Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Terrible, pointless rebalance.

I mean I get the desire to make it so that all the ships in a particular class have their own uses or roles within that class, rather than just having ones which are worse and you just tolerate until you get a higher level skill for that ship class.

That's obviously a great idea, and has been working well with the other ship classes tackled so far.

But this... this doesn't accomplish that, does it? You're left with four ships which are in the EXACT position that these rebalances hoped to address. That's slightly fewer left in this "we're just worse/pointless :(" limbo than currently, but it's not a solution. It's half a solution, and throwing your hands up and saying "whatever, we tried!"

In my opinion, these changes might as well not be made considering they don't achieve what they're meant to, and will need to be massively changed again in the future.

After seeing this complaint show up a few times, I think I figured out what the difference is that resulted in the haulers looking so similar when the combat ships didn't, or at least what would to me if I were a designer. The combat ships already pointed in the direction for them to be changed. A Caracal is different from a Moa after tiericide because they were different before tiericide too. All the tiericide rebalance did was make them not suck at the roles they looked like they were already trying to fill. Very few tiericided ships actually had bonuses changed, and the ones that did had them changed mostly because the general consensus was that the old bonuses didn't work at all.

In the case of haulers, every single one of them seems to be trying to fill the exact same role. This is why we got "train Amarr if you are putting a little effort in or Gallente if you're putting a lot of effort in," which turned into "Only use the Iteron V" when the Bestower could no longer use its reduced skill requirements as a selling point. For me, at least, that problem is significantly more egregious, and much more urgently in need of fixing, than the fact that haulers are boring. This is tiericide at its most basic: bring ships that aren't worth flying under any circumstances up to the potential of ships that are worth flying.

I'm not sure how I'd make haulers more unique. I think the best one I've heard is basically Caldari=tank Amarr=lowslots Minmatar=align Gallente=capacity. You can't make it too dramatic (say, >10% top-to-bottom), though, or we're back to the Iteron V problem. Or, you could do it like the freighters and do Caldari=space Gallente=buffer Minmatar=align Amar=???. The problem with either of those spreads is, in either case, those are in relatively soft stats that a lot of people won't notice.

Edit: I guess what I'm saying is that I'm fine with "They're all the same so just pick one," if it gets rid of "Most of these are objectively bad ships for any purpose," in this case.

WoW.......

While i do admire your work on balancing and i respect your skill at what you are doing, and honestly i do like your work and i think you are a great guy professionally.

Now that i got that out of the way, we all know your personality leaves a lot of work for improvement if you want o bypass the jerk stages. This we all witnessed in the cheat-fest video devblogs. It's easy to see you hate losing so bad you are ready to ruin everybody's fun if you can't have any.

Now if i was to have any authority on CCP, i would have *****-slapped you so hard that you left the island by air for the comment you just did.

Just so you get an idea how it actually came across because sometimes we are so tied in what we think, that we forget, to think about how out messages come across.

So here's what i understood from your message.

"You (the community) swore at me so bad that i barley held myself back from to just changing **** to **** you off, because i own eve and i do whatever i want. But you (the community) should be thankful that i was suggar-talked by other members of the community and i let it slide. Beware, next time you have a profanity outbreak i'll change all your **** just to get back at you, because i own eve and i do whatever i want."

Honestly, i'd fire you instantly!But that's just me, and i hope i am the only one to whom you came across like this.

+1

Myself i make many harash posts, where honestly i'm not nice. But i'm not CCP employee and noone pays me for posting here. So i can post, say whatever i want. But if i would work at CCP i would be obliged to be nice and i would be , and i would do my best to balance this game. I really like many changes CCP did so far, but if you work under emotions and to **** off people who don't like your ideas then ... then i can say already someone would do your job way better. Don't get me wrong - not saying it would be me or someone specifically. But that is horrible what i read here.

Ok since now i give up on posting on those forums. I never though that DEVS are so touchy about internetz forum posts.
Looks like if i will want laser buffs they will get nerfs , just because my posts are harsh.

Pathethic...

It's not "forcing people to train **** they don't need" if they really do need or want it because it's better for the task at hand, though. This is a bit like going "WELL THIS IS THE ONLY LOGI I SHOULD EVER NEED" when you get bitched out about bringing a Scythe to an armor fleet.

TLDR: Good first step, but DST pilots feel left out and need to be included in the industrial overhaul. Solution to the 4 additional ones: add cargo hold specific indies for Gallente, use the Hoarder model to create three for Minmatar, and use one of the two options for Amarr & Caldari. Finally to combat generalization, look at what you have as specialization in freighters and apply that to the industrials.


CCP Rise, being a hauler myself, I have to commend you on a good decision with what to do with the Tech 1 indies. The choice between safety vs. cargo capacity is not new however, except that this decision is made by the DST pilot and not so much the tech 1 industrial pilot. All of those tech 1 indies have no tank, need no tank, so can go all out on cargo capacity. The DST has the potential to haul more than a tech 1 indie ever can (with the exception of Gallente), but then the DST has only a slightly better tank than a tech 1 indie. Or the DST pilot can put in a lot more tank for security sacrificing cargo capacity.

It's great that you give this decision to the tech 1 indies as well clearly boosting 4 of them to be a "DST-light" version. But the problem arises for DST pilots like myself that feel a bit neglected then. True, a DST is superior to the tech 1 secure industrial, but it feels like the DST's niche area is completely open now for the tech 1's to operate in (to a certain extend). That itself is not a problem as long as the current ones operating in that small market are looked at too.

DST's have the role of an armored transport. It gets the job done to haul high-valued goods in high-sec because of its tank. This role saw a new entrant in the form of a BR with its cargo scan immunity. And now you give other ships the defining ability that a DST has: an industrial with an actual tank to survive suicide ganks. I know you only want to focus on tech 1 ships first, but as far as industrials are concerned, you have to include the tech 2's as well (and mainly the DST's as BR's are just fine as great low-sec/null-sec haulers).

But on the topic of Tech 1's and the 4 additional ships. Why not do the following?

Each race has a secure industrial and a cargo capacity industrial. Pretty much the same as what you mentioned.
Then each race has three specialized cargo-hold ships:
An ore-industrial
An ice-industrial
A PI goods-industrial which can fit a cov ops cloak, but does not have the same warp speed or agility a BR has (so a "BR-light" version)

For Gallente; this one's easy. You have three tech 1 indies and each of them can be given a task.
Minmatar has the Hoarder as extra ship, but the Amarr and Caldari are left out. So what to do? Simple, all you need to do is create multiple versions of the same model. So for Minmatar: create an Ore-Hoarder, Ice-Hoarder and PI-Hoarder. The model doesn't need to change, you just need to make sure each of them has a specific cargo hold. For the Amarr and Caldari, just choose one of the two which will be used as the model for specific cargo hold ships.

Is this really a huge undertaking? I'm no programmer, but isn't this a matter of copy & paste with a few modifications?

Also about generalization: look at your freighters to remove it as much as possible.

Minmatar has the smallest hold, but aligns the fastest and has the highest velocity
Gallente has the best tank, but it's turn rate is bad.
Caldari has the largest cargo hold, but is a true slowpoke.
And finally Amarr freighters are the best all-rounders of the lot. And they are the most sexy to boot.

So use this mechanic to create differences between the specific haulers (secure industrials, cargo capacity industrials, ore-hold industrials etc.). Then each player can still decide to go for a certain empire specific ship because of its speed, tank, or other reasons.

You can do a lot more with them than what you came up with so far. It's not bad, don't get me wrong. It just has a lot more potential you're not using.

I'm not going to read the whole thread to see if I'm duplicating anyone else's comments, but the article on themittani got me thinking about this, and I have a few ideas for other things that industrials could do to diversify their roles.

1) Ghetto orca - give a bonus to tractor beam range. This would be a good low cost, low risk boat for managing jetcans in mining operations. Such a ship would need to be able to get above 27500 m3 in cargo at least on the mining version (which is the +/- point for anything that's mostly cargo oriented to be useful). It would be good to have a reasonable scan resolution on this ship, too, so it doesn't take a million years to lock cans.

2) Ghetto noctis - cheaper ship a small bonus to tractor beams and salvagers with a cargo hold that falls between a destroyer and a noctis would find use in clearing wrecks. If this one capped out at 8-10k m3 and 3-4 high slots that would likely strike the best balance with the noctis, though it wouldn't hurt if it was able to move around at a half-decent clip.

3) Drone boat - I know this seems like a strange idea, but an industrial with a bit of a tank, even only 25 or 50 bandwidth, and enough of a drone bay (100? 125?) to carry a few different flights of small or medium drones could also be a flexible addition to mining fleets and such. It could be a swiss army knife - it helps to kill rats, repairs mining barges, salvages wrecks, and ewars gankers instead of sitting around doing nothing while waiting for that next can to drop.

4) Logi - similar to the drone boat, but why not? Maybe someone will find a good use for an industrial that can rep and give cap transfers or sensor boosts.

Orcas have a much higher skill point investment though than T1 haulers, and are much much much more expensive.

How many days to earn 700-800 million isk, and keep the rule of not flying what you can't afford to lose?

Out of curiosity, would it be so bad to give Industrials the grid and armor/shields/structure of t1 cruisers, along with more turret and launcher slots? They still wouldn't have any combat bonuses but they could be fit to fight if their owner chose to do so. I'm thinking it might be kind of fun to have a ship like the Galaxy from the original Privateer.