Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Its still works but scrubs gon b scrubs

My bad you can ! Well I wonder what didn't work last time I tried a month ago then.

fix light missiles, then fix rapid launchers

While definately well intended, this is still a bad solution. 35 seconds is still far too long of a reload time to be useful.

In order to fix the mess a few things need to be done.


-Rebalance heavy missiles vs light and cruise missiles in general before launcher tweaking is done.

-Revert Rapid launch missiles to their original functional state with a 10 second reload.

-Reintroduce burst launchers as an upscaled launcher instead of an undersized launcher. i.e. frigates firing a volley of heavy missiles, or cruisers fire a volley of cruise etc. (1-3 volleys before a 10 second reload).

-Later Introduce rapid cruise launcher for the Phoenix.

Yeah, again, let's pretend I made every critical post in that massive threadnaught from a few months back. It was me. And my 5000 alts. Obviously.



That's certainly debatable.



I'll just jump right in where I'm most familiar here: these launchers are beyond awful for solo PvP, unless your idea of solo PvP revolves entirely around cruiser-and-below-sized faction warfare sites. The weapon works best for killing tiny ships (but even then could only kill a couple of them before going on its 40-second reload), but no tiny ship in its right mind is going to hang around and get tackled by a Caracal or Cerberus when it knows there's a good chance that the pilot will be using RLMLs (the odds are decent that they will be, since HAMs and heavies are both pretty bad). Of the things you could potentially catch in a RLML-equipped ships (namely other cruiser-and-larger hulls), there are very few things you can kill with your maximum of ~25k damage that you get (assuming you're rocking a Tengu and you keep furies loaded-- numbers for your average Caracal / Cerb will be a LOT lower-- think ~12k damage from a Caracal before reload) before your heinous reload kicks in. Basically you can hope to have a shot at killing a badly-fit T1 cruiser or a paper-tanked HAC, and that's about it. A tanky T1 cruiser, most HACs, and anything larger than that will not die in one magazine, so you then have to fall back to your sustained DPS figure and hope that rather pitiful number is enough to net you a win (unlikely). A typical Carcal with RLMLs would struggle to kill a tanky assault frigate before running out of missiles. Oh, you tried to fight a Jaguar in your frigate-death-spewing, highly-specialized gimmick Caracal? Have fun losing to your intended targets, much less anything better equipped.

Finally, as if not being able to aggressively pursue most targets wasn't enough of a black mark against an RLML ship, you've got to worry about contingencies. What if you find something lame to shoot at (and I literally mean lame as in partially disabled rather than "uncool"), but as you're shooting it another combat ship comes through the gate? You have to leave, is what, because you can't allow yourself to be tackled, because you'd never be able to finish your target and have ammo left to kill or force off the newcomer. Reloads that last the lenght of an ice-age are exactly what you don't want in a solo PvP ship-- solo PvP ships need to be flexible.

As for small gangs, in small gangs rapid launchers become insanely overpowered, especially while gatecamping or otherwise ganking. When ganking, you don't need to worry about engagements lasting very long, because ganks don't take very long. For these scenarios I can cook up a Tengu that will apply almost 800 dps out to 45km to basically any ship in the game that's larger than an interceptor. You tell me how that's balanced.

In the past, assault launchers were balanced and generally useful-- they never did ridiculous dps, but they made up for their mediocre peak damage numbers with excellent and reliable application. They were the opposite of hit-or-miss, front-loaded damage, serving as a viable counterpoint to many turret-based ships, including ones that specialized (and still specialize) in front-loaded damage. They were basically the definition of a viable compromise weapon: one someone would bring if they didn't know what they'd be fighting and wanted to be able to deal OK damage to whatever they encountered. Now they're either ridiculously overpowered in small gang contexts or ridiculously useless for solo work. Either way you look at the RLMLs, they're bad for the game.

Why don't you go back and read the previous thread yourself. The points are already written down there for you to ignore. I don't see why I should have to go do your research for you. While you're at it, you might make note of the tremendous number of other players expressing frustrations similar to my own, and Rise systematically ignoring them.

ignoring them so much that he posts a new thread proposing an adaptation to the original concept to be released in 7 days from now on the understanding that the initial proposal was inefficient?

Given that the original changes were an abject failure by CCP's own criteria, would you agree that it would be sensible for the developers to summarily disregard all feedback from those who supported the previous changes since they have amply demonstrated themselves to be incapable of reliably predicting how balance changes will affect the game?

If you failed to kill something active tanked with the high burst, how do you expect to be able to kill it with a low sustained dps instead?

2 New RLML caracals will be able to easily break a dualrep navy exeq. If it was the old RLML the navy exeq would probably permatank them.

depending on certain provisions regarding this.

1: if CCP considered the entire project an abject failure. based on reports from both CCP fozzie and Rise in the previous thread rapid light missile use appeared at the time to be preforming as expected in terms of use and metrics.

2:has any been incapable of reliably predicting how balance changes would affect the game? can you point me to a source of information which has proven itself entirely accurate on this regard AHEAD of these releases in every single circumstance without the ability to test the results? if so CCP would surely like to hire this individual. this is far from a binary situation, its not a matter of its either Right or Wrong, its a matter of achieving the effective solution which is always somewhere in the grey.

its quite demonstrably clear that the development team involved in this project makes use of a scientific method when evaluating the success of these changes. only through long term data collection and proper analysis of causation and correlation can accurate conclusions be drawn.

as it stands the Devs are unsatisfied with the initial result of the module between member base response and on server usage and, as such, are making the correct decision by making an iteration on this module on the first available point release.

to specifically answer your question: no, I do not believe that this module was an absolute failure and that any opinion, sufficiently well argued and informative should be given consideration

"I hate this" is not useful feedback

"i hate this because of the following reasons... etc" is a potential source of good feedback. the same goes for positive responses, honestly i'm not overly fond of people on my own side simply saying "this is a good change" it is certainly beneficial to my own position but doesn't help the developers discern much information.

is that a sufficient response?