25 minutes ago, Brunas said:

Afterburners is pretty much synonymous with Darth Vader - more usages on him than any other pilot (or all of them combined). Vader does about as well with afterburners as without: (34% vs 34.17%):

Does this data change at all with the advent of gas clouds? (Just asking mostly rhetorically, since I doubt that info is available in any meaningful way.)

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If we're only really seeing AB on Vader (450+ compared to other pilots at around 0-10, wedge/guri at 40-50), and it's roughly an even value add on Vader, I think it's safe to say that if Vader + Afterburners is too cheap it's Vader that's too cheap.

I think you're drawing too much conclusion for (a) not enough data, and (b) an incredible soup of things swirling around Vader that make it very difficult to draw the conclusions you're drawing. To be clear, I don't necessarily think you're wrong ... I just don't think the statistics you presented provide very much support.

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At least balance wise. If you think there should be an additional tax for lack of fun or whatever for double repositioning, that's fine too, but I don't think the tournament data supports afterburners being the part of this equation that's too cheap (on vader).

For the record, there's none of that. I am the most faction- and playstyle-agnostic player I have ever known or even heard of. (I may lose the crown because I have no intention of buying Separatists, though.) I don't form opinions based on what would be "really good" (or "really bad") for a particular faction or playstyle.

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I also take issue with initiative based pricing because it's so non-granular. There aren't half points, so every initiative has to either round (complicated/ugly), or just be way out of line.

I think this is the crux of your position on this ... and I don't entirely disagree with you. Init-scaling is absolutely not perfect. But IMO -- and it's tough for me to credit any disagreement, I have to admit -- Init-scaling is better than not Init-scaling. It has simply made the game better, IMO. And I'm pretty sure I've recently heard the wise advice not to let perfect be the enemy of good.

I also don't think Init-scaling's rounding errors have to be egregious or worth worrying about. If an upgrade costs the same for Init 1 and 2, and the same for Init 3 and 4, that's pretty much never going to break anything.

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Let's say arbitrarily afterburners is absolutely correct at 6 on i6 (or if you hate this, some hypothetical upgrade that scales with initiative that isn't afterburners). Is it really going to be one point on Academies? For example, does 1 point afterburners (or 2 points even) for academies or generic t70s sound right or fair?

Well, you might have noticed that my scaling started at 3 points. I think 4 points for Academies or 5 points for rookie T-70s doesn't seem terribly far off.

You started at 6 points, which extrapolated to 1 point for Academies and 2 points for rookie T-70s. I submit that of course that feels not right and not fair ... you started at the wrong place and extrapolated to a wrong place. Doesn't seem surprising to me.

14 minutes ago, Brunas said:

Oh, and before anyone yells at me for ignoring Guri because it doesn't fit my data - I'm ignoring Guri because I've never played AB Guri to have an opinion.

I will say that it appears that AB is better on Guri than Vader, which leads me to be skeptical of initiative based pricing. Or people think you can AS roll, move, then boost, which seems like it would be pretty good...

It's real good at:

Getting her R1 for the free focus

Letting her boost and roll to arc Dodge.

That being said, I went with LW instead because I found she was really only doing big moves up to engagement, once you get in, she tends to pick knife fight moves instead

14 minutes ago, Jeff Wilder said:

Does this data change at all with the advent of gas clouds? (Just asking mostly rhetorically, since I doubt that info is available in any meaningful way.)

I think you're drawing too much conclusion for (a) not enough data, and (b) an incredible soup of things swirling around Vader that make it very difficult to draw the conclusions you're drawing. To be clear, I don't necessarily think you're wrong ... I just don't think the statistics you presented provide very much support.

For the record, there's none of that. I am the most faction- and playstyle-agnostic player I have ever known or even heard of. (I may lose the crown because I have no intention of buying Separatists, though.) I don't form opinions based on what would be "really good" (or "really bad") for a particular faction or playstyle.

I think this is the crux of your position on this ... and I don't entirely disagree with you. Init-scaling is absolutely not perfect. But IMO -- and it's tough for me to credit any disagreement, I have to admit -- Init-scaling is better than not Init-scaling. It has simply made the game better, IMO. And I'm pretty sure I've recently heard the wise advice not to let perfect be the enemy of good.

I also don't think Init-scaling's rounding errors have to be egregious or worth worrying about. If an upgrade costs the same for Init 1 and 2, and the same for Init 3 and 4, that's pretty much never going to break anything.

Well, you might have noticed that my scaling started at 3 points. I think 4 points for Academies or 5 points for rookie T-70s doesn't seem terribly far off.

You started at 6 points, which extrapolated to 1 point for Academies and 2 points for rookie T-70s. I submit that of course that feels not right and not fair ... you started at the wrong place and extrapolated to a wrong place. Doesn't seem surprising to me.

Just combining everything back together, because you put it well in the bolded bit there. My preference is I'd rather see simple pricing - price afterburners around roughly it's max utility, than to try to find a proxy for it's value across all platforms. I'm not confident they can do granular pricing like that well enough for it to be worth it, so our "let the perfect be the enemy of the good" stances are just the opposite and that's... fine?

this isn't very exciting. FIGHT ME YOU COWARD

Just now, Brunas said:

this isn't very exciting. FIGHT ME YOU COWARD

I think you missed a few pages back where you're supposed to submit meekly to me. I took enough ***** for that joke that I should at least get some value from it.

I am genuinely curious what you mean by "try to find a proxy for its value across all platforms." What's an example, for your "max-utility-costed" Afterburners?

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only 5'11" built like a lawnmower

Just now, Jeff Wilder said:

I think you missed a few pages back where you're supposed to submit meekly to me. I took enough ***** for that joke that I should at least get some value from it.

I am genuinely curious what you mean by "try to find a proxy for its value across all platforms." What's an example, for your "max-utility-costed" Afterburners?

Oh, so what I mean is, I'd prefer we live in a world where upgrades are priced according to roughly the maximum utility - Juke should have a price assuming you're bringing it on a phantom or defender, swarm tactics should have a price assuming you're bringing it on i5/i6, HLC assuming you're bringing something that can consistently get bullseye arcs, supernatural reflexes on a high intiative ace, etc.

So for something like Afterburners, that's probably Anakin/Vader, but mostly Vader because of the lack of native Boost. I don't think initiative is a good enough proxy for how valuable afterburners is. I think it's probably some constant based on whether or not the ship can boost/double reposition natively, added to some funciton of initiative, followed by some function of that ship's access to regen and such as well. Having the initiative based pricing on something like afterburners is in my opinion adding very little utility or new options to the game, but makes the footprint of potentially accidentally broken stuff significantly larger the more upgrades scale like that.

I agree with Chris here, but I guess the "this isn't fun tax" is part of the equation that FFG considers. If we look at the last season where Supernatural Reflexes was 12 points on Vader, it was played on about 46% of Vaders with a performance 6.3 pp above the average Vader. Hate Vader actually outperformed it. Looking at this data, we might assume Super probably needed to be around 15-20 points on Vader but it went to 32. The tax on Supernatural was more because it was less fun to play against than because it was hilariously broken on Vader.

https://pinksquadron.dk/pbm/?sid=6&q=pilots&p=darthvader

20 minutes ago, Brunas said:

Oh, so what I mean is, I'd prefer we live in a world where upgrades are priced according to roughly the maximum utility - Juke should have a price assuming you're bringing it on a phantom or defender, swarm tactics should have a price assuming you're bringing it on i5/i6, HLC assuming you're bringing something that can consistently get bullseye arcs, supernatural reflexes on a high intiative ace, etc.

I got that part of it. I don't understand the "try to find a proxy for its value across all platforms" part. I understand all of the words ... I just don't understand what you're saying. What is a "proxy for [Afterburners'] value across [non-Vader ships]?" How would that actually look on other ships?

I also think that what we should have, and do have (however imperfect) is a combination of max-utility valuation and Init-scaling. But we get more utility from upgrades -- meaning we can use more upgrades for more ships, not that a given upgrade gives more value on a given ship -- than max-utility costing, because ... well, no rookie T-70 (let's change that to T-65, since the T-70 has native Boost with wings open) is going to take 8-point Afterburners. Now, probably no rookie T-65 is going to take 4-point Afterburners either ... but it might, and if it does he's not going to be totally screwed for it, because he's paying closer to its actual value for him.

Max-utility costing does two things:

It makes list-building far more of a trap-laden puzzle than it needs to be, or should be, IMO. That means that it rewards obsessive and skillful list-builders, and punishes more casual list-builders (no matter how otherwise skillful at the game) unless of course they just rely on others to find and build the good lists. So max-utility costing makes list-building worth more, relatively speaking, than other skills in the game, and massively rewards finding under-costed "max-utility-costed" upgrades. It seems natural to then assume that how one feels about max-utility costing would correlate to how one feels about the relative value of other skills in the game ...

... but that doesn't comport with what I know about what you seem to value in the game, so I'm genuinely surprised you think max-utility costing -- alone, without the error-checking effect of something like Init-scaling -- is the way to go.

"Max-utility" reads too much like "I don't like how Pilot x is able to use Upgrade y so I want upgrade y priced so high no pilots use it" (a.k.a. "NuK3 1T!!!!!") for my taste...

2 minutes ago, Hiemfire said:

"Max-utility" reads too much like "I don't like how Pilot x is able to use Upgrade y so I want upgrade y priced so high no pilots use it" (a.k.a. "NuK3 1T!!!!!") for my taste...

this is why codexes are the answer

price all upgrades differently for each pilots

different points in each format

maximum 🤔

If this has all been a bit too complex for my relaxed reading to really take in, then it's too complex for my idle brainspace list building while I work.

So stop it. Afterburners are FINE.

(Vader could probably go to 67/68. Auto focus+lock and 3 green dice is very good)

20 minutes ago, Jeff Wilder said:

I got that part of it. I don't understand the "try to find a proxy for its value across all platforms" part. I understand all of the words ... I just don't understand what you're saying. What is a "proxy for [Afterburners'] value across [non-Vader ships]?" How would that actually look on other ships?

I also think that what we should have, and do have (however imperfect) is a combination of max-utility valuation and Init-scaling. But we get more utility from upgrades -- meaning we can use more upgrades for more ships, not that a given upgrade gives more value on a given ship -- than max-utility costing, because ... well, no rookie T-70 (let's change that to T-65, since the T-70 has native Boost with wings open) is going to take 8-point Afterburners. Now, probably no rookie T-65 is going to take 4-point Afterburners either ... but it might, and if it does he's not going to be totally screwed for it, because he's paying closer to its actual value for him.

Oh, I'm trying to say initiative based scaling itself is trying to find a proxy for it's value across different ships. And I don't like that.

20 minutes ago, Jeff Wilder said:

It makes list-building far more of a trap-laden puzzle than it needs to be, or should be, IMO. That means that it rewards obsessive and skillful list-builders, and punishes more casual list-builders (no matter how otherwise skillful at the game) unless of course they just rely on others to find and build the good lists. So max-utility costing makes list-building worth more, relatively speaking, than other skills in the game, and massively rewards finding under-costed "max-utility-costed" upgrades. It seems natural to then assume that how one feels about max-utility costing would correlate to how one feels about the relative value of other skills in the game ...

... but that doesn't comport with what I know about what you seem to value in the game, so I'm genuinely surprised you think max-utility costing -- alone, without the error-checking effect of something like Init-scaling -- is the way to go.

So in a perfect world I agree. Unfortunately, I don't think FFG is good enough at pricing things "correctly" for more complicated pricing schemes like this to actually work out. It's hard to do hypotheticals here, so let me know if you think this is unfair. Let's say advanced sensors scaled with initiative, because of course re-positioning before moving at high initiatives is very strong. Something like 3 at i0, and 8 at i6. Now some interesting things happen - those generic Bs can bring advanced sensors, which is neat! ...but also, thannisson in his i1 upsilon sure is happy about never having to worry about clearing a maneuver ever again. This is what I mean by "trying to find a proxy for the value of X" - initiative based pricing is an attempt to find a proxy or approximation of the value that advanced sensors will give, and frankly I don't think it's accurate. Another example is squad leader, or the coordinate action in general. It's most valuable at i0/1, 6+ and... whatever happens to be after your opponent moves. I don't think squad leader's pricing really makes sense because of that. There's always going to be exceptions to pricing based on initiative (things like null) or agility (hi Ric), etc.

Basically, I don't think the points are rigorous/accurate enough to support some complex schemes like this, and I think it's likely we move into whack-a-mole with finding the accidentally underpriced stuff that ends up that way.

I think variable pricing as a means to make every upgrade viable on every platform is never going to work, but it does create the possibility of shifting which pilots the upgrade is viable on. For example: Initiative-scaled pricing for Afterburners could penalize aces so much that it becomes more of a low or mid Initiative upgrade. Basically, instead of setting the point scaling to follow the value curve, you artificially exaggerate the pricing curve and create an incentive at a certain initiative level. Say if Afterburners were 4 points for I1-4 and 8 points for I5 and I6. The optimal use of the upgrade might move from Vader to say Turr Phenirr.

13 minutes ago, Brunas said:

Oh, I'm trying to say initiative based scaling itself is trying to find a proxy for it's value across different ships. And I don't like that.

Probably that ^

Boost is great for blocking and killboxing. AdvS is great for yoloing obstacles and the **** with consequences on my I2 scrub. Coord is just as awesome at low Init as it is at high Init. Yo, Rex just blocked your I3s sloop with a boost and now 4ks behind it....

High Init is the best..... well, it's just not that simple.

5 hours ago, Brunas said:

Of all the words not to be word-filtered...

I’m as surprised as you are

21 minutes ago, Cuz05 said:

High Init is the best..... well, it's just not that simple.

But nothing about Init-scaling says it has to go from low-cost to high-cost. Or to scale in proportion to Init.

So, for instance, Squad Leader (or other Coordinate effects) could, in fact, have two cost peaks, one at low-Init and one at high-Init.

Advanced Sensors uses don't so much get better at high-Init as the uses change from low-Init to high-Init (they get a little better, yeah), so maybe AdvS gets something like 5/5/5/7/7/9/9, or whatever.

As far as FFG's ability to price things correctly, I would agree that should be a show-stopper ... if they didn't now have a working mechanism to fix their mistakes, including the willingness to fix the worst mistakes very quickly.

1 hour ago, Brunas said:

Or people think you can AS roll, move, then boost, which seems like it would be pretty good...

You can’t do that, can you? Cause I was pretty sure using AS disallowed the use of AB , but now you make me doubt myself

2 hours ago, skotothalamos said:

tbf, they do what they want in Spain with regards to points changes anyway.

Spain is different, my friend! Long live the siesta!

1 minute ago, RoockieBoy said:

You can’t do that, can you? Cause I was pretty sure using AS disallowed the use of AB , but now you make me doubt myself

His "..." at the end was likely meant to be a clue towards sarcasm of that actually working and/or that people still don't understand the rules and the people with success may have incorrectly used afterburners after adv sensors which would be pretty good, which is why it's illegal.

5 minutes ago, RStan said:

His "..." at the end was likely meant to be a clue towards sarcasm of that actually working and/or that people still don't understand the rules and the people with success may have incorrectly used afterburners after adv sensors which would be pretty good, which is why it's illegal.

Ok that’s what I thought, but my English level made me doubt.

Let’s see what the Spanish meta brings, we usually have a special flavor 😂

P.S We all here wished point changes were available for the SoS but I guess it wasn’t meant to be...

14 minutes ago, Jeff Wilder said:

But nothing about Init-scaling says it has to go from low-cost to high-cost. Or to scale in proportion to Init.

Advanced Sensors uses don't so much get better at high-Init as the uses change from low-Init to high-Init (they get a little better, yeah), so maybe AdvS gets something like 5/5/5/7/7/9/9, or whatever.

Right, but let me loop back around to the original point you made:

1 hour ago, Jeff Wilder said:

...

It makes list-building far more of a trap-laden puzzle than it needs to be, or should be, IMO. That means that it rewards obsessive and skillful list-builders, and punishes more casual list-builders (no matter how otherwise skillful at the game) unless of course they just rely on others to find and build the good lists.

Isn't this what's happening here? For something like advanced sensors, we agree that initiative variable costing doesn't really solve the issue. Obviously advanced sensors is significantly more valuable on an upsilon (regardless of initiative) than it is on a bwing. Isn't this also leading the new player to go "cool, look how cheap advanced sensors is on my i3 bwing", when that price is really set at that for upsilons, not bwings.

How do you variably price it to avoid this? Initiative isn't a good stand-in for whatever the value function here is, neither are base size is silly, as is attack and agility. MajorJuggler would probably (correctly) say that it's a value function based on the price of the rest of the ship - basically, the more expensive a ship is, the more upgrades should cost. I just don't think that's realistic, or even the intended goal for the game.

4 minutes ago, RoockieBoy said:

Ok that’s what I thought, but my English level made me doubt.

Let’s see what the Spanish meta brings, we usually have a special flavor 😂

P.S We all here wished point changes were available for the SoS but I guess it wasn’t meant to be...

Yeah that was incredibly unfortunate timing - I'm sure it'll be great regardless, but frustrating!

10 minutes ago, Jeff Wilder said:

But nothing about Init-scaling says it has to go from low-cost to high-cost. Or to scale in proportion to Init.

So, for instance, Squad Leader (or other Coordinate effects) could, in fact, have two cost peaks, one at low-Init and one at high-Init.

Advanced Sensors uses don't so much get better at high-Init as the uses change from low-Init to high-Init (they get a little better, yeah), so maybe AdvS gets something like 5/5/5/7/7/9/9, or whatever.

As far as FFG's ability to price things correctly, I would agree that should be a show-stopper ... if they didn't now have a working mechanism to fix their mistakes, including the willingness to fix the worst mistakes very quickly.

I don't disagree with that at all, and I think it's supremely valid, but man..... the complexity!

I think you quickly get to a point where an upgrade is marginally better not only on certain Init, but also on certain frames. At different Inits to other frames.

It spirals.

I think you guys probably covered all of these angles in the paragraphs I attempted to take in above.

But that's where the art of squad building is for me. Finding the squirrelly little advantageous synergies. As long as they're not so advantageous that... Wait, my Leia is recharged!

I have played every ship at least once. Name all the ships you have never played.

2 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

I have played every ship at least once. Name all the ships you have never played.

Scum Z95

... and apparently that's it!

4 minutes ago, Brunas said:

Scum Z95

... and apparently that's it!

Rekt