Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Dear EVE community,

I don't know about you, but I have been playing this game since early beta, and with increasing frequency I find myself in a wow clone where all ships are basically the same, but where we can choose the color.

Lets examine the situation for a second:

For years now, we have lacked any real distinction between the races, its bad enough that cross training has been prevalent since forever, but fine, different race different design philosophy.

BUT, especially recently we see the races losing even the most basic distinction.


Remember how the races used to be (or at least deigned to be)?

Amarr

The straight forward battle race, no bullshit, hardly any Electronic Warfare.

Amarr were supposed to be the "honorable" race, spoiled by millenia of supremacy as the first among the stars. Their Ships are supreme armored by the toughest alloys ever conceived by the "past jovian" races . They don't care about speed, they have time.

Their weapons are excellent, designed to strike perfectly and impressively at any distance, most advanced, most effective, but efficiency doesnt matter much to the Amarr, since they are the supreme rulers of their domain.

They are so advanced that they are the only one of the four races that use Antimatter reactors even, not because they want speed, but because those power their impressive weapons.

The only thing they use outside of their golden shells and glorious burning light, is their advances in capacitor denial in the form of Energy Neutralizers and to a lesser extent Nosferatu modules.

S.s.: slow speed, very few med slots, godly amounts armor and capacitor, a great many of low and high slots with lasers being the best, yet most inefficient weapon system, coupled with capacitor warfare.


Caldari:

A tough race, a cold race, efficiency is the name of the game. Hardened on their not-fully terra-formed world, the Caldari have been frozen into shape by the elements.

Left with no reprise from their world they had to meld themselves into being ruthlessly efficient at everything they do. Survival at all costs.

When the Gallente came to their world the caldari were still only an industrial civilization, however their spirit and distinctiveness was already fully formed. They absorbed all they considered advanced, while rigorously abhorring that which they considered weak. Which in that case was the Gallente spirit of liberty.

So when the eventual split came, the Caldari had to abandon their most precious possession, their very homeworld, in order to save the greater good, their state.

Fighting against a much stronger enemy, they were forced once again to be ruthlessly efficient, and so they had to adopt tactics and a philosophy that would make them claim every victory they could, but avoid any losses they didnt absolutely have to incur for the greater good.

As such, Caldari ships are fighting at extreme long ranges, using self guiding missiles that dont require them to put themselves into harms way, use the most advanced electronic warfare to deny the enemy from damaging your ship and to confuse them, and if all else fails: Rely on the toughest and most efficient shields of the four races.

S.s.: Caldari have Best Shields, Fire and Forget Missiles and Rail guns, that allow them to leave a fight before they get shot at. And in case they do get in a sticky situation, they have high tech jammers that confuse the living hell out out of the Enemy.


Gallente:

The Gallente are basically western Humans in the future. They are a democracy, they love liberty, they love money, they are basically us with future tech.

They are the perfect all round race. they have no preconceptions, they have very few restrictions. They hate to lose people, but when challenged they will do whatever it takes.

As such, they rely on both armor and shields, however, they dont like being shot at for long, so they invented the MWD (with the caldari) to get quickly in and out of a fight. Once in, they deploy their all ut blaster weapons to melt away the enemy quickly.

If possible, they even avoid going close range, and just let their drones do the dirty work, since dead computers dont matter.

S.s.: Gallente have burst speed, no great emphasis on tank, the highest dps at close, and drones, drones, drones... ohh yeah, Drones.


Minmatar:

Spoiled by a lush world, very little pressure was on the minmatar to quickly develop, and so when the two thousant years more advanced Amarr came, the minmatar were woefully inferior.

Quickly subdued and subsequently ensalved for generations, they eventually were able to exploit internal Amarrian weakness after a failed reclamation attempt on the Jove, and the Amarrians meeting an Empire that was a significant counterpart in size and strength, the Gallente.

So, secretly aided by the Gallente, the minmatar fought an rebellion of attrition. While in no way equal to the Amarrians, their entire philosophy was to single out and overwhelm Amarrian vessels with speed and numbers. Destroying even one Amarrian ship was enough to justify most losses.

S.s.: Minmatar ships, have bad cap, bad ehp, and below average damage. But they are super light, very fast with afterburners, they tank badly with 80% shield a bit on armor/hull. however, they are also much cheaper than the other races.


So, I ask you, the Player:

How much cooler would EVE be if there was a much stronger focus on these vastly different designed philosophies. Imagine the variety of tactics, and fighting style emerging from that, fighting an amarrian ship would be vastly different than fighting a gallente ship.

Instead of just one race, there would be 4 distinct experiences to go about in eve, instead of mastering F1-F4 in three days, you could spend a decade exploring the distinctiveness of all races.

Imagine how awe inspiring EVE would be!

Post to make it happen.

The recent teircide movement is, unfortunately, taking us farther away from racial diversity. It would be great though. I'm a bit of a role-player so when I started EVE and rolled Minmatar, I was fully committed to the intensive training time required to get the most out of our ships and to a guerrilla-warfare style of play. It makes me a bit sad to see those things go away bit by bit.

Individualizing things virtually always works out to simply making a lot of things just plain better than a lot of other things, leaving a great many things 'worthless'.

You use the example of WoW as something that isn't individualized, you're wrong. It's a class based game... it's too obvious to bother debating how wrong you are here. The problem with these kinds of 'individualized' games quite simply is that many of these 'unique traits' you so dearly crave are inherently stronger than, and very limiting to, other 'unique traits'.

Class based games like WoW are extremely individualized by nature, different classes simply do different things and/or specialize and build in different ways within their own class; they combat the inherent unbalance of this individualization by building in rock-paper-scissors designs of varying degrees of complexity. These hard-coded rock-paper-scissors designs are not suitable for the vast majority of EVE.

I enjoy how EVE's design isn't individualized, the majority of ships can do the majority of functions. Want a battle badger? You can do that. Want a combat Hulk? You can do that too. Obviously its not the greatest idea for many ships to attempt some things but the point is that ships aren't deadlocked into a specific role, they're flexible, they're not very individualized. Some ships are better suited for certain things, and many have their strengths and weaknesses, but it rarely prevents them from doing the complete opposite fairly effectively.

You probably just hate change, I don't see how you can look back into EVE's 'individualization' in the past and not see how the rifter being god of all T1 frigates, rupture being king of T1 cruisers, and ships casually outrunning missiles are bad things. How quickly you forget that EVE's 'individualization' involved 80% of ships being garbage.


TL;DR You're wrong, go away.

So for the sake of roleplay and backstory fluff you would have 90% of the game's ships be basically useless, the way it used to be?

No. Biomass yourself.

So for the sake of being ******** you are just stupid like that 90% of the time?

....

Anyway, why would you even assume that many ships would be obsolete or not worth it? Distinctiveness =/ Imbalanced.

It not just about chaning ships slot layouts, its about changing race appropriate modules, like say neuts/nos would only work best on amarr ships, or ecm would be pretty caldari only.

Drones would work best on gallente, and after burners would be a staple of minmatar ships.


How idiotic is it to assume that different races would be automatically imbalanced?! Ever played starcraft or something?


And sure, picking and choosing ships of different races for gangs to benefit of the best extremes would be a viable strategy, however, if done right, sticking in your own races groups could actually provide complementing benefits by itself.

Sure it requires some very aware balancing, but hell, i could do it with an excel sheet, I kinda would expect that the Devs should be able to, and if not, I'll even offer to help.

Couldn't agree more.

I had a go at defining a bit more Minmatar racial identity in light of the current balancing direction for minmatar.
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=225308&find=unread

Would be cool to see similar exercises done for the other races by people who know their race through and through. :)

While I see where you are pointing at, I also think that you are overreacting.

Show me an Amarr ship that uses projectiles more efficiently as a Minmatar ship.

A Gallente ship better at ECM than a Caldari ship.

Etc, etc....

Yes, after the patch, you will probably see more Armageddons with projectiles or missiles than with lasers, but that will be the pilots choice, which is the whole point of having a fitting system in the first place.

As someone said above, the ships can be fitted to suit the pilot's needs. Racial flavor comes in the form of bonuses and slot layout. Even a bonus that may seem identical can have very different effects.

Best example is an optimal range bonus for lasers. It is basically a damage bonus, because it allows more flexibility in crystal choice. The hybrid range bonus on the Rokh does not work that way because of the different nature of the guns used.

The current tiericide movement is a very good thing, even from a lore perspective, since it only makes sense that the four races have to come up with a counterpart to their rivals' ships.

The same thing happens in real life on the automobile market. The various manufacturers must come up with a counterpart for each of their competitors' cars; They need a family car, an SUV and whatnot, just to remain competitive.

Of course, if you want that all fleet warfare is dominated by Abbadons all day every day, because they are the only ship designed for sustained heavy combat, we will just have to agree to disagree.

I really hope that some day it may be possible and practical (and I don't mean mandatory, of course), to field a single-race fleet that can operate efficiently for all four races. Because at the moment, Caldari and Amarr clearly have the upper hand on fleet warfare. The Minmatar's only saving grace is the alpha from artillery, while Gallente are only used for... oh wait, they aren't used at all!

Edit: Also, don't forget that balancing the races against each other doesn't really make sense in a game where all fleets are free to chose from all races' ships. The only problem is that not doing it would lead to everyone always flying the same race.

would be nice if every ewar module had 5000 cpu on it, but each race had a 99% reduction to cpu on the ewar modules for their race.

making it completely unique.

Alphabaddons :P

I agree with the OP. The ships will no longer have that "vibe". Yes they will be more powerful and maybe more useful. But we are losing an important part of gameplay for it.

Have to admit though OP, the geddon is defiantly a good change theme wise.