Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I have no problem with being under attack from undock. This is my final word on this subject as others have rightly said that this is turning into a miners vs bears thread when we should be concentrating on feedback about the ship balancing to the devs.

Gank cats do not risk getting attacked by anyone, this is a straw man argument as unless your squad is under war dec, participating in faction warfare or are criminally flagged they are not at any more risk of attack until they begin the gank, at which point it's too late.

I'm all for pvp but lets make it fairer. Lets see barges that can fight back. How about a bigger drone bay and better bandwidth for a proc or a bonus to ewar lets get creative with these mining barges and pull a rabbit out of the hat. I'm not advocating invincibility for barges, but the thrill of pvp comes from killing things that can threaten you. If that's not the case you might as well turn your guns on a belt rat as opposed to a mining barge.

Could add another tech 2 line of barges: Battle Barges. Not as much yield as their Exhumer cousins, but designed with pvp in mind. (Or you could add another tech 3 line with some of the subsystems allowing for combat options...)

Given some of the really big rocks out there, maybe the Rorqual needs to be upgraded to mount capital strip miners? It's defense and agility would need to be improved a lot, before people risked it in the belts though... (I think you'd also have to remove industrial mode or something, just let it have max boosts right out of the box... or industrial siege mode could turn the Rorq into a mini-tower with a small force field (half a small tower maybe? I suggest it use strontium and have a short reinforcement timer so that reinforcements could come and help?) that other ships could hide in. The ultimate turtle mode... Heck, something like that might be useful in regular pvp fights too, unless weapons couldn't fire out of it, only mining lasers...)

Just random thoughts I've had, maybe someone else can come up with better.

If you build an active mechanic, you create active players. If you build a passive mechanic, you get the level of personal investment that you designed for. Fitting a tank still doesn't make you immune to anything. It just raises the bar of success a bit, which is fine. If I'm allowed to tank a BS to be gank resistant, no reason I shouldn't be able to do it with a barge; they don't live in a no PvP bubble and we should probably stop trying to balance them like they do.

Barges don't need more free tank. They need actual cruiser level fittings & slot layouts. hardcap the number of strip miners if you have to. Then you can actually make some choices & trade offs with Mining Barges, rather than the current extremely limited fitting options & ways to fit them.

I have to agree with this. The mack and ret are just a little bit too tough. Perhaps lower the numbers a little more to make the skiff/proc better by comparison.

If you are only thinking about gank protection, making the Mackinaw/Retriever tank equal to the Hulk/Covetor may make sense. But don't forget that they also need to be able to withstand a null sec rat spawn as well, which could produce 3-4 battleships of DPS.

In null sec mining, profit hinges on being able to stay in the belt instead of warping away from it. This is true regardless of the reason that you are forced to warp away, whether that's a rat spawn, not having the right mining crystal, a full ore hold, or a neutral interceptor one jump out. Gathering more ore per minute is somewhat helpful, but only if you can actually stay in the belt to use that capacity.

The value in ganking a barge only comes from the mods. The hulk, if I recall, has the same base tank as many t2 cruisers and if you fit a T2 tank its not going to be anywhere near profitable to gank. Even the pre buff hulk was on par with heavy assault ships with its base tank. Macks would be just fine with the hulks base tank.

Having all the sperg posters in the other threads is a good thing. We might get the barge balance right this time.

You didnt see the thread the last time they did this. 90% of it was nothing but grr goons and other gems.

You compare exhumers to cruisers, as if exhumers were not far more predictable and easier to locate.

Perhaps you had not noticed, but the ability to locate a target is a factor in it's balance. This has precedent in the covert line of craft having reduced capability in PvP, in exchange for being harder to locate and having more discretion with encounters as a result.

When you use an exhumer as intended, in a belt full of rocks, your location is not difficult to guess, and you become an easy target to both locate and organize against.
This has significant impact on the game play value of the craft, and as a result has been balanced by increasing tank where the craft are more likely to be expected operating solo.

The hulk is notably less tanked, because it is NOT intended to be solo to the same degree a mack or skiff would be. There is the correlation you seemed to imply did not exist, this ease of finding in a vulnerable circumstance.