Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This change really makes me wonder if CCP is paying any attention to anything, having not even remotely discussed this with the player base before just going OH HEY! We're going to be Obama and talk about change change change and have no intelligent plan on how to implement change for the better.
The problem here is not that fighters are getting assigned: The problem is fighters are getting assigned to small fast ships, people cannot tackle the fighters, so thus you have exactly as you said, let me spelli it out for you:
PEOPLE FLYING WHATEVER THEY WANT WITH 5 FIGHTERS ASSIGNED

You said it yourself, now take your pants off your head and listen.

Carriers are very expensive targets, and you are listening to the whiners who just want killmails, not interesting combat. This will not cause carriers to be deployed EVER. They will simply be used in the situations where triage already is used, which well....guess what. FIGHTERS CAN'T BE USED THEN.

Let me explain a simple solution here, since you didn't care to consult with us all first.
Do not let people fly whatever the hell they want!

Now how might you do this? Let's start off with what you are denying US, that your player base who determines if YOU survive, wants.

a) Have fighters only assignable to larger slow ships like Battlecruisers, a ship class that receives no love and is helpless compared to t2 cruisers and was already nerfed into the ground with the command ship changes, or battleships, a ship class that is slow and easy to tackle.
b) Have fighters assignable only to ships that have a drone data link big enough to support the number of drones assigned to them, thus restricting them to tiny ships having at best 1 fighters and 4 drones in the case of the ishkur, interceptors getting none, and anything that can't drop a heavy drone getting none.
c) Have fighters take up drone bandwidth on the ship they are being assigned to since SOMETHING has to control them.
d) Have fighters assignable only when in some sort of 'siege mode' by adding a new module. Now the ship cannot retreat for x amount of time when fighters are assigned
e) Have fighters able to be tackled! They deploy their fighters, they have to commit them to the fight since they cannot recall them arbitrarily based on which one is about to get tackled.
f) Have fighters that are assigned not get drone module bonuses while they are off grid

Imagine that! One of your players has taken the time from her evening, while not even at home, to give YOU options that you deny us!

You don't need to go smashing creative design of your own game and burn your game.
You don't need to turn players off from using ships that exist because they're all of a sudden useless.
You don't need to play to whiners and poorly skilled idiots who cannot figure out how to kill things that ***** about a mechanic because they think they know best, just to get you to nerf it.
You don't need to have very poor foresight to think all playing fields in the entire ******* game are all the same. Your problem exists exclusively in different forms in lowsec, nullsec, and wspace. Don't try to one size all fit the solution, or you'll certainly lose a lot of players here.
You don't need to tell us how to play your game. We don't need to be denied choices to cater to killmail whores that don't care about this game who just want killmail killmail killmail and not a thing but the nerf bad for other players, just in order so they can get their jollies for 1 hour, log off, upon which they just quit after a couple months when they get bored doing the same damn thing every day with their t1 cruiser gangs.
You don't need to bury your head in the sand to the fact that a capital ship is a target regardless to whether it costs 100m or 1000m. This in itself makes it very risky to deploy them, focus on solving the problem not nerfbatting your game into the ground.
Carrier pilots don't need to be 'given content' to force their now useless ship, one that barely does damage with fighters anyways(two ishtars, one carrier, guess which does more drone damage, applies it much better, and costs much less?) to be ordered onto grid when they would use TRIAGE instead of fighters to reach peak effectiveness for the isk, when it's not content at all. You're only removing choices to try to appease some whiners, and not thinking your solutions through in the least.

Pay attention to the people that keep your lights on, ask for feedback like other game developers do, or guess what? You will quickly find yourself dying to games like Star Citizen that has its crosshairs straight on your hull by offering players exactly what you seek to deny: variation and choices.
Stop trying to kill your own game.



One final great note. You are saying that exposing skynet carriers to more risk, which you declared is the PURPOSE for this change, seemed convoluted, and would put an unneeded game mechanic into the game. What? A mechanic where carriers that assign fighters have to be risked? WOAH. You're ********?
How is exposing skynet carriers to more risk an unneeded mechanic when that was your goal in the first place? How is this a strange and unneeded mechanic? You are taking the lazy way, now rescind on your idiocity, and stop trying to do what you're doing. Go back, think it through, and stop this bull.

Maybe disregard the range requirements, but the POS restrictions are a pretty solid way to limit it.

What use is a carrier with fighters if not able to assist exactly? are you just relegating them to triage modes now? Im not overly a fan of cap warfare (though it has its uses) but it just amazes me you 'rebalance' ships simply because they get used a lot; i mean nerfing rails cus 'their popular'.. well yes of course they are, 2 whole factions use them (not including pirate factions) as opposed to one each for the projectile and lazer using factions.. currently there are what.. 2 t1 cruiser variants that are bonused for missiles? probably the same for projectile and lazer cruisers and at least double that for rails... of course their popular; more people can actually use them.

How about some scientists (probably caldari) frustrated at their gallente counterparts tactical use of carriers and the like research and design several operational counters to such tactics? Maybe a smartbomb.. oh wait.. how about an ecm burs.. oh nvm... who exactly is whining?

There is a magical force in the eve universe that prevents me from activating a smartbomb w/ in 5km of wormhole. It doesn't really make sense, but it's there none the less. Apply that magical force to drone deployment. The launching ship can't be w/ in X km of a POS or station. Risk aversion removed \ meaningful and interesting PVP opportunities created.

Prevent sentries from being used by any class of ship that isn't a battleship. Lots more risk averse stuff removed \ meaningful and interesting pvp opportunities created.

Remove drone assist from the game and one over used soul and server crushing form of deliberate player induced lag is removed from the game. Soul and server crushing will be reduced.


No one is upset about carriers assisting thier fighters to some noob on a gate. Folks are upset that the carrier is nosed out of a POS shield and can't be touched in a reasonable way.

Please callibrate whoever is coming up w/ the 'fixes' for the ishtar, skynetting, sentries and so on issues. They aren't 'fixing' anything. We are on the cusp of the worst changes to hit eve.... ever.

If you support fighter assisting you're literally part of the cancer that is ruining this game.



You trained for something which is broken, it's your own fault for wasting the time to train something as abusable as fighter assisting. That's your fault, not CCP's.

Should have just given a control range in AU and made a module or set of modules/rigs that allowed fighter assist, 1 drone per module/rig.

Btw only used it once myself a long time ago and if anythings a cancer to eve its the lack of diversity that players show ingame, nothing to do with ships/modules themselves.

CCP, if you hate carriers and supers this much just remove them from the game.
Same goes for fighters, because if you think they'll be used for anything after this you're delusional.

And give me back the isk and time spent training for them; it'll be easier then selling mine. I'd rather not have millions of SP in useless skills after this, because given the trends I'm pretty sure the next change coming for carriers and supers is to make them a 25bil version of the mobile depot.

Do you guys play his game?

Okay, having read about half of this thread (getting tired of seeing people who don't even know how carriers work talk about how they should be changed) I'm going to attempt to sum up the various arguments.

First off, there is no such thing as fighter assist. Doesn't exist. The correct term is Delegate. Reason this matters is that Assist lets one ship direct 50 drones, this isn't possible with fighters any ways that I can see. So if we're arguing that off-grid delegation is what needs to be nerfed, then let's look at ways to fix it.

From good to bad:
1. Change the requirement for being able to receive delegated fighters from the pilot's drone skill, to the ship's bandwidth. Being able to delegate 5 fighters to shuttles or interceptors is arguably broken. Being able to delegate 5 fighters to a ship that can already launch 5 wasps or at least 5 mediums, that's okay. (This is similar to limiting fighter delegation to larger hulls, only more balanced as it makes the receiving pilot trade their existing drones for the fighters).

2. Additional limits on fighters delegated from supers. The change to supers to make their fighters do double the damage was to reduce mass drone lag during large fights. It wasn't intended to double the DPS that could be delegated to other ships. So with the previous mechanic, make fighters delegated from supers require 50% or 100% more bandwidth.

3. Make fighters scrammable, yeah sure. I'd argue that for coding reasons they probably need to be bubble immune, so they don't end up just sitting there with a broken AI. But a tackle frigate should be able to keep them from running off.

4. If an off grid carrier warps, or enters a POS forcefield, do not let the fighters recall. Instead treat it like the fighters were just abandoned. If the carrier pilot wants to play it safe, increase the likelihood of losing the fighters.

5. Add to killboards. E-peen FTW, but hey why not? let's see more dead fighters.

6. Require the carrier to sit away from the POS forcefield. This seems like a good idea at first glance, but it's not going to result in carriers sitting 100km off POSes where they can be bumped and killed. It's going to result in carriers sitting in safes, aligned toward POSes so they can warp to safety instantly. Perhaps an improvement, but not likely to matter much.

7. Making the delegated fighters get their bonuses from the receiving ship instead of the carrier. Why even bother then? Presumably the receiving ship isn't setup for drone bonuses, or it'd be using its own already. And unbonused fighters are garbage. There's a reason nobody used them before they got bonuses from drone mods. Better off with some medium drones.

8. Nerfing the fighters themselves. See above, only worse. Even now, a carrier that's setup for combat is better off using sentries or heavies rather than fighters, because the base stats of fighters are just that bad (if you include speed issues and return time). People who think fighters are instalocking, amazing tracking machines have never looked at their actual performance. If it takes fifty fighters to alpha a T1 cruiser, there isn't a problem with fighter DPS.

9. Removing delegation from the game. Hey look, some of CCP Rise's small-gang buddies are having a sad, because they can't fight against a far larger and more organized group. Let's just nuke a mechanic entirely rather than fix it, because fixing it might take effort. Yeah, that sounds harsh, but the proposed ishtar nerfs are small careful steps, while this is trying to fix a minor problem with a sledgehammer. I'm having a hard time thinking of any reason why fighter delegation is so terrible that it has to go away, other than CCP bias/laziness.

FB assist has either never been a thing or hasnt been since a couple months after they came out when i got my first Supercarrier

And coal miners would really like it if we kept burning coal, they have been mining it all their lives after all!

Times change, past investments are not justification to halt change. Evolve or die (often).