Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Why don't we have X-Large Cap Batteries in game?

Right now I think the situation of oversized batteries on cruisers/(battlecruisers to a lesser extent), has opened up an interesting new pvp fitting choice that never really existed before hand. Active tanking in PVP has always required capacitor boosters to not be a suicide mission the moment a single neutralizer shows up, however with the cap battery rebalance we are seeing a new option for active tank pvp. By fitting a Large Cap Battery to a cruiser/battlecruiser, ships are seeing

• Very high GJ/s regeneration increases.
• Neut Resistance.
• Increased capacitor pool to weather neuts longer.

The overall effect on most cruisers is that an oversized cap battery is in the vicinity of, if not significantly better than, capacitor injectors for maintaining capacitor pool under heavy cap usage scenarios (such as being neuted, or running heavy repair modules). The nature of flat capacitor capacity bonuses makes overfitting these batteries give extraordinary effects that normal medium capacitor batteries do not match.

Those out there who fly/pyfa these sorts of ships know firsthand that the equivalent of fitting a medium on a frigate does not match cruisers because of the fitting requirements making battery frigates unreasonably empty on fitting space. On the other end of the spectrum, Large Capacitor Batteries are a joke for battleships. They don't take serious fitting investment on a battleship, and they don't give enough capacitor to matter to a battleship's already massive capacitor. I would conclude that we need XL Cap Batteries to allow battleships the same options cruisers have, but I don't think this is fixing a problem entirely. Instead, I think CCP needs to re-evaluate what they want batteries to be. I believe that the cap injector vs cap battery module role overlap is a really healthy place for batteries and CCP should normalize all batteries to approximate cap injector utility and power.

All fitting requirements of batteries should fall into cap booster fitting ranges, with batteries costing more fitting than boosters to reflect the usage of your ship for the gained power rather than the ship's cargo. All batteries should be given stat updates to match/approximate the benefit of a capacitor booster.

I figured as much. It seems CCP wanted to adopt an "Iterative" development cycle after incarna so they could better respond to feedback and tune thier product, however they rarely ever do that. Instead all iteration happens on the test server or worse behind closed doors, and once they have something that looks good, they push it live. From there we get a release that is better than what it was, but deemed good enough and forgotten. I don't pretend to know thier development backlog, but It seems they don't actually encourage development teams to stay tasked on a project, even if that means reworking it 4-5 times to make sure it's not half assed and actually is in a healthy place that won't need revisiting soon.

This makes me sad because I really like the idea of batteries being an alternative to cap boosters, with thier own strengths and weaknesses.

how can you say it was done well? just like b4 the change in almost evry case you are better off with recharges. most of them cost to much fitting for what they do

The bigger the changes they make to something the more effect it has on other things. So its better to tweak things in small increments than big ones. Testing gives you a general idea of how something is going to work. But when you put it live people come up with all kinds of creative ways to use it( or get around it) and thus your likely going to have to readjust it again anyway.

I think this why they have been easing changes into the game rather than doing massive overhauls like they use too. For example the sov changes were a nightmare and it didnt go over well with the player base. They just changed the structure we had to grind. Now instead of grinding structures that were useful for other things( POS) we had to grind structures that were useless for anything but sov. I think it made sov warfare even more boring. At least a POS will shoot back making it somewhat entertaining and sometimes people will stick their heads out of the shield. Sov structure grinding was about as fun attending a funeral. They since have backtracked on that some completely removing some sov structures from the game while making others more useful.

Then you have walking in stations which was the biggest failure to come out of ccp for eve. Like less than 5% wanted walking in stations if that many and they likely dont even play anymore( and went back to wow). The rest of us complained since it was announced saying we play a space game, we want things to do in space. not to adventure around a station like it was the local shopping center.

They have learned some hard lessons over the last decade. They are more cautious now with releases. They figured out we like new sand in our sandbox regularly, but not a lot of sand and it has to be a certain sand and it has to go in a certain part of the sandbox.

I am surprised the citadel expansion was as big as it was. But for the most part we seemed mostly enthused about it.

They will make small changes to some parts of the game and see how it plays out. Cap batteries use to be only good to recycle. Only a noob would put one on a ship. If this makes them a useful option they will likely leave them alone or tweak them very little. If they still end up in reprocessing 99.9% of the time and no one is bothering to make them then they will likely tweak them more so they are a good option to consider for certain ships doing certain tasks.

@Roenok Baalnorn while that is true the issue with CCP is they have ADD and tend to forget to keep tweaking something leaving it in a broken state for far longer than it needed to be so they can work on some other shiny thing that caught their eye