Player Features and Ideas Discussion

What suggestion would you give to someone who wants to use their carrier, but is not a part of a huge alliance, and is surrounded by other, violent, huge alliances who routinly drop on anything and everything bigger than a battleship with overpowering numbers and probably a couple titans?

In that kind of environment, what kind of use is a carrier and fighters?

Ok... this... this cannot be. Fighter assist is a unique and viable option and should remain. When the drone bay of supers was nerfed to ONLY fighters and fighterbombers you removed their flexibility to do anything but slap another capital around or take a nap while shooting a stationary object (structure grinding). Titans took a hit when their weapons vs. subcaps was nerfed into the ground. The Phoebe patch took a huge chunk out of roaming and ganking with supers (am I the only one who's noticed its taken longer for caps to show up as the top kills on EVE Kill). What I'm saying is, supers have already lost a lot of usefulness and taken away a lot of fun and diversity and seeing action, to the point its almost not worth owning or logging on. The problem, is not fighter assist, it's what you can assist your fighters to.

A fleet of 30 stealth bombers killing a TCU on a gate with a dozen carriers/supers assisting is a little absurd. How about this... no drone bay, no assist. You can already assist 50 drones to any single ship but the ship is on grid and still using your bandwidth. Fighters take 25 bandwidth, use that. If a cruiser only has 25mb drone bay, it can only recieve 1 fighter, a battlecruiser with 50mb can only recieve 2. This diversifies who all can recieve the assist. You already can't assign fighterbombers you have to be on grid to use them, but fighters should remain unique on how they can be used over other drones. This would also reduce the amount of carriers fielding fighters, instead of 1 carrier giving 10 fighters to 2 people, if he has to give his fighters to 3-5 people that heavily reduces the presence of overwhelming dps.


Also, I hate to be "that guy" who cries for the little guy but... think of the little guy! A larger corp or alliance can affordd the numbers to not need a defense like that, but smaller ones use whatever force multipliers available (#suddenlyfalcon) to give themselves a fighting chance in gate camps or other attacking forces. You take away fighter assisting and you severely impair any ability to give the little guy a fighting chance in a situation that by normal standards they could not. If you have access to a carrier or a super, enjoy the available options it provides. #NB4Death2AllSupers

Removing Assign fighters from carriers is a big mistake

you should drop the max assigned to 1 fighter per 25 bandwith so your little ships will only get 1 fighter or none
if you really do remove the assign function from carriers you will need to quickly find a new useful way to use carriers as you have totally removed the whole reason I had to own a carrier.

they dont qualify for the 90% jump fatigue reduction that JF enjoy but you reduce carriers combat usefulness making them more and more a transport ship.

What is wrong with assigning fighters and doing some ratting? NOTHING Thats what

why break ratting.

I have recently been involved in a fight where the enemy had fighters assigned we still over came their numbers and made kills, telling 40 people to target fighters was a easy way to get the fighters to run to safety. as an added bonus we killed some of their expensive fighters worth more than some of their ships.

The history of warfare is a history of development of two things: ways to overcome the enemy's "impregnable" defenses (usually via better, more powerful weapons), and ways to counter the enemy's "invincible" weapons. If there's a problem with fighters being too powerful, come with with a weapon or EW system that better deals with the threat. Don't just change the engineering capabilities of the weapon builders (ie., yesterday Mr. fighter builder could build a fighter that can be assigned to assist another ship, today he can't build it, and in fact the ones he already built can suddenly no longer do it. It's like "I pull out my .45 and start shooting at the enemy." "Sorry, but as of today, and forevermore, your .45 only shoots marshmallows."

End fighter assist. Down with Sky net.

Fighters should warp, they , according to lore, are individually piloted, have a place in Valkyrie and should therefore Warp, follow if set too, or keep up with you,
after all fighters and their pilots are not as easy to replace,

A lot of people are suggesting using the assistee ship's bandwidth to determine how many fighters can be assigned. The problem with this idea is the gross disparity of bandwidth amongst ships. The Ishtar and the VNI have 125mb but are cruisers. A Golem has 25mb and is a battleship. We already have problems with the Ishtar and VNI; we don't need more.

No, as I stated earlier all drones from lights to fighter bombers should just lose any and all bonuses when they are assigned (dropping down to their base stats), and fighters/FBs should auto recall to the carrier/SC if it comes within a set range of an "escape route" (station, POS, stargate, etc.).

I would NOT be opposed to assigned fighters/FBs keeping their host ships' bonuses if the host ship was on grid with them. Risking the parent ship should have a reward attached.

1) Keep fighter assist

2) Keep fighter warp

3) Make fighters warp disruptable

4) Disable off-grid fighter assist within 50 km of POS shields

Removing fighter assist is an easy and frankly stupid solution to a problem that is not related to Fighters as much as to POS shields.

EDIT:
Going by the same logic, I would propose making so that Titans can't bridge while being half inside the shields, because they are effectively very safe in that situation, which is very much akin to "skynetting".

Don't disappoint me, Rise. Removing fighter assist and warp is a crap way of dealing with this issue.

I quote your own devblog :

"Carriers and Super Carriers assisting fighters to small, fast ships from the virtually 100% safe edge of starbase shields is becoming more and more common. Victims and perpetrators alike are expressing frustration and it’s time to take action."

Carrier and super carrier are not only use to pvp.

"Rather than a data based decision, this one is really about design philosophy. In general, we want there to be risk associated with power. We also want to promote active gameplay as much as possible. We're failing on both with Skynet by having very little risk associated with something rather powerful, and we're also not providing any gameplay to the carrier pilot."

So remove perma cloacing, make clocking harder. And boost off grid ? Same logic.

"However, this problem quickly leads us down a path of needing to redesign capitals in general (which would be nice but it isn’t happening just yet). We also have some hesitation about the lost tactical gameplay that comes from larger scale applications of fighter assist. "
Agree you want change capital no problem : So Nerf capital WHEN you have the plan to the new capital role. Your game designer have a diplome in game design ? Never nerf a thing and said " we will change this after", when you nerf you make a direct change to avoid to loss player, and create some problem because you have kill a strategical part of your game without offer an other.

"Therefore our proposal is to simply remove fighter assist."

My proposal : No problem the day who you redesign all capital ship (and if you want i 'm free to help you, i have make some game balance for other game).



But change it to change it is not a good solution. Said to people wait and one day your ship can change is a very bad solution in fact ...

I would like to see fighter assist in a different way. If the carrier warps away the fighters then there optimal range, DPS, tracking speed, and accuracy will change. Meaning it would be better to have the carrier with in range of the fighters.

Fighters should still be able to warp. It's part of there charm.

Also make it so you can't use fighter assist some distance from a POS. The excuse could be communication with a POS and all ships in a 40 km radius causes problems for fighter assist commands.