Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Question: would giving interceptors anchored bubble immunity yet having them remain vulnerable to interdictor bubbles constitute a good compromise solution?

It would make null more dangerous for 'theme-park nullbears' while still allowing small gangs to delay pursuing fleets. Thoughts?

Yes it is risk free. The only thing that will catch intys after this goes live will be smart bombing battle ships.

And no! Remote sebo'd ships will not catch intys due to module delay. To catch a inty, even with a insta lock, you need 1 sec for the server tick to apply the warp disrupter. 99% of intys will be long gone by time the server applies the disrupter.

If you don't understand what I am talking about I suggest you go pvp for a while before trying to sound smart again!

You have never gone into an instalock gatecamp haven't you ?

The only time I've ever been caught in a low sec gate camp was when I was three months old and jumped a mission-running Myrmidon into a gate camp. Anyone who gets caught in low sec is careless, drunk, inexperienced, or very unlucky. Anyone who gets caught in 0.0 is not scouting properly - but if I am well-prepared and lucky I can at least kill his scout.

0.0 is already bad enough with cloaky-nullified T3s (which should have to choose one or the other, not both!), but at least that ship costs a few hundred million. The only way you kill them is if they are slow to cloak up (i.e. lag) and then slow to align - or if they choose to engage and it was a bad idea.

It is ridiculously easy to avoid PvP in Eve - all you have to do is dock up - but it should be harder if you choose to stay in space. I would like to encourage people to make an active defense of their space. If I make a reasonable effort to lock down a 0.0 pipe with a small gang, I should be able to accomplish that - until another gang pushes me aside or maneuvers around me. If people can pass through my camp with impunity, or avoid death with impunity, then my ability to secure my space with an active defense is greatly diminished. Right now, except for cloaky-nullified T3s, there is good balance. A covert ops can be caught by a well-prepared, lucky gate camp. An interceptor can be caught, or at least forced back to the other side. Interceptors will still get caught after this change, but not unless they are careless, drunk, or inexperienced. I've used plenty of remote-sensor boosted gangs - but catching an interceptor is more than just getting a lock on it.

An inty gang will only get caught if it is overly aggressive. Most inty gangs will be able to roll right past defensive gate camps (they can already, but inties will be much more common after Rubicon). This makes a mockery of the notion that 0.0 spaceholders will be able to mount an active defense of their space (and thereby generate good fights and other content).

I hate the idea that certain folks have bubble-protected ratting sanctuaries, but a single covert ops or recon ship inside of that puts all those ratters at risk. That is a viable answer (ratting with neutrals in local is a time-honored recipe for death) to the problem. I'm also perfectly fine with making it so that anchorable bubbles cannot be anchored within x-distance of a gate. Drag bubbles will still be viable, for those who are skilled in their placement. But no ship should be able to warp through a bubble with relative impunity - and certainly not a cheap, low-skilled ship like an interceptor.

Rubicon Interceptors are the 2013 equivalent of the old warp-core stabilized ships and the nano-ships that followed them. Those risk-free doctrines were justifiably purged from Eve and interdiction-nullified ceptors should never come to Tranquility.

Yeah, if they were only immune to anchored bubbles, that'd be fine and wouldn't really screw over small gang FC's in any way. I don't believe the "balancing" Devs have the ability to generate original code, however.

The best solution, however, is to simply disallow anchored bubbles from being anchored within 40-50km of a gate. Then interceptors no longer have any benefit to bubble immunity, as ratters and renters wouldn't be able to stop people from entering systems and immediately going into warp. It not only fixes the problem of renters/ratters hell-bubbling entry gates, but removes the ability to anchor large bubbles all over regional gates. Such a change would empower DIC/HIC pilots, rather than mitigate their effectiveness.

Let me introduce you to the post rubicon crow fleet: a 5kms uncatchable gang of talwars with 650 alpha per crow. They can speed tank pretty much anything, go straight through bubbles, actually fight other fleets if you've got a competent anchor and target caller(you cant rely on 1 dude to manually pilot a crow and call targets at the same time). With 15 crows you got 1500 dps and approx 9,5k alpha strike that can be applied to anything within 60km. They can realistically only be killed by smartbomb bses or specialized counters like rail taranis, even in the latter case the crows can just bail like they don't give a damn.

RLML ships are no threat to crows, they're usually used in small gangs and have no way of catching a crow. Scare a lone frigate? Get 50 of these crows and try and fight any nullsec fleet doctrine, if the crows are skilled it will be a pretty one sided battle. They could literally anchor up and orbit the enemy fleet 1shotting any hyenas or huginns trying to slow em down.

I had great fun flying talwar fleets in pizza, there were alot of people who underestimated the fleets enough to welp solo cynabals and vagabonds and what not thinking "it's just destroyers". A solo cerberus does not apply much damage to an MWDing crow moving at close to max speed, and if I have to sacrifice one for a cerberus kill then I think the only one who will be dissapointed would be the cerberus pilot. As for keeping targets tackled, did you suppose the crows would be alone? You can just add a bunch of tackle ceptors for the people that cant use missiles well and you'll have a completely bubble immune gang that could potentially kill ratting carriers and what not.

And FYI, I probably have more than 100 frigate losses in nullsec and even more in lowsec - making assumptions like that on random people in an internet argument can backfire horribly.

Interceptor gangs aren't no terror, but they might very well become. Interceptors are generally pretty irrelevant in lowsec in the first place so I don't understand why it was brought up.

Imagine that


In low or null ? They aren't in lowsec and the change we are talking about actually makes them act as if they were in lowsec... bubble immunity, the only thing that will make them a terror is nullsec residents' inability to cope with a paper thin fast moving wolfpack that hasn't troubled lowsec residents in the slightest, certainly not enough to make a thread about it.

Indeed, single inties catching big targets may be but we are talking about the terrorizing inty wolfpack of doom that will pillage all of nullsec and nobody will be able to stop them (you brought that up) The fact is, as you said, inties are pretty irrelevant in lowsec. If the gang you describe was so OP without the aid of bubbles to stop them we'd have heard about it already from lowsec residents, but as you said... they're irrelevant.

What I do not understand is why you started off arguing against this change from the viewpoint of small gang pvp (a viewpoint that had some merit) and have inexplicably switched to the nullbears' "OMG inties will kill errything and nobody will able to stop them" viewpoint, which is frankly, ridiculous and not supported by the already existing reality in lowsec where bubbles have never existed.

I like your earlier arguments much better, even agreed with some of it.