Missions & Complexes

Yeah new pilots shouldn't expect too much from their ships if:

1. Aren't capable of flying with good bonusses
2. Don't have all support skills at least at lvl4-5

I made the same mistake when I started Eve online. People telling me when you don't have at least 12mil SP you should not be in a BS. I obviously went against that advice and got a BS asap. Needless to say I lost some in the first lvl4 missions I went on.

Believe me, I am still not convinced about the SP requirments they gave me that day and the fact whether or not someone should fly a BS with 8mil SP already. Just trying to point out that when you're new and inexperienced it might be better to take one step back and do missions you can handle, in ships that you can tank and fit with DPS (and damage projection) properly.

A little OT: I have an alt that I trained. She has just over 9mil SP and still isn't capable of flying anything larger than destroyers, but she can fully T2 fit both Minmatar and Gallente Frigates and Dessies (spaceship commandskills all to lvl5).

I think in my case that might have been an issue too. Little SP, and part of the SP i had was spread out over: Learning skills, industry, mining, exploration and who knows what other skills I'm hardly using nowadays.
So yeah if you focus your 8mil SP with the right guidance you could be able to pull it off......however that is in the old situation.

The new situation the OP refers too is very unfriendly for low-SP characters. I can still do my missions, I dualbox with my 45mil SP missionbear with Marauders lvl5 and another 48mil SP in a Mach.
But there still are things that I think is not ok with the new system which the OP refers too.
Yesterday I did one part ( I think 13 or 14) of the Amarr Epic warped in with the Mach, got locked by a frigate at 50km distance and my 70km falloff was reduced to 28km by one single frig.....
Only when the Paladdin warped in was I able to start applying damage after the elite frigs were taken care of. Untill the Centus Beasts started triple track disrupting me. Luckily I'm flying with 2 ships, but it might have been very hard to do anything woth just one single turretboat.

yep. my irl friends who introduced me to eve brought me to null and gave me skill books to train core competency. they're also the types who would stop talking to me if I mentioned battleships or anything ill-advised.

my first loss was a drake to a stealth bomber. I was like, ok, obviously something is wrong here, and it's me.

so I spent two years in destroyers and frigates while I trained.

that type of patience is not common, and core skills take a year-- so I understand why players think bigger ship = win. but it's still wrong.

when i took alliance pilots on missions not too long ago, I tried to set a good example by using cruisers.

I tried to change one pilot's mind about battleships, and they said " but i always see you in battleships or bigger" (bigger meaning my Orca)

...and I felt like I let them down. (they're like kids, they watch everything you do and then assume all the wrong things about it)

For starters, 8 mil SP is pretty low. If you were able to run IV's more easily before doesn't mean that it should be that way. Lvl 4's used to bring in a LOT of money regarding the difficulty and prerequisitions to run them. A 3 mil char could run them quite comfortably back then. I know this because I did them myself at that point.

This shouldn't be that easy, plain and simple. At 8 mil you have a lot of other possibilities to make money and you can also team up with your friend/corp to run a IV before you can do it yourself. Sure, the reward will be lower but you can minimize the loss by running them as effectively as you can with your friend. It i also more fun.

There needs to be a balance between difficulty and income and before the change missions were too easy. The older players need to have a bit of a challenge as well. You cannot demand everything to be tailored towards new players. Look at it as a goal to reach. You will get bored soon enough if you just sleep through IV's.

i don't know about sleeping but I did AFK on nightmare mode and went to the store after clearing a room

a late spawn drone overseer turned my nightmare into a pod. ...last week

whoops

Interesting idea, rarely see a Heavy Interdictor as mission ship.
Onyx:
Going with two LASB instead of XL grabbing 1.3k tank against guristas, can fit 3 CN BCU, an AB and a painter in the mid because I like them, specific non-navy hardeners, and a full rack of HAMs with rigor rigs, it does 440 dps (no drones), applies it perfectly to any cruiser, and still has a chance of hitting frigs with navy missiles.

450m3 cargohold, 1.5m3 for each second of tanking (apart from the first minute already pre-loaded), assuming some of the cargohold is for missiles as well and no container magic (should do it but whatever), let's say can stay on field for 5-8 mins. With that dps, I'd estimate that's enough for 8-10 battleships, not quite a full room in the harder L4s.
Ofc as you mow down some opposition you need to boost less.
So it could work, having a marauder with you with it's cargohold doesn't hurt, else you loose time possibly warping in and out.
Specially if there are 5 warp gates.
I'm almost starting to like it
(But at that point, same training time, Tengu?)

Didn't run the number on the Vulture, takes way longer to train those, I'd rather be in a nighthawk and apply more dps than in a ship that does potentially less than a Thorax the way you fit it.

So we should make all game content difficult for the high skill point players who can afford the shiny ships. At the same time make it impossible to play that content in anything less. Why not just completely remove all T1 ships from the game. Have faction ships the lowest tier. By changing the content to be challenging to the elite shiny ships you are basically making those T1 ships useless, so might as well just remove them.

There will also be no more noobs to worry about, they can not afford or fly the shinnies so they can just quit and find another game. Then the gankers will quit as there will be no noobs to kill. Then everyone else will start jumping ship as the game population drops. After a few years they can shut down the servers as there will not be enough active subs left to pay the bills.

Or we can be realistic.

Lets see level 4 missions WERE designed as solo content, and as entry level content for battleship pilots. Not content only available to highly skilled battleship pilots with the best equipment, but entry level, as in T1 non faction ships, with T1 fittings. Level 4 missions have never been easy for these ships with lower skill points, but they were doable. Level 4 missions ARE mid range content NOT endgame content. If you want more challenge, there are level 5 missions, and incursions. Scout incursions only take a 4-5 ship fleet to complete. I am sure Some elite players in their officer fit faction/T2/T3 ships could do it with 2-3 ships or even solo. There is no need to make level 4 missions harder. If level 4 missions are made to difficult for new players just getting into battleships, then what content is there for lower skilled battleship pilots to play? low skilled battleships are useless in most level 3 missions as they can not track the smaller ships. Level 4 missions are supposed to be for THESE ships not their elite big brothers.

Since comparing EVE to WOW has been so common lately lets use that analogy. In WOW if a max level character with full raid gear decided to start farming content designed for level 60 characters would it make sense to change that content to be challenging to the maxed out character with full raid gear, and make the content inaccessible to the level 60 characters it was intended for? NO, that would be stupid and make no sense. So why do it in EVE? Just because veteran players with urber equipment choose to run level 4 missions does not make it end game content. They are just choosing to farm easy content rather than engage in the harder content that is available to them.

EVE needs to continue to draw in new players to survive.

well yeah, and they need to get in a decent corp that will force them to stay in assault frigs, then go to assault cruisers

T3? one cruiser doesn't need to do so many things for a mission--

200ISK T2 cruiser with resist and weapons bonuses, with tons of cpu, and you're good....

stop telling newbs that battleships and T3's are cool...

I hate flying T3's!

if newbs would learn to cruiser, then treat battlships as huge cruisers with more utitliy, they would be better off!

letting them bounce from destroyers to battlecruisers then to T3 or battleships is not a proper progression--

imo new pilots need to learn how ships relate to each other from one to the next like:

frigate -"ok my life sucks"
destroyer as a frigate killer -"i love to pop frigs!"
T2 frigate as a battleship killer -"o, that's what a speed tank does" <-are happy they didn't jump to battleships
- cruiser - <--anchor, kill up and down the ship scale
T2 cruiser for better survivability -"this T2 cruiser is a ROCK!"
battlecruiser as a cruiser with deeper capacitor and defense reserves, -"ok that's slow and sucks"
battleship as a cruiser with deeper capacitor and defense reserves AND more utility, -"i have like, four slots to do whatever with!"
THEN T3 as battleship utility without the cap and defense reserve -"do we HAVE to use T3's for this?? it could be done better and cheaper with..." ^one of those previous ships

the first thing I want to know about a new contact is: can you/ have you flown assault frigs, and then the answer is no, and then I know they're below-average pilots, and noooobody ever took the time to tell them any different

How do you make the jump from L4 missions to all game content? Your perspective of this game is seriously narrow if you think all T1 ships should be removed because L4 missions are suddenly more difficult.



Do you really believe that all players do missions? It's a niche inside EVE, catering to a very specific group of players. Changes to missions mean nothing to majority of the player base.




But his is not a content-game. You run missions if you have a specific motive to do so- you collect LPs for trading, or raise your standings towards an NPC corporation or faction. Yes, they are designed for battleships, but nowhere is stated that they should be doable with too low skills to fly a battleship properly. Battleships are very skill point-intensive to fit and fly properly, which already makes them more accessible to older players.

The content in EVE are the other players. MMO.

they supposedly patched out full room aggro this morning, so there is not a huge reason to continue a lot of these arguments :D