Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You implicitly confirm what I stated earlier: you do not want the Bastion to be balanced around some abstract principles, you just want Vargur to receive more advantage, relatively to other marauders. Mind you I'm not saying that wanting it is bad in itself. I just prefer to be perfectly clear whether we're talking "I want more power" vs. "I want more balance".

And your proposal, even though I like it, by my books falls in the former category. Or you didn't make your case clear enough in balance terms. Sorry to say it, but so far what I read is only "I want more power for Vargur". Reaver Glitterstim have put it in better words than I could.

Let's theorycraft for a while. The very first problem starts with evaluating optimal vs. falloff. To cut story short, let's assume the rule of thumb that 1km of optimal is worth 2km of falloff and subsequently declare that effective range is optimal+falloff/2. And even if you equalize everything else, you still run into trouble. Take two hypothetical guns. First: 50km optimal, 0 falloff. Second: 0 optimal, 100km falloff. Theoretically they should have comparable performance, yes? No. How, or more precisely, AT WHICH POINT do you equalize dps? At optimal? The quasi-AC will be severely nerfed. At falloff? Then it's out of whack. At half falloff? Better, but it still depends on what is the distance of typical engagement.

My point is that even if you abstract and equalize what you can, you still run into apples vs. oranges. Which means that the question of balance is never easy. Which is why I usually don't bother with such analysis and I prefer to check the final results. And here, just for your convenience, I took my Vargur out. While I don't grind as hard as I used to, those few missions I tried felt normal. Just today I had WC and finished whole BR leg and was well into chewing on Angels at entry gate when first tick arrived, pretty much the same timing as I had with blaster-Kronos. So what do you want, having 25% ISK/hr more than other marauders?

In other your post you wrote: "Something about an AC ship losing overall mobility and gaining the special ability to become immobile, all while gaining the least in benefits from projection, doesn't sit right. Vargur has gone from awesome to dust collector. I don't care if its awesome or not, I just don't like the dust collector status"

If you put it this way, have you considered the possibility that the problem may be not within a ship and/or modules but lay between keyboard and a chair?

Let's focus on this bit.

Why? Why Vargur needs to be buffed and Paladin to be nerfed? This is the question I want to have answered. This is the question of balance. And since you remember our discussions from rebalancing thread, you should also remember that I like theory only up to the point and after that I prefer discussing real data from live server. The data which I personally gather whenever I can and share when asked, more often than not not having favor returned. I am the first to admit that I may use suboptimal fits and fly ships in suboptimal way but at least I try to make some measurements and base my conclusions on them. If you want to change my convictions, post your results: what you had with your old Vargur, with new Vargur and with new Kronos.


Now we're going somewhere. See, I don't claim the bastion is balanced (which doesn't mean I claim it isn't). I only didn't see convincing proof that the ships using it are not.


I do, though I not always remember that. ;) But the point was that (re)balancing is much more complex than just juggling two or three parameters.


See above. I only didn't see the proof that Vargur is now too weak.

As a side note, your analysis had interesting quirk. You have compared Vargur using RF ammo with Kronos/Paladin using T2. I know reasons for that but the fact remains: if you want more range you can load Barrage. Or consider this, the fact that RF can be used for most engagement distances, maybe it means that AC range is so much OP that it makes sense to use regular/faction ammo instead of T2?


First off, this remark wasn't intended as personal attack and if it looked like, my apologies. I mentioned PEBKAC specifically because it is one of the very first things I myself try to eliminate before I start complaining about anything. And let's be honest, that argument of yours fits the bill. Which, let me repeat, is okay. If the ship doesn't feel right to the point you don't want to fly it, it's normal to demand to have it changed. Just let's not call it balance issue (unless good amount of players is having the same problem but you have dismissed proof-by-survey, haven't you? ;)

which translates to: optimal and falloff bonuses both affect the range without affecting the DPS-to-range mechanics already in place. So they're equal bonuses as long as they are giving a proportionally equal bonus to overall range.

The problem with the Vargur is if it was to be given enough of a falloff bonus to give artillery the same kind of bonus to range that the paladin's lasers get, it would be so high that autocannons would be getting way too much of a range bonus.

the problem is that none of you nor CCP is any good at math. This would fix everything:

Lets say for balance purposes we want the effective optimal and falloff to compare something like this:

Beam laser: 11+3=14
Pulse laser: 6+2=8
Railgun: 11+7=18
Blaster: 2+2=4
Artillery: 6+10=16
Autocannon: 1+4=5
(I chose these numbers to remain similar to the originals while also not allowing two turret types in the same class (ie. artillery and autocannons) be too different from each other. The balance between range and damage/other effects is done out side of this exercise, this is only to make sure our effective range actually works in practice.)

Now as anyone with experience firing turrets at various parts of falloff is aware, shooting at 25% falloff makes very little difference in your damage application. Shooting at 50% falloff yields a lot less damage, but you're still making decent hits. Shooting at 75% offers strongly diminished damage, and shooting at 100% of falloff gives barely any damage at all. Anything much past 100% of falloff is too little to really matter. This is due to the logarithmic curve that the falloff equation follows. So clearly to balance falloff with optimal, we have to set the ideal equivalent for optimal at less than 100% of falloff.
Take a look at this chart: https://wiki.eveonline.com/wikiEN/images/a/a4/Falloff.png
50% falloff yields about 80% damage. This holds true in-game, 80% damage is a decent hit but it feels more diminished than it really is because cutting your dps by 20% greatly increases the dps margin between you and another ship. The real question is how far out is the damage effective? To answer that, you must compare with how damage scales through swapping ammo types to increase range. Long range ammo deals 62.5% of mid-range DPS at 160% of the optimal. It's hard to get a clear scaling because the ammo types don't match for different turret types, but we can get a rough estimate--about 145% net range for all turrets put together but excluding autocannons. This shows that if we put (1/1.45=0.689) the 62.5% DPS point at 145% of effective falloff (about 70% of total falloff), we would be putting effective falloff for optimal comparison at 48% (50%?) of total falloff. Putting it there would make falloff pretty similar to an automatic ammo swapper that changes your ammo to the type to best hit your target at any given range. So obviously we want it higher than 50%. Since it has to be clearly higher than 50% and clearly lower than 100%, lets put it at 75%. That strikes a good balance between taking advantage of the flexible range and suffering from the decreased DPS at longer range.

1/0.75=1.3333 so without further ado, I present to you the new range values for our new, balanced, turrets:

Beam laser: 11+4=14
Pulse Laser: 6+2.67=8
Railgun: 11+9.33=18
Blaster: 2+2.67=4
Artillery: 6+13.3=16
Autocannon: 1+5.33=5
I didn't forget to update the totals. The totals are the net effective range of the turrets.

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Now that we have made a completely new set of turrets, we must redesign the optimal and falloff bonuses. We're still going to give amarr and caldari ships an optimal range bonus because their weapons use mainly optimal. We'll give minmatar ships a falloff bonus because they use more falloff than optimal. Gallente ships can get a falloff bonus if we want them to have a clear preference for blasters, or they can ignore range bonuses. All depends on ship designs which are built and balanced after we have the guns working.

To balance skill bonuses, we need to average what they are covering. Given the effective range numbers at the top of my post, we can conclude that the average percentage of the total effective range that is optimal range or falloff in each category is:
Beam Lasers: 11/14= 78.6% optimal
Pulse Lasers: 6/8= 75% optimal
Lasers overall: (78.6+75)/2= 76.8% optimal

Railguns: 11/18= 61.1% optimal
Blasters: 2/4= 50% either
Hybrids overall: (61.1+50)/2= 55.6 optimal

Artillery: 10/16= 62.5% falloff
Autocannons: 4/5= 80% falloff
Projectiles overall: (62.5+80)/2= 71.3% falloff

Running out of space here so trust me on these numbers: cruiser weapons in live EVE have 200% of the range and 133% of the DPS of frigate weapons, battleship weapons follow the same trend over cruiser weapons. Combat frigates fit an average of 3 weapons, combat cruisers 5 weapons, and combat battleships 7 weapons. This puts the DPS scaling at 3/6.67/12.4 or cruisers +122% and battleships at +86.7%. So it's approximately double range and double DPS when going up a ship class. This shows an intent for range and DPS to scale about the same, similar to what we saw near the top of the post. If we trust CCPs vision (it hasn't been proved wrong yet), then we should make range modifiers give the same bonus as DPS modifiers. So we want +5% net effective range per skill level. That translates to:
Amarr: 5/0.768= +6.5% optimal per level
Caldari: 5/0.611= +8% optimal per level
Gallente: 5/0.5= +10% falloff per level
Minmatar: 5/0.713= +7% falloff per level
Voila! Balanced the range bonuses:

Now put tracking enhancers at +15% optimal and falloff, and tracking computers at +20% each, or put TE at 10/20 and TC at 25/12.5 so that it increases the variation between the two. Either way works.

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And that's how you build a balanced range setup. Next step is to balance the other functions of the turrets, and finish with a DPS setup that smooths them all out. If any end up with hugely different DPS to compensate for some other oddity or complication, they might be poorly adjusted. I have no room to give examples. Point is, when making changes, you have to find the root of the problem and fix it there, no matter how deep that may be.

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." -Carl Sagan

dreading the post at this point...


If these are in reference to additional optimal / falloff given by bastion, with what ammo and guns? You are also screwing ACs.

If you are attempting to rework entire weapon systems, you should start a new thread.


yeah... This probably should go into a different thread. Possibly start a new one and get feedback?



didnt you lead with saying that no one at ccp is any good at math?





Actually it's: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

The point you pretty much missed is that the mere fact that you and chaosgrimm fly Vargur better than I do, the fact which I accept without any kind of proof, does not invalidate my argument. You do it only by providing how Vargur's performance has changed over the Rubicon and compare it to another Marauder.

In short, ticks or GTFO.

"percentages below show change from the sums of optimal and falloff."

This was the percent of range increased from activating bastion.

Ex: for the pally with 2 tracking comps w/ opt range, the 17.4% describes percent increase from the sum of optimal+falloff before and after bastion is activated. 14.6% the increase the vargur gains in the same conditions.
This is:
X = sum of opt+falloff before bastion
Y = sum of opt+falloff after bastion
Finding the percent increase from x -> y

You argued that 25/25 was fair because:
optimal * 1.25 + falloff * 1.25 is overall a 25% increase to range. When you factor in stacking penalties it doesnt work that way and favors optimal. Essentially, the 2 TC scenario is:

Pally:
Optimal * bonuses + falloff * bonuses is a 17.4% overall range increase when activating bastion

Vargur
Optimal * bonuses + falloff * bonuses is a 14.6% overall range increase when activating bastion.

The effect of activating bastion increases the pally's total range by a larger percentage (not talking about static distance) than the vargur's even though the bonus is 1:1

Yeah, of course. Though I was pointing that you were pointing that Paladin gets 17,4% from bastion but skipped that it's 17.4% contribution to total 53,3% net gain of 33km absolute gain. By the same token, while you mention Vargur gets "only" 14,6%, it's 14,6% contribution to 87% of total gain of 44km absolute gain.

I feel we start repeating our arguments.

You: bastion is imbalanced because Vargur gets lower falloff bonus than Paladin to optimal
I: maybe, but show me how does it hurt performance
You: it does because Vargur's relative bonus is lower
I: okay, but how does it affects your game?
...and ad nauseam.

I obviously failed to produce an argument which could convince you and you are unable or unwilling to produce the one I requested, which could make me reexamine my convictions. Unfortunately until that happens I don't believe I could add to the discussion anything of value.

Name one of them. Point me where I made a mistake. And if I didn't, why do you accuse me of trolling?


Yes, though not including stacking of course. And since all ships we're talking about already fly in well stacked configurations, I honestly don't care what bastion's contribution is. I use it for ubertank and for EWAR immunity and if it had no gun bonus at all I wouldn't give a damn.


Now you're nitpicking. It's you who started to compare Paladin's optimal to Vargur's falloff. But if we go this way, let's go further and include hull bonuses. This way we have (still bastion + 2x TC scenario):
Megapulse+scorch: 45+10; on Paladin: 94,9+18,7; delta: 49,9+8,7; gain 110%+87%
AC+Barrage: 6+36; on Vargur: 9,2+101; delta: 3,2+65; gain 53%+180%

While we're at it, you have used as a reference the fact that TC and TE give 1:2 split bonus. But have you noticed that ship's bonuses are 7% and 10% respectively?


Which doesn't stop surprising me as I thought it to be one of easiest things to do. Since my early days, after the ohmygod-I-can-run-l4s adrenaline rush waned I started to pay attention to how long does it take to complete my missions. Not long after I noticed my walled icon blinking from time to time and upon closer inspection I learned about bounties and ticks, of which I started to observe both trends and variances. Not to the point of keeping full records of every mission, just enough to have good grasp how things are going. This way when I switched from Myrmidon to Ishtar I knew my typical ticks raised from 4 mil to 6 mil, then I could see what improvement I got when used Proteus, what Megathron Navy was good for, how old Kronos compared to Vindi, how Vargur rocked and how Machariel was awesome. And precisely this is why I claim that new Kronos is on the same level as new Vargur.

Yet it seems I'm the only one doing it because every time I ask anyone to provide me similar kind of data, I get forum equivalent of blank stare.

Come on! If you measure your performance in any way, all I ask is to share this exact data. And if you don't measure, how the hell do you know which ship is weaker and which is stronger?

[....] You do not understand falloff[....]
[....]you dont understand projection[....]

...sez dude who asked to discuss the ship, not the pilot.

I wouldn't go as far as that. They are not fountain of wisdom but they are not stupid either. They are humans and the job is really hard (at the same time being cool and exciting, not doubt). You can push in your preferred direction and ignore any argument against while they have to deal with thousands of people like us, every one of them them pushing in their own way and with no possibility to make everyone happy at the same time.

The fact they do not do what you tell them to do is not in itself a sufficient proof of math ignorance. Just saying.