Thanks, Cosmic (Mike (...I hope I wrote your name the right way)) and Miguel. That interview cleared some of the most important issues (IMO). Great work. Keep it up.
While I appreciate the interview, I wish you guys had discussed the Eldar Vyper more specifically. You seemed to be agreeing with Miguel that if there are normal bikes in the game available to non founders, that this would somehow negate the problems and justify the exclusivity of Fast Attack Vehicles. But the Vyper, perhaps more so than the SM 2 seater, is extremely different from the default bike. It's a small tank, really, not a bike at all, and thus is completely incomparable to the one seater jetbikes with their locked sponsonless weaponry. If the Vyper, as an entire class of vehicles, is founders only, the Eldar have no alternatives to replace this role. It is their sole and exclusive fast attack vehicle. So having this be founders only is absolutely not a sidegrade, regardless of what the regular bike stats are; you are restricting an entire tank class to your founder players, without providing any comparable option to the regular paid subscribers. Imagine if the Harasser in PS2 was founders locked? Would making the Flash ATV improve that situation at all? Of course not. Tweaking the bikes will not make a fast attack vehicle any less strategically unbalanced if it is locked to your founder players. This is even worse than PtW, it is Pledge to Win, where even paying players who join post launch will be getting the short end of the stick.
Yeah, that could definitely be a problem for the Eldar for several reasons. Because this means that either the Eldar will get a significantly more powerful founder's vehicle than the other factions while also having their only FAV paywalled, or the Vyper's representation will be butchered to make it behave like a regular bike. This is yet another example why it's important to understand the distinctions between types of vehicles. You can't just say "Oh, one two-man vehicle is the same as any other". This: Is not the same as this: One of these has a missile launcher, and that's a HUGE difference.
I was not attempting to imply that the Vyper was not better, only that the Eldar do have a jetbike that could be used as a Fast Attack vehicle for non-Founders. And while it may seem bad at first keep in mind that this is the Eldar's bike, and the other Fast Attack vehicles they'll be going up against (that aren't the Founder vehicles) are also bikes. (The one-seater Assault Bike and the Ork Warbike.) Edit: I thought Fast Attack Vehicles were mainly bikes.
This pretty much goes for the ork warbuggy. The real make or break point isn't that it carries another person, it's the gun sponson: 360˚ of stabilized heavy ranged attack is a really big deal. The regular bikes don't share that offensive hit and run capability with their fixed mount light weapons. You can't possibly compare a fully rotating autocannon or missile launcher with a pair of fixed infantry weapons (shruiken catapults). Miguel has to know that. And the fact that he's doing so anyway makes me very nervous. An FAV is not a bike. It is an FAV. It's like comparing this: To this: Two completely different battlefield roles. Improving the bike isn't going to make excluding the FAV any less damaging to vehicle combat.
That's not a big deal, the game it's supposed to be asymmetrically balanced one 2 seat bike somewhat better than other it's ok (even more if it's the ork bike) what's not ok it's to say that a 2 seat bike is balanced because you can use a regular bike, a regular bike is a transport with little to no firepower, you will probably be better shooting with a tactical marine than with a bike while moving, on the other hand 2 seat bikes are heavy weapons plataforms that can relocate really fast, imagine a group of devastators than can move rapidly to one advantageous position to another before people can outflank them, harasser classes or vehicles are really good specially if you are playing like a team.
I think we might need to make a poster kind of like that "this is not a pipe" picture to remind people what is and is not a transport. Ce n'est pas un transporteur.
Of course, that's what I meant. Was that not what it sounded like? I've got no problem with regular bikes, it's just that they are (and should be) at a much lower power level in hit and run vehicle combat, which is where these 2 man attack bikes will excel. So it's not in the least bit fair to compare them when trying to justify the inclusion of this exclusive vehicle.
