Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Edited out some stuff

I'm not going to sit here and talk about how missiles are so much better or how they're so much worse.

I'm not even gonna talk about how that most of them are long range but most effective at close range.

Missiles are my passion. Love 'em. I love watching my torps explode on a target. I enjoy having the versatility in range and damage type. However, what I don't enjoy is waisted volleys, lacking effectiveness in pvp, being turned down for incursions cause I'm using missiles, and what I hate the most is watching a target blow up from a drone boat with less dps before my volleys even get there.

So with that in mind, here's what I had in mind

Greatly increase missile velocity
Greatly decrease missile flight time
Balance accel time to give us the same ranges we have now.

What a lot of people don't understand is that a missile boat's dps is the same at long range as it is close up, the only difference is the amount of time for the dps to initiate on the target. However, greatly increasing the velocity means that missiles simply initiate dps sooner, but still hit the target every 10 seconds(or whatever cycle time is) thus not actually increasing or decreasing dps.


The next thing is new missile graphics.

After thinking about it for a while I figured out a way to make them work that won't effect lag server, but instead will effect the server the same way a missile volley does now.
First off, if they're not vollied, then they'll have the same graphics they do now(except maybe a little prettier)
Now, the key factor to a volley being the way it is now is that it's less hefty on a server to just use one missile to factor the flight and travel of a volley as well as the animations.
My thought was to buff just the graphic. Instead of launching a volley of missiles, each with their on mind, you launch a single info bubble. This bubble retains all the information the same way a volley does now, but will have a new graphic showing the number of missiles attached to that info bubble revolving around it. The only new information that is added is the graphic itself, but in designing it as one graphic, it will be easier on the server than trying to design several graphics to work together because it requires less information.
On large graphic showing however many missiles orbitting a center point as it approaches the target will be less coding than designing graphics for each missile and trying to wrap them together. Plus, since there is only one info bubble similar to how a volley works now, then they won't have to factor the bubbles of each missile and try to slap them together.
Now, for those of you who are more darker crowns in the box, the info bubble is not actually visible. It's just a reference to explain that all the info is retained in a central point the same as current volleys, but with a new graphic the orbits around the invisible bubble.
Also, the missiles orbitting around the bubble will be nothing but a graphic. It will not actually have any effect on missile velocity or flight time, since all that information is retained in the bubble which is travelling in a line the same as missiles do now.

Another animation that needs to be redone is that actual explosion effects of the different missile types themselves. Somewhat similar to how super weapons work, in that they each have a different animation.

EM - This blast will basically look like a lighting cluster. Lighting bolts that shoot out from the explosion point. The animation being this way would just fit with how it's effective against shields, and since we all know lightening can melt metal, it explains how they're effective against armor and hulls, but at lesser value

Thermal - This would be more of a molten shards of metal type effect.

Explosive - This is obviously just an explosion animation, but will look much better than current animations. (torps are really the only missiles with a cool animation, but they could be better as well)

Kinetic - Being the primary damage type of most missile boats (besides stealth bombers of gallente, amarr, and minmatar) they will generally have the cooler looking effect since it's what we'll be seeing the most. So this would be an animation that at the last second spears foward with a snap sound followed by an explosion.( cooler in my head than it sounds on paper) but just think a hard pierce followed by an explosion.

While I may not be the most technical person in the world, and probably don't have a firm understanding on how the programming works, My point is still valid that these are two aspects of Eve that have been mentioned for a long time and haven't changed making me think CCP either gave up, doesn't care, or doesn't know what to do.

Any suggestions to fix a misunderstanding or just a better suggestions in general would be greatly appreciated.

Try not to just troll and say no.. Lets be civil.

Yes, explosion velocity does effect dps, which is why I said this skill would replace explosion velocity.
What i'm saying is if missiles moved much faster, then they would likely hit the target every time. Explosion velocity has been used for missiles as they are which is slow, so explosion velocity determines how much of the explosion can hit the target before it is out of the exp radius, but again, with much faster missiles you'll actually be hitting the target directly, therefore you need a new factor that will determine the dps on the target in the same manner exp velocity did. hence the new factor.


missiles will still have all the dynamics that they have now, but be much faster in relation to engagement of the target.
This will be helpful to missile boat pilots because you'll be able to engage targets much faster, but still have a down fall because it won't be instant. also, with torps the biggest problem players have is that a fast enough ship can out run them. Therefore we have inneffective dps. Also, since we will be able to engage targets much quicker, we'll be more pvp effective, and be more acceptable in fleets.



The reason for the proposal was to make missiles more mix fleet viable and more pvp viable.
The rest of the reasoning behind animations is just because CCP announced they were working on new missile animations when they announced they were working on new turret animations. Well, turrets have come and gone and we haven't heard crap about missiles since the initial statement from CCP. So they either gave up on us, forgot about us, or don't care.
This part of the post was just to throw out some ideas incase they needed help, or just to let them know what would be cool.

Yes, explosion velocity does matter, but if missiles were to travel much faster like say a missile goes 6000m/s for 10 seconds and they changed it to where missiles went 30km/s for 2 seconds, then odds are the missile would actually hit it's target, so if that were to happen then explosion velocity wouldn't matter anymore.

Oh, and as far as losing your posts. Always copy your post before you click post. That way if you lose it you can just paste it.

Yeah, I do know what explosion velocity is and how it relates to the target and it's size and velocity. What it mostly relates to is far away the ship can get before the explosion can catch up to it in laymen terms. So I guess if you wanna keep explosion velocity in the game, then I don't suppose missiles would need a complete overhall. It would really just be a matter of greatly increasing velocity and greatly reducing flight time, then simply rebalancing flight time in relation to accel time so that you still get the same range.
Some people seem to think that this would increase the dps of missile boats, but those people don't have a firm understanding of how missiles work. Missile dps is always the same no matter if the target is 50km away or if it is zero km away.
the only difference is the time it take to initiate dps on the target.

So lets say there's a target 0km away and a target 60km away.
the target 0km away will be hit instantly by the missile every 10 seconds which is the cycle time.
Now, lets say it takes 12 seconds for your missiles to reach the target that is 60km away. The first missile will travel for 10 seconds and a second volley will be launched. once the first volley reaches the target the dps will initiate and the next volley will hit the target in exactly 10 seconds.
So again, the only difference between hitting a target at 0km and a target at 60km is the amount of time it takes for the dps to initiate, but once initiated the dps will be the same for both targets as long as you keep firing steady volleys.

My suggestion is to simply decrease the amount of time that it takes to initiate dps on those far away targets. So you'll initiate dps on the target at 0km and instantly start doing 500dps. But now the target at 60km will be initiated in 2 seconds instead of 12, but will still be taking 500dps and will still be hit every 10 seconds once the dps is initiated.

This will also allow missile boats to be effective against those annoying little frigs going over 3km/s. Turrets can hit them, but most of the time missiles will burn out before they get there. Now, will those targets be able to outrun the exp velocity....maybe, but i'd rather find out about that then to never be able to hit them to begin with.

As far as the rest of the post relating to animations, I just figured maybe CCP needs the help on figuring it out, but I also wanted to throw it out there that I would like to see different explosion animations for the different missile types. I think it would make missiles a little more fun to watch if every so often you got a mission where you needed a different damage type and it actually looked different, thus making you feel a little less like everything is always the same.

Well, at least we'll be able to engage ships we can hit much faster

I had a similar Idea for the missile graphics:

If you remove the current missile texture and all associate animations, you (the client and the server) are left with the same object tht deals damage. If you change nothing about this, you could construct a client-side only animation of turrets that fire missiles that track the invisible missile that you just launched without changing anything on how missiles work.

It'd be a simple change, especially if you added missile turret graphics or used the currently existent missile launchers bays as a basis for what launches objects that track the missile bubble.

Depends.

If you removed the present-day missile textures and animations, your pc, regardless of the source of that missile would stop rendering it. It would still be there, like a mathematical object that'll magically deal damage. what you would see would be the turrets popping out missiles at that object and they'd track it, try and follow it untill it blew up. But these would all be client-side missiles, other than the original untextured one, so everyone would see little missiles following a invisible one, but they'd only be present in your client.

So if you shot at me using missiles, your missile would be actually a pack of missile drones orbiting it in a random fashion. I'd see it, and you would see it, but we'd see different things since they'd just be client-side animtion that don't get transmitted along the server. but the general idea wouldbe that missiles would work the same, and require only a graphical representation that might be different from client to client. so in your client your missiles would probably be, i don't know, organised in a hexagon-shape, while i'd see a squared shape, but it'd be irrelevant other than eye candy.

a picture:

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/585/missileidea.jpg/

I'f prefer if the missiles exploded somewhat randly near the vicinity of the target ship, creating that flak/shotgun approach modern missiles use to shoot down planes (Missiles don't impact on the plane, they just explode about 1/100'd of a second before hitting, to maximize damage).

Otherwise, they'd be cool. I'd prefer coloured-explosions that were small and random enough to make it look like flak guns. :)

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