Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So you can no longer drop 15-20 guys on an unsuspecting target, then immediately jump back to safety. Oh no, you might actually have to deal with some consequences for a hot drop now. Also, making you do some extra scouting to see what kind of reinforcements are waiting in the nearby systems, or having to maneuver yourself into a favorable system to reduce jump fatigue to a minimum are bad things?

Perhaps it was wrong of me to assume that people would understand how blops ships generally work and what their purpose is.



All these changes mean for blops ships is that you can no longer do drops that require a midpoint, and that you now have to either spend 45 minutes idly waiting in the drop system (not a danger of any kind, since you will be cloaked -- just boring for everyone involved, including the people who live in that system) or you can jump back right after your cooldown and be locked out from blopsing for the rest of the evening.




Wrong. The point of these changes is to lengthen the traveling time over long distances. Furthermore, CCP has explicitly stated numerous times that they do not want to hit blops too hard with these changes, "too hard" meaning that their intention is not to ruin the intended use of the black ops battleship:




The current changes almost completely ruin the manner blops work on TQ right now, while the only point of these changes in regards of blops is to prohibit their use as long-distance travel vessels. It is completely necessary to restrict them somehow, as if they were completely exempt from these jump changes they could be abused by bridging stuff across the universe in a flash. However, limiting their intended use is something CCP has stated they want to avoid, yet have been thus far unsuccessful with it.

If you can come up with a less convoluted suggestion to nerfing long-distance jump travel but keeping the intended short-distance usage of blops intact, I'd be glad to hear it. As they stand now, however, the jump changes will all but kill blops. Any "nomadic" blops gangs will probably just completely call it quits, whereas entities like PASTA who stage out of a single area will be somewhat hindered but not catastrophically so (as in, we'll have to make sure not everyone gets fatigued, and people can only drop once every two hours).

That math is flawed: jump cooldowns do not get reduced by the 50% bonus, except possibly for the first jump with 0 fatigue, this is something that's not completely clear from the devblog/forumpost as there's a contradiction between them. I'm assuming the first jump has the 50% reduction, but the rest don't since their cooldowns are based on fatigue and not the distance travelled.

Additionally, the "sustained hotdrop" scenario is quite unrealistic. Let's consider two more realistic scenarios for blops: a simple single-jump drop on a target within jump range, and a drop on a target that requires a midpoint.


Single-jump drop
A renter is ratting in his carrier in 7G-QIG with a hostile in local. The hostile tackles him, lights a covert cyno, and blops and bombers from PR-8CA (6.438 ly away) jump in to kill the carrier. Total time spent in hostile system is, say, 10 minutes.

1st jump:
Distance: 6.438 ly
Cooldown: 4.219 min
Fatigue: 4.219

2nd jump:
Distance: 6.438 ly
Cooldown: 4.219 min
Fatigue: 13.580961

formula for cooldown is cooldown = MAX((1 + distance * reductionFactor), (fatigue - timeBetweenJumps / 10)), and formula for fatigue is fatigue = (fatigue - timeBetweenJumps / 10) * (1 + distance * reductionFactor)

Considered in a vacuum, this single-jump drop isn't horribly ruined. However, you need to wait over two hours for your fatigue to completely decay, and if you don't, you risk eventually running into a situation where you have ridicilous amounts of fatigue. In practice it's not uncommon to do two or three almost back-to-back single-jump drops like this, in which case the fatigue (and thus cooldowns) will quickly get prohibitively large.


Midpoint drop
A mining fleet is transporting ore in a freighter from belt to station in UVHO-F in Querious with a hostile in local. The hostile informs his friends in PR-8CA in Delve about this, who put a fleet up and use MKD-08 as midpoint to reach UVHO-F. The route will look like this. They move briskly, and only spend a maximum of five minutes at the midpoint and seven minutes in target system (but if they're limited by the cooldown, they will jump as soon as it's over).

1st jump:
Distance: 7.201 ly
Cooldown: 4.6005 min
Fatigue: 4.6005
Delay: 5 min

2nd jump:
Distance: 5.389 ly
Cooldown: 4.1005 min
Fatigue: 15.14929725
Delay: 7 min

3rd jump:
Distance: 5.389 ly
Cooldown: 14.44929725 min
Fatigue: 53.38292869
Delay: 5 min

4th jump:
Distance: 7.201 ly
Cooldown: 51.93799897 min
Fatigue: 238.9407642

(delay here is the amount of time they spend waiting idly after the jump)

As you can see, after a midpoint drop like this, jump fatigue starts reaching the prohibitively large territory. It now takes over 1.5 DAYS to deplete, which means that you won't really be blopsing for at least 36 hours if you know what's good for you. The only ways to avoid this are to space this midpoint drop out so that you spend 47 minutes in the midpoint, then 36 minutes in the target system, then 36 minutes in the midpoint, and then wait at least 47 minutes before doing another drop anywhere... or not mid-pointing at all, ever. Both of these options are obviously dissatisfactory, and evidence of these changes ruining current usage of blops.

The range is being increased from 7.875 ly to 8 ly, so it's far from a significant increase although it will generally put you in range of a few new systems.

Before anyone even argues about this, I think drops requiring a single midpoint are a completely justified use-case. That's just how blops were pretty much designed to be used, and they give up a lot of things in terms of combat stats to achieve that. Blops are fairly weak for anything except surprise attacks with overwhelming force, and will easily die if they bite more than they can chew, which will even considering the new system's goals be enough of a balancing factor for their sneaky mobility.

I don't think adjusting the fatigue reduction bonus is the solution here. If you set it high enough, like 90%, it will certainly solve practically all issues with regular use of blops, but it will make them extremely abusable for teleporting large distances fast. Since the primary intention of these changes is nerfing teleportation mechanics as means of long-distance travel, that would be quite counterproductive.

Here's the quick spreadsheed I made to calculate this, just make a copy of it and change the numbers to your heart's content. The "FRF" field on the left there is the bonus multiplier.

I guess that could be true in theory, but in practice people will just bridge bombers which can quite safely burn back, and almost never use blops. Blops are still battleships so they warp super slow, and a small fleet like a blops drop taking gates with battleships in null is just asking for trouble.

In that regard, it's sort of a false choice. 99% of the time the other option is so horribly bad compared to the other that people are just never going to use it. In my experience, black ops battleships usually offer only marginally more to a gank than bombers do, so if a change like this rolls out which practically forces you to take gates people are just never going to use their blops for anything but bridging.

Obviously there are other usecases for black ops battleships, such as running deadspace complexes or camping an undock with an arty Panther to kill cynos, but I think those are quite marginal compared to the fast hit-and-run ganks the class is famous for. It's also not what I would consider a "good niche", it's more like something I would consider about as useful as the old Marauders were.

a lot of tears and a complaint about the fix, it is the INTENTION of the fix to make it harder to travel further distances live with it or quit EVE... if the last applies can i have your stuff?

"Blops are still battleships so they warp super slow, and a small fleet like a blops drop taking gates with battleships in null is just asking for trouble"


I am honestly not sure I have much sympathy for the situation. Every time I undock my mining fleet I realize that space is dangerous. I am not sure I can really see any reason to support the idea of changing the upcoming patch just to make life for a black ops fleet safer.

The thing is, I think most people actually regard black ops dropping a lame tactic, it's only overlooked atm due to the even lamer tactics of capital and titan bridge dropping. I know most people I spoke to seem to think of black ops like this, and harken back to the days of old school combat.

Lets face it, the current method of black ops dropping requires little skill as you can pretty much choose your engagement, and also despite the high cost of the ships involved, there is actually minimal risk if you pick the correct targets. And with nerfs to titan bridging and capital drops, there will be even less risk now.

So a slight nerfing of black ops capability would be welcomed by most people that I speak too.

Target 4ly, 5ly some less ly maybe lets try system next door ly.
What about 15 ly?

You know most renters will just move far enough from your staging system with this and then you can just forget about dropping them altogether.

Edit: this just makes some nullsec systems 100% safe.