Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Since we need a noobhauler, something a brand new player can step out of the tutorial with and get to hauling, then price has to be factor somewhere. There needs to be a cheap T1 hauler to serve as a entry for new players or a low investment way of relocating a loot stash. Price has to be a balancing factor at some point.

There's just absolutely no reason why all T1 industrials have to fit the noobhauler role, and using the Venture as an example, there's no reason why the noobhauler can't have interesting quirks that still gives it a use beyond the noobship role.


(Its also important to note that price is a different type of balancing factor when it comes to hauling than it is in general combat. If I pop into a Caracal instead of a Tengu for a fleet engagement, I've put a very clear ceiling on my maximum loss if I lose that Caracal. Hauling doesn't work that way - if I want to move 10k m^3 worth 500 million then minimizing my potential loses by using a T1 industrial instead of a T2 makes no sense, because the expected loss goes up, not down, when I travel through Niarja in the T1.)

How many days to earn 800 million ISK. It varies from pilot to pilot. I say about twenty-eight hours roughly.

If you are going to do justice to the Orca a lot more training than that needs to be done in the 'Leadership' category.

Some of the suggestions so far about increased diversity through giving roles unrelated to hauling are pretty gimmicky and miss the point of the ship class - Battle Haulers are funny and sometimes effective because nobody expects a hauler to be PvP fit and so they blunder into neut/scram range, if you give it ewar or damage bonuses then all you have is a bad combat ship that people know what to expect from.

My main recommendation would be splitting the existing haulers mostly into one of 3 niches, rather than just 2. I'm not sure that speed and EHP need to be merged into 1 hull as is currently the proposal, since there will be times when a player wants to haul quickly and other times when a player wants to haul (relatively) securely, and it reduces niche options for no particular reason.

So give each hull one of three roles: cargospace, EHP, or speed/agility.

Amarr:
Sigil: Excellent EHP, mediocre cargospace, mediocre speed/agility
Bestower: Excellent cargospace, mediocre EHP, medocre speed/agility

Caldari:
Badger Mk1: Excellent speed/agility, mediocre EHP, mediocre cargospace
Badger Mk 2: Excellent cargospace, mediocre EHP, mediocre speed/agility

Now since the Minmatar have 3 hulls this allows them one hull to excel in each of the three roles, so to compensate, each hull has to be below average in one of the other two roles:

Minmatar:
Wreathe: Excellent speed/agility, mediocre EHP, poor cargospace
Hoarder: Excellent EHP, mediocre cargospace, poor speed/agility
Mammoth: Excellent cargospace, mediocre speed/agility, poor EHP

And since Gallente have 5 hulls, we need to follow the same pattern as the Minmatar for three of them. The remaining two are a little awkward, but can be given a compromise dual role at the expense of the third:

Iteron I: Excellent agility, mediocre EHP, poor cargospace
Iteron II: Good agility, good EHP, terrible cargospace
Iteron III: Excellent EHP, mediocre cargospace, poor speed/agility
Iteron IV: Good EHP, Good cargospace, terrible speed/agility
Iteron V: Excellent cargospace, mediocre agility, poor EHP

I'm also unconvinced about some of the slot layouts suggested in this proposal, since they would appear to allow too much flexibility in circumventing the supposed role of these hulls. For example the Badger Mk2, supposedly a cargo option with poor EHP, has 6 midslots to fit a shield buffer into and you have raised the base shield hitpoints too! While it doesn't have the grid to squeeze LSEs into these slots (at least not without using reactor controls or ACR rigs which would compromise the cargo capacity) it is already possible to get a respectable shield buffer from a Badger 2 just from the midslots. If you want these hulls to actually stick in the roles you've designated for them, you need to restrict the slot layouts more.

granted that the badger mk2 may have the better tank, but if you're needing to move volume how often is it that ~35k m3 of stuff is actually going to be worth enough to gank? if it's a reasonably high value relative to it's m3 then it makes no sense to put it in a t1 industrial instead of a blockade runner, or a freighter, or an orca or something that isn't made out of paper. if i read your post correctly even the "tanky" hauler only gets ~20k ehp? c'mon, barges have that much ehp and are ganked daily just for the fun of it, now imagine if some one actually wanted you dead for the loot and actually put a bit of effort in to it.

so what we have, are some haulers that can't match up to the bestower's cargo in a meaningful way except perhaps the iteron V and those will only be flown by people who have already trained gallente industrial V as there's no reason to do so now, and a bunch of "tanky" industrials that are still rather flimsy.

i'm really struggling to find anything in these changes other than "yeah, the bestower is the new king. or, buy an orca"
i wasn't expecting the changes to make industrials super awesome do everything ships, but there isn't even much balance between the ships after the changes. i thought ccp would have learned from what happened with mining barges.


i don't want to be negative about these changes i really don't, and i hope CCP aren't reading my comments as negativity for the sake of negativity but really, the bestower is just the new king of t1 hauling to be honest.
let's look at the facts;

at amarr industrial III the bestower is bigger than the badger mk2 at caldari industrial V, and the mammoth at minmatar industrial IV (that was the appeal of the mammoth, at industrial IV it was a faster train than the itty V and could scoop roughly an entire jetcan making it a good size hauler for minimal SP) and takes less training time than both.

at amarr industrial IV the bestower is bigger than the mammoth at minmatar industrial V for less training time.

finally at amarr industrial V the bestower is bigger than everything.

so really with amarr industrial III you gain access to a freighter, you are only 1.2% smaller than a fully skilled mammoth, and 6.2% smaller than a fully skilled itty V. the bestower is either within an acceptable margin, or just flat out better, than every other t1 industrial of it's role for equal or lesser SP.

i fail to see any reason other than t2 ships, which have yet to be rebalanced, or a fondness for a particular freighter why any one would train any racial industrial skill other than amarr, and there's no real reason to even take that past III

Are you out of your mind? 8 mid 8 low slot for Iteron, Wreathe, Badger, but 5/7 for Sigil. All that slot is far too many for T1 industrial ship! How could you possibly make T2 variant better than this? 8 High slot as well? Just seem overkill for those ship.

And aren't they backward of blockade runner ships?
Small quick but fragile and cloaky.
Large slow beefy and scram resistance

My head hurts trying to understand your logic.

Cargo expanders really should be stacking penalised.

A T1 Indy is a T1 indy really, personally they should all be made obsolete and ORE get involved in the indy making business. There would be a small indy type frigate like the Probe for smallish, fast, indyish type ship. Something like the badger/itty/mammoth etc that holds between 25/30k m3 and then something between these and a freighter. and then a specialised version like a blockade runner. there is no point having so many ships doing a role which is more or less the same, scrap the current ones, design something from scratch and put out something else.

I came over here to make this post, got beat to it.
Look, this doesn't have to be *that* complicated. The basic cheap indy is just a hauler with fairly poor stats. They're given away as part of the career tutorials. The nicer one has best cargo space at high SP (itty), best cargo space at low SP (Bestower), best tank (Badger II), or second-best tank and cargo (Mammoth).

Then you make the Hoarder super-agile, make the itty 2 have small cargo but really fast velocity for people autopiloting with cheap fittings, give the itty 3 an oversiezd ore hold, whatever. Give us options and variety. Eve is all about the options.

This bit directed specifically at CCP Rise: I do not think people are demanding "pop". Rather I think this is about having enough variety in the industrials that people who use them for different reasons would want to fly different ships. Consider:
Hauling large loads
Hauling large loads of ore (very low value per m3)
Hauling small expensive things
Hauling ammo and spare fittings to mission hubs for personal use
Hauling mid-sized loads with low SP
Hauling to lowsec before BRs (think PI, small cargo runs)

Ask yourself, for each of these uses, would the new system have a different ship? Or would most of them end up using the same one? If so, the rebalancing has failed.

The one high-value, high-volume good that comes to mind is PI products. They can get upwards of 75M ISK per 10k m^3. It's possible that capital parts qualify also, but I have no experience with those and I suspect most of the people making those are savvy and SP-ful enough that they have already trained Orcas.

Anyway, the problem, more so than "the Bestower is the new king" (because I think I might trade that 2% cargo space for the 50% more EHP of an Itty 5 that might at least stop a destroyer... or just trade it for align time on the Bestower) is that the Orca, with 60k hold at skill level and the ability to fit a MWD for accelerated aligning just completely obsoletes all of these ships. Sure, the orca costs about as much as 6 Blockade Runners (at least when I got my BR on my alt...) but it also carries the hold of them, at once, and it has more EHP than the 6 of them put together.

It's possible that the answer should be something to do with T2, but, the Orca really is still the premier highsec hauler, eve with a third of its potential cargo capacity being in the form of an ore bay.

Thanks for the "make haulers into stupid gimmick ships because LOL WE DID A BATTLE BADGER ROAM ONCE ROFL" suggestion there.