Player Features and Ideas Discussion

No. You have implicitly assumed that a balanced game requires all BCs to be equal in the attributes that are favoured in fleet combat. Or you've assumed that fleet combat is the only PVP, either works. Ships with good EHP and damage projection are inherently better suited to fleets. A drone-gun BC such as the Myrmidon can never hope to have the damage projection capabilities of a missile BC - and if it did, then there wouldn't be much point to the missile BC.

The more appropriate environment for the Myrm is solo and small-scale combat, as these favour its drones, high-but-poorly-projected DPS and rep bonus, so seek to balance the Myrm here, not in fleet. Does the Hurricane have too much of an advantage over the Myrm at this level? If the Hurricane is also supposed to be focused here, is it justified that it also has its own fleet doctrine? It's also arguable that the Drake is too good at small-scale combat, given its competence at the fleet level. But this criticism can just as easily be applied to the Hurricane too.

It's a fair point, it always takes a good few months before things really settle down, and the rate of change recently has been much higher than in recent years, and the boosts to drone damage, blasters, null and Gallente mobility have all added up for the Myrm.

I'll be very interested to see what does get proposed for the Drake though. While I criticised Jame's methodology, it wasn't my intention to defend the Drake also, even on the fleet level - it is too popular there. But how? The old idea of changing it to missile velocity and ROF will never work and there's little point in balancing the fleet Drake/Tengu if all the fleet Drake pilots immediately just jump into Hurricanes. I don't envy CCP tbh.

Dear Fozzie,

I haven't said it before, but it's really amazing and refreshing to see this kind of communication going. This is very, very rare sight. Please don't stop, even when we're a little mean.



That's a good point, but perhaps when the ship itself doesn't need a buff, the role it is meant to perform could use a buff of its own? If a ship is to perform a specific function, but nobody uses it for that function even though the ship is fine, that suggests the function may be broken. Like stealth bombers right being used to blitz L4s in FW. It's clearly not their intended purpose, and yet it's been like this for a very, very long time now with no fixes to bombers or FW missions.



OK, so Tristan is good in 1v1, and not as good in fleets. Not consider this, with data available, which happens more often - 1v1s or NvN (gang, fleet, etc.) fights? In a game where most fights are NvN, a ship that excels in 1v1 is meaningless, because it will constantly encounter 1v2, 1v3, 1v4...2v1, 2v2, 2v3...NvN. That's the example where intended role (1v1 dominance) does not make the ship desirable because the situation in which the ship shines happens once in a blue moon. Just because a test case exists, it doesn't mean it occurs often.

Besides the frequency of the event for which the ship is designed, you should also consider the importance of this event. Typically, a 1v1 is meaningless, except to the people involved. And when the "don't fly what you can't afford to lose" doctrine is followed, the event IS meaningless. While a fleet fight can be of critical importance (0.0, sov, etc.) Thus, a race that has the most hulls suitable for fleet action is at a huge advantage over a race that does not, forcing that race's pilots to cross train. Which sets them back, in real time, by many months. All these things must be considered.

And then we'll still end up looking at usability as well. When Ship A performs its function with 1 click (passive shield tank, no split weapons) while Ship B requires half a dozen or more clicks (active tank, split weapons, micromanagement of drones) to perform the same function, that makes ship B obsolete by design. Even if ship B will totally spank ship A in some obscure scenario that hardly ever happens, ship B is still obsolete. Even if ship B spanks ship A in half of the scenarios, adjusted by frequency of those scenarios and their relative importance, ship B is STILL obsolete because your win/loss is 50/50 but the amount of work you do is 6x higher, and this probability of user error leading to a loss is significantly higher as well.

I may be asking too much, but that's just the way I feel about the whole thing. Currently EVE is suffering from a "Frankenstein syndrome". It is a patchwork of bits and pieces, design decisions that at the time may have been valid but just no longer apply. Like changing the drone boat bonus from giving extra drones (beyond 5) to drone bonuses? Made perfect sense back in the day when lag was the deciding factor, but now with time dilation is it still mandatory for the 5-drone maximum to remain? Probably not. Yet, here it is, and we keep getting split weapons.

Not necessarily! Fleet doctrine is not necessarily a singular approach. There could be multiple, equally viable fleet doctrines that favour multiple combat mechanics.

For example, there are drone boats. Ideally there would be a fleet doctrine that favours drone boats. For example, a bunch of spider-tanking Dominixes. But it won't work. Because a few ships with smartbombs will completely decimate these ships' ability to do damage.

To address the issue, drones themselves could be tweaked. For example, Caldari drones could be changed to use missiles or rails, and do so from range that is outside of the largest smartbomb range. They would still be caught (orbiting ship A, getting hit by ship B's smartbomb while passing by), but it wouldn't be a sure-fire thing.

Sentries were designed to alleviate this problem, but they don't work due to their immobility. If they were outfitted with Micro Jump Drives, and could return to the ship that dropped them, they would instantly become viable.



See, this works and it's not much of a problem to an older player. But to a new player, these mechanics are crippling or fatal (player simply quits).

Like I mentioned before, suppose I go Gallente. I end up with a Myrm. Now suppose I want fleet PvP, because that's where I ended up (joined a friend's corp, for example). And this corp is part of the alliance, and the doctrine is Drakes. What am I to do? Train for Drake from absolute zero (no shield tank, no missile skills, Caldari hulls at zero)? A new player at this point has a choice - face months of training to be useful, or do something else. And doing something else when the whole corp is cheering on vent about how great a fleet engagement is going is hard. And while technically you can participate in a frigate or something, performing some minor role, it's just not the same. It's one of the things that keeps EVE's population so low. Yes, I said low. 450k divided by an average 2-3 alt accounts per player is not that much, UO had that many in 2003.

Anyway, I'm going to stop now because I think I'm veering off on a tangent here away from combat frigates.

Hrm. The more bonus range you give to the railguns, the better the Damage Charges are (aka the More Damage/Less Range type). Also it would improve the blaster range as well. Hm.

I'm with you on this one. Generally speaking, there is no tactical advantage to bringing a close range fleet. Kiting as tactic is overwhelmingly favored in EVE at the moment due to a variety of factors. Ships that don't lend themselves to kiting or are bad at dealing with kiters are just considered bad.

The frigate level fortunately is much less affected by this so there's much more variety.

I'm telling you: Atron/Navitas fleets are going to destroy the world.

-Liang

If your corp if flying nanodrakes, you can fly a neut myrm as heavy tackle/antitackle. If your corp is flying brawling drakes, you can fly a normal goddamn myrm.

Myrms are the most versatile bc and will fit into pretty much any gang.

Did... did you just say that a Harbinger has laughable effective range next to a Harbinger?

-Liang

For fun, fit a Hurricane with a rack of 425mm ACs, 3x damage mods and tracking enhancers. Then fit a Harbinger with a rack of Focused Medium Pulse, 3x damage mods and tracking enhancers. See what damage projection graphs you get in EFT.

The Focused Medium Pulse take 16% more CPU than the 425mm ACs which in turn take 16% more PG then the lasers, so they're just about equivalent.