Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This is going to be a very contentious one.

As someone whose bread and butter in EVE consists of small to medium scale combat (5-40 man fleets), the one current meta that is simply untouchable is the logiblob. A lot of groups do it, but the most obvious and consistent example I can reference is the sort of fleet composition Rooks and Kings traditionally runs. As a rough generalization, they tend to comp 60% buffered battleship DPS, about 5-10% tackle/support, and 30-35% guardians. Depending on the engagement in question, they may escalate with triage carriers. I'm not calling them out in particular, because a lot of groups do it, it just happens to be their trademark and they do it exceedingly well. It is not uncommon in the least for them to engage twice their numbers and come away with only one or two losses, if any at all, while having wiped out the hostile fleet and held the field.

The end result, however, is that engaging them in any sort of evenly matched fight is suicide unless you out-logistics them. Bringing enough alpha to break through a 250k EHP Abaddon before it gets repped back up is not feasible with a fleet of 20-30, or at least not realistic in practice as much as it may seem on paper and in EFT. Thus, seeing such gangs rolling around is simply a sign that it's time to pick a different destination or dock up until they've moved on. Meanwhile our fleets are forced to comp a solid % of logistics (general rule of thumb seems to be 1 logi for every 6-8 ships in fleet depending on composition and FC preference), and while in a ~20 man fleet this isn't an overwhelming amount of repping power, it quickly becomes such that unless we're up-engaging twice our size, an enemy fleet has little chance of overcoming our logistics.

Interestingly, you'll note that the tournament banned logistics pairs and RR modules on anything but the logistics because it made for very dull matches to watch. Similarly, bringing outrageous numbers of logistics makes for a rather dull and hopeless engagement for the ones without the logistics--or worse, engagements where both sides eventually give up because neither side is killing anything due to the amount of repping power on either side (I've been in a few of those--nothing more frustrating than finding a good 30v30 and having to call a stalemate and walk away with nothing to show for it besides less ammunition in your hold).

TL;DR, the fact that many groups in EVE are comping up to 40% of their fleet ships as logistics and making engagement of them in the small to medium scale of combat next to impossible is an unfortunate development in EVE. As such, I would propose that there be some sort of diminishing returns on RR. I don't propose to have math or numbers to offer--that isn't my strong suit. But I do think there should be a point at which stacking more repairs is simply ineffective. Obviously, this should scale much differently with capital reps, but I wonder if even for those there would be a role. I don't participate in enough of the large-scale capital combat to know how common it is for a flock of triage carriers to save a supercapital by simply stacking 50 CRARs on it.

There are certainly precedents for this sort of thing elsewhere in EVE. Stacking penalties on damage mods, resistances, electronic warfare (specifically thinking of damps and TDs--incidentally, fix damps on Gallente recons kthx), speed modules, etc.

I think these stacking penalties would need to be fairly limited. The goal of them would be to obsolete the meta where 10 logis in a 30 man fleet is standard. It would encourage fleets composed of more recons and DPS, using logistics in conjunction with the electronic warfare and tactical target calling to minimize the incoming damage. Ideally, it would create a situation where one fleet would not be invulnerable up-engaging 3 times their numbers simply because they have as many logistics as they have DPS ships. They should not have a noticeable effect on logi pairs or trios, but as you reach higher and higher numbers of remote repair effects on a target they should diminish more and more rapidly such that after a certain number of reppers, you're simply wasting capacitor.

I'll don my asbestos flamesuit and hope this gets plants a seed in the back of someone's mind anyway.

This rock-paper-scissors relationship actually doesn't exist at all. In fact, there is nothing correct about this post.

And here I thought it was all about the sub cap action. The more (bigger blobs) the better you all say....


To introduce stacking penalties for RR....

would amount to the same thing as stacking penalties for:

Ships shooting other ships
Ships jamming other ships
Ships scrambling other ships
Ships webbing other ships
Ships target painting other ships
Hulks mining a roid
Ships jumping through a gate
Caps jumping to a cyno





So a resounding no to this one.

-1

Great risk with stacking penalties is that remote repairs would not scale well past certain limit, rendering logistics completely useless in large fleet fights.

The problem with using ECM (in my opinion) is not so much about managing targets, but the reliability of ECM modules. In order to counter X-number of logistics effectively using ECM, you need a lot bigger number of pilots than you would by bringing logistics of your own. So it is simply more cost effective (as in how many pilots you need to spend) to bring more logistics than trying to counter them with EW.

Bottom line is that logistics need effective and reliable counter that is not "more logistics".

On the contrary, DPS is something that should overcome tanks. It makes sense that if tracking disruption has diminishing impacts on your target's turret tracking, other remote effects such as RR should too. Do RSBs have diminishing returns? Maybe they should. I'm not not sure if remote ECCM do, but perhaps they should too. I'm fairly certain tracking links do.



ECM is a pretty hard mechanic to fix I think, and another topic unto itself.

And like ECM, scrams are a yes or no type of ewar. You're either scrammed or you're not.



Fairly certain that stasis webs have stacking effects, in other words stacking 2 50% webs don't slow your target to 0 as 50%+50% do not make 100%.



I have no qualms with this, but it's fairly inconsequential as after a certain point the sig radius of a target no longer matters. And you reach that point pretty quickly with a couple of TPs.



That's actually an interesting mechanic. Black Ops BS can only bridge as much as they have fuel to bridge. Same with titans. Why not have cyno fuel needs scale based on the mass of the ships being cynoed in? Would be interesting, though would seriously cause havoc with large capital blobs.

I have between my main and alts a 6000 kill to 300 death ratio. I'm rather comfortable with my abilities. I just enjoy slugfest fights and am curious to discuss how we might make them better. And rather than dying and crying I'm making rational posts about the topic while on a roaming gang that just wiped out (an admittedly inferior) fleet. We even did it with only one logistics in fleet! Do I get a gold star?

Incidentally, neuting 15 guardians out takes an unbelievable amount of neuting power given the way they create capacitor out of thin air. And the cycle times on heavy neuts make it next to impossible to reliably do with heavy neuts, relegating you to using medium neuts. And that means you need an incredible number of medium neuts. Nevermind spreading them effectively across 15 targets well enough to hurt the cap chain.

Would make more sense, certainly. And eliminates the dice roll of attempting to use ECM on extremely high sensor-strength logistics. Not sure how it wouldn't lead to simply bringing more logistics, but I suppose in the smaller-scale fights where you need a bare minimum of DPS to have a coherent fleet, you couldn't simply overcomp logistics to offset the possibility of anti-RR ewar.

Would be interesting. Not sure how CCP would fit it into the existing meta where every ewar has a racial background and specific ships tailored to them, but perhaps it's better that such ewar does not have any ships tailored to bonus them.

Logistics in large fleets (those over 50-60) is already an obsolete meta. Fleets of that size can easily alpha through ships with arty rendering logi pointless.

Currently, using other weapons (besides arty) in fleets this size is sub optimal. Using blasters or autos, for example, opens up the possibility of the primary getting repped back up to full health once 10-20 guards (or one or two triage carriers) cycle on him once. Nerfing the ability of logi to do that might actually make these weapon systems effective again at these fleet sizes.

Another problem with logi, is that in the 10-50 gang size range, it is a complete waste for a smaller fleet to engage a larger fleet that is comped with heavy logi (IE: pretty much all of them.) The smaller fleet has no ability to inflict any kind of loses at all, and the larger fleet can engage with impunity.

I am not saying that a fleet of 10 pilots should be able to win a fight against 20-30, but they should be able to at least take a few down with them. As it stand, in that situation you are unlikely to even kill support ships.

If you change the balance (by this, or some other means) between logi and DPS, you will give smaller gangs more of a reason to be in space.

Edit: I can not count the number of gangs I have seen in space in the 10-40 range which were comped 30-40% logi. I recently came across a gang of 4 canes and 6 guardians..... sad thing is, I can not really think of any comp that could beat that with roughly even numbers. Besides of course simply bringing more logi and repping each other to a stand still. This is not the game that I want to play.

+1 to OP.

Not 'cause he's in the same alliance/whatever, but that it's an interesting idea that gives people a chance to "punch up" considerably. Or simply reducing RR amounts (nerfing, bleh) would be feasible.

I'd say removing cap transfer bonuses is a bit of a stretch, but reducing amounts there isn't terrible ( and inb4 "yeah right broski watch my epic reply countering your terrible logic...BAM")

Between the two, I'd go with some form of RR-negating Ewar. CCP already has the mechanics to do dimishing returns ♥ so there you go!

Good post. And I certainly agree that I have no idea where best to draw the line, which is why I wonder if perhaps an anti-RR-effectiveness ewar is a better solution. Decreasing at 2 seems silly, they were made to be used in pairs. Maybe you see a very very slight drop on the third to maybe 95%. 4 90%--not noticeable numbers until you hit a certain point, at which point it steadily slopes upwards. The issue is, at what point, as you say, do they become useless, and I don't really know.

The issue of hostile fleets using RR on their primaries to nerf the effecits is a nasty one, and I'd not even thought of it. Glad you brought it up. It makes me lean ever harder towards a form of ewar over a simple stacking penalty.