Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You fitted CPU intensive modules to an ECM frigate (that are intentionally loaded with excess CPU) and claimed that the fittings for ASBs aren't through the roof. Dual MASB is 100 CPU, 24 PWG. That's not small change on a frigate.

Yes. This is how brick tanks work. You either walk away, or chip away at the brick until it is no longer a brick. You don't encounter a dual rep incursus and just sit there while his 0 range control rips you apart with his highly range dependent weapon systems, do you?

If what you say is true, triple (or quadruple) MASB hawks would be the most popular frigates in the game. They aren't, because MASBs are both difficult to fit and (shocker) take slots.

I agree with the OP here, and why do people think 15 minutes of tank isn't a problem? He will run out of charges? Don't make me laugh, you'd have to bait a stupid pilot into falling for something with the dps to kill him. More likely in that 15 minutes he will have his falcon alts on field.

Also why do ancillary shields get all the perks? You can't dual or triple fit an ancillary armor repairer, you can't just fit an ancillary armor repairer with just 1 slot like the shield version because you need cap boosters too, and that's two different charges on top of it. Did I mention even with 2 slots instead of 1 for tank (which gets doubled with two fit), you can still have your tank neuted into oblivion? You can also UPSIZE a the ancillary because of the low fitting requirements, it's the only reason cpu might be a problem.

It's made even worse that midslots means more room for dps as that's almost all anyone cares about. The only downside is you need 5 mid slots unless you don't need a web.

As the OP said. People fitting armor ships with shield modules and would you fit a hawk with armor repairers??? Didn't think so.

Is that your only argument? Alrighty then, blobs almost always win fyi.

This whole thread started with a non tq tourney where they only brought frigs and meta 0 mods except for the dude in the maulus who cheated and brought meta 1 stuff.

PS a brick tank of pure buffer could take as long to kill as a ASB to run out of charges. It is the nature of brick tanks, pure buffer dont have a way to regain what they are losing and the asb has not much buffer at all and can be forced to bleed into armor and hull.

the whole point of this thread is that in a 1v1 where one side cheats that side wins.

Also sure you can tank forever if the other side doesn't bring any dps. But you don't need tanking mods when that happens.

Thanks everyone for your thoughtful comments.

I have been sifting through the responses looking for reasoned arguments as to why the current ASB mechanics are not broken.

I've seen some ad-hominem, invective, name-calling and poking fun so I know I am definitely posting in the forums of Eve Online, the game we all love. Thanks for confirming that I'm in the right place fellas. <3

I've seen some agreement that the mechanics still aren't right, and some posts essentially saying, "no it's fine" but without giving hard data to support the position.

In return I have laid out the cap efficiency demonstration which shows the ASB, when fuelled with the smallest charges possible being more efficient than the shield booster alternative.

There is a common conception (even on the eve university web site) that ASBs are less efficient than SBs. It turns out that this is a misconception, and this must surely give everyone pause for thought.

My view is that with undersized charges, the ASBs performance is double that which the designers intended. Note that with the bigger charges, I feel that the ASBs are absolutely fine.

Fixing this anomaly will I believe, fix ASBs completely without impacting at all their designed purpose - which is to provide "a quick boost of shields for skirmishers".

I have seen dev posts confirming this design goal.

I have also seen a post by CCP Rise stating that an L-ASB should deliver a little more shield than a large shield booster (it was in a discussion about the vagabond).

In reality, an LSE gives the ship 3281 points of shield, an overheated L-ASB with navy 150s delivers 9x589 = 5301 points of shield on a vagabond (before rigs, crystals and pills). This is not "a little more", it's "almost double".

For the timebeing, if you're fitting a shield-buffer battleship you might want to take this anomaly into account - you actually get more buffer (assuming you survive the first alpha strike) by fitting a large ASB than by fitting a large shield extender.

An XLASB with 9x navy 400 delivers 9x1078 = 9702 points of shield, 3 times as many (before ship bonuses).

Clearly, if you have the choice between LSE and XLASB, take the XLASB as it's worth 3 shield extenders (again, before implants and drugs) in all but the most extreme situations.

The last time I checked, the killboards miss some very important data about all fights (which is something I am sure you know well):

* The KB does not show the fit of the winners.

* The KB does not show the presence of logistics (unless they happen to get drones on the target)

* The KB does however show the fit of the lost ship.

So in summary, the killboards contain only 30% of the information required to draw any conclusion.

In addition, I will ask you to consider the apparent anomaly in the functioning of ASBs. They accept two (or three) sizes of charge, but the amount of shield boost is not affected by the size of the charge.

What incentive is there to use a larger charge? None.

Does this not strike you as... wrong?

OK, I'll walk with you.

So Ideally we would favour a data source that shows winning fits, how much damage each party soaked up and an outcome.

We lack half of that data in the killboards (although CCP could do the analysis from its logs I expect).

So another way to approach this would be to look for evidence of displacement.

i.e. How many people are [not] using ordinary shield boosters in consensual pvp when the ship type suggests that they ought to?

I know that armour repairers are used (I use them). I know that ASBs are used (I use them too). I am going to suggest that finding SB-based local tanks are going to be very rare in *consensual* pvp. Of course we all know that in PVE they are used extensively.

We could say that a signal for "consensual pvp" would be the presence of a warp disruptor or warp scrambler on a ship. Then it's just a case of cataloging the ratios of armour repairers, shield boosters and ASBs, and cross-checking that data against the ship type.

I'm happy to do the queries and tabulate the data. If anyone can point me to KB data in a searchable form, that would be a great help.

Of course this only gives us data on the losers, but its a fair argument that PVP is for most people, a zero sum game.

The ideal is impossible and even if there were addtional data, normalising it would be impossible (to account for use of links, boosters, logi, experience of pilots, etc.)

There is no way to achieve an ideal data set.

What is possible is to see the total volume of the data (of which there is a lot) and look at trends; added to that with personal experience.

Personal experience (and data to support a view) comes from testing under real conditions, not limited conditions. Even then, the testing would require a lot of fights in order to draw out the trends.

CCP may have other data they look at, but unfortunately we don't have access to that.

Theory crafting is fine. But testing under real conditions is imminently better. That's where the killboards provide an overall picture, even in the absence of perfect data. They provide all the data available so you don't have to go fight and win/lose dozens of times in order to really see if your view is correct.

On the aspect that it is not possible to see the fit of the winning ships. That's not totally true. Every ship that is involved in pvp eventually dies. Often with the same fit that it had when it won previous fights (not always, but quite often). The winning and losing fits are often the same thing, just at different points in time. Again, the total data wins:loss ratio helps to indicate the dominance or otherwise of particular ships and fits. It's not perfect, but it's what is available without specific testing.

Stop already. Do your tournament again permit up to t2 mods. Lets see how well that works.