Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Background
This will take a bit of explaining, but hear me out. I do not, repeat, do NOT want remote logistics to be nerfed. With that said, I see the writing on the wall. Over the years I've seen many topics always brought up. Some are rightfully ignored. Others, well, sometimes make legitimate points, and CCP eventually made changes. Thus far, remote logi has escaped the wrath of nerf, however, proponents of nerfing it have made convincing arguments in the past about the power of logi, especially in large groups and null battles. Therefore, I fear CCP will nerf them, and I'm not comfortable with CCP's nerf record (heavy missiles, first iteration of jump fatigue, etc). So I wish to get ahead of this, as it were, and propose something reasonable before it gets hammered, if it gets hammered at all. I'm still hoping it doesn't get nerfed, because I did train logi to 5, and it would suck if yet again something that seems fun gets hammered just as soon as I finish training.

When I create proposals, I try my best to use as many existing systems and game mechanics as possible to limit both coding requirements, and player confusion (akin to my sensor overhaul proposal in my sig, it also mostly uses existing game mechanics).

Also I have way too much free time on my hands, and I actually enjoy coming up with ideas and trying to flesh them out. Since there seems to be a dearth of ideas concerning remote logi, it is hard to have a discussion about the pros and cons of anything specific since there is nothing specific. Therefore, I am putting forth something specific so we can discuss something concrete.

The basics, a.k.a. TL;DR version

Simply put: when you, as a pilot, receive remote reps, two timers start. The first timer is the fatigue amount, based on percentage. The more reps you receive, the greater the percentage accumulates, up to a limit. This "fatigue" diminishes the amount of rep you receive from the next cycle based on that percentage. The second timer counts down from the last time you received remote reps. When that one counts down to zero, your fatigue resets completely.

That's it Just that simple, just that easy.

The variables in play.

Maximum fatigue. This variable is the highest amount of fatigue you can accumulate. You can also consider it as, the highest possible percentage of diminished received reps.

Base fatigue rate. This is the base amount of reps diminished per cycle, based on percentage. Accumulation is additive.

Multiplier. This is factored against the base fatigue rate. Each source of remote reps is given a multiplier, with bigger sources of remote reps giving a higher multiplier.

Fatigue cooldown. The amount of time you must go without receiving remote reps, in order for the fatigue to reset.

Other terms I'll be referencing.

Number of reps needed to reach max fatigue. Pretty self-explanatory. This is the number of times a single source of remote reps can rep a single target, before the target reaches max rep fatigue.

Time (in seconds) that it takes to reach max fatigue. Will be used for reference, as people know battles take place over extended periods of time. Since there's different rep times and different rep multipliers based on size of module, this is just a handy reference to understand how long it takes to build up fatigue.

Other important tidbits

Fatigue is applied to the recipient of the repairs, NOT the logi pilot.

Keep in mind that repair/cycle time is already a set number in the game, none of my proposals change the current numbers.

Proposed numbers are for discussion and example only, these are not final proposal numbers unless so indicated.

The numbers we will work with.

To start these examples, the variables will be set as such. Max fatigue possible will be 30%. The base fatigue rate is 0.02%. Multipliers for the sources will be as follows: small = 1, medium = 2, large = 3, capital = 5. The fatigue cooldown timer is 15 minutes.

Since smalls cycle twice as fast as mediums, with half the multiplier, small and medium end up giving equal amounts of fatigue over time. Thus, for the example I will limit my discussion to mediums and above.

Or we stack more logi in our fleet and ignore your 30% reduction...

People take logi on board of their fleet to save their ship. Do you really think people will stop doing that? You guys keep crying how no fleet ever undock unless it has it's appropriate number of logi and then stalemate happen because the loss of a few DPS makes them lost the critical mass they need to burn through the logi wall and now, you want to make the number of logi required higher by limiting how much they can rep over time. Do you really think the FC will change their mind on trying to get enough logi support to hold their fleet up and just go with relatively less (same number with your new rule mean less power) logi power on board just because you made a change?

FC supposedly don't undock without X logi but they will without X * 1.3 under your new rule?

An excellent discussion already!

I don't pretend to know what people will do. I wish I could give accurate predictions, but no matter what your experience, people can still surprise you.

What I would expect, however, is a new meta to emerge. In the first parts of the battle, logi still remains the same. Reps go out, there's minimal reduction if any at all, nothing really changes there. What changes is what happens over the long run. And by design so far, I haven't proposed drastic amounts of buildup or a large cap. The buildup increment is tiny, the cap is reasonable. The point is to decrease the likelyhood of stalemates because of two range fleets spitting at each other over the course of hours. With the way DPS generally decreases over range (exceptions noted), this is to make long-range fleets a bit more viable, as logi wall will crumble over time.

FC's can do whatever they wish. They can adapt and have people fit local reps to do minor repairs or supplement long-term repairs to reduce the need for remote logi. They can put more emphasis of DPS ships in their own fleet since logi now has diminishing (but still important!) returns, thusly increasing the chances of breaking through your reps fatigue or not.

FC's can even field a field of exclusively logi, with all of them just repping in circles just to troll. But it is not going to be effective at doing anything other than making logi pilots bored, and you're not going to protect any territory like that.

Modules fitted to your ship have stacking penalties. In a way, this introduces it to remote logi. With this, logi is still important even at max fatigue, it's just not as effective so people can start shooting through your wall. And if you can't destroy enough enemy ships to make up the difference in coming DPS verses logi fatigue, you lose ships. This makes timing and tactics important.

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If logi is the problem then work on those who provide the logi, not those that receive it.

Instead of crying rivers of tears about the evils of remote reps why not apply those brain cells to developing effective counter measures. From personal experience I can assure you there are many ways to deal with them in most battles, so the challenge is can you think outside the box? can you be unpredictable enough in your battle plan to figure out how to deal with them? Do you have the fleet makeup that would allow you to implement some unusual attack plan?

I see what you are getting at, but as most of this balance is centered around fleet balance with less than 40 participants having more than 7-8 logi would almost always be the hardcap for subcap fights. You just brought the hardcap up to 10ish, which is kinda meh... if you go over 40ish, you enter alpha land, which is another beast alltogether, bringing logi to alphaland is a bad idea in general, but can be done if baittanking is engaged, at certain compositions.

Which leaves us with the current issue of fleets of 20-30 people being unable to kill eachother. Unless they fly some variations of fuckyou mechanics.

Generally speaking though, I would advice against trying to think of ways to increasing bad omplexity, and rather break down the existing complexity and tweak the level of badness. Which means feature balancing by removal/simplification instead of adding more fuel to the fire

That's a lot of words to essentially say nerf logi...

Why couldn't you just say nerf logi?

TBH, I didn't read your nerf logi proposal, because a nerf logi proposal doesn't need to be 8000 characters on nerfing logi.

You could have said, nerf logi by introducing fatigue.. DONE..

Despite the nerf logi rant, I support a nerf logi idea.

Though, I don't know why it can't just be a stacking penalty logi nerf..

Now you just broke lowsec gatecamps, not to mention structure repping, incursions and probably a bunch of other things :-/

I really feel for you though, let me see if we can think up some other mechanics? How about reppers increasing signarure radius at slightly higher rate than you suggested, with no cap? This would actually create a bunch of weird effects, most of which is a slight step away from cruisers online, not to mention buff bombs vs everyone engaged in combat, or even herodropping a phoenix

1: Not structure repping. I explicitly stated, for this very reason, that fatigue accumulates onto a pilot. In the first post in another thread where I first floated the idea, I also spelled this out. Structure repping would not change at all. Structures are not pilots, therefore cannot get fatigue timers. Also why I put fatigue onto pilots who receive reps, instead of logi pilots handing out the reps.

2: As for the others...possibly. Remote logi is a very powerful tool and might be in line for rebalancing soon no matter what we say and do here. Which means that lowsec gatecamps and incursions might have to make adjustments, but every change in this game requires adapting. I'm certain the incursion community can do something about it. Either manipulating aggro onto fresh players, cycling in new pilots (hey spreading that LP around doesn't sound like a bad idea), or something else, but I cannot fathom a change to this game where incursion runners can't find a way to adapt.

As for lowsec gate camps...that's debatable. Fresh reps would still work against gate guns, and even over the course of fatigue, would probably be more than enough to keep you alive despite them, especially if you adapt and equip local reps too. Again, the idea is to keep logi powerful without being insurmountable, a great tool without being the end-all be-all crutch that people imply that it is now.

If you can flesh out some other mechanics like you hinted at, in more detail, feel free to post it in this thread and we'll look at them. How would you see it effecting a basic fleet battle? Flesh it out a bit more and we'll discuss :)



Cap consumption - interesting idea, but no. Diminishing returns doesn't mean reduced investment in what you were trying to accomplish. My second invul field doesn't get reduced fitting requirements, fatigued pilots shouldn't take less cap to rep. If he really needs the reps despite the fatigue, then you deal with the cap issues. Your outgoing reps and cap use aren't changing, the other pilot's received reps are what's changing. Changing your cap use because the other pilot is fatigued doesn't even make sense and would likely be impossible to code correctly anyway.

Fatigue on cap transfer, neuts? No. And "no" to any other fatigue that gets generated by remote systems. Remote sebos, cap transfer, eccm, are nice side benefits from some logi cruisers that would be great to keep at full effect even if their reps aren't. Also I haven't seen compelling reasons to diminish returns on those, and some wouldn't even make sense to do (like sebos and eccm).

Sure you could generate infinite cap from xfers, but preserving that is also part of my balancing point. Increased reliance on local reps....that cap has to come from somewhere over the long haul.



That's why I boiled it down to six sentences. Six sentences. What kind of world are we living in anymore where people's attention break over that? This must have something to do with the Twitter generation.

I did. Your line of reasoning was "massive nerf to everyone out of fear of me training a level V skill that is slightly less useful"

That's not a reason to me. What part of current game mechanics justifies this idea?

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