Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I generally like CCP's game design changes, but I am rather opposed to all these gimmicks we keep getting. Gimmicks are lazy game design that do not facilitate meaningful choices by players but rather stifle them.

Here's a list of some of the gimmicks we have in the game--things which do a specific thing in a specific way and often can be fit to a specific ship in order to give it a specific capacity. I will not list the Covert Ops cloak here as there are a lot of ships that can fit it.


Micro Jump Drives
Target Spectrum Breakers
Specialty Haulers
Freighter fitting
Orcas
Deep Space Transport's fleet hangar
Ancillary Shield Booster
Ancillary Armor Repairer
Reactive Armor Hardener
Interdiction Sphere Launcher
Warp Disruption Field Generator
Bomb Launcher
Remote ECM Burst
Doomsday Weapons
Jump Portal Generators
Black Ops
The upcoming Heavy Stasis Grapplers

and plenty more...



I'm not saying we should remove these things from the game, but there are a lot of ways around this sort of lazy game design that better facilitate player choices. I'll give an example right now of how to make MJDs less of a gimmick, and maybe I'll do some other examples if I have time later.

MJDs can be fit to battleships, DSTs, combat battlecruisers, and command ships. They are considered fine for use on battleships in general, but bad to allow capital ships to have that ability, and also plenty of smaller ships shouldn't have it-so the playerbase has decided. Well the assumption seems to be that any MJD will jump the ship 100km. That would definitely be a fearsome tool in the hands of attack battlecruisers or interceptors.

So howabout having different sizes of MJD, small that jumps a ship 25km, medium jumps a ship 50km, and large jumps a ship 100km. Now I'll completely remove the gimmick by allowing ships to fit any size they want if they have the fitting room for it. Here's the balancing factor: capacitor. The capacitor cost of running the module is a direct multiple of the ship's mass. For example, say the small costs 1GJ per 50 tons mass. An Executioner with a mass of 1090 tons will spend 21.8GJ to activate the module, while a Tornado with 15,228 tons mass will spend 304.56GJ to activate it. It'll cost a Megathron a whopping 19,680GJ to activate the module.

So the larger variants can handle more mass per GJ of capacitor, but they have a higher powergrid cost to offset their use.
Here's a summary:
Battleships can still jump 100km. They can jump shorter distances with a shorter spool up and cooldown time but it costs a lot of capacitor.
Attack Battlecruisers can fit a MJD, but can only use it to jump 50km.
DSTs get a role bonus that allows them to jump twice as far with their MJD.
Frigates can use small MJDs and jump 25km with a very short spool up time, but it's not going to make them highly mobile so much as allow them to do a short pounce move.

All in all, it's up to the pilot to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of fitting/using the module, and the choice hasn't been made for them beforehand.

Couple things with your example here.

Having a small that can jump 25km, that would presumably be fit on frigates and destroyers, seems underwhelming to a large degree. One of the major reasons people use MJDs on battleships is because it takes so long to travel 100km using any other prop mod. Since frigates and destroyers are much faster then battleships, only travelling 25km from not using an oversized prop mod is a bit underwhelming.

From there, the scaling in your example, there is not a single person that would spend 20k GJ to jump their battleship. Especially since it would take a full rack of Cap Batteries (Other then the 1 slot for the MJD), with it fully rigged with Memory Cells along with 4 Power Diags to have enough juice to actually make the jump, and the person would need to be at around 95% cap just to completely drain it.

I fail to see how most of the items on that list are "gimmicks". They're strategic items that do special things. Gimmicks, (at least to me) is doing stuff like hard limiting the speed of entosis ships to 4k m/s. Sure, a needed restriction, but there's more elegant ways of going about it.

Restricting things to hulls creates specialization. Otherwise there would be stuff like, I don't know, a tengu fleet, with tengu bubblers, tengu tacklers, tengu bombers, tengu whatever you name it. Without restrictions like that there'd be only a few ships used.

I don't know what the second module is but maybe we can tweak the cooldown timer on mjds a little - 3 minutes are a very long time.

Well, it's kinda like doomsday.. They can be extremely powerful if used properly, so they need to be balanced.
A well thought out fit and fighting strategy can be extremely powerful.

Having said that, MJDs were likely balanced to have a 3min CD so that Marauders could have a special "gimmick"..

Sounds more like a catch22 here since the mjd came before the "sit in space for a minute so you have zee overtank of the century -ship" canc- er change.

MJDs were in Retribution, Bastion mod/marauder refresh was Rubicon.

This thread is a gimmick, the modules in it are not.

Gimmick: a trick or device used to attract business or attention