Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Mr Rive here, I thought I would use this char, considering the fact I will be discussing triage carriers a lot. Some of what I say here is purely theoretical in nature, but a lot of it is based in facts. I kind of want to go into the history of eve fleet combat a bit, becuase I think it gives good context for the changes which are happening now, and what it will need to make them work. I apologize for the long post, but if you are into eve theory, tactics, and balancing, you might find this stuff as interesting as I do.

To give some context, I have been flying triage carriers since they first came out, and PL was one of the first (if not the first) group to fly standardized triage fits and use them as a backbone for large fleets, I would always FC the triage carrier wing in Shadoo fleets back in the day. I have had every possible decent combination of triage carrier fit on EFT for the past 5 years, and update them regularly whenever new modules come out. There's a general joke in PL that you don't talk to me about triage carriers, because I can talk for hours on them. I've been a part of theorycrafting for PL for the past 8 years, and have come up with many tactics involving fleet doctrine that everyone just thinks of as common sense today (logistics anchoring anyone?). I say this not to show off, but to give the impression of the depth of knowledge I have on the topic of fleet combat and doctrines.

And this is why, after reading thoroughly the new changes to capitals, I approach them with a sense of cautious enthusiasm, but also trepidation. On paper, they look awesome, but there are several glaring holes which I hope to adress, in the hopes in this early stage of development they can be fixed. I also want to talk about the general role of fleets, and how these new capitals will fit in with the several different venn diagrams of ship concepts which have been used by CCP in the past, to varying degrees of success (this will sound confusing, but ill explain later, i hope).

It's going to be very hard to write this, not just because we still have ships which have barely changed in roles for the past 6 years, but also because of the way all of those ships interact with each other. I'll do my best.

The best example I can give of a basic framework of the constant balancing act which is fleet warfare, is the t2 logistics ship. In terms of role, bonuses, tactics, basically everything, the t2 logistics cruiser has barely changed since it was first thought up long ago, probably before some of the devs who are working on these changes even knew what eve online was.

The t2 logistics ship, like many of the ships in the game, has one primary attribute, repping, and several sub attributes, of varying importance and potency. In their case, their attributes are:

Repping power
Cap
Tank
Speed
Range

There are obviously more (like ecm resistance, signature, ect) but for our purposes, these five attributes are the primary concern in fleet combat. It's also what a theorycrafter looks for in a decent logistics ship. Each t2 logi has a fairly stiking difference in terms of these primary attributes. EG:

Basilisk: High repping power, High tank, high cap, High range, Low speed
Guardian: High repping power, High tank, High cap, High range, Low speed
Oneiros: High speed, Moderate tank, moderate cap, Moderate Range, Low repping power (comparitively)
Scimitar : Very high speed, High range, Moderate Repping power, moderate tank, Low cap,

Obviously, this totally depends on the fits, but generally, this is what you see from most major fleet doctrines, and each one is used depending on what attributes you need. You wouldn't use basilisks in a HAC fleet, because they are too slow, but you would use them (situationally) in a battleship fleet, due to their repping power and tank.

Now, They have obviously been tweaked slightly over the years, but I feel there was an obvious and clear intention to their design, each one fulfilled a very important role, and each one had its place in major fleet combat. Over time, the usefulness of the basilisk has been reduced, as has the guardian. This happened not at the time of their inception, because at that time, whoever came up with t2 logistics clearly had a good overall view of all aspects of fleet combat (sniper battleships, remote rep battleships, HAC's, sniper hacs, ect). Admittedly, their field of vision need not be so large as it is today, because there were far less ships to work on, but as new ships were added, such as bombers, t3's, ect, the basilisk especially, was relegated to a far more niche role than i think was originally intended.

Second, while we know little about the new logistics carriers, having capital neuts is going to drastically limit their capacity to keep a fleet alive. The biggest enemy of triage carriers today is neuts, and there is simply no way to counter them in large numbers. All it takes is 10 battleships, fit out with neuts, and one triage carrier will die. The larger the fleet, the more quickly those triage carriers will die. THe worst time I had was losing a 5 man triage wing in the space of 5 minutes to a 100 man fleet, because they knew what they were doing and we simply weren't prepared for that amount of neut pressure. There really is very little you can do against it, because it kills your cap immediately. Adding capital neuts, with seemingly no new way to counter them, will mean fleets are going to have an almost impossible time to rep each other against supercarriers. Whats worse is, it's going to be a case of, I think, whoever brings the most neuts and triage carriers wins, you have taken it away from supers, and given it to a smaller, cheaper, and more replaceable ships. Please, consider the effect neuts are going to play in logistics, because otherwise, this entire system is going to end up N+1 again, just like you want to entirely avoid. The second thing is that armor triage is STILL going to be better than shield triage, because even through my continued protests over the past two years, the chimera still deosnt have the same local reps bonus, or remote rep cap reduction bonus rigs, than armor logistics. Local repping is obviously super goddamn important, and something you want to promote, so you HAVE to fix the rigs so they they're balanced, the chimera simply cannot keep up with the archon and have the same cap, and you have to constantly refit it to make it work in both a local tank, and local rep role, something which you're abolishing altogether by the sounds of it. The most convincing argument I can make for the unbalancing of rigs is to say, go put a capital aux nano pump on an archon, and see what it does to its local triage repping ability, then put a remote repair augmenter on it, and see what it does to its cap stability when remote repping, then go put a capital core defense operational solidifier on a chimera, and cry as it's cap dissappears, and oh wait you cant put a remote rep cap reduction rig on a chimera because it doesn't exist.
I'm not trying to ***** at you, and obviously a whole lot of work has been put into this, and it all looks awesome, but JUST like with the sov changes, it wasn't until after several years of tweaking the old system, realizing it still sucked, and then creating an entirely new one from scratch, did we get something promising, you can't expect to take a massive chunk out of the status quo of fleet combat, leave the other half in, and somehow expect them to magically work together. It's the same mistake that has been repeated time and time again.

I might sound crazy right now, but the ONLY way you are going to get a properly balanced, engaging, fun, and fully integrated fleet combat system, is to design it from the ground up, entirely. You're working from the top down, and you are going to end up filling in the cracks in the foundations of the system you create for the NEXT five years.

Please, don't get me wrong, some of the new features being added are awesome, and something I can't wait to see in game, but ultimately, people like me thrive off of CCP making tweaks, and not expecting the consequences of those tweaks further down the system. Does anyone remember armor hacs? That fleet of 80 PL guys which could take on 300 battleships and come out with no losses? Yeah, that was because CCP 'tacked' on a new feature without understanding the consequences it would cause in the entire ecosystem of fleet combat. Of course, it is great for me, I get a shiny new logistics toy to play with, and to spend hours and hours boring the crap out of people telling them why the 2% difference in capacitor level makes all the difference, but ultimately, this is going to cause everyone to hate the new system a few months after its launch, tweaking it afterwards is fine, but you can only tweak something so much. Go from the ground up, redesign everything to fit into one system, add your new awesome changes, and forget major balance issues like ishtars for the forseeable future, I implore you.

I wrote this post in an hour at 3am, and it in no way covers everything I have to say. The important thing to get out of it, is that eve fleet combat currently resides around several systems, or varying sizes, which have been introduced over the last decade of eve. It works, but barely. Adding this massive change to fleet combat, without also redesigning your 'soundations', is going to end up with the entire plethora of tweaks, new features, old features, and concepts, all collapsing under the weight of it's own imbalance. If you want to do this properly, you have to look at all the way from frigates, to capitals, consider the same system which cas used with t2 logistics, and make sure every class of ship gels, instead of grinds, against each other. get rid of the redundancies, fill in the gaps (like t2 logi frigs though iirc theyre in the pipeline) and make all the cogs from scratch to work together instead of against each other. I have given plenty of examples of this, and they are by no means the exception. I know you can do it, it will just be time consuming and expensive, but then right now, eve combat is so complex, contradictory, and difficult to master, that trying to persuade someone new to get into it and understand it takes months. If you want eve to last the next decade, you can't just keep painting over the scratches, youre going to have to give it a new engine, chassis, and most importantly, chair.

I love you guys, dont do it for me, do it for my mentee, who is still trying to figure out why his interceptor gets destroyed by a navy slicer.

Tell that to my blap dread from 2013 :3