EVE General Discussion

You noticed how I chose the retriever as an example instead of the venture? and how I mentioned the Apocalypse as a viable mining ship?

This trend towards homogenization hasn't started yesterday (but it has grown worse as of late).

The Venture is a continuation of the trend as it is again a new ship that is designed around a single role. An even more horrible recent example would be the Noctis.

The introduction of these specialized ships reduces the number of roles that less specialized ships (say a salvaging Harbinger) can perform competitively thus taking away variety from the game.

In MMOs an inefficient/suboptimal solution might as well not exist at all as far as players are concerned.

(If you ask me the whole concept of t2 ships was a mistake.)

Stop drinking the Kool-Aid or whatever it is you are smoking.

Seriously though, with all the previous replies, many of which make a lot of sense - ORE as its own faction hellbent on industry/mining makes alot of sense. Tiericide of mining frigs -> mining barges -> exhumers -> command support ships = Orca -> Rorqual.

If it is simply that you want to for the sake of homogenization the look of an all Caldari or Amarr fleet running strictly Caldari and Amarr ships then you are the one barking up the wrong tree.

Furthermore, the re-vamp of frigs and cruisers that came with Retribution was done to fill in a gap and further extend the life-cycle of frigs and cruisers within the respective races focus (missiles, turrets, drones and types of ewar). Next, some Tier I and II battlecruisers are getting the overhaul simply to make them viable options in this PvP-game (with PvE-elements) and to diversify/narrow the use of said ships to fit whatever need there may be.

Hopefully we will get more ships from ORE, said the character focused on Gallente and ORE.

That certainly went over your head.

If you want to mine in a frigate fleet, do it, it's still possible.

The miners are pretty obvious, they usually have lasers shooting asteroids. You aren't "disguising" the miners, and the venture is sturdier than any mining frigate ever was.

I've seen more people mining in a badger then I've seen mine in a frigate; which is why they repurposed them.

They were rarely used to mine, so each faction had a single frigate that was pointless. Prior to retribution I couldn't give those frigates away. What a shock, now that they don't have mining bonuses people actually buy them.

Did the racial mining frigates and cruisers lose their mining bonuses? Or are the wiki's not updated yet. Sorry, can't be arsed to load up the client and check. If they do still have those bonuses, then they are still racial mining ships, yes? Sorry, not seeing the problem still.

It's always been a foregone conclusion that people interested in mining were going to aim for a ORE mining ship. These have always been made by ORE. So yeah, only the newbs of the noobs were using the racial mining ships. Hell, I even remember long hours in my Exequoror until I could fly a Retriever.

Given the limited nature of mining and that CCP has now opened up ORE ship mining to basically everyone with a few minutes of skilling is no great surprise nor a detriment to the game. There's only fractional advantages of one racial mining ship over the other racial counterparts. It's nothing to excited about or worth cross training. If ORE didn't exist then maybe it might be worth the effort to gain a few extra percentage of cargo space or quicker cycle times or ore yields. But ORE is here. Noone has complained of homogenization before the Venture and really, noone should be complaining about it now. I'm not telling anyone not to complain. I'm just saying this is a non-issue. But hey, people love taking issues with non-issues all the time, especially if they're OCD.

I love pointing out that ORE ships are actually Gallente as far as race goes

Gallente = hybrids, minmatar = projectile

Let's stop and focus for a second here - mining equipment is not the same thing as combat equipment. Each race has a different preferred combat style revolving around equipment that race specially developed throughout history. But mining equipment is homogeneous by its very nature of being mining equipment. What special bonuses can you give a mining ship other than those that specifically assist the homogeneous task of mining? Sure, there are different types of mining: asteroid, gas, ice and others, but all the bonuses of a mining ship are going to focus on the task of mining.

And imho, developing new racial mining frigates after they just got rid of them is not likely to happen. People LIKE the little yellow submarine, and even if they reintroduced the racial mining frigates, the Venture would still outclass them all as per the stat bonuses they used to have. As a logi ship, for example, the Navitas is actually useful now.

Best post all day. I lol'd.

The streamline, sad as it is, is "justified" by making it an ORE design. As an independent company (that secretly controls all of New Eden) they exist outside of national designs.

As for actually making national mining ships... I'm kind of meh on that. It would only really be worth effort if CCP ever got around to actually arming mining barges (I say barges because technically the Venture can carry weapons - though why it would is beyond me). Otherwise they'd only be changing armor/shield/cargo, which may be slightly interesting, really wouldn't make that much a difference once they got done "balancing*" everything.

(*balancing = the art in which game designers make everything take different paths to reach the exact same predictable result).

Now if we get armed barges the first thing is that I will knock out a bottle champagne in sixty seconds flat. Then we can actually see enough national differences for it to actually be worth making the ship variety you speak of. For example, Gallente barges might skip turrets and just go with much larger drone bays. Caldari barges could have better shields and use missile hardpoints. Armarr barges would actually have a strong armor tank ability. Minmatar barges could avoid gankers by disguising themselves as large pieces of space debris. And so on.

In summary: Right now, national mining ship variety would be... meh. Sort of interesting, but not really worth the effort. But someday it just might, and when & if it is done right, it will indeed be pretty cool. Just don't hold your breath, though.

He may have been but that doesn't mean everyone has to follow what OP was intending. There have been some good thoughts re the concept of ship specialisation here even if mainly through the mining example.

I think the consensus here is that we can expect tiericide to remove any remaining 'general purpose' ships and replace them with specialists per race as attempting to balance ships without them having a predetermined specialty is pretty much impossible unless each nation is reduced to one ship of each class.

(never mind treating ORE almost as a separate nation now their ship range is almost complete )