Player Features and Ideas Discussion

And Blop-dropping (unfortunately, the tactic is pretty binary; either you surprise your target, or you lose the target altogether).

And Jump Frieghtering (Red Frog isn't going to commit a battleship each time they want to move something).

7 days, especially around the holidays, isn't going to be particularly statistically significant. There's a reason that the finest grain stats zKill offers are monthly, and even those have pretty substantial variation.




Yes, but that's all down to planning. If you jump someone's Obvious Bait Cyno-Tempest with your Black Ops fleet then you're going to get pretty badly messed up. Black Ops BSes aren't that strong for T2 ships and an equal sized HAC fleet will pretty much chew up anything it can get and hold point on. If anything out of the Blops side of this hypothetical survives it'll be down to either bad point spreading by the other side or the actions of any Widows on field.



And generally speaking the playerbase disagrees. Mitigating the risk of a cyno dropping on you is what intel channels are for and generally being able to project your own power. Plus with the new PANIC module it's extremely viable to be able to scramble a response fleet to something like a mining OP hot drop.



Bombers, T3s, and some of the better Recon Cruisers can viably go gate to gate. Black Ops BSes would be effectively scrapped as a class by these changes, as would most Capitals in anything short of a massive engagement. Even Bombers and other Cov Ops ships would be pretty heavily neutered since with current intel mechanics they'd be effectively unable to ambush targets in Low and Null which is something they require to be effective.

Your desire to prevent reinforcing a fight into the middle of it is questionable at best. There's nothing particularly imbalanced about it, both sides can do it and it's expected. At best you'd be delaying the reinforcements by the cyno timer plus warp time. That's not actually balancing anything in a large fight, it's just an inconvenience, and with heavy TiDi it's a 10+ minute one.

If one side wants to block Cyno access to the grid we already have Mobile Cyno Inhibitors for that.

Your desire to require a Battleship to move a Jump Freighter is just laughable. You'd basically be closing out Jump Freighters from anyone who can't afford a Citadel network to make it even halfway usable again. There's no reason for this, Jump Freighters die enough as is and the Logistics people have enough to worry about.

Also, to be clear, the issue wouldn't be for the Freighter it would be for the requirement to essentially throw away a Battleship every time you want to move a Jump Freighter because the assumption every time you light a cyno is that someone is going to blow up your cyno ship unless the space you're in is secured to five jumps in every direction.

Your logic for all of this seems to be "but this is clearly imbalanced!" and goes from there, but you don't seem to actually have a good reason it's imbalanced, you just feel that the ability to drop on people is bad and should go away.

You're also relying on some vague and undefined intel changes to make this all balance out for a lot of the ships involved, which is probably the most ridiculous thing about this whole idea of yours. Both because you don't even define the intel changes you're talking about and because that would be *two* major meta shakeup changes at once.

Cade,

I pulled the most relevant statistics that I could find, unfortunately, they didn't cover large periods of time. If you have better statistics, by all means, bring them into the conversation. I'd like to see them.

Droppers generally don't avoid counterdrops because the droppers plan well; they avoid them because the amount of effort required to defend against drops is vastly greater than what is required to drop. Convincing people to spend hours upon hours of time on a POS or in a station waiting for something that may or may not happen is a very tough sell, and brings into question the viability of ratting or mining in null at all rather than just making money in highsec with an alt, or jumpcloning to high when you need some isk. Considering the sheer volume of unoccupied systems in null compared to the bustling activity of highsec, it appears that many people have come to this conclusion.

It's pretty bold of you to say that your opinion represents the playerbase. There are many opinions on this issue. Some like it, some hate it, and some just want to run numbers in Jita or explore things in wormholes and couldn't care less.

The PANIC module helps one type of activity, and makes response fleets a bit more viable for that activity, but in my opinion, it addresses the symptom of the issue, not the issue itself.

When it comes to covert ops viability, I said from the beginning that changes would need to be made to intel. Later in the thread, I even suggested changes, though I do have a few misgivings with my own idea, and it probably would need some tweaks.

Captals would still be extremely viable if these changes were made. You don't need a battleship to bring them in, you need 1500 PG (which you can get on a T1 cruiser. In fact, as I look at the numbers, I may have made the requirement too small) and 20 seconds. However, you do mention sacrificial battleships, which is not the intent of this idea at all. Perhaps the overall time of the cyno could be reduced, it would make the cyno ship more survivable after the jump is complete.

For large fleet fights, cynos are not balanced with other ways of positioning forces. Mobile cyno inhibitors are not survivable and cover a pitifully small section of space, especially considering the range of carriers and the size of citadels. System cyno jammers are viable, and add a lot of interesting gameplay as people try to take them down in order to bring a capital fleet in. This would add another layer onto that so there's still some counterplay and strategy after the system cyno jammer goes down.

When it comes to jump freighters, they already get special abilities when it comes to jump fatigue. If it's an issue, you could put it onto this too so they could go through a small or medium cyno rather than just a large or capital one.

Your premise here is just kind of wrong. For a start, we have the PANIC module now, which fixes the main problem non-combat fleets had with dealing with dropper which was response time. Everything that isn't an anchored Rorqual can and will dock up as soon as a hostile enters system and either wait it out or scramble a response fleet. I know for most of the groups I know people in or have flown with myself the response would be to grab a PvP ship and go try to shoot the bugger, because hey something to shoot!

Similarly groups have started to have people PvEing or even roaming around looking for fights also be in intel channels and ready to respond. That way no one needs to be sitting in a POS they just need to be paying attention to pings.

Yes, lots of people live or have alts in High Sec, but that's never going to change and is not an indication that Null is too dangerous or isn't attracting players, it just attracts players looking for different things.



No where in any of this have I said that I speak for the playerbase. I'm sharing my observations based on my own experiences, many of which are things you can see right here on this forum.

I can, however, say with a fair amount of certainty that the vast majority of active players in the game actively use Cynos in some way, whether that's for Logistics, Cov Ops ganking, larger battles, or something else entirely.



No, they wouldn't be, because keeping something alive on field that can't be remote assisted for any length of time is basically impossible even at the small scale. In 20 seconds I can burn down the average PvP fit Battleship with a small squad of Battleships or High DPS cruisers, especially if he's had to dump 1500 PG into something other than tank and guns (which, by the way, is a ridiculously large value).

That leaves me the option of either gimping everything else about the ship to fit a cyno, at which point congrats you've removed caps from everything short of large fleet engagements, or I cyno the cap in off-grid and warp to the fight, which would have roughly the same impact. Caps become effectively worthless in small fights because it's now a massive pain to get them to the fight in anything like a timely manner and you have to almost completely sacrifice a combat ship to do it (as opposed to a cyno alt).



Yes? And? Working as intended?

Positioning forces in a large fight basically boils down to range control and bubbles, and once you have caps on field most range control goes out the window anyway because Caps are A. Huge B. Not very mobile at all and C. likely to go flying around the grid when they jump in with any numbers anyways.

You're saying this would somehow magically lead to "interesting gameplay" but your justification for this seems magical in nature and pretty widely divorced from the reality of Null fleet fights.

Other than that, yeah what Iain said.

I am also going to comment on this breath takingly bad statement of yours. Yes, it is true, your statement. But when it comes to missions that is the only part of the game that is nearly free of PvP.

For example, look at mining. If I show up in a belt and then you warp in, we are in competition to get those resources. If we both sell stuff on the same market, we are in competition. When it comes to missions there is no such competition. I can run the same agent as you can with no adverse consequences. So yes, one could (and should) argue that CCP needs to look at the risks vs. rewards.

However, for every other aspect of the game it is NOT CCP's business unless something is broken (e.g. tracking titans). If you are a complete doorknob and take on enormous levels of risk and I decide to take advantage of your foolishness it is literally no business of CCP's that you were dumb as a doorknob. That is your problem and in absolutely no way a concern for CCP. The problem can be fixed by you not being dumb as a doorknob.

The use of cynos falls into this latter category. Players can use cynos to take advantage of other players' foolishness. You decide to rat, alone in a system with a guy your are 99.999% sure is cloaked and can use a covert cyno and you are not on comms, have no cyno of your own, and are not in the standing fleet...well you were dumb. At that point you deserve what you get. This entire game is built around the notions of emergence and spontaneous order--i.e. the sandbox. There is no such thing as a fair fight.

Functionally this rarely if ever happens. The only time you're using a tiny frigate to move a massive fleet is when literally the only thing you're doing is moving it. The rest of the time you have the cyno fitted to a ship that will survive more than half a second after warping on grid, since if the cyno ship gets popped then anyone who jumps in the space of time between then and when the beacon disappears will be scattered around the system.

Tying Cynos to cap on the receiving ship, especially in any way that could collapse a cyno, would be a mess since turning off a Cyno would actually be a benefit to the activating ship in most cases, and cynos involve sending ships between nodes, which means the ship running the cyno won't actually know anyone's used it until they arrive, which would mean either the aforementioned scattering or no functional difference from right now unless someone is *really* late hitting the jump button.

By this logic, a doomsday on a rifter wouldn't break risk vs. reward as long as it could only be used for PvP, since there would be competition. Clearly, that's absurd, but it could easily be argued that a T1 cyno is more powerful than a doomsday. In addition, you imply that one of many things could counter a covert ops hotdrop. If you've been on either side of one, you know that's not true. The real counters are 1. Stop almost all activity in that system. Or 2. Have a counterdrop fleet sitting on a Titan or BLOPS, ready to go. Either way, one individual who may or may not even be at his keyboard, in a cheap COVOPs frigate is able to have an inordinate impact on the game when compared to the risk he's taking or the effort he's putting into it. You could address this on the cloak mechanic side of the house, however, I think that addressing it on the cyno side offers a cleaner solution.

It is up to players to balance risk vs. reward, not CCP, at least not generally. Your example of level 4 missions was actually a terrible example as I already noted.

So it isn't just that people aren't reading it, they fundamentally disagree with it.

In fact, a cyno can often be the mechanism that flips risk vs. reward. A gate camp with a dictor or 2 and DPS ships will be almost entirely risk free to just about anything jumping through the gate. Then in comes a battle cruiser. Turns out it is a brick tanked BC with a point or 2 and a cyno. Once engaged the cyno goes up and in comes the 25 guys that are going to change the risk vs. reward dynamic suddenly and dramatically.

The core problem seems to be the extraction. Increase risk by using a cloak timer.

IF you use a cyno, THEN you cannot cloak for an undefined period of time.

This method hits risk versus reward by increasing risk instead of decreasing reward.

It also goes well with a cloaking module rethink that is due soon anyway.

How is a bored titan pilot with a cyno alt in any way equivalent to making it take upwards of half an hour to move a capital fleet a single jump?