farm the ship and maybe three toons and then you have to gear them up to G12 and put some zetas on the toons to max your ship. But with all this time to farm, gear and zetas you could also get three toons that can push you in squad arena, raids, TW/TB and GA. So what do you do? Yes you choose the toons that help you the most in the game and skip the ship.
Here comes my suggestion. Make the ship pilots exchangeable with toons from the ships faction. So except using the Jedi Consular on his ship, you could maybe use GMY. Of course there are a lot of questions to be asked, because its not that easy, but lets go into that.
What factions are allowed?
Those two options have pros and cons. The AND option makes sure that only suitable toons of the same era can use the ship but its less diversity and its of course the other way around with the OR option
What about the skill levels?
Here we have an easy option that could maybe make it impossible to use an upgraded ship or an flexible option that is maybe more difficult to implement.
How should the toons influence the ship stats?
That could of course just be the same as now. Or it could make toon stats more important to the ships as it is right now. A fast toon could give the ship more speed, a tank could give the ship more durability and so on.
Should the skills be bound to the toon or the ship?
The second option would be an extreme change to the ship game and would need much efford from CG but it would also make a real diversity in ship fights. Suddenly a ship would have some fixed and some exchangable skills and that would bring so much more theory crafting options to the quite boring ship game. But of course the outcome would be hardly predictable. It would make the difference between a quality of live change and a real change of the game mechanics.
I think this could bring the ships a lot more spotlight and would make the ship game more fun. But what do you think? What would you make different or add to this proposal?
To be honest, ships aren't that much fun right now. To less diversity and no real use except the ship arena. But the biggest downside is the fact that you often have to farm and gear up toons that have no use exept of this ship that you might use for a time in ship arena. Lets say you you want Cassian's ship for you new shiny Milenium Falcon lineup. So you need to farm the ship and maybe three toons and then you have to gear them up to G12 and put some zetas on the toons to max your ship. But with all this time to farm, gear and zetas you could also get three toons that can push you in squad arena, raids, TW/TB and GA. So what do you do? Yes you choose the toons that help you the most in the game and skip the ship.
Here comes my suggestion. Make the ship pilots exchangeable with toons from the ships faction. So except using the Jedi Consular on his ship, you could maybe use GMY. Of course there are a lot of questions to be asked, because its not that easy, but lets go into that.
What factions are allowed?
- The AND option: Its only allowed to use a toon for a ship that has all the faction tags as the ship
- The OR option: You can use a toon that has any of the faction tags as the ship
Those two options have pros and cons. The AND option makes sure that only suitable toons of the same era can use the ship but its less diversity and its of course the other way around with the OR option
What about the skill levels?
- The even or greater Option: You can a toon that fulfills the gear level of the skill he's used on
- The adaptive Option: You can use toons with lower gear level then the skill but the skill will be decreased to the toons level.
Here we have an easy option that could maybe make it impossible to use an upgraded ship or an flexible option that is maybe more difficult to implement.
How should the toons influence the ship stats?
That could of course just be the same as now. Or it could make toon stats more important to the ships as it is right now. A fast toon could give the ship more speed, a tank could give the ship more durability and so on.
Should the skills be bound to the toon or the ship?
- Skills bound to ship Option: With this option the skill is bound to the ship and the used toon just changes the ship stats.
- Skills bound to toon Option: With this option every toon has his unique ship skill and the this skill is then accessable on the ship.
The second option would be an extreme change to the ship game and would need much efford from CG but it would also make a real diversity in ship fights. Suddenly a ship would have some fixed and some exchangable skills and that would bring so much more theory crafting options to the quite boring ship game. But of course the outcome would be hardly predictable. It would make the difference between a quality of live change and a real change of the game mechanics.
I think this could bring the ships a lot more spotlight and would make the ship game more fun. But what do you think? What would you make different or add to this proposal?
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Replies
Yes to adding double what we currently have for ships and cap ships.
Problem solved for boring ships.
Greedo piloting Slave 1
Hermit Yoda piloting Ankin's Eta-2
Zaalbar and Lobot crewing Han's Falcon
... because reasons.
The current system allows for iconic ships to be piloted by the pilots that flew them.
Yes we have some filler and generic pilots, but I dont see the need to make them interchangeable.
What you are suggesting goes against the basics of the game. The dev team have stated they dont eant you to be able to do it all with one team. If you think things are stale and boring now, imagine doing it all with the same 20 toons. It will not increase diversity, because it dorsnt drive diversity.
Sure, I wouldn't mind more events where you need ships, or even a raid for that matter. More content is great. But I'm perfectly happy with how the ships themselves work currently. Give us more content and more ships, instead of changing ships.
I'm not sure how the pilot specific skills would work, whether you would tie them to the pilot or the ship. Either way they would only work at their max for an S class pilot in the correct ship.
Your casual ship player gets to use the ship and enjoy it while the serious ship player would still play as now where they are farming and gearing up specific pilots for specific ships.
This. More content so that the investment made in ships seems worth it compared to the investment made in ground squads, but leave the pilots alone. I'm currently debating whether to put a stun gun on Revan to finish him off at G12 or Kanan to get him to G11 so I can max out his Ghost abilities. (spoiler, going with Revan, but it's fun to have the choice!)
The issue is that this is a made-up problem. Most characters that are derided as "useless" are perfectly fine, they just aren't good enough for a #1 arena spot so people write them off for anything that doesn't explicitly require them.
Sure, some characters really are rubbish. Looking at you there, Ugnaught. But you could build a Lobot/Droid team that works perfectly fine in 80% of the game. People just don't, because it wouldn't be "meta."
Being versatile is different than just doing it all.
Having toons that you can fully develop and plug in anywhere and be able to work as well as "the required toon", is different than a toon that is good at what they do and can work in multiple locations.
I personally wouldn’t mind reverting back to 5v5, but I know a lot of other people don’t think that. I can remember ships used to be my favorite game mode, but now it’s just boring. The falcon and EP’s shuttle have made things fun again for the moment, but I just hope they’ll continue making it so.
Yup been posting for well over a year that they should never release ships with toons people will already have starred and geared...... and Bam...that's exactly what they did...So anyone who put a lot of effort into ships to get ahead like people do in arena immediately had over a years worth of work DESTROYED...
I wouldn't care if there was some ship content...but it was pretty bad what they did....
Should have been a marquee pilot then a marquee ship.....
Or release the toon or character as a marquee and put the other in the fleet store make people choose between the ships/pilots or zetas....
Not just hand people G12Zhan G12Z Chewy G12Z palpmobile, G12, Anakin, G12, whatevers next...horrible
But not for fleets
The palp mobile is pretty much useless in the current state of the meta, the Falcon however requires literally 0 work to throw together a rebel fleet capable of beating top tier teams. Terrible design.
Now I'm not so sure anymore. Ether the Youtubers are wrong or the people that post here stuff like "worst idea ever" have heavyly invested and dont want others that didnt to close up to them. But honestly I dont now which is the case...
There are not many ships that have a completely useless pilot. Most pilots either were a meta or have some use elsewhere in a good team.
I mean look at the ships you listed, AA and Cad are probably the least used units outside of ships from that group, and they are not bad.
Previously we saw the bugs, again not super high usage, but soldier is probably the only one if the 3 that doesnt have a real use if already geared.
Vader, biggs,tfp,fotp,and even 5s and anakin, all have uses and can save you from gearing someone else in a respective faction team, or even a mix team.
There are lesser used toons with ships, but you can either make due without them or gear them up and they are still a good 5th in a decent team.
Ships, the worst game mode ever
Yes buts exactly a case to what I think is the problem. The Hans Falcon, the BH ships, Vaders Ship and a lot more have good pilots but how many invested in the bugs to compete in Ship Arena. They maybe geared up the bugs to G12 and now they have toons that have no use at all. They dont form a full team like the ewoks, they are not important for an event, the are possible backwall toons but nothing more. Thats just crap in my eyes. If CG would have made a rework for the available bugs and added two more so that there is a full team that could compete with certain teams then it maybe had some use but as it is right now its wasted time and efford. I feel lucky that I didnt invested in the bugs, because if I did I would be really angry.
GA/TW, TBs, even raids make just about every toon useful.
I use sun fac and geo spy in the above to great effect and never farmed them for ships.
Why gear toons "you" dont see an effective use for? If someone only farmed them because they had a good run in ships (I didnt because they seemed to be a 1 trick pony.), then they got the advantage you saw. If they now realize that was a short sighted decision, that's not something the game should design around. Players have to make these choices, and weigh the resources they use. It's all about resource management.
It's a game of choices and hard investments. I never did chase the bugs meta and I have been placing first in fleet almost since I started my fleet shard. Then I invested heavily in bh ships which carried 1st easily until the falcon dropped in. When that happened I dropped some gear on my rebel fleet and bam! Ackbar is great again. Meta is always shifting and new ships are always being added but you cant expect an investment in one arena to carry to the other. That would not follow the spirit of the game that allows a player to be strong in their chosen element of the game. Whales can dominate both obviously but if your f2p or a light spender then you have to decide where you invest your resources and that is what truly makes this game fun
I agree, but it was not about to argue about that. And I think if there would be raids and other events that would make the players fleet a lot more important then there wouldnt be anything to argue about the ships at all. If a Bistan is as important as a CLS because of the possible use in game then I guess we would see a whole lot mor G12 Bistans as it is right now ;-)
Not all arena meta teams in the past were useful outside of arena. People geared those toons specifically for arena to earn crystals. People geared up those pilots specifically for fleet arena to earn crystals. It's all the same incentive. Gear to earn more, use what you earned to build up other teams that are useful elsewhere.
Would like to see some of the classic ships.