Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I find this thread a bit frustrating to follow..

Several players are pointing out some really important facts and issues, and its basically being ignored by both Fozzie and Rise..

A word of advice get the BIG picture philosophy of ALL of industrial ships right. Talk to Seagull and Soundwave, they usually have good over all insigt on the larger scale of things.

We currently have so many strange shelved, ignored and handicapped ships and features in EVE its not funny anymore.

Orca and Rorq, where the Rorq is industrially underpowered, and the Orca is some weird multi-purpose ship.

Mining barges that are up side down regarding yield, versus solo and group focus.

Noctis that is almost perfect, but with the Primae being totally useless and a piece of crap. The hold is way to small for the actual purpose as a dedicated PI ship.

The Industrials are all from 2003, and have no change AT ALL. They should be considered a semi modular multipurpose hull, that industrialists can fit and tweak for special roles.

The whole tiericide and rebalance thing is a bit of a Joke imho. Things that are 10 years old and all we get is some database value changes. Its presented as this huge operation, but it seems its more like swapping some numbers and asking the community if they are about to go and shoot a monument.

There is nothing to stand in the way of doing both.

Containers should be integrated into the rest of the EVE gameplay and ecology. Ideally the function should be saving cargo and scannable function, and ofc added capacity and security.

The BAYs should be added in the rig slots, and become a feature in all ships, to change capacity of needs. Also bonus from skills on special ships should go on BAY and not on the basic hangar floor of the ship.

When a ship is destroyed the containers almost always drop, thus not using containers become a "denial" of loot but at a huge cost-benefit to capacity.

The Freighter, Jumpfreighter should get added rig slots for bays, and no longer have the pickup and jettison in space, that "boost" was very bad balancing, and basically removed the original role of a DRY load container ship. All the industrials and in space work force was nerfed, suddenly you only need one ship to clean up after an activity in space. This was a poor solution to the lack of development in industrial ships and purposes from YEAR of ignoring these aspects.

The fact that we have two PVP heavy devs in this thread and on this issue and they seem to totally ignore real topic, while talking about skinning and other ships, just proves that we need to get the CSM on this case. This time around we have a very strong knowledgable team regarding finance and industry.

True.. I might be exaggerating quite a bit. I just find it a bit frustrating that the discussion is allowed to be derailed away from talks about a bigger picture of industry. These topics have seen hardly any attention for many years, and now when every financial oriented player, every industrialist and related players are holding their breath in hopes for big changes in the wake of Odyssey, its fair to push the issue hard.

If this was not a personal focus area I would say that said devs have done an amazing job, but there will be a lot of old disgruntled players raging if something so over due is not done right.

I apologize for punching low, and will retract..

If there are reasons why the discussion is not allowed to develop, like changes we arent meant to know about yet, then we should at least be told that there are plans and reasons behind the "silence"..

Hey guys

I spent most of the weekend going over feedback and talking about this issue with a lot of different folks (CSM, Devs, and random folks from the community via stream chats or private convos), and I want to touch base with you about where I'm at.

First, I want to dispel any ideas about the level of investment in this project by myself or anyone else here. Like any other part of the game, we want this to be as good as it can be. The rebalance in the OP was not the result of some lazy afternoon where we dismissively decided what to do. It was the result of a fairly lengthy process of negotiating within the balance team about what industrial balance should really consist of. We started with fairly lofty ideas and slowly backed into a more conservative solution, both because of concerns about equality relating to the extra industrials and also because of knowing that more high level industry work was coming down the pipe that could impact our needs in the near future. Moral of the story: we care about this a lot, and want to do it right.

So, whats the plan? Although I am a bit nervous about backlash coming from the other direction, I want to take your feedback and try to do something that makes you guys more excited. As far as I can tell, there's a few common concerns/desires that you're hoping for with these ships:

Make them all useful

Make them as different from each other as possible

Add new function/purpose where possible

Most of these could be said in different ways, but essentially it seems that in-so-far as balance allows, you want more niche applications, more character, and more differentiation. To me this seems reasonable, as long as it doesn't obligate people people to cross train for very basic needs. So, here's what we're looking at doing to address these points:

Special purpose bays - This will be for Hoarder, Iteron Mark II, III, and IV. We wanted to do this originally, but held back because of concerns about racial inequality. Based on feedback I'm now hoping you guys will be fine with this inequality, as long as it isn't so favored towards Gallente that no one would ever train another race for hauling.

More separation between the two basic hauler types - I want to achieve this through several means including giving the faster haulers better warp time (up to 6au/tick instead of 4.5au/tick), taking a mid slot away from the cargo focused versions to highlight the tank on the others (this will partly be counter-acted by giving back the second high to the cargo versions), along with other small changes to make some of the tankier haulers stand out a bit more.

More quirkiness overall - I won't go into specifics right now, and it won't be anything extremely drastic, but I want to try and get each ship within a role set apart from the others as much as possible to avoid any feeling of homogenization (though I still feel that the very simplistic hauling system doesn't provide a lot of room for variation that wouldn't severely handicap some ships).

I'll post again within the next couple days with details, but until then I hope this will do. Finally, I want to say that I really appreciate all the feedback that was given in a polite and constructive manner, both from the CSM and the community as a whole. I hope this change will help to build some faith in our ability to take that feedback into account and make good adjustments for you guys. (I also hope it doesn't make you feel like any time you make a 30 page thread I'll do whatever you say =)

See you soon in the OP with more details
Fly safe

It's a core principle of EVE that people should be allowed to make bad choices.

This is a great point. So far, hauler tankiness means one and only one thing in practice: how many Tornados can it survive. That number limits the value of cargo that can be safely moved in high-sec, while the cargo bay itself limits the volume. But it's not a very interesting limitation because almost every hauler proposed here can only withstand 0 or 1 Tornados. It also doesn't really matter at all in low, null or wormhole space because any amount of damage at all will eventually take down a hauler which has been pinned. It might take an hour, but the hauler still has no recourse, no matter its tank.

But if the "tanky" haulers had some additional capabilities, then suddenly their tank means something else: how long do they have to run off a solo pirate in dangerous space before going down? And I'm not just talking about weapons, necessarily -- how about a line of "tanky" haulers with EWAR bonuses?

• Caldari: bonus to ECM jammers, to break the attacker's lock
• Amarr: bonus to energy neutralizers, to disable the attacker's point/scram
• Gallente: bonus to sensor dampeners, to break the attacker's lock
• Minmatar: bonus to web range and strength, to outrun the attacker's point/scram

i still hope warp-acceleration will be a ship-attribute at some point...

What about +1 stabs for one or two of them. Make them psuedo smuggling ships? Limited size cargo bay for illegal goods that can't be scanned by customs officers?

This. Though I like the idea of barring or limiting cargo expanders in haulers (like Damage controls, so there is a precedent for the mechanic) and giving them a generous base cargo hold increase (maybe equivalent to half a rack of expanders?) would be a good thing. I think that this would free pilots to actually use those low slots to make meaningful decisions about ship fitting.

Right now 90% of industrials have all cargo expanders in the lows. To me, this is a sign of bad design that is easily rectified. IMHO. it also makes sense to limit cargo expanders, we're talking about ships that are already designed from the ground up to be optimized for cargo space- how many times can you really optimize that design?



Also this.

Or 'special cargo bay' could be a cargo bay that is significantly smaller than the mammoth's/Itty V, but self destructs when it is destroyed. Basically, if you kill the ship, you aren't going to get the loot. So the best you can hope for is griefing the user.