Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You're mixing up combat enagagement vs simply warping to a corp bookmark.

Given the lag on BM propogation there's NO COMBAT impact to those, but hey - we don't need QOL or a way to move fleets as a unit efficiently, right? We need to find something for those poor poor frigates that everyone leaves at home because no FC ever wants tackle.

Right?

It's horseshit. There were a plethora of ways to address the perceived issues without heinous collateral damage and these changes are not it. It's like deleting drones because of ishtars.

I propose we test this. Next fleet you FC, don't use fleet warp. That should give us some opinions based upon experience. Sure, I *think* I know how this will end up... but hey, few things can refute empirical evidence.

There are an awful lot of misguided responses here, or at least responses from a very narrow point of view.

Some say it changes nothing, because FC's will just run another alt scout. This is kind of a hard choice, because they can do that and be less effective overall (divided attention) or they can let someone else scout the warp to points. Hard choices make the game interesting

Then some say nobody will want to do the scouting because they want in on the kill mails, and those poor pvpers will be forced to scout instead. But not everyone measures their time in the game by their killboards. Some simply want a sense that they have made a meaningful contribution to the success of their team, and if scouting becomes more important, it will be easier for scouts to feel so.

Some bemoan the inability to get the whole fleet to land on grid at once. Except that in most situations, you can still fleet warp to a scout. And if it takes more planning and skill to coordinate arrival when not doing a fleet warp, this seems to me like another way that a well trained fleet has an advantage over a poorly trained one. That's a good thing. The more opportunities there are for player skill to matter, the more interesting the game is.

I don't know overall how this change will be. It impacts so many different scenarios that I don't profess to understand all the impacts. But it seems to me that many of the responses we are seeing are overblown and emotional rather than factual.

And using that as a clumsy segue, I'd like to point out that the posts which devs are responding to are not the ones that say "As always you are f**** up", or "this will kill the game!!!!". Devs are responding to posts that clearly describe potential issues in a step by step, rational way. If you'd like YOUR post to matter at all, you might consider emulating that style.

Marech.

It sounds like, indeed, they think moving fleets is too easy. It appears to be the primary point of the change. Is it less convenient than the status quo to which you and quite a few of the posters here are accustomed? Of course.

Also, your insistence, and the insistence of several posters in the thread, of corp bookmarks being the solution to the problem (or a font of annoyance due to their slow propagation time) is amusing. These bandaid workarounds only work if all of your pilots are in the same corporation. Being able to share bookmarks and probe results in this fashion would automatically would give homogeneous groups an advantage over those not in the same corporation. As such, I steadfastly disagree that corp bookmarks should ever be instantaneous.

Just remove all fleet warp and let me broadcast bookmarks and scan results. You don't warp people around you just tell them where to go.

I have never complained about the propagation delay or asked for them to be instant. The very fact they lag is WHY you should be allowed to fleet warp there. It prevents ad-hoc combat use, it helps the well prepared by adding value to pre-scouting/pre bookmarking areas. It gives people a home field advantage in their home systems by having corp bounces available to fleets.

The lag should remain, but we should be allowed to warp there as a fleet because all pilots CAN warp directly there manually.


Alternatively, let us regulate our warp speeds.


As I say, if the aim was to split fleets, then they simply stop the unification of warp speeds in a fleet warp. They have not - thus it is apparent that this is collateral damage.

So, let me get this straight, with this change CCP are trying to kill, or at least severely nerfing by slowing down, several different game play styles:

1. Wormhole life/activity in general. With one hand, you give us fun new W-Space systems but with the other you make it more tedious and unappealing to play in them as a group.

2. Group exploration roams. Specifically roams where you allocate different people in fleet to scan different sigs and everyone then warps to the juicy relic/data to run it together. This will also impact on any exploration training roams for newer players into lowsec/nulslec as the teacher will also have to be scanning down sigs rather than just focusing on keeping the newbies safer and looking for threats.

3. NPSI Fleets and other rag-tag fleets where not every one has access to a shared set of bookmarks (shared bookmarks are NOT a "solution" for this bad change because of different warp speeds/acceleration).

4. ANY fleet that makes spontaneous/unplanned use of tactical bookmarks and pings.

5. Manually multiboxing miners, or even a normal mining fleet or any multiboxed group, where you want to be able to fleet warp to a safe.

6. fleet Blitz-daytripping into Wormholes for ninja gas huffing. Now everyone in the fleet will have to go and make safes rather than just the scout who found the site/hole.

7. Advanced intelligence gathering/preparation where a scout goes ahead of the fleet by some time to set up bookmarks, etc.

8. Providing scouting services through Thera and other wormhole chains where the scout is the only one with the bookmarks.

9. Level 5 missions (or any other group PVE for that matter).

10. Any fleet that wants to arrive simultaneously at a bookmark. Before people suggest allowing us to vary our warp speed, think how many other "exploitable" headaches that would result in.


Yes, cloaky scouts could be used to mitigate some of these but how many scouts would you need? For some situations, I could see LOTS of scouts being needed to the order or more scouts than people partaking in the actual fleet activity. Some speculation from me here, but you would also need the same number number for each additional fleet in large operations with more than one fleet involved.

For some situations, this is going to require either a multiboxed alt just to sit at a safe/ping/POS/wherever or have an actual player sat there effectively AFK cloaked. If it has to be a player, you know it is going to end up being the newest/lowest skilled person in the group - Being sat there doing nothing is NOT engaging gameplay and you are just creating another problem reminiscent of off grid boosters.

This is going to hit both large fleet ops and small fleet ops but my personal feeling is that this is going to have the greatest un-mitigatable negative effect on actual small group activities by requiring lots of supporting players/alts and more preparation. I could see this change helping to push EvE towards the two extremes of there only being solo play and larger fleet activity as everything else is too tedious and requires a disproportionate ammount or preparation.

From an FC point of view, unless I have a competent scout sat at the destination who is actually there and not off taking a bio or watching netflix (non-engaging gameplay remember) this just makes my job more frustrating as I now have to worry about if people are warping and when they warp so that they arrive as a cohesive group in addition to worrying about if they are doing whatever we are going to do. My opinion is this is going to increase FC Burnout and make FCing a lot less fun.

@Marech Bhayanaka: I should perhaps have said throwaway/covops. Sitting in a hole waiting on the rest of the fleet arriving at some point is not a nice thing to do.

Basically if they're removing things and trying to put things in the hands of pilots - but not furnishing us with tools to strategically match warp speeds with comrades which can no longer fleet warp to do so.....that's not really adding depth so much as a penalty.

I don't really care if the fleet warp is gone - what I care about it I have *no* replacement method available to me as a pilot to regulate warp speed. I need to wait until $DUDE gets into position so the FC can do tomorrow what he does today - fleet warp. There is absolutely no skill added to my gameplay nor options or scope for error.

What is added, is a travel delay. And that's about it.

It's neither makes sense nor fits with the spirit of the changes.

This is what happens when wormholers don't have a voice in CSM

Sure, but logistics arriving too late due to non-uniform warp speeds wouldn't help you in that situation.