Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I just looked through all 16 t1 cruiser changes and something became blatantly apparent. Almost every ship follows the pattern of a minimum of 4 mids, and 4 lows.

What happened to the uniqueness of racial warfare?

There used to be exclusivity of drones, of missiles, of shield tankers, of armor tankers and of slot layout. With this patch, the ships look grossly the same. The missile nerf is like the final nail in the coffin on any exclusivity of stat differentiation, and it's for the obvious reason that you can't understand the mechanics of the weapon.

At what point do we just rename the game to one race, one 0.0 blob, stalemate online?"

Maybe go back and at least rethink some of the slot layouts before this goes live? I mean **** sake, diversity is kinda nice.

Does this blatant lack of slot layout differential not bother you too?

Could it not be more beneficial to see some 5/7/2 or 4/2/8 layouts just to make something unique?

Could you not go beyond a 5% damage or resist bonus to fill in gaps and make this interesting?

This was your chance to make the game's races stand out. Instead you made the game races irrelevant.

I've got 4 accounts sitting inactive, and one that has large gaps in subs. I know countless other vets with similar situations. Do you just not want our money? Do you really think we're just bitter fools and not actually trying to help you to give ourselves reasons to log in? I mean what the hell dudes? Can you not tolerate criticism? Do you really think we're always going to be nice after repeated failures?

Well soon i can shield tank and nano nearly every cruiser and have it be effective. Every ship with a obscene number of mids i can armor tank with fit dual tracking disruptors or dual webs.


Really their are only a few archetype setups that are viable for cruisers currently anyhow. For true proper uniqueness you would have to overhaul the entire game and rebalance every module their is, or the lulzier route in my opinion take the shittiest ship their is and make everything as good as it. Have everyone play with minimal slots and see what happens.

I wouldn't say the imba arose from the uniqueness. Stemmed more from fotm lemming canned fitting you see floating around. PL whooped our ass....lets use their fit kind of stuff. Or the super secret xyz alliance spec fleet ships and fits. Gee I jsut came from another alliance and looky here...I am changing out jsut 1 mod. real creative fit, can I run the tier 1 ship instead of the tier 2? No.


I am seeing the op's slot argument. Bit of diversity is nice. Just needs some creative thinking to make it work. I will use wolf as an example. For years I wondered wtf you can do with this thing, as did many players. HAs what I thought for a while a crappy slot layout. 2 mids? how the hell can I fit web,prop and scram on ship spec'd by bonus for AC and kind needs all 3....like every other frigate/tackler running around.. Then within the last year I see the rise of the arty wolf. You aren't closing to use web or scram....slap a point and the prop mod and done. has the grid with some fitting mods to run big bore arty and voila....the ship jsut finally made sense to me and other players. took time but it made sense eventually. And by many reports arty wolf can tear it up real good.

Granted some cruisers needed slot tweaking but .....kind of seeing the blah in the slot redo. But but...my cruiser not like other ones. Yep its not. Find a way to make work. this hard I know at more organized levels of pvp. I caught crap often in my cerb/navy crapacals. Wtf idiot, no point? Yep no point....ima snipe if falcons show up so I run sebo instead, I am sure the 10 of you amarr and wimatar cruisers all spec'd for SR have more than enough tackle mids to lock ships down. Need my navy crapacal to be the last ditch point or we lose on a target when several flabbers dicked up locking and killing stuff....this fleet has bigger issues than me not having a point.

There was a time where stacking penalties didn't exist. The problem is that people have a nasty tendency to min/max their ships and create absurd things that were very hard, and sometimes near impossible, to counter or scale between small and large warfare.

One of the most infamous examples of this was the 8 heat sink Armageddon. It could fire a volley off every second or so... utterly melting cruisers and frigates at range. In small numbers, they could melt overtanked battleships in seconds and even POSs with relative ease. Sure, they didn't have a tank of any sort and ate capacitor faster than a starved fat kid at a buffet... but who needs a tank or capacitor when everything dies in mere seconds?

The "nano-age" was a time after the stacking penalties were introduced (if I recall correctly)... and people took advantage of nanofiber structures and various ships' base speeds and agility... creating battleships that could fly at several Km/sec and basically obsoleted any ship or tactics that didn't employ similar range and speed tactics.

Was it a more "interesting time" in EVE's life? Certainly. But it made for bad gameplay as tactics were rather "inflexible." You either did it, or you couldn't compete.

The current changes do somewhat do away with "racial flavor"... I'll give you that. I look at the stats for the Thorax and all I can see are shield-gank fits being used on a ship whose race is known, lore-wise, to be armor tankers.
However, the changes do open up the Thorax for more tactics beyond lol-armor tanking with low end blasters and honor-tanking gank-fit.

The point is, it's a joke that there is no individuality among ships and races anymore. All forms of weaknesses and strengths are being removed.

The only real factors left to distinguish seem to be tank, gank, speed, and range. And just look at the weapon reblances and module rebalances that are already aiming to homoginize that.

I don't think they're that homogenized, the old system was to just have tier 2 cruisers be flat out worse than tier 3 cruisers for example and so the lesser one is just not going to be seen because there was something obviously better and easily attainable. When you remove tiers and make other ships viable it is going to feel somewhat homogenized because there are only so many roles for ships to fill and so there will end up being more competition for certain roles than there were before. To not do this would be to keep ships like the Maller as just being terrible in all situations all the time. (For the record it still is but slightly less so now)

Personally I like the idea that more ships will be viable and it WILL open up a lot more opportunities for someone to surprise you with a fit as although ships do compete for similar roles they will fill it slightly differently. I feel like the ASB was a mistake in the first place as for small gang combat shied tanking was generally preferred before the ASB existed because it was too easy to get jammed by a falcon alt and outnumbered and shields can get off the field safely much more easily than armor. The ASB firmly cemented shield tanking on top, the old short coming of shields was the lower effective HP and, barring the ability to alpha your ship, that is no longer the case as the ASB adds so much HP over the course of even a short fight. The ASB is useless when there is enough weight of ships on the field to alpha your ships and so it was natural that it would fit into small gangs primarily. As for dual ASB fits I feel that the extend you have to go to to fit your overtanked junk pile is not worth the tradeoff. I've fought several dual XL ASB cyclones/ferox/maelstroms and in pretty much every case it's just been a matter of mitigating their damage through e-war (not jamming, they rage much harder when they can lock and it's still ineffective as they can't just type "falcon..." into local and excuse the failure) and/or piloting and run them out of boosters. The lack of a cap injector means that they can run their tank but they will cap out if you draw out the fight and will sit there dead in the water because the ASB doesn't give you any cap, so if you have a tackler under their guns and long range shooting them from farther than they can reach they will just flail about ineffectively and rage about how you didn't fight them "properly". I had two cyclones self-destruct because it was going to take about 40 mins to kill them. The dual ASB fits just take so much away from the ship anyway that if you refuse to brawl it then often there is little they can do about it. Too many slots are spent on CPU and grid and the rest of the ship has to be fit with low CPU/grid requirement mods to allow the fit to fly and that leaves the ship less effective and less versatile in all respects excluding the tank. Even rigs must often be used for resist mods as you lack the CPU to fit an invuln.

After reading the dev blog for BC/BS I'm hopeful however as they identified things like the Harb isn't really terrible at doing what it does ie. pumping out dps with lasers and drones. However, the problem identified is that the Harb is very thin when shield tanked and an armor tank leaves it too vulnerable to kiting. In other words CCP seems to know that armor tanking is not worth the tradeoff and so it sounds like they have plans to make armor tanking more appealing by that update although there is still nothing in terms of details. But in any case it sounds like diversification may be on the menu in the not to distant future and I look forward to it.

not all mods, just some mods.

Similar slots =/= homoginizizizizizziziation

Wouldn't this re-balancing open the way for more racial modules though which, in turn, would make the game much more varied?

People don't use plates regularly anymore b/c they are horrible on almost every ship.

Because of homoginized ships... it's pretty easy to get shield extenders on, get resist higher, and get the advantage of start of cycle shield repairers.

It also allows you more speed to kite other players which is much easier today than it was years ago since they have homogenized gun ranges to the point where the small advantage autos have due to falloff range extension has a clear advantage over pulse optimal, and blaster combo ranges. And of course missiles are becoming more of a joke because of their changes.

This is where the game has turned away from, weapons with different strengths and weaknesses into, same dps, same range, crap skill use. And on top of it, now ship slots look like this. It's a ******* joke.