Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Should Industrial ships be able to solo battleships?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6so9AT4UydQ

:)

It's eve bro. Bigger wallet, bigger ship, and more sp doesn't give you an autowin. There is a counter to everything, L2 not get checkmated so easily.

No. It's the literal sinking of the battleship with the anti-ship cannon. For your scenario to play out, you'd have to take that battleship into Dust.

It's not an exploit. It's using a weapon for its intended purpose. It is also an extremely incompetent battleship pilot.

No, it's how balanced combat looks like: when your ship does not guarantee you anything, especially when mixed with incompetence, and when bigger isn't automatically better. That way, you can't pay your way to victory, nor can you just rely on your skill queue to do the work for you. You actually have to do a large part of the job yourself. It means you are always at risk, rather than in some massively unbalanced state of always on top.

You keep using that word. It doesn't mean what you think it means.

It's not endless, you know that right? And you know that any WoW comparison is inherently incorrect since WoW operates on an utterly hateful, lazy, and obsolete bigger-is-better design?

Yeah, no. That's not how EVE actually works. It is how WoW works, though, where smaller stuff is flat out forbidden to do any damage to the large stuff, just so you can have a simplistic one-directional power curve that creeps endlessly upwards, obsoleting old stuff as it goes. EVE uses the much more elegant and balanced design of having hard and soft counters to everything, and no real power levels.

I guess it's easy to rag on the OP - initially. However, I think there is a point hovering in his post somewhere. It has to do with "form follows function". You can see the absurdity more with frigates, or dessies against industrials. My example would be to take your favorite Humvee and ram it into a bulldozer. See who gets off the lightest.

The purpose of a bulldozer (for instance) requires it be constructed with a certain density, size, etc., with no regard as to whether it's being fired upon, or not. However, hit the magic of EVE and industrial vehicles suddenly become aluminum foil. It's as though the "physics" required to handle metric tons of space dirt don't transfer to managing any other forces in physics.

I'd go so far as to suggest ramming a Caterpillar with an M1 Abrams would give the tank owner a heart attack at the thought of it. You look at the sheer size and density of these major mining "vessels," or earth movers today (compared to their modern armored counterparts) and you really have to scratch your head at the - extrapolations CCP designers have employed.

Getting back to the game where reality has no application (but where convenient to the programmers), when you find an entire game population flock to a particular kind of ship as THE SHIP, while a particular ship is abandoned en masse as THE SHIP THAT SUCKS, you've definitely got an imbalance that could be viewed as a material chokepoint - chokepoints being a game designing cardinal sin.

However, also, it must be said - Even though with the advent of T3 cruisers and the all but complete abandonment of battleships as being fail boats, there isn't a lot of "fleet" fighting going on. Small groups in a fleet, yes. However, fleets of the size where the various types of ships are called together to perform the myriad functions available don't seem to be happening much at all.

Is this a failure on the part of game design? Or, is it a failure in terms of how the playerbase "socializes"? Has the "trust no one" aspect of the game revealed itself in this leaving the player base to nitpick over game mechanics and individual component stats, replacing the language and interactions surrounding full-fleet functionality?

(Is this why scads of more intelligent players have abandoned the game leaving it to be populated by
two-dimensionally thinking miner gankers?)

Yes, anti-ship cannon that works on everything from drones to capital ships with equal efficiency

Big guns are designed to work on big targets and suffer a lot of drawbacks when used on small targets.
Small guns work against small targets and they work without any drawbacks. That's the problem here.

I think most Eve players understand that but don't really want to admit it because they like to use cheap ships and cheap fits and be equally efficient against any targets. All of you know what parts of Eve are broken and you know how to avoid and exploit it. That's why you can use a cargo ships with a machine gun to destroy a battleship.

That's why Eve never get more than 50k online players in weekend and went free 2 play.

No, it works at different efficiency and peaks out somewhere around large frigate/small destroyer size.

But they don't work without drawbacks. For smaller-than-intended targets, there are tracking issues that keep the efficiency down; for larger-than-intended targets, they are behind in pure power and in power projection compared to the guns that are intended for that target size.

No, I don't think that most EVE players are that wrong about how the game works. Or at least I hope not.

You realise, of course, that it gets more than 50k players online and that it hasn't gone free-to-play?

So .. gameplay-wise I think it'd be boring if you could only effectively do something against another ship when using a same-size ship.
Being less effective, ok. Battleships are less effective against frigs because their main guns have a harder time hitting.
You can still make it hard for the frigates with neuts and drones, for example.
A single frigate has it hard against a Battleship due to the high EHP .. or might not even be able to break a Battleship's tank if that BS is active tanked or has a high shield regeneration.

I think that's balanced.
If you make Battleships virtually invulnerable against smaller ships, how's that supposed to be balanced?

Lore-wise I don't think the armor of battleships and frigates is of a different quality. A battleship just has more of it, and also more volume you need to damage, hence more HP. The frigate guns still can damage the BS's armor where they hit just as much as they can damage a frigate's armor.
There is just, as already said, more armor and ship to damage in the BS case.

Guys, can't we just leave this troll alone? Look at his post history, all he does is slag off Eve and CCP.

The game is more balanced now than it's been in a long time. Look at the killboards now, and look at them two or three years ago. Notice anything different?

People stopped flying the same four or five ships. That's the major difference.

Battleships have way more HP... Where's the problem?

As a frig I use my size and Speed to ignore the BS's guns.
As a BS I use my high buffer hitpoints to ignore the frig's guns.

Both are not complete defenses, however.

As a frig if I don't keep transversal up or get scrammed/webbed, I'll die.
As a BS if I don't kill the frig and keep getting hit over and over, I'll die.

Shoot a tank with a machine gun, you will find that it causes serious issues after enough rounds.