EVE General Discussion

I get the feeling from what I have seen that CCP tends to look at graphs of a class of ships. Then they will nerf the most used ship in that class until all those ships are used roughly the same.
However, I think that people then swop to another ship in a different class.

I am under the impression that CCP is herding flavour of the month players around rather than actually balancing the ships.

As do I. Unfortunately it's been that way as far back as I remember. And not just ships.

Actually, I think that I could.
First decision would be what number of hostiles you would want to balance around and their composition.

Example:
25% logi, 15% ECM, 10% tackle, 50% DPS.
Max 30 attacking any one ship. (whole gang or a tactical wing from a fleet)
10 doing 100% damage, 20 doing 75% and 30 doing 50%
Hard break point, 40 shooting then 10 random hostiles (standings, fleets, etc) per server tick do no damage.
Logi have a similar reduced effectiveness.

Once you have a base line for max alphas, DPS and incoming repairs then you can actually balance the ships around roles.
- Damage sponge
- Damage avoidance
- Damage resistance
- Damage mitigation
- Alpha damage
- Damage per second
- et cetera.

Then you can look at say 30 maxed alpha ships hitting a damage sponge and work out how much buffer tank it needs to hold tank (factoring in mitigation of average ranges, transveral and such obviously) with max effective repairs in coming.

My eyes are bleeding ...



Firstoff, CCP does way more then just look at a single chart to balance ships. Second, you will allways have the FOTM. People, not just EvE but gamers in general, are min/maxers. In EvE, at least you have cost vs effectivity unlike other games.

From all I have seen of their posting, I highly doubt it.

For the most part, I agree. I think it is possible to take those min-maxed ships and balance them in their roles.
For example, you can make a ship excellent at kiting, they can pull out of a bad engagement to recover / repair or they can pull ahead of drones and destroy them but while they are doing that range tanking, they shouldn't be able to out snipe other ships. Being both out of reach and able to pick off the enemy is unbalanced against other builds.
A sniper build should be slower, having to hit, kill some and then warp off to safety and re-position or cloak up and hope they aren't found.

Actually I pretty much tend to agree with this sentiment, though on a general level. And it has to do more with the speed of assimilation of new tactics and knowledge by us, the capsuleers of New Eden. The older we get the faster and easier we assimilate new info and FOTM, and so the older the player base the quicker everyone changes. The fact with people is that over time we will naturally progress to the best of something, min/maxing, and eventually youll reach a stagnant plateau. Something that CCP needs to control and mitigate or else you get bored players that will leave the game. And one easy way to do that isnt NEW content and Jesus features but churn. To churn the top spot for different gaming options, both PvP and PvE.

This churning isnt necessarily bad as CCP understand that after X amount of time no matter how much content or change players will still leave. They are just artificially extending this as best they can. Then as they do add new ships and skills it forces players to actually train more skills, needing them all, again forcing them to play longer and pay longer until all skills have been learned, and then adding more along the way.

Its the same with the nullsec ideas really. Theyre forced to create and environment where there cant really be a real winner. Or else everyone thats not a "wiener" just leaves cuz losing sucks. Then of course you get goons trying to break the "wiener" game and you have to reinvent null.


Ultimately its a hamster on a wheel. Trying to get us to run as long as possible. Everything else is an illusion. Theyre a company and want us to give it to them.

After they coded the skins to load and change, et cetera; it enabled the art department to keep producing without needing other departments to provide code or assets.
Rather sound use of development time.