Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Until off grid boosting is 100% removed there will not be on grid boosting except for the smallest of gangs who don't have any alts

Useful, thanks--but what about the slot layout? This clears up (most of) the fitting issues the Nighthawk has, but it doesn't change the fact that the Claymore's slot layout makes it able to fit a much stronger shield tank...

I also want to quickly address the concern I'm seeing about my comment that we want to someday remove the +HP bonus from the Damnation.

To be clear, we are not removing the Damnation's HP bonus in Odyssey 1.1, as right now it helps the Damnation fill a useful role that would be lost if we removed it.

However in the long run, adding HP is not the solution to key ships being volleyed off the field. As EVE battles grow in numbers and coordination people are going to find a way to volley just about anything we design, and then we'll be right back where we started. We're not going to get into an escalating design battle against the dps and alpha of player fleets.

The solution to the problem is to sidestep it by reducing reliance on a few lynchpin ships. The reason that command ships have this problem while other key fleet ships (like logistics, recons or dictors) don't is because people can bring redundant numbers of those other classes. When we get the capability to remove offgrid links our plan is to also replace the way links apply so that losing one key ship won't mean you need to take your ball and go home.
Now of course command ships are larger, more expensive and skill intensive than those other key classes, so it will still make sense for them to have significantly better tanks than a recon ship. However at that point the perceived need to have over 300k EHP will be significantly lessened.

At the same time we are continuing to push more viable gang boosting options into lower brackets of SP and isk requirements. Many of you will have noticed that one effect of the gang link changes is that T1 Battlecruisers will provide better bonuses, and a character with level 3 or 4 skills will be vastly improved compared to the current situation. There will still be significant benefits to training skills to 5 and upgrading to a Command Ship, but for people that can't afford to bring redundant Command Ships, redundant Battlecruisers will be a fine option.

I've also seen the idea expressed a few times to expand Target Spectrum Breakers to the Command Ships, and that's an idea I think has some serious merit. There likely isn't time to get it in for 1.1, but we'll investigate further and see what comes out.

so +50 CPU for ??? ASB's'

noo... just less pimp to make it fit.

Soon™. But more realistically, we were supposed to have a thread on the Command Ship model changes that is "greyed out" now (since the thread doesn't exist), so where is that thread?

Only if you want to fit short range low CPU mods with links.

So,

About that tracking bonus on the Eos? Is that like a place-holder while you guys are brainstorming a bonus that wouldn't force you to make use of those four turret slots?

Also, is it possible for the Eos to get more drone bandwidth? After all, one of its bonuses specifies heavies, and you can hold only two flights of them, and no other drones. Unlike turrets, you can't really overheat drones for a damage boost, and they're quite vulnerable to being destroyed by other players. Heavy drones especially.

It would be nice if you could order your drones to overheat themselves :3

Especially if they burned out in a minute or so and went dead in space, also taking your drone control facilities offline and killing your DPS.

Kind of like what happens when you overheat your guns/missiles too long.

I'm not usually one to worry about the ship models, but I have to say I agree. The very presence of drakes in the game makes my skin crawl, since for the first 2 years of my game time they were simply uber-mega-overpowered ships that soured the whole experience of Eve.

My corporation mantra remains to this day, "all drakes must die"...

:-)