Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Frankly, I don't mind them being the specialized mission ships, just like for instance Noctis is a specialized salvaging ship. All they need to do is make them worth training for. The cruise missile changes have seen a bit of a rebirth of the Golem hull, while Vargur will surely step into its own once the Machariel hull is toned down a bit. Paladin "suffers" from standard laser syndrome (amagad, I do EM/TH damage, laz0rs sux!!!11!1oneone), while Kronos... well, it's not Machariel again :p So the hulls really don't need all that much, tiny modifications can be enough. The only thing is that CCP should probably look at their e-war vulnerability. Perhaps a role of 50% resist bonus to NPC jammers? I don't know, just throwing out ideas.

i'm aware that i am derailing the thread but let's take a minute to discuss this here statement, shall we?

first off, nobody will deny that hisec income could be a little riskier. we do not want to turn hisec into lowsec, of course not. but. eve online can not and should not compete with other mmos in the discipline of being a candy wonderland. as it stands now, the carebear faction is so emboldened by the current state of things that some of them demand the complete removal of pvp from hisec. in reality, what hisec needs is more pvp (=more excitement).

on the point of increasing hisec income you totally lose me. as a guy who has near perfect mission runners sitting in almost every major and some minor hubs i can safely claim that if anything, hisec income should be decreased. that way, at least those of us who are willing to follow the ISK/hour will consider null and wormhole life. as it stands now, there is no reason to leave hisec unless you want to pvp for pvp's sake.

lastly, there is the nebulous issue of 'fun'. here, i dearly hope that you are not of the "let's make missions more exciting!" crowd. i will save myself some work and just put up this link.

so why am i writing all this? it's simple: i want to demonstrate that Malcanis's views on hisec are a mixed bag. thus, being better at 'shooting red pluses' might be exactly what the marauder class needs, regardless of his opinion.

Well as posted 2 pages ago the golem needs kind of a buff as torp platform, while it is a good CM ship with the latest changes, it just overlaps to much with the other hulls this way. I would agree on the Vargur.



The Paladin, beside the Golem, is the hull that stand on equal footing compared to faction BS(NM in this case) it produces similar results and there is no clear better hull. The Paladin is better for Amarr space, by the better resist profile, better cap to handle neuting, a bit more dps after rigging and can come into her own if you look at Incs, because there is no faction armor BS that can fit Tachs, got a 90% web and super high dps. The NM on the other hand got the overall bigger tank(mostly because deadspace shield mods) and with the extra tracking and range(after rigging) it is more flexible outside of amarr space(it is even a ok guristas ratter with tachs, that deal ok dps at 50km since you can use multis with high thermal damage) and again is used in Incs for different gang concepts. While both look similar, they are a bit different, got different fields of use and don't overlap in a way, where you could say one is clearly better(like it is with Vargur vs Mach currently).

The problem of the Kronos is the design. It is designed around being a mega that was actually fitable with 425mm rails and tank(the mega before the buffs had huge issues wtih the CPU doing it), however with all the changes over the years the better fitting is not a big deal now and it was never as powerful like on the Golem(to fit torps with active tank) or Paladin(to fit tachs) and most T1 hulls have stepped up. Also there is the issue with overall hull damage in combination with rails.

A Vargur does about 1200+ dps, however this is with high tracking, ok range and flexible damage types what makes it a bit better as you might expect on paper.

A Paladin does 1300+ dps with tachs or 1400+ with puls, what is clearly better than what other hulls get, but it is limited by damage types.

A Golem can do 1300+ dps with fully selectable damage types and no falloff penalty, however it is limited with range(40km), target size and painter cycle time.

A Kronos can do 1100-1180 DPS, however this limits it to close range sentry's, meaning a lot less dps at range and every time you can't use the sentry's overall dps is a lot less than what other marauders can do. If you now add 2 more sentry's what translates into another 120 dps up to 50km and give the ability to carry a 2. sentry wave for higher ranges, combined with the drone optimal and tracking bonus from the domi to help it keeping sentry dps up, it would be pretty good rail/sentry platform. Quite similar to the navy domi or vindicator, while lacking a bit at max dps, making it up with better damage application, combining turret and drone tracking bonuses. In my opinion, that would solve most of the issues, giving the Kronos something it does different(dps projection at any range and effective application) without making it plain better than the alternatives.

Which pirate BS out-do their respective Marauder?

Bear in mind that the Machariel is already confirmed for a nerf.

How about making them anti Capital:
Golem = Citadel torps
Kronos = Force Multiplier of when you lock a ship they can only lock you up
Paladin = limited 'fighter' bay
Vargur = ability to bridge a squad of subcaps

i indeed understood you as disapproving of the pve role of marauders. if you are not in fact against having a more pve centric marauder class, i will not argue.


when we are talking about a game that is played by hundreds of thousands of people, we cannot look closely at every single one of them, thus we have to generalize to some degree.
as for my generalizations being too wide or even insulting, obviously i disagree with you. i do not know how much experience you have in the mission running business but i've had my fair share and what i described in this post was my view of the situation. if you are not willing to take my word for it, i could go ahead and fish out some threads from missions&complexes where people explicitly ask for overtanked fits so that they can get up mid mission and take care of their baby or other posts where people explicitly care about ISK/hour, compare their best completion times, brag about their deadspace tank etc.


several points:
- please note that i am not talking about pve in general but mission running specifically. there is a substantial difference between a typical mission runner and, say, an explorer or incursion runner.
- it alienates your constituency when you put words in their mouth. no sane person would advocate an idea that he/she believes is awful to be implemented into eve.
- you falsely believe that the current state of missions is awful, not entertaining and not challenging. this is only true for the type of player who will not touch missions in the first place. sure, a typical pvp player will find missions dull and repetitive but there are other player types in eve and some of them are perfectly fine with most aspects of mission running (see above).
- with the current state of game mechanics and aesthetics, server lag, game pace and user interface it is impossible to make missions nearly as entertaining and challenging as the pve equivalent in other comparable games. you would pretty much have to scrap the entire client, and reimplement it with faster paced action, more colorful environments, more dynamic and direct controls (wasd, manual aiming), a fraction of the server latency and so on.


i will abstain from any comment other than the following: ccp tried to make archaeology and hacking more 'entertaining and challenging' for odyssey. the result is a poor man's roguelike that gets just as boring as the old system except it is now also a giant clickfest. take the hint: eve's strengths are in another castle.

Well as a point of philosophical principle I'm not really keen on the idea of a whole shipclass designed around PvE - I'd far rather see EVE's PvE have fewer, smarter rats that act more "realistically" so that PvE requirements look pretty much like PvP requirements, and don't condition players to be able to take on 20 cruisers with their Faction fitted BS.

But until that glorious day, PvE-focused Marauders don't do any real harm.

I think it would be fair to say that I'm against haveing an even more PvE-centric Marauder class. I would like to see Marauders made viable for PvP, and if my guess is right, they'll have a whole new role that needn't affect their PvE capabilities at all. Which doesn't preclude a review of their effectiveness at mission grinding, I suppose.

Of course my guess could be dead wrong and Fozzie, Rise & Ytterbium are planning to make the Marauder a specialised gas miner or something even more off-the-wall


Incidentally my understanding of the progression ladder for ships is that it's generally:

T1 -> Navy Faction -> T2 -> Pirate Faction

One of the obvious key points to the Marauder change is this.

The sensor nerf.

Consider what the reasoning for it must have been, and whether that reasoning is still valid at this point in the game.

It is an obvious detail that this was aimed to give them an obvious weakness, to balance them in PvP so they would not be the flavor of the month type of deal.
It worked too well, however. Popular opinion would have already painted them as ridiculous to use in PvP for their cost alone, not to mention not be skill training effective unless really wanted for PvE activity.

They have demonstrated a concern they don't want this ship to be too good, but it still needs to justify the effort enough to be considered as desirable as the other T2 boats out there.

i hope you are aware that baring a turing complete AI (read: skynet), this will never become a reality. sure, you can tweak the numbers, make the rats tank more and hit harder, but you will never quite achieve two main attributes of human opponents:
- unpredictability
- ingenuity

sure, you can approximate an AI that will act similar to a human player in a limited set of situations. but the broader the scope and the more degrees of freedom you get, the sooner will actual players find ways to outplay the AI by enforcing situations unforeseen by the developer. (a good example are spidertanking tengus dualboxing C4s.) as soon as the AI becomes predictable, it becomes boring and farmable. this is the reason why, even disregarding my opinion on missions in general, i would advise against wasting man months on tweaking it.


while i don't particularly mind either, i do believe that dedicating at least one of 20 or so ship classes specifically to pve combat is not a bad idea per se. whether or not marauders are 'pve enough' is another question.


this need not be set in stone either, but i have no strong opinions either way.

It doesn't need to be smarter than it is now, in that context you described.

It doesn't need to be significantly more complicated either.

It just needs to be more clever.

It can be as simple as having a random variety of different balances to NPC fights, so that predictability flies out the window, and caters instead to a generalized fit able to handle any of the possible encounters.

It can be set to include triggers, so that farming attempts can be balanced out.

To oversimplify the concept, when you play rock paper & scissors and also know the choice the opponent will make, yours becomes obvious. That is what farming is now, I got mission X, so I grab friends and use the ships with fittings to farm it.
That is boring because it is predictable.

Remove the predictable part, and employ simple safeguards against players being able to bypass the surprise.
(You can't scout the enemy ships first, etc, because they are not there till you fully commit to the encounter.)