Player Features and Ideas Discussion

OMG, it takes two to kill them according to your blog:



Oh the horror...the horror...

As for the epithal and making it easier to do PI...maybe that was CCPs intent. Didn't stop to think of that did you? In fact, you are implicitly calling CCP devs dopes. You are implying they had no idea this ship would be a buff to PI which would lower prices (holding other factors constant).

BTW, the fit is a no brainer if you are doing PI in low sec. In null, fitting 3 or 4 WCS may not be ideal since a bubble renders those slots with WCS as wasted.


So, to recap...trying to kill a ship that has no DPS solo is not as easy (you could do it, just not in the cloaky T3 those leet WH PvPers love so much) as it once was, and they give a boost to PI. Which CCP probably foresaw...which makes the whine for a nerf all the more questionable. I'm sorry, I'm still not seeing the problem.

I think the only real counterargument here is that the Epithal has become a better ship in the PI role overnight, shifting the balance of power a bit. Does that remind you of anything? Like, for example, the introduction of the covert T3 shifting the balance of power massively to the benefit of cloaky ganking?

The only difference here between then and now, is that now PI haulers have bigger cargo bays. The trade off between WCS and agility/tank still exists. Likewise when you go roaming, you accept the tradeoff of being able to engage some targets well, and some targets poorly. This thread has shown how easy it is to kill an Epithal, especially in W-space, if you prepare correctly and accept your tradeoffs. One of those tradeoffs is that a cloaky T3 is not the best ship for killing haulers (although if you practice bumping you'll find it's easy as pie), and allowing it to be would overshadow the roles of other ships and be far more unbalancing than the Epithal change.

This thread reaminds me of a joke....

How many Eve Players does it take to change a light bulb? 250,000, one to screw it in and the other 249,999 to whine ***** and moan about how the last one was better.

No, no, no they could have a tank of 17,000 EHP and given that most don't have any...DPS...uhhh....oh Hell....

Regarding Meyr's posts. I think he has a point that when industrialists doing PI complained about gate camps in places like low sec the response was very much like the ones he has been posting. A bit of what was good for the goose, is now good for the gander, IMO.

As for the epithal's potential tank and WCS...one point that has largely been ignored is that this is exactly what CCP wanted with the upgrades to haulers. Are people seriously considering the Dev's are morons and could not see the obvious fits and impact the epithal would have on PI? That is how I read the OP. A translation could be,

"Devs, you dummies you have buffed PI and the haulers used in that unfairly. Know I can't gank them with impunity, I actually have to change my tactics and work a bit more! And now they'll make even more ISK!!!"

That is not a very generous reading, but it reminds me of joke about Eve players:

How many Eve players does it take to change a light bulb? 250,000. One to screw it in, and 249,999 to whine, b!tch and moan about how the old light bulb was better.

The OP is one of the 249,999.

Yes, this is a buff to PI...but at the same time has any dim bulb whining about this buff also considered that there the change to HS custom offices being replaced by POCOs could very well be a nerf? I very well expect HS custom offices taxes to go up as PvP corps/alliances in HS take them over. Some of the LS corps and alliances might do the same. Even some null alliances might do it for luls and set the tax rate at 100% effectively locking people out of those planets.

Lets run through some quick numbers (after all this is Spreadsheets Online right)....

Lets say you have a set up on a planet pulling in lets say 600,000 P0s every 3 days and crapping out 4,000 P1s. Lets say the P1s are Chiral Structures which Eve-Central go for about 550 isk/unit lets say. So those 4,000 P1s have a total value of 2,200,000 isk. Now currently at 17% tax 374,000 isk goes "away"...nobody gets it. But if you go and blap the CO and replace it with a POCO and keep the tax rate the same, that 374,000 isk will go into your pocket...and once you have replaced the CO with a POCO you earn that isk doing...wait for it...wait for it...nothing. A somewhat passive income stream.

Now, lets say there are 10 guys using that planet and now your potential income every three days is 3,740,000 isk. And you had to buy the stuff for the POCO, shoot the old CO and you realize you might have to protect/defend your POCO, so you up the tax rate to 25%. Now you get 550,000/PI guy or 5.5 million every 3 days. Or 55 million every month. Your corp/alliance decides to grab 20 such planets and now you have 1.1 billion isk coming in/month. And if you are a corp/alliance that enjoys PvP you also have something that could generate fights. Win-win.

Of course, with a tax increase some players might say, "Forget it, not enough isk given the time spent doing PI," so you lose 1 PI guy and have only 9...so you income takes a 10% hit...so your POCO income drops, but it is still substantial (990 million isk). But this also means overall PI output might decline. It is a well known result in economics: you want less of something...raise its price. Works here in Eve too. And a tax increase is essentially a price increase. I'll spare you the details on this, but if you want just go google deadweight loss and look at the pictures (hint: wikipedia has a great page on this).

Now, it is speculative that these changes will have exactly offsetting effects, but still the apparent buff to PI is not the only thing going on. Hence part of the OPs diatribe is dubious, IMO. And making a post saying, "I can't kill these ships that pose almost no threat to my ship nearly as easily"--and lets make no mistake in low sec without WCS any industrial ship will be slaughtered much sooner than later--smacks of an overblown sense of entitlement.

I also find this complaint rather amusing that people who live in Low Sec often complain that they want more people to kill...errr there. So CCP does something to make PI in low sec considerably more viable and thus potentially boosting the traffic in low sec...and the people complaining about lack of traffic complain...oh the irony.

TL;DR: Changes to industrials are being followed by a potential nerf to PI, thus at least partially offsetting the concerns that the epithal is a buff to PI. Complaining about making a ship with extremely poor combat capabilities a bit harder to kill displays an overblown sense of entitlement--i.e. they are not impossible to kill (as the title of this thread implies).

Let me also add, that a change to the epithal with no other changes to PI could, in the long run, be an indirect nerf on PI....

Why this is so is left as a homework assignment to the economically illiterate.

My personal (uneducated) opinion is that this issue has more to do with warp core stabs being a poorly designed module than with any particular ship being over powered. It is way too binary that you can either warp or you can't. Any counterplay has to come from refitting the ship instead of being done tactically in space. Should industrials have a fighting chance at escaping from a ganker? Sure. They should have to fly their ship to gain this advantage, not be automatically immune because of fit. Both bumping and mwd/cloak tricks have a much more positive impact on the game than the point interaction between stabs and scrams/disrupters.

I can really sympathize with meyr on this point, for years any time someone pointed out that miners and indy's were paper thin and hugely unbalanced a slew of "LOLZ LOOK AT MORON NOT BEING LEAT PEEVEEP, MOAR TEARZ PLZ!!!!!" would rain down.

So it is hard not to rub it in a PVP characters face when they start complaining.

That having been said, indys are super easy to bump. The cloaky/nullified proteus can pop one in four seconds, and anchor a bubble to catch it in a larger system. They are still paper thin and unable to fit any form of actual tank, so any decent hunting ship can basically instapop one.