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Still not seeing this change on SiSi - any idea when it'll be there?

Gameplay now as a blaster boat pilot is like being the fish and the Minmatar the fisherman. The Fish decides to commit. The fisherman can decide to keep it or let it go.

Make our ships faster. Make our guns hit like hammers.

this is why I was saying remove mass increase from metal plates altogether, replace it with a senor strength hit.

100% agree. Give gallente some "sprinting" to jump on the victim for showing what short-range power mean.

interesting

If you buff blaster boats base speed, people will just fit ACs and have a better kite boat than Minmatar itself. Nerfing Gallente agility also doesn't make sense at all, since they require good enough agility to orbit at the very tight range of blasters.

Again, what Gallente lacks is a way to be considerably faster for a brief period of time, just enough to get into blaster range, and be penalized on MWD capacitor usage to force a balance between cap drainage from sprinting vs. cap available to actually shoot the blasters. The MWD bonuses mentioned are a way to achieve this. It's just like the RoF bonus most Minmatar boats get or the capacitor bonuses to Amarr - it's the bonus that gives you an edge when you fly the boat the way it's intended to be flown.

Turning Gallente into Minmatar is not the answer to fix blasters. Also, you don't fix the game by nerfing Minmatar.

do you know you can overload your mwd?

It seems like everyone agrees that blaster-equipped ships need some sort of significant tactical advantage over AC-equipped ships, but damage, range and speed buffs all have serious pros and cons - some which make blasters too much llike ACs and others which make Gallente ships too much like Minmatar ships. So, here's another suggestion for the fire:

How about making projectile ammo take up more space? Say, 400% larger. And reduce cargo space on Minmatar ships by about 50%?

Minmatar ships would be logically faster, due to smaller cargo holds (ie. less mass), and have good weapons to match their speed, but cannot carry nearly as much ammo as a blaster boat.

This would put a stricter limit on how long an AC ship can kite in a battle, before running out of ammo. And, it would put a tighter limit on the ability of Minnie pilots to simultaneously carry all damage types, which makes it more likely that a Minnie pilot could be caught without the optimal ammo for every encounter and range, or even run out of ammo completely. Ammo vs. cap charges would also become more of an issue - which is fair since Minmatar ships are a lot less cap hungry.

Now, this change still allows the solo Minmatar AC ship to keep a reasonable advantage in most one-on-one encounters with blaster boats, and leaves the Minmatar arty alpha strike capability intact, too, but gives the Minmatar projectile ships a larger disadvantage in extended or multi-ship combat, due to the greater possiblility of running out of ammo faster than the other racial ships or weapon types. It makes overall logistics more fun, too, since a Minmatar fleet/gang would need to bring along more ammo haulers, which would make for vulnerable targets of opportunity.

BTW - I got the basic idea for this suggestion from watching Clear Skies 3 (again).... :)

An alternative ammo-related suggestion (but requiring more coding work) would be to add mass to the ammo, with projectile ammo as the heaviest type. So, more ammo means a slower, less manueverable ship. As you use up ammo, your ship would be lighter - ie. faster and more manueverable.

An empty Minmatar AC ship would be faster than an empty Gallente blaster boat, but a fully loaded Minmatar AC ship would be slower than a fully loaded Gallente blaster boat, since projectile ammo would have greater mass than hybrid ammo. Somewhere in between, the ships would have the same speed. As a nice side effect, laser ships would have an added advantage of no speed/agility penalty, since they don't need to carry tons of ammo.

This change would force pilots to consider how much ammo to load, too, since it would compromise the speed/agility characteristics of the ship. It also makes ejecting your ammo into a viable combat tactic, if you need to kick up your speed/agility to catch someone, or to GTFO.

What if you got a bonus to MWD overloading on blaster ships? IE 15% bonus to overload effect of MWDs per level, that way blaster boats would be able to close that distance, but would be completely unable to rely on that effect long term, you could even make it 15% bonus to overload effect and heat production of MWDs per level, so they'd overheat faster but overload better.

Thoughts?

If you fight with a blasterboat you need to be in scram range. This is a big Problem, especially when you get baited.
What about to make Gallente Ships imun against scrams ? Then they have a good role in my view.