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If I understand this correctly, the current SiSi version is the patch that comes out later today, so I figured I'd talk about some of the issues I'm currently having with it.

First of all, reading the patchnotes, CCP seem to have neglected mentioning a change to one of the game's core mechanics:

http://community.eveonline.com/updates/patchnotes.asp

On SiSi right now, you can cancel warp at any time, and you never get "trapped" in warp regardless of how fast you're moving. This is ofcourse CCP's solution to the freighter webbing exploit, yet it's odd such a massive change in game mechanics does not even warrant a mention in the patchnotes. After all, this is in practice a huge buff to supercapitals, and will most likely have a massive effect on nullsec warfare. I haven't been able to test all of this on SiSi yet, but I'll try to give some examples of how things appear to be changed.

Currently, moving supercapitals, and titans in particular, around the battlefield is a difficult and increadibly dangerous. For a titan pilot, bumping of another spacedick is terrefying, and any time your fleet moves around you risk a titan getting bumped or left behind.
One of the main reasons for this are the mechanics CCP are now removing. When you get bumped while trying to warp your titan, you can't simply cancel the warp and jump out. You have to ride it out and wait until your titan slows down, then either just jump out or re-align towards where you want to go. This happends pretty much all the time, but with this change, you can allways simply cancel warp and jump out, warp somewhere else etc. Similarily, when titans come out of warp and start bumping off eachother, you can't simply jump out as you're traveling away from the pack. You have to wait for your titan to slow down, then jump.
With the new change, titan movement is fairly easy and risk-free, as long as you have an emergency cyno ready to jump out to. No longer will you be able to probe down and bubble bounced titans, they'll be able to jump out while still at high speeds, and when tackling them is impossible. For obvious reasons, this will all make fighting titanblobs that much harder.

This, ofcourse, means the days of rapecaging supercapitals is over too. It's allways been difficult to trap them, but with good probers, some dictors and a lot of patience a rapgecage super was trapped. With this change, however, all that's needed is to disallow corp/alliance use, change tower password and watch the supercapitals/capitals fly away. The moment they're out of bubbles they're good to jump out, and as they're likely to be bumped hundreds of km away from the tower you can't keep them bubbled until they stop. By contrast, if you have a prober at it's not hard to warp dictors in on bounced supers, and get bubbles on them before they slow down enough to jump out.


As I'm sure you all understand, this change in mechanics will "fix" a lot more than a simple exploit. It will change something fundamental in this game, it will tip the scales further in the titanblob's favor, and remove the subcapgroup's ability to take out those who bounce away from the group.

I'm not saying this is inherently a bad thing, supercapitals bouncing of eachother might not be something CCP wants. But why not be open about these changes, tell us what you're changing and give us a proper chance to test all these things on SiSi? As I haven't had much time to test these things, I can't verify all of this, it's simply what I've found so far playing on SiSi, I haven't had time to repeatedly test and document everything. But I'm sure there's plenty of details like these, probably many more, CCP have either overlooked or chosen not to inform us about as they bring us this patch.

What you're describing sounds like an exploit used to kill capitals, not legitimate game mechanics.

bubble games are still more fun than station games

I've often wondered about this and wanted it myself. And Callic nailed it I think. This seems like more of a "fix" for a broken mechanic than anything.