EVE General Discussion

It's been awhile since the epic shitstorm that resulted in an apology from Hilmar, and it seems like CCP are already falling back into their old ways of releasing "cool stuff" while ignoring the actual ingame impact. I speak about the new module additions (particularly the ASBs) and the new Faction Warfare mechanics.

First, FW mechanics. Everyone in FW knew what was going to happen, and everyone told CCP as soon as the devblog was published. Among other problems with the system that they've ignored (lol plex farming), it was blitheringly obvious to anyone that there were major snowball mechanics in place which would ensure that in either war, one side would start winning and then just steamroll the opposition.

Both the Amarr and the Gallente have pretty much stopped plexing because the existing FW mechanics make it pointless for them. They could either fight an uphill "war" against an enemy with tons of advantages over them, or they could just ignore the capture mechanics and use FW as a permanent wardec. Guess which one they're going to choose?

This was not hard to foresee. As I recall (though I cannot find the exact quote) some CCP member -Ytterbium I think- said that if such balance problems propped up, they would implement changes quickly to rectify the situation. It's been months and we don't even have a devblog, a devpost, or anything else that even begins to suggest that CCP are actually looking at this.


Moving on, this attitude is not limited to FW. Incase it isn't obvious, CCP has been trying to find ways to make active tanking more useful in PVP, which led to the release of Ancillary Shield Boosters. Not even going to go into the actual balance of the mods as they are, let's take a look at why they're poorly designed and can never be balanced in their current incarnation.

Firstly, the whole idea behind them is that they provide a high burst-tank for Xs before going dormant for 60s. They can continue this until they run out of cap boosters...Since cap boosters are the only limitation, there's no reason why people can't just fit multiple, sometime CCP was clearly not thinking of when they designed these mods. Fantastic.

Worse, they still suffer from the inherent problem of balancing active tanks. The main problem with active tanks is that they do not scale with fight size. Pre-Inferno active tanks were roughly balanced for a lot of 1v1 scenarios. They were considered bad because if that fight ever escalated beyond 1v1 then it would be inherently worse. The whole point behind ASBs is "Hey, let's take these existing boosting numbers, and make them BIGGER". So now active tanks are useful for say, a 5v5 fight, but are now overpowered for a 1v1 (or any situation where not a ton of DPS is being thrown around)

The best part is that the old boosting mechanics had a weakness. If they had just overbuffed the old shield boosters, people could just bring a ton of neuts...But despite the fact that these new modules allow ships to permatank tons of damage for minutes, they also decided that they should completely remove the only actual weakness that active tanking used to have.
This isn't poor balance, this is poor design. I don't believe for a second that anyone at CCP honestly sat down and evaluated them; they just shoved it out to Tranquility and haven't done a damn thing to fix it since.


Excellence means that CCP should be testing their mechanics before deploying them. If the playerbase tells them that something isn't going to work, then comes up with a ton of well-reasoned arguments as to why something isn't going to work, they should either engage the playerbase or rework what they're doing. They should be making an effort to ensure that they don't roll out ****** mechanics. They were doing it for awhile, but they're starting to falter again.

It's Summer, I think excellence is off on holiday?

And passive tanks do? Nothing on your ship scales with fight size besides bombs and pulse weapons. This is hurting your otherwise decent argument.

Crybaby

No, no it's not. The 60 sec reload is consistent but the runtime for frigs is actually 20s (small ASB) to 30s (medium ASB), cruisers 30s (medium ASB) to 40s (large ASB) and for BS or bigger 40s (large or XL ASB).

- All assuming ASB is not being pulsed and is loaded with the smallest possible charge, info from EFT as I can't be bothered to log in atm -

The real problem - trying to make combat super-balanced.