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"Activating buttons on time'" is not an interesting mechanic tho. It's like paying attention to local. Those who do it right will always survive without any choice of counterplay by hunters.

At any rate, enough discussion on a feature that's never gonna happen I guess.

5ly base jump range. Train JDC V for 10ly.

You've just contradicted yourself here. You've said that no one will ever use the thing and then pointed out a situation you're concerned about where someone is clearly using the ship in question.

Beyond that I think there's a bit of a conception that every play style should be cleanly open and available to everyone no matter what other conditions they impose on their play. If you want to play completely solo then it makes sense that you're going to be exposing yourself to more risk than a group of players able to pool their collective resources, risk mitigation, and firepower.

Strictly speaking here there's nothing stopping a solo player from using a Rorqual in the same way that there's nothing stopping a solo player from using a Carrier to rat with, but as noted above you're going to be exposing yourself to more risk than someone in a group.

Eve is, at the end of the day, a group focused game. It's perfectly reasonable to make some content require large group cooperation.



Grouping up will always give an advantage, but that's not unfair that's just the advantage of working with others. If you don't like it go form your own group.

As for the idea to make this a random teleport somewhere in the system, just no. An experienced prober will have you nailed in seconds at which point it's entirely down to the size of the system and the random position you landed as to whether or not you can get away. This makes a "balanced timer" probably longer than 40 seconds and large enough that even a half competent aggressor will catch you 99 times out of 100, making the Rorqual not only useless for small groups but also large ones since it's still going to burn down before help can arrive.

The entire point of this invulnerability period is for combat pilots to be able to support mining pilots without having to babysit them all the time to stop them from dying before help can arrive. If you want to mine solo then either fly an aligned mining barge fleet with Orca support or ninja mine with a Venture or Prospect.

The only people who can use a Rorqual at all are people mining in Low and Null, and almost everyone in Low and Null who is mining is part of some group or other. Between that and the current jump range restrictions you don't have to worry too much about someone dropping massive numbers of caps on your Roqual, so even a moderately sized group (say, large enough to have both Miners and other players active at the same time) should be able to bring reinforcements to help besieged miners, even if all they can do is jump in Griffins to jam the points and let the ships warp off as soon as the PANIC effect drops.

If you're not in a group that's large enough for that then... find more friends? Honestly if you're not in a group large enough for that I'm kind of questioning what you're even doing mining out in Low and Null in the first place. Renting maybe, I guess, but even then you could potentially make friends with neighboring renters enough that if you say "hey, something to shoot here! Next 10 minutes only!" they'll jump over at least at the prospect of something to kill.



There is never going to be something that makes the Rorqual feel worthwhile to the larger group that also makes it viable for you without making it functionally unkillable when used by the larger group.

If it's powerful, like it is now, then it needs to be high risk to deploy. The best way to mitigate risks like siege timers is to bring lots of friends, either to make people wary of dropping you in the first place or to be able to bring aid in the event that a drop does occur.

If it's relatively weak then making it "safer" becomes more viable, but then it becomes just a thing people have rather than this big ball of risk vs reward, except for the smaller groups because so much of the risk mitigation is now built into the hull.

On top of that there are two things working against the sort of design you're talking about.

The first is a decision that's been explicitly if not loudly stated by CCP a couple of times and that's that they would like for end-game content to be group content. That's why the end-game for High Sec PvE is currently Incursions, as opposed to solo Level 4 missions. It's also come up with respect to Null PvE and how CCP aren't happy that the current end-game is basically solo farming sites and belts.

The second is just the inherent N+1 nature of a game like Eve that tries to avoid arbitrary brick walls and player limits. More players will always have an inherent advantage over less players. That doesn't mean that more players will always win, but it does mean that more players will probably win the vast majority of times if all other things are equal (especially the level of incompetence on both sides).

If you want a middle ground then either don't Siege the Rorqual and mine aligned, which significantly increases your safety and ability to warp off quickly, or use an Orca.

Base jump drive range: 5ly (+2.5)

Its literally in the dev blog you are posting on the thread for.
A base jump range of 5ly will give you 10 ly at JDC5

Initial reaction so far.

Not a chance in hell I'd put my Rorqual into siege. You never know what a hot dropper is going to drop.

What a windup...

I usually lead blops fleets, and blops is the epitome of being able to snatch kills in places where you could not have contended the victims otherwise. I can safely say what you say above is simply not true. A nullsec entity, if it wants to PvE sufficiently, will be spread to a multiplicity of systems and will not be able to cover all its area with active fleets. Sure you can't contest PL titan fleet, but those who own such fleets have to spread around to rat properly. The only way you can defend all your sov is having a capital counterdrop force ready at all times. Some alliances do that and are pretty good at it. And there is almost no way to frag a carrier or a rorqual of them. Then again with small tweaks, like making mobile cyno inhibitor relevant again, CCP can take steps to make sure even they lose Rorquals every now and then.



This is entirely right, but can be solved by teleporting the fleet together. Given MJFGs or Hand of God doomsday it shouldn't be so hard to code. It is actually the reverse of Hand of God.



You see, the luck factors (sytem radius, where does the fleet actually get teleported to etc.) in my proposal make it sure that even most experienced hunters fail at times, and mediocre ones get their capture at times. Other than that, players' probing skill is indeed a scale and not a binary.

Your example is not analogous, because in that case you need a virtue t3 which you will never ever use again, so most people deem its worthless to get one just to probe OG boosters. Meanwhile in my approach Rorqual hunting is accessible to every combat prober, and most hunters are hunting in combat prober ships anyway. And if not, they can get a prober hunting ship, still do their main job, and still hunt Rorquals if they wanted to as well. But in your example you need an expensive dedicated ship for just a niche job.

Now whether you can take down the Rorq itself or not is often a binary, but that is the case for every ratting ship and not relevant.



I recognize the advantage above, and we will fully make use of it. But it gives complete immunity to organized group Rorquals and non-organized groups will not use them much (just see my next message). I think giving people risk-free PvE is more loss than the hypothetical gain from the fights that a PANIC button will start. Most of the times if a defender entity has stuff to defend their capitals from the attacking fleet, they manage to warp them in before the capital dies. If not they won't engage anyway. The first Rorq died after patch died in 40 minutes, vs a not so big fleet, in which time no defender fleet came in. PANIC button will just give people in Delve who didn't even fit cynoes one more chance to survive.



They will just jump out and evac, and go stage in another nullsec whenever they see me coming.

I will just leave this here: http://i.imgur.com/YUZawWk.jpg

So exactly as I anticipated above, those who can drop 100 titans to defend their Rorqauls will abuse them to the fullest, and those who can't will not bother.

Any chance ccp plans on fixing the current excavator drone prices? You have failed to take into account the ability of manipulating the entire production chain and now the startup cost of any rorqual mining ship, even without backup drones is 8 bil. Some number crunch can maybe step in here and figure out how many hours of successful mining results in breaking even but, in any case, the mining drones are more than five times the estimated production cost. Prior to the extortion of elite drone ais maybe there was some argument that the bpc price (ORE/concord lp) would have the largest price variance, but in fact, price gouging is and always has been part of new content release. In light of that could ccp punish these ridiculous market and game content manipulator by making the drones themselves and/or the components for them npc items for whatever fixed price was intended.

We're also, what, two days after release? Prices for new items are always high right after release and then drop as supply increases and the market finds a price most are able to pay.

Beyond that you should know that CCP generally keeps their hands out of the market. It's possible to count on one hand the number of times CCP have stepped in to curtail player market actions in any kind of overt and direct way, and the only time they've stepped in and stopped anything that could be considered "price gouging" was when PLEX was involved.

In short your expectations here are unrealistic, CCP will likely only adjust the build requirements for these drones if they're still massively expensive after a few months, not after three days, and even that's unlikely.