Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The recently released CSM minutes have prompted a fair bit of discussion on our Corp forums and I wanted to open some of that discussion to a broader audience.
This is of course a pretty big statement and something that I personally believe is a huge step in the correct direction, but this brings up a few concerns for small gang command ship uses. Right now 'racial links' divide the bonuses so that shield (obviously) and skirmish links are bonused and provided by fleet command ships designed for shield tanking. On the other side you have armour (duh) and info links bonused and provided by fleet command ships designed for armour tanking. Leaving the T3 and command ship discussion completely to one side, an armour tanked claymore is a pretty poor solution for something like an AHAC gang that relies quite heavily on the sig reduction and speed provided by bonused skirmish links.

I hope CCP Ytterbium has a plan for this in place?

Taking this line of thought to the extreme it seems pretty reasonable to say, as devil's advocate, that the easiest solution would be to remove the 'racial' attributes from command ship bonuses and allow a fleet command ship to boost all links by their 3% per level. You would quickly end up with damnation and vulture CS everywhere passing skirmish links together with their traditional armour and shield links with an occasional bonused info link thrown in. (A lack of claymores and eos would likely continue to exist due to the current active tank bonuses on those ships and with no requirement to bring them to get their bonuses). This would force some interesting changes in the meta with the inability of CS like the vulture or damnation to kite in any way or really mesh well with some of the small gang dynamics common in the game.

I was thinking about this line from the minutes however:
This makes a ton of sense to me and immediately seemed like it could apply to the problem of fleet command ships as well. What if the damnation and eos where both given armour resist bonuses and were balanced so that damnations have the same sort of speed and tank as they do now, but the eos were made somewhat less tanky but roughly as fast as Gallente HACs. Much like the proposed solution for devoters and phobos. The same could be done with vultures being a shield resist bonused brick with current mobility, while the claymore gains a shield resist bonus and roughly the mobility of Minmatar HACs. The desirable end result would be a shield fast / tanky and armour fast / tanky decision to be made which could support current and future metas for large and small gangs.

This is fairly far out, and broad brushed concepts rather than specific numeric balancing but do people think this is a potential problem? Do you think this is a potential workable solution to this issue? Do people have other ideas that could be implemented? Fire away and hopefully it will give CCP some thoughts and tools to work with when they eventually look at this aspect of balancing.

this subject is bigger than just combat command ships.. when you talk about "grid" you might as well say "belt" for miners. I can't imagine a scenerio where Rorqs required to be in siege mode in belts to give their superior boosts would end well.

You have a great point, but I am not sure the debate about boosts being on grid or not belongs in this thread. CCP Ytterbium certainly seems to be convinced about the way ahead for off-grid boosting based on the line in the CSM minutes, but who is to say what the solution would be for Rorqs etc. Maybe he has some other work around, maybe he believes the risk / reward needs to be adjusted anyways, maybe it is some other combination of factors.

From a PvP focus however, I am pretty confident that moving links on grid is the best solution for the health of the game. Doing this without making some very significant adjustments to the applicable bonused ships could be a rough blow for certain types of gangs and tactics. That is what I am hoping we can brainstorm some solutions for, that CCP can use when the day comes to address this issue.

If on-grid only boosts does become a reality what would be YOUR proposed solution for miners and mining links?

This.

Whilst I completely understand the need for combat boosting to be on grid, the cost of a rorqual prohibits it being on grid. The bonuses don't give enough of a boost to make the risk worthwhile.

Carriers can provide gang links too. People will use them as off-grid boosters out of a POS if their command ship or strategic cruiser can no longer do that.

Off-grid boosting should not exist at all.

If an exception needs to be made, then ONLY for the mining gang links, but I'm not convinced that this is necessary.

I dont see problem with that. If you have a POS in system - you're the defender, and should have the advantage. And having a dedicated expensive and skill-intensive ship is a fair price for that, IMO. Besides, carriers are less efficient than command ships, and thus are not used in this role at all, AFAIK. So either boost command-carriers, or nerf this ability away from them, leaving it to supers.

So I think it is safe to say it is possible for CCP to cook up some solution for mining links if they think it is required. I am still pretty curious if people think the problem of skirmish and info links in armour and shield gangs would become a problem with 'on-grid only' boosting without some sort of modification.

Easy, change the rorqual so it doesn't need to siege to provide the bonus to the links, only siege for ore compression

Rorqual should be on grid for gang links to be applied. end of story

Heaven forbid that people would actually have to protect their mining ops with combat ships and the Rorqual can fit a good tank (1.4 million EHP + a cap shield booster). Yes super-capital hot dropping will still occur. Can't be solved until the obscene number of supercaps in the game is reduced.

Lets look at this from another point of view though. POS's are getting their force fields removed. So super cap hot dropping rorqs at POS's will probably happen anyway. But their is talk of an anchorable forcefield. I imagine this will be destructable so why not anchor a bubble at a belt and boost away. Yes you could still be caught if someone bubbles the force field before you can warp off but it's an option. (purely speculation)

then mine without rorq. Eve is a sandbox, either you will organize defense for your mining ops, or mine without bonuses otherwise.



this.
Having ships sitting somewhere and making all other ships in fleet better is an extremely stupid idea for its own.
If you like bonuses, expose them to the risk the remaining fleet is at.



your assumption POS is only for defenders is wrong. POS for offensive activities is reality, for example staging POS in enemy territory. POS provide already defender advantages since you cant remove them instantly - you are required to go a RF cycle, time during which POS owners could relocate to a safer place (another POS) at manageable risk. There should be no bonus ships sitting safely in POS providing boosts for everyone else.