Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Good job CCP Fozzie.

I grew up in a world where bombers were decloaking each others. Just get good whiners.

Now it's time to work on a golden armor and fedoras for the New Eden Store.

Two questions:

• Setting up manual bombing runs already requires some work, so a LOT of people use ISBoxer to remove some of the hassle. The decloaking change will make human-controlled bombing runs considerably more difficult to set up, while ISBoxer bombing probably won't be affected all that much. Is this intended? Does it play any role in your thoughts about bomber balancing?
• Are there any plans to change the MASSIVE difference in bomb effectiveness against shield- and armortanked targets?

If someone asked me what I'd change about bombers, I'd probably say ISBoxer and the effectiveness of bombs vs shieldtanked targets, it really baffles me how CCP apparently intends to make ISBoxer bombing even stronger.

:Slowly goes around collecting the tears of PASTA and other risk averse multiboxers:

Impressive response to a problem that has been plaguing EVE for far too long. Now we can finally end the easy mode bombing runs and make it a skill based effort.

Would like to see a staged reduction in bomb damage as well, the current excessive value is stifling proper PVP in favour of multiboxing no riskers.

So this one step BACKWARDS is all about curbing muti-boxing software users. But in doing so you are funking up the play styles of countless players all across the game just to curb a (for now) small set of multi-boxing software users.

Please CCP (not just you Fozzie) Get your head out of the sand and ban the use of multi-box software. All you are doing with this change is addressing the symptoms and not the cause.

The cause is multi-box software. Not only has it made bombing for them that use it easy. It is also helping to out competing players in the mining community and the Incursion community.

Sure right now it's only a small bunch of players using multi-box software. But every time you miss an opportunity to ban it. All you are saying to the rest of the player base is "HTFU AND GET MORE ACCOUNTS AND YOUR POORS"

When a new player enters the game. The 1st thing he should do right now is learn how to install and use multi-box software. Because with out it, He will never be competitive in the PVP game. Why? Because he will not have the ISK to fly all the ships he is going to need to fly at the same time when competing with other players that are using multi-box software.

When one players is cornering the ICE market in hisec because he can use 40 (yes this is true) mining ships at the same time, You know something has to be done.

TL;DR

This change is wrong. Fix the real issue, not the symptoms.

Also, I got Post 69, I like that (little things)

Yes, I am sorry. You can join PASTA and learn the ways of ISBoxing bombers which with these changes are obviously encouraged by CCP.

QFT - though id like to ammend it to not just software but hardware command multiplication too, and an inclusion of such things to be dealt with using the 'report bot' button.

you guys say u always have logs for stuff. well you will most definitely have logs showing the exact time you recieve clients requests for a server to do stuff, even if that server runs on a 1hz cycle. it should be clear as black and white if a bunch of clients are responding with the same requests at near exact ms times.

Really looks like CCP took a look at the jump changes thread, saw 'hey, lots of players are embracing a huge nerf, lets see what else we can slip by' and decided to toss this turd in the pile.

Really poorly thought out changes that are going far overboard on making bombing more difficult, while putting already strong bombers ahead of the rest. Why did the hound get such a big speed buff for example? And was it really necessary to throw on the sig radius, align time, warp speed, AND decloaking eachother all in one run? A bumper that gets pointed with 6k ehp and a bomber that gets pointed with 4k ehp are both just as dead, the hp makes no difference, but the sig radius makes you that much more likely to die. The align time makes you that much more likely to die. The warp speed change makes it harder to outrun ships like dictors chasing you, and harder to get into position fast enough to bomb properly.

What ever happened to 'lighter buffs and nerfs since with patches closer together, we can amend them sooner?'.

New jump changes: Great for eve
New hictor changes: Nice for small gangs, and dealing with gatehugging capitals
New relic/data changes: verymuch needed buff to exploration
Bookmarks showing up in space: About time!

Mutli-faceted nerfbat assault on stealth bombers: Disappointing. Just disappointing.

I would take this idea over the proposed one any day. Why not use an uncloaked ship to decloak the bomber? This is still a valid and widely used tactic. As a bomber I have to stay still until time to drop the bombs, if a ship gets too close I'm forced to warp off, dropping the overall DPS of our bombing run, which is a good and valid tactic.

Lets take a look at bombers and the recent issue that the player base has had with them and the cause of the vocal minority screaming their little **** off about ISBoxer being cheating etc etc.

Like the issue with Apex forces and Sov re-balances ( which I'm still not 100% convinced will solve stagnation, but I do believe CCP is on the right track with it ) the issue with bombers have many issues that have caused them to spring up to be the massive force multiplier that they are now.

Bomb damage. Lets take a look at this mechanic. Bomb damage is X amount of a certain damage type based on the bomb and the amount of damage that a bomb can do ( X ) can only be affected by the ship's hull. This only applies to maximum damage of a bomb. The damage is applied SOLELY by the target's signature radius.

This causes issues regarding balance of bomb damage application to doctrine ships. Armor is obviously the best choice when defending against bomb damage due to their low signature radius. Thus armor ships will mitigate the maximum amount of damage possible for their size, even if they are sitting absolutely still. Shield ships however, gain their tank at the cost of signature radius. This means that as a shield ship gains more tank, it sets itself up to take even more damage from a bomb.

The inherent benefit of shield as opposed to armor is the built in drawbacks of each type of tank. Armor has no penalty to sig radius so its sig radius remain relatively unchanged, but maximum velocity is reduced. Thus the ship will travel slower and be susceptible to increased damage. Shield ships do not have a penalty to velocity but inversely have their penalty as increased shield radius. This means that shield ships will be able to move faster and are ideal for skirmish, but ships will be able to target it faster and apply damage slightly better due to its larger signature bloom.

Bombs damage are ONLY affected by the signature radius thus this means that bomb damage is extremely imbalanced towards shield. Changing bomb damage to take ship velocity into account, similar to how missiles work, would do well in balancing bomb damage between fleets and not pigeon holing fleets into armor doctrines due to this large weakness. Also introducing a skill that reduces the sig radius penalty of onlining shield extenders similar to the armor plate skill Armor Honeycombing would also benefit shield doctrine ships and help balance the skew towards armor.



Bombing mechanics. Bombs currently have an extremely high resistance to their own damage type. This means that when bombs are launched, the bombs needs to be the same type or they will destroy each other and negate the bombing run. Current mechanics allow a maximum of eight bombs to be launched before the resists fail and the bombs start to destroy each other. This mechanic is a great way to prevent a cluster of 100 bombers dropping bombs and giving the finger as they warp out.

for simplicity sake we're going to go with base damage number of 8000. This is for a perfectly skilled bomber using the correct bomb type of their hull. At 8000 damage per bomb and at a rate of 8 bombs per wave, youre looking at 64000 points of potential damage per bombing run.

Now lets take a look at the average EHP of typical doctrine ships. First lets take a look at the baltec. Roughly 150k. It would take 3 bombing runs to destroy this fleet. Each bombing run of 64k damage at 10seconds per run allowing a margin of error and thus adding another bombing run, 4 bombing runs for a total of 256k Points of damage in ... lets say 45 seconds, allowing around 5 seconds of error.

This amount of damage applied to an area wipes out an entire fleet and is extremely difficult, nay near impossible for slow moving ships to counter. This is one of the reasons you do not see battlecruisers doctrines anymore. The smaller tank yet larger sig accompanied by lower velocity all adds to a death trap asking to be bombed when taking these types of fleets out.

My suggestion to fix this issue is to only do half of what you are currently thinking of implementing. Half the resists or the hp on the bombs to reduce the maximum number of bombs per run down to 4. 5 maybe at most. The reduced alpha and the increased time needed to run a complete set of bombing runs to get to the amount of damage needed to clear a fleet will allow FCs and pilots to react accordingly. Adding 2 seconds but leaving the damage unchanged does not change the current issues that exist with bombers.



I am quickly running out of characters for this post so I will touch up on 2 last things.

Decloaking cloaked ships with cloaked ships. This was a bug that was fixed, not a feature granted to us by CCP to make bombing easier. Please do not lie to us. The change was implemented because it was a bug and it required fixing. Changing this to make it seem like a feature is... for lack of a better word, stupid. Creating a mechanic that is simply harder for the sake of simply making it harder does not make a good game. When you do that, you are merely punishing the regular players.

The heart of the bomber problem is their ability to apply large amounts of damage quickly in rapid succession and the inability of ships to mitigate the damage from these bombs.

I was hoping to make only a single post, but it seems that the last bit is going to have to be made with a 2nd post.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=5123508#post5123508

Allow me to quote myself on this issue from when you were still stealth-testing this:



Main point bolded for your convenience.