User blog:AdmyralDoc/In response to Mace's tech post

Here is another sentiment of mine that I quite dislike in our current era of RP:

Ships are REALLY being judged by looks; and it's actually affecting RP.

Let me take some examples of ships made by users that I've looked up to in the past two years.













-

If I recall correctly, Io, made by TATO is skinny at some parts as well.

So, some of these are just fat with wings, others are genuinely skinny. Notice how I didn't use a single Doc ship in here, which are notoriously known for being thin. With a face slapped on it. And some red eyes.

--

So, what do all these ships have in common? They're all skinny.

What does that matter? They look awesome while being effective at the same time, right?

No.

Traditionally, in RP, a ship was usually determined by its toughness, amount of guns, placement of guns, and how well it performed in MP compared to other ships. However, we lost MP a long time ago, so we ended up resorting to a much worse method.

"Any skinny b****s 'round here?"

Now RP has turned into this: -
 * You shoot Korrina II wings, it causes some structural error or some crap and causes it to crash. Like, really? Korrina doesn't even have guns there!
 * Same applies to Lovecraft.
 * You shoot Undertaker through the middle, it dies instantly. The actual result should be Undertaker shooting you back while standing strong.
 * You shoot a volley, manage to hit Narada's tendril, and snap it off instantly. Making the dictator of the flying ship world that heavily nerfed? Seriously? If we had thought that all it took in RP was 9 ships to fire a volley at the tendrils, hitting them properly, we would have done that. But we didn't judge by that. After all, this thing wrecked both the obese and the fit ships in this world.
 * Io gets split in 4 quadrants. I know there is a Star Trek Enterprise pizza cutter out there, but that doesn't mean Io is going to get shared by a standard American family any time soon.
 * Spear of Desolation is insta-killed.
 * Slava is insta-killed.

So, what does this kind of theory in RP state for all of us?

"It's all about that bass, no treble." You all know what that song is talking about, right? If not, you'll find out soon.

I don't know who is the one who came up with this idea, but if your idea is going to make even ol' classic WINGS become the worst thing to put in RP, there is a problem.

Almost EVERY SHIP will look like the bottom pic, because they were scared to break the boundaries of ship building because RP will just nerf them to infinity.



See! Look how structurally sound it is in physics! Look how brilliant this literally unimaginative ship is! Rectangles beat all!

Or maybe, let's turn it at a 45 degree angle.



Actually, no, let's turn it back to the rectangle. Then we'll either go two ways; trim both the front and the back...

Or just kind of round it out a little to look like this.



If you can't admit that those ships are almost the same, except with more-or-less guns, and a few extra appendages, then maybe you've accepted the state our ship building is in. Or you're the guy who built them.

(HYDRAXIS is so dead after this blog post. But I'm willing to deal with UAC if it means seeing all these wonderful ships again)

But see? None of us can built anything remotely new. Every time I look at the images, it's the same thing; that familiar rounded hull, a square, a diamond, a long rectangle without front or rear mass, or a square that's trimmed a little bit, maybe looks concave too.



We're too scared to build ships any more.

We're all scared of being told "Your ship is useless in RP, because that part right there makes it easy to crash, or split in half."

If you're not stretching the creativity in ships, you'll die out, eventually. That applies for all of you.

There was a man in the ancient days, who decided, "Oh, I'll stick some 1/2 hulls next to the propellers for fun!" And you know what, that creative, stupid, idea ended up revolutionizing the entire BSC field.

Someone decided, "Oh, let's use the SPY-1 Glitch to make a ship and see how it turns out!" Without that man with a spark of fun and imagination in ship building, we wouldn't have this RP today.

Someone decided, "Let's manipulate BSC parts using the computer, because my Mayan stone can't process the complexity of this ship!" And so was born Narada, Death itself.

...

I haven't seen a quote related to those ideas in ages.

Are we even pushing the ship race in this RP anymore?

Someone decided, "I have no idea how to make ships to rival them in the game, so let's just settle on using theory to screw their day up."

Someone decided, "I'm not going to push further to improve myself anymore. This hull is the greatest."

Someone decided, "Hey, Narada is cool, let's make a ship that looks like it!"

Someone decided, "I'm lazy, let's just make another Rook II."

Someone decided, "I'm done with ships. I'll just dominate this pathetic framework of a roleplay we have, meant for bringing people together to battle cool ships together."

Someone decided, "Let's make ships obsolete, nothing but testbeds."

Someone decided, "Let's ruin this wiki's original goal."

It is argued that vast amounts of tech on these very simple looking ships actually promotes strategy. But does it really?

Putting your hands in a T, and saying that your new tech negates death doesn't sound like strategy promotion to you, does it?

As with all Doc posts, my thoughts are very messy. But I'll sum it up this way.

RP is becoming stale, because newfound tech made everything just fat now, fat testbeds for experimental rockets and wave cancellation. There is no effort in ships anymore. And these experimental rockets, railguns, etc. make it so you can't even touch the realm of thin. - Yesterday, WolfgangBSC was telling me that he wanted to start flying ships again. I was happy, so overjoyed, I talked to him with a silly grin on my face.

His ship crashed, and was unable to fly.



It wasn't even done yet, and it looked COOL. I looked in the images, that ship was different from the squares and rounded hulls I'd seen before.

But it crashed.

Compensate for Wolf's inability to build ships anymore. Build something that would make him proud.

Build a ship to be remembered, dang it!

Build for uniqueness!

Because in the end...

No one will remember the 4 ships you built that look exactly the same, only made powerful by a long paragraph of text talking about your Big Bang Theory.

Counterarguments and Responses (not a good debater, but I tried)
Example 1= ...Actually, no, it wouldn't. It'd just be people who devote sixteen hours to moving pixels around ruthlessly crushing people to whom BSC -- the game -- is a hobby, not some sort of profession. That is a game more alike two men standing at point-blank range with different guns, and whoever happened to make the biggest or have a quicker reaction time wins. Without technology, there is no diversity."
 * "It would still be rock-paper-scissors without technology at all.

If we're quite frank, I can't really argue with this. I do see the problem with this, but I am also the kind of person who devotes sixteen hours to moving pixels around.

But you did mention that Protoss would slam AIF, and that in itself is actually a problem that lies in RP, not in BSC.

Protoss owns a entire star system, or galaxy, or something, to get resources to build their god ships so fast.

It's our fault that we didn't regulate Protoss's ownership of an entire system. In a ideal world, I would view Protoss as the kind of navy that has few but strong ships, so it's much like a boss rush, perhaps.

Sadly, we ended up just making the Zerg instead.

I wish I could negotiate that, it would make our RP quite a bit balanced, and also remove the need for such extreme tech to counter their mass production rate.

I'm not sure if Zum would let me though.

"This is the point of why I began pushing the boundaries with technology in the first place! The Luddites claim I am destroying RP; well, what is more destructive? Over half the wiki being useless in any given battle, or people with imagination, creativity, and intelligence being allowed to shine and flourish regardless of the amount of time they spend on BSC or the mods they were able to download?"

I don't know, sir. I'll say this bluntly, although I will be slammed for this.

I'd rather have half the wiki be useless in any given battle due to BSC addicts, than ninety-percent of the wiki be useless in any given battle due to a mixture of BSC addicts and fake technology.

Also, it's not really half the wiki, is it? Again, same problem as the Protoss. If we limited numbers in the age of mass production, we wouldn't have half the wiki be useless. Almost all of the navies (except US maybe and AFOH) are capable of standing their ground against any navy. It's just that we accidentally allowed navies with overpowered ships, like Sith, UAC, and Protoss, to go rampant with both Delusion-level ships and mediocre kind of good ships.

You're just speeding the transition of this roleplay, from cool ships to long paragraphs of text of mass production goals, up.

Again, I can't stop mass production. I'll assure you that every one will disagree with me on the mass production points. But I'm standing up for myself here. I've already offended some of the most powerful navies in this post, so I figured I'll go all out.


 * -|Example 2=
 * "Mace, I don't think you understand what space warfare would be. BSCN is unbelievably unrealistic. Real space warfare would be completely without humans, completely without more or less anything except ships, weaponry, and technology. And the technology, especially the AI technology, would be the most important of these all. Here's a RP scenario if we took what IRL space warfare would be and put it into BSCN. "

BSCN is more described not as unrealistic, but primal. This is the effect of using a primal game to fuel a primal roleplay. However, it's much the same way as how most people think sword fights are cool. Or boxing. Or Jackie Chan. If all those martial arts in movies were replaced by guns, it really wouldn't be an exciting movie. I appreciate your goal of trying to move RP into the future, to fit with all these flying ships.

But in the end, we use a primal game system to calculate how good ships are. There is no way to change that, nor does it need to be changed. Roleplay was merely a way to acquire a fancy way to tell someone "I want to battle you!" After all, we can't have Bug Catcher Tim say his shorts are comfy every time he wants to battle. At the same time, it allowed you to make better connections with people.

Ever since Multiplayer took a turn for the worse, and soon stopped working on many people's devices, Roleplay tumbled down to what it is now. Your wish for complete tech domination makes it even more stale, uninspired. It's all OHKOs and "You didn't touch mes" these days.

If Roleplay was eventually forced to take precedent over its roots, I'd rather have it be strategic placement of troops and flanking, instead of "I DETECTED YOU OHKO BABE"

Maybe something, like "We need to delegate some ships to take down the boss ship here, but we can't spread our defense fleet too thin, in case another enemy fleet pops up." would be fun.

Not "Boss ship gets killed by 200m railgun." Nah.