Player Features and Ideas Discussion

If not firing missiles for a bit means you are sitting there doing absolutely nothing in a fight, then I think you aren't fighting correctly. If you don't kill the enemy by the time your rounds run out, chances are you should be doing some evasive maneuvers.

In terms of ammo types, they already said they would look into being able to switch ammo easily without a 40 second reload back at the start of the topic. It didn't make it into rubicon.

It wouldn't be able to exploit the 40 second reload timer because (as I currently understand it) it will be a 1 for 1 swap of ammo.

For example: you have 15 rounds of Fury missiles. You switch to precision but you would only get 15 rounds of precision.

or

you have 5 rounds of explosive and switch to EM. you only get 5 rounds of EM.

Will the swap be instant like crystals?

Important would be the figures on people that have success.. not everyone.

How many players with a highly positive kill ratio (The ones that can judge properly a weapon system) are using them?

First off, thanks for following the thread still. Hard to ignore it though I guess - its now the second largest Rubicon thread after marauders, and that had a months lead time.

But sadly, I had to cringe really when reading this. If the goal then, was to reduce people using the RLML by introducing an awful mechanic, then yes, you've achieved your goal. But CCP Rise said this was supposed to be 'Fun' so surely we should be seeing an increase surely?

This just makes me think you've basically introduced this to kill RLML over use, without understanding the reasons why it became popular in the first place.

1. The Light Precision Missiles hit almost every target perfectly

2. Heavy Precision Missiles hit for only a third or half their DPS against Frigates and Fast Cruisers and do less DPS than the old RLML, so why bother using them - so nobody did.

If you fit 5 Target Painters to a Caracal and its missile still can't hit at their full potential, then, clearly there is something very wrong. And please bear in mind these missiles already do far less potential DPS than their gun counterparts - yes - even at range.

I repeat - please give us the choice over the original RLML and the new burst ones - then you could truly see if anyone really wants to play with burst modules - or prefers to have more than 18 missiles in their launcher.

And fix the Heavy Precision missiles... which are a terrible, laughable joke.

Sorry but this logic is Wrong. No ship in game has a way to ensure it will hit for 100% of its potential damage against a ship of a smaller class.

Missile users want something compeltely unfair there. A rupture also cannot hit a frigate with AB to the majority of its damage, even if they use 5 tack computers and track enhancers.

Dmage mitigation HSOULD exist. Missiel users must get this into their head, turrets in some situatiosn suffer less, but in other sistuations they suffer way more.

The value might need adjustment, but is lack of reasonable thinking to expect any missile to hit for 100% of damage on an AB frigate!

Of course. I would direct your attention to the first half of my post, which makes it quite clear that metrics are only one of many methods by which we're keeping an eye on how our changes play out on the live server.

People keep saying this like it's ever actually going to happen, therefore problems solved. It hasn't and it probably never will.

I'm going to add some more words to this fairly bizarre thread!

Something that a few of you are at least partially talking about is the difference between power and fun and the relationship between them in this balance pass. I'm extremely interested in this as well and it can be very difficult to figure out how each are impacted during a given change.

The goals for this change, just to be clear, were to lower the overall power level of rapid lights somewhat as we felt they left too little room for the other medium launchers despite their intended application which is very specialized. So in less words: overall nerf, with the exception that they still need to be very good at their specialty of killing frigates.

Attached to that was the goal of keeping them as fun or more fun to use than the were before. This was motivated by the knowledge that if we simply lowered their damage output to achieve the first goal, they would be left feeling very unexciting even though they would still have value against small support.

So we have two things we can discuss now, but they should definitely be kept separate. One is power level, the other is fun.

Metrics like the one Fozzie mentions could represent a range of things, but it's very likely that power level is still more than satisfactory OR that they are so much fun to use that people are still fielding them despite being under-powered, or a combination of the two. Usage is of course also affected by momentum related to skill points and familiarity but the relative stability of use can not be explained completely by that.

edit: Oh, and in case it helps to say it at all, like Fozzie said we are watching these closely and I want to iterate on them. It's too early to know what that iteration might be but they won't get abandoned.

Power level cannot be completely dissociate from fun. Because power level dictates how often you will get frustration. Otherwise peopel would be using festival launchers on pvp.

In real eve, you very rarely can be sure you will face only frigates. If the weapon system is ONLY usable against frigates, its power level is near zero outside duels. No one ask it to be as good as hams to kill cruisers, but when your ship must run from an untanked t1 fit cruiser .. you are not going to have fun.

If you gave zealot pilots the chance to use small lasers with same bonuses they have on medium ones, but with nearly same fittings as the medium ones they would very very rarely be used.

In real eve you cannot throw away your offensive power completely like that. You can trade some, but throwing away means the frustration level will Rise (pun intended) to unbearable levels.


Also a lot of peopel use rapids because other missiles do not FIT in their ships. Keep that in mind. I for once have EXCLUSIVELY that reason to have still some ships with rapid launchers. What would happen with Hams got the same fittings?