Player Features and Ideas Discussion

In this thread we learn that Rise prefers to get his balancing feedback from external forums and only posts here to troll us and/or for posterity.

CCP Rise: If you find this thread difficult to interact with, perhaps it's worth considering how your replies, seeming to have such a dismissive attitude toward everything we've said, might have made it that way. If you don't want to know what we have to say about something, or don't actually care (with the notable and glaring exception of opinions that align with your own), don't insult us by putting up a thread about the matter and ending your post with "Let me know what you guys think".

Just say "This is what we're going to do and it's going to go live this way," and lock the thread.

We've told you what we think, some significantly more loudly than others. We've proposed alternatives and compromises and we've discussed ad nauseum where the problems actually lie and the real reason RLMLs are so popular. What we get for our time and trouble and our posting and our arguing with each other is "I find other resources more valuable for balancing feedback and don't really care what you guys think."

How completely ridiculous. How absolutely and completely ridiculous.

double

when kil2 became rise i had hopes that ccp will now care a little about small/solo

but my hopes were destroyed multiple times now.

problem is that solo needs ships/fits that are some kind of "OP" (or just really good) remember when vagabond was really good? yes it was a good small/solo ship.

but i've never heard of large vagabond fleets just shredding ppl cause it was "OP"
because what made it strong diminished with increasing number of fleet members

I want to know who gives CCP rise his metrics, which show that hmls are good weapons and that feedback in this thread is "mixed"

I think you are missing the other discussion, the one where the players are saying we missile specialists have to use RLML's because the correct sized launchers / missiles (HMLS and HAMS) simply do not apply their damage well enough in the modern pvp environment where links are so pervasive.

I think you are trying to fix the wrong problem, the way that all missiles deal their damage needs to be looked at. You are putting a sticking plaster on a bullet hole.

I just hit the preview button and was a little shocked when I saw how much i ended up typing, but I hope you will work your way through it if you value feedback as high as you say.

First off: I will not talk about the apparent problems the launchers with 40s reload will run into as I and many others covered that in other posts sufficently.

But as I already said in my last post, I really appreciate that you want to try out new stuff and play around with a little out-of-the-box ideas - it can definately make Eve a much more interesting and diverse game. I can understand that you´d love to shake shake things up with this fresh idea, I personally really like the extremely fast-shifting Eve-meta ever since the T1-Cruiser rebalance.
When you got hired by CCP and joined the balancing team you were, and probably still are for many players, a big hope for smallscale pvp, simply because of your very own, extensive experience in the area. Make use of this, you may not be the most practiced game designer yet, but instead have a much better insight into the actual day-to-day gameplay of Eve than plenty other devs, which can be way more valuable.

Another thing for you to keep in mind considering the feedback in this thread is the question WHO actually uses RLML currently. You rarely see any ships with these launchers in gangs of more than 30, maybe even 20. A big chunk of the current playerbase does not fly in smaller gangs much, and can not really evaluate the impact of these changes. This thread has gathered up ~50 pages of responses, with the majority of the profound and reasonable reactions being negative.
Now imagine the same situation, a complete revamp of a weapon massively limiting it´s useability, if it would affect large scale pvp - a thread about treating 425mm Railguns the same way would have 100 pages by now.

So, by all means, keep rebalancing things in a reasonable way. Don´t release these changes in a rush and let us be the beta-testers on TQ, those are basically all-new weapon systems, almost comparable to the new ABCs and Destroyers. Did someone come up with them 1.5 weeks before the expansion and just pulled it through? No, they were presented way earlier, and both tested and tweaked extensively on Singularity.
Just ask yourself, does it really make sense to revamp a weapon system completely before testing it properly, just to probably drastically change them again in a follow-up patch because of bad balancing and plain missing but required features like the ability to switch ammotypes without the full 40s reload, and then maybe even again in an upcoming expansion featuring all-around module overhauls and tiericide?

It´s been mentioned in this thread plenty of times already; the main reason why RLML are the medium missile system of choice in smallscale pvp in many cases is the simple fact that there are no good alternatives.
Light missiles hit untackled Frigates decently and do their max dps to basically everything else, whereas HMLs and HAMs have a hard time applying damage to Cruisers (aka ships that are meant to fit them) that is in line with the massive increase in fittings and such loss in tank.
For comparison: Heavy Pulse Lasers hit other Cruisers with close to full dps at roughly HAM range using Scorch, and up close with a web and Multifrequency - HAMs lose a massive amount of damage even against a webbed cruiser.
The only reasonable way of making such drastic changes to RLML would be as part of a complete overhaul of medium-sized missile systems, which might even show that the only rebalancing to RLML needed were slight tweaks, along with adding the alternative launchers with front-loaded dps. You didn´t remove the traditional shield boosters when introducing ASBs either after all - for the sake of diversity.

Fortunately, your idea offers the unique opportunity of both releasing the all-new mechanics onto TQ directly to gather massive feedback AND tweaking an existing weapon system that may be slightly OP. Just let the current RLML keep their behavior and adjust their stats, then add the front-loaded version as a new module.
A slight, further increase to the PG-need of RLML (up to a point where the very popular LSE+XLASB RLML Cerb does not quite work anymore with only 1 fttingmod and genolutions) combined with a ROF reduction of 5-10% would certainly be a reasonable and careful adjustment that can be done without massive testing on SiSi, and does not keep you from adding further changes in a follow-up patch. Same goes for a straight-up release of all-new launchers with front-loaded dps (feel free to name the cosmos/storyline version 'Rise' Burst Light Missile Launcher).
Keep an eye on how people use and abuse them, then react accordingly with Rubicon 1.1 via tweaks to ammo-switching etc. You´d even still have the chance to remove RLML, or rather convert them all into the burst version later on this way, without risking to remove a popular weapon along with releasing one that potentially noone will use before gathering proper ingame feedback.

I really hope that my humble opinion and all the other great posts in this thread will make you rethink your plans, do not underestimate our thoughts and evaluations - the CSM members are not in their positions because of exceptional gameplay knowledge, but because of their insight into the community and major groups of the game.
You are the game designer, we are the people who use, test and abuse the mechanics you implement - together our joint opinions are what make Eve a more fun place for everyone.

When can we expect this on the test server?

It doesn't surprise me this ridiculous idea is going forward after all it's oposite day at CCP every day.Also I don't see all this positive feedback towards a change that hasn't even hit Singularity.
And as a last thought the only reason RLML picked up any popularity was because HML were nerfed to oblivion and became totaly unreliable as a cruiser/bc weapon.

You mean they are bad pvpers and I agree.

We have various concerns from a Hydra Reloaded member here and I will take all of his opinions very serious.

They practically invented small gang and solo pvp, have tons of videos to look at and pilots that all belong in a hall of fame when piloting ships with small members or even just by themselves.


Dear CCP Rise,

from all your solo piloting experience you should know that a missile launcher doesn't make a weapon system good or bad, the pilot does.

I hate to repeat myself but I already said the those launchers have been as they are right now for about six years.

When heavy missiles got nerfed and missiles had a say in pvp at all, people started looking at other solutions for what they have trained and they didn't want to 'ditch' missiles completly from the table of options.

Light missiles are a long range missile solution for frigate sized ships. The rapid launcher has been a cruiser sized launcher for the sole purpose of anti-support.
For the better part, all things are working as intended.
(Even if they only found out recently and it only lasted a few weeks)

But if piloted by a competent pilot I doubt a Caracal or Cerberus pilot will be succesful in fighting a Thorax or a Deimos with light missiles or any other missiles we have right now for that matter.

For sake of all the killmail hungry folks out there, the new fittings of the Caracal and the Cerberus will be looking like this:

5 / 6x empty high slots
shield tank for taste or at all,point, maybe a mwd for the fun of flying at all
damage control II, 3x nano
and rename the ship at the docking bay to 'mock me naow' or 'kill me first, I can't shoot - need to reload'.

The marauder thread, we were given plenty of time to discuss the changes then it hit Sisi where we were able to field test the changes and provide further feed back.

With the hacking changes, along with the loot spew, we were given plenty of time and were able to provide feedback as the changes was being implemented. The only thing they did not listen to us about was just removing the loot spew (at least then anyway).

With the SOE thread we have had, 2 weeks maybe(?), to test out the ships, and they did not live up to there exploration hype. Feedback was strong on both sides but like you said was ignored for outside opinions.

This on the other hand, if a find load of BS (and I don't mean battleship) it was posted just over a week before the launch there is most likely going to be no time for testing it on Sisi, and despite extremely strong feedback will still be pushed through.

If nothing else CCP Rise push this steaming pile of crap feature back to 1.1 so we have some time to test it out.