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[November] Rorqual Changes

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Olmeca Gold
The Free Folk
#521 - 2016-12-07 19:51:47 UTC  |  Edited by: Olmeca Gold
Cade Windstalker wrote:

If you want to contest the major powers than go nation build. It's not even like NC/PL/Goons have been the major powers for 10 years.


The game was new back then. Asset and SP gap was bridgeable by effort and community management know-how was not this developed. Right now major powerblocs have accumulated so much power in these areas there is just no room for a newly rising entity. All of Eve came together and failed to destroy Goons last time. They just were able to migrate them. They will be even more irremovable next time.

Cade Windstalker wrote:
I'd also like to point out that you just said that "all it takes" to keep a Rorqual safe is like 30-40 times the value of the Rorqual in assets sitting around doing nothing. Not listed: all the stuff it takes to keep those few Supers from getting dunked if someone drops them when they respond. So yes, I would say it takes a lot of planning and organization to keep a major Alliance running. There's a reason the jump fatigue changes were careful not to aggravate the Logistics people because those guys are two steps from insanity on a good day.


I didn't make any claims on easiness of alliance management. so don't put words into my mouth. I made claims on easiness of defending your Rorquals. These two things, believe or not, are separate things. Bottom line is nobody is entitled to %99 safe Rorquals in nullsec and CCP should change the game to make this goal true.

Meanwhile your capabilities of alliance management gets rewarded many areas in Eve. Fame, members, sov, fun, etc. You don't need a further %99 safety for your Rorquals.


Cade Windstalker wrote:

Again, they aren't entitled to any real or perceived safety, they got it by having enough stuff, time, and organization to deter or beat people who come to make things dangerous for them.

If you don't like it, and feel it's OP, then go build your own big alliance and kick their door in. It's happened before and it'll happen before, but it won't be fast and it won't be done by whining on the forums about how you can't reliably kill Rorquals with 200 bil in assets playing bodyguard.


Addressed these issues above. But I want to stress again: %99 SAFE RORQUALS IN NULL SHOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE FOR ANY ENTITY AT ANY LEVEL OF ORGANIZATION in this game.

If the only way for me to kill your Rorquals is build my own super nation then when I come for them you will dock and migrate back to lowsec, wait for me to deploy somewhere else and then migrate back to null again. This is not an interesting cycle of events.


Cade Windstalker wrote:
They don't need to cover every system, they just need to cover the ones the Rorquals are in for that day, and with their own cyno-jammers up in each system they can ensure that they have local force superiority.

Also you just contradicted your own point about this being a case of "a few alts" just sitting AFK on standby.

Cyno-Jammers aren't easilly scattered around to every system at present, what you're proposing would be an extremely cheap way to do what now takes an expensive module, upkeep, and an IHUB. I seem to recall there also being other restrictions that make it impractical to just spam Cyno Jammers around in every system, but I may be somewhat out of date there.


Ever checked Delve map with NPC kills stat? There are ratting carriers and Rorquals at over 80 systems in there. So yeah if Goons need to divide their supercapital counterdropping force to 80 to cover their entire space then each unit is pretty contestable with a blops group, or a wormhole group.

Wormholes, covert cynoes and gates are exactly the travel methods that the fleets which kills Rorquals in this game use to travel. Not cynoes. People do not use capitals to kill other people's Rorquals, neither titan bridges (generally, or statistically). And if you ever go to some regions in this game you will see spamming cyno inhibitors each system is the exact thing some people are doing. Your case which you think is a hypothetical is real in some places, like deep dead end farming pockets in Period Basis. That doesn't stop anyone from attacking them and killing their Rorquals. Because attackers do not mainly rely on cynoes.

Cade Windstalker wrote:
Overall I'm just not seeing this as a convincing argument, you're basically complaining that large organizations (that take a ton of work to keep going) provide too many advantages for the effort required.


I am in no position to complain. I am in neither a large or a small alliance. I FC NPSI hotdrop fleets and have been enjoying killing Rorquals a lot and we have been having a blast since Ascension. Whether null sov blocks will remain that way or there will be other groups emerging changes nothing for me. I will be harassing them with my fleets whoever they are. That's what I enjoy in the game.

It just breaks my heart that some people are PvE'ing in null with 0 worry at all of warping off when someone neutral comes into their system, or no worry at all sieging 30 Rorquals in same belt, while others work their ass off to keep one single Rorqual they use for boosts from dying, when all they lack is skill points, capital alts and supercapital ships (and not organization, teamwork or dedication like you claim). With hulk mining you at least have the same risk of getting blapped, no matter which alliance you are in. With Rorqual mining you are just immune to PvE ship loss in a major powerbloc.

Covert Cloaky FC. Sustainable Whaler.

Youtube channel.
Cade Windstalker
#522 - 2016-12-07 21:45:32 UTC
Olmeca Gold wrote:
The game was new back then. Asset and SP gap was bridgeable by effort and community management know-how was not this developed. Right now major powerblocs have accumulated so much power in these areas there is just no room for a newly rising entity. All of Eve came together and failed to destroy Goons last time. They just were able to migrate them. They will be even more irremovable next time.


This is just flatly false. Back then having 2 Titans allowed you to basically wipe a grid and building one was a concerted effort for an entire Alliance. The first Titan kill was a huge deal because it took so much to pull off, now you can kill one with a few dozen people if it's solo. These days if you want a Titan fleet you just need enough ISK, enough time, and a bit of cleverness to get it all together and staged. You won't have one of the big players knocking on your door if there's even a whiff of you building or owning Titans or Supers like in the old days.

Olmeca Gold wrote:
I didn't make any claims on easiness of alliance management. so don't put words into my mouth. I made claims on easiness of defending your Rorquals. These two things, believe or not, are separate things. Bottom line is nobody is entitled to %99 safe Rorquals in nullsec and CCP should change the game to make this goal true.

Meanwhile your capabilities of alliance management gets rewarded many areas in Eve. Fame, members, sov, fun, etc. You don't need a further %99 safety for your Rorquals.


They're not separate, one thing makes the other possible, the same way that someone carrier ratting out in heavily defended space is, at least in theory, very safe. The safety comes from the organization that keeps the large alliance running, maintains pickets and intel on incoming drops, and all those other things that actually come into all the claims you've made here.

This isn't even vague nebulous 20 steps removed stuff, the main reason for large alliance failure is organization and leadership failure, not lack of resources.

It's not even like that 99% is real safety, it's "I don't have enough people to threaten their defenses, CCP pls nerf". If you had more people to bring against them you'd be fine, but there will always be someone with more to defend with so someone will always complain.

Olmeca Gold wrote:
Addressed these issues above. But I want to stress again: %99 SAFE RORQUALS IN NULL SHOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE FOR ANY ENTITY AT ANY LEVEL OF ORGANIZATION in this game.

If the only way for me to kill your Rorquals is build my own super nation then when I come for them you will dock and migrate back to lowsec, wait for me to deploy somewhere else and then migrate back to null again. This is not an interesting cycle of events.


Which I would like to stress, isn't a real thing. The Rorquals are only safe because of player effort, and are vulnerable to a comparable level of counter-effort. What you want is Rorquals with tons of backup available to be vulnerable to a small fleet of bombers.

If it becomes impossible to bring a relief fleet to a Rorqual then the PANIC module becomes worthless. If a large org can't do it then a small one certainly can't, and we're back to "lawl, who would fly one of those loot pinatas!?!" which guarantees 100% safety, because you can't shoot docked ships.

Olmeca Gold wrote:
Ever checked Delve map with NPC kills stat? There are ratting carriers and Rorquals at over 80 systems in there. So yeah if Goons need to divide their supercapital counterdropping force to 80 to cover their entire space then each unit is pretty contestable with a blops group, or a wormhole group.

Wormholes, covert cynoes and gates are exactly the travel methods that the fleets which kills Rorquals in this game use to travel. Not cynoes. People do not use capitals to kill other people's Rorquals, neither titan bridges (generally, or statistically). And if you ever go to some regions in this game you will see spamming cyno inhibitors each system is the exact thing some people are doing. Your case which you think is a hypothetical is real in some places, like deep dead end farming pockets in Period Basis. That doesn't stop anyone from attacking them and killing their Rorquals. Because attackers do not mainly rely on cynoes.


Nowhere in here did I ever say you were relying on Cynos, I said your portable system jammer idea was bad because of what it would do to that balance, or for fights where people want to counter-drop capitals because a Rorqual fight (or some other fight) escalated (which is a viable path when your gank get cap dropped and still want the kill).

Olmeca Gold wrote:
I-SNIP-

It just breaks my heart someone in this game that some people are PvE'ing in null with 0 worry at all of warping off when someone neutral comes into their system, or no worry at all sieging 30 Rorquals in same belt, while others work their ass off to keep one single Rorqual they use for boosts from dying, when all they lack is skill points, capital alts and supercapital ships (and not organization, teamwork or dedication like you claim). With hulk mining you at least have the same risk of getting blapped, no matter which alliance you are in. With Rorqual mining you are just immune to PvE ship loss in a major powerbloc.


Except the reason any person lacks those things is a lack of organization and people. If you build a good Alliance you can find good high SP pilots, or if you have the ISK you can buy them on the forums. Titans are easy, the infrastructure and organization that keeps Titans alive is the hard bit these days, and that's what large Alliances have over small ones.

That's what lets a large group respond to tricks like your group dropping several points at once. Groups who are bad at that lose entire Carrier fleets to a single dread and a bunch of WHlers T3s and Cruisers.
Olmeca Gold
The Free Folk
#523 - 2016-12-08 01:31:14 UTC  |  Edited by: Olmeca Gold
I am past the limits of the time I would like to allocate discussing this stuff with you, but thanks for taking my posts seriously and stating your opinion. I hope someone in CCP reads these posts and they help them to form their own opinion.

A general notion where I will just keep disagreeing with you is that just because players can spend (alleged) a lot of effort to achieve a status (%99 safety in null) it doesn't mean that status should automatically be available to them with no questions asked, especially if it breaks the game. This is where most of our disagreements are coming from, and why I don't take people's "but the organization", or "build your own empire" objections as valid.

Covert Cloaky FC. Sustainable Whaler.

Youtube channel.
Cade Windstalker
#524 - 2016-12-08 04:11:40 UTC
Olmeca Gold wrote:
I am past the limits of the time I would like to allocate discussing this stuff with you, but thanks for taking my posts seriously and stating your opinion. I hope somewhere in CCP reads these and they help them to form their own opinion.

A general notion where I will just keep disagreeing with you is that just because players can spend (alleged) a lot of effort to achieve a status (%99 safety in null) it doesn't mean that status should automatically be available to them with no questions asked, especially if it breaks the game. This is where most of our disagreements are coming from, and why I don't take people's "but the organization", or "build your own empire" objections as valid.


That's more or less where I disagree as well. I know enough of what it takes to keep a large org running (I was part of Eve Uni for a long time, and I have friends in or formerly in pretty much every large Alliance in the game in every area of the game) that I don't treat any of this as automatic. I've also seen large and supposedly untouchable alliances disintegrate from a hard sneeze because no one noticed that all their leadership and organization had disappeared.

If you aren't familiar with it I highly recommend looking up the fall of Atlas Alliance, they were at one point considered absolutely untouchable, and then they got invaded, lost like one fight they probably shouldn't have, and suddenly everyone was evacuating.

Then on top of that their leadership started ****-slinging and a ton of members lost a lot of stuff, including Supers both in the field and in build, back when Supers and Titans were major major assets.

This wasn't even a case of no activity, they had people (though not as many as they might have wanted), they had Supers, they had resources, and they had more or less everything except leadership and organization, and that cost them their space in one of the most complete losses in Eve history.

Putting in all the time and effort required to secure space, keep it protected, and keep people around and invested in protecting it, is a ton of work, and absolutely no point in the process is automatic IMO.

Even if a group has all of that, has active players, good leadership, and good logistics and infrastructure you'll still find holes and lapses if you poke long enough and in the right ways. You can poke around until you get lucky, bait Supers in one direction down a pipe while the rest of the fleet hits the mining op at the other end, and generally try to out-smart your enemies. Heck, if they're relying on the mining fleet for the cyno then an on-grid jammer could be enough to let you get the kill, especially if you wait a minute after they call for help so they take longer to get a secondary cyno in place.

Basically my take on the whole "organization OP" deal is that that's kind of the point of Eve. If there was a way to drop these ships in a fairly guaranteed or hard to counter manner then no one would use them almost ever.

I also maintain that anything that requires people to sit around bored in order to protect something else is probably a bad system, which has always been the issue with mining ops and why I'm a fan of the PANIC button.
zelklen
Team-UBER
#525 - 2016-12-08 20:58:42 UTC
Coelomate wrote:
Perhaps consider removing the drone mining bonus from the industrial core, and then compensate by further increasing the command bonus it provides.

The optimal setup isn't going to be rorq + fleet, it's going to be a gigantic fleet of rorqs


The Rorqual can and should be the best mining ship in the game. But only when it is using its core, and even then, only at most 1.9 times better than the second best mining ship.

At 6 times better than already being the best, it seems like the "fleet" would be better off watching gates while the Rorq mines by itself.
Ronin Gabe
Brave Newbies Inc.
Brave Collective
#526 - 2017-02-13 07:05:16 UTC  |  Edited by: Ronin Gabe
I realize that I'm coming in to this thread quite late, since all of these rorq changes have now occured. I've read this thread almost all the way through, and there's one thing that wasn't touched upon: The rorq DYING, no matter what changes are made. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, pi**es an alliance/corp off more, than people losing shineys and messing up said alliances/corps boards. People get bounced and blacklisted for that.

Making the rorq unable to provide a service from within a POS (risking it in a belt) is just setting up the owners of them for failure. Your superboxers and elite groups will benefit, but your average foot soldier corp member is going to seriously balk at risking these on field, for the repercussions he/she is sure to experience as a result of losing it. Only real benefit I see here is for the capital builders who will benefit from the increased replacement orders. Hard enough to be successful in null/worm, why create an additional difficulty for the small indy guy/gal just trying to do their bit? The SECOND that rorq is lost, they are going to be on everyone's sh**list.

Meanwhile, CCP has done a** nothing to make this game less of a huge time drain, you know....for people who want to come in and enjoy it, without making a virtual 60hr/week career out of it. My advice? Quit the game and stop enriching CCP. They don't LISTEN to you anyway. Customer service is for suckers, let alone taking their desires and concerns into account. They are the same kind of beta-cucks that write the Walking Dead episodes. Just out in la-la land...

/rant off
Frostys Virpio
State War Academy
Caldari State
#527 - 2017-02-13 14:39:15 UTC
Ronin Gabe wrote:
I realize that I'm coming in to this thread quite late, since all of these rorq changes have now occured. I've read this thread almost all the way through, and there's one thing that wasn't touched upon: The rorq DYING, no matter what changes are made. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, pi**es an alliance/corp off more, than people losing shineys and messing up said alliances/corps boards. People get bounced and blacklisted for that.

Making the rorq unable to provide a service from within a POS (risking it in a belt) is just setting up the owners of them for failure. Your superboxers and elite groups will benefit, but your average foot soldier corp member is going to seriously balk at risking these on field, for the repercussions he/she is sure to experience as a result of losing it. Only real benefit I see here is for the capital builders who will benefit from the increased replacement orders. Hard enough to be successful in null/worm, why create an additional difficulty for the small indy guy/gal just trying to do their bit? The SECOND that rorq is lost, they are going to be on everyone's sh**list.

Meanwhile, CCP has done a** nothing to make this game less of a huge time drain, you know....for people who want to come in and enjoy it, without making a virtual 60hr/week career out of it. My advice? Quit the game and stop enriching CCP. They don't LISTEN to you anyway. Customer service is for suckers, let alone taking their desires and concerns into account. They are the same kind of beta-cucks that write the Walking Dead episodes. Just out in la-la land...

/rant off


If your alliance/corp blacklist you because of your billboard, you need a better corp/alliance.
Cade Windstalker
#528 - 2017-02-13 15:14:50 UTC
Frostys Virpio wrote:
Ronin Gabe wrote:
I realize that I'm coming in to this thread quite late, since all of these rorq changes have now occured. I've read this thread almost all the way through, and there's one thing that wasn't touched upon: The rorq DYING, no matter what changes are made. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, pi**es an alliance/corp off more, than people losing shineys and messing up said alliances/corps boards. People get bounced and blacklisted for that.

Making the rorq unable to provide a service from within a POS (risking it in a belt) is just setting up the owners of them for failure. Your superboxers and elite groups will benefit, but your average foot soldier corp member is going to seriously balk at risking these on field, for the repercussions he/she is sure to experience as a result of losing it. Only real benefit I see here is for the capital builders who will benefit from the increased replacement orders. Hard enough to be successful in null/worm, why create an additional difficulty for the small indy guy/gal just trying to do their bit? The SECOND that rorq is lost, they are going to be on everyone's sh**list.

/rant off


If your alliance/corp blacklist you because of your billboard, you need a better corp/alliance.


Seconding this. If your Alliance is hard over enough about killboard stats that they boot someone for a Rorqual loss, especially when the drones won't even show up on there, then there's something wrong with that Alliance and it's not for CCP to fix it. If they're that worried then they can either protect their miners aggressively, put them in another corp/alliance to buffer their killboard against red marks, or do without having any kind of industry in their space (which seems like a losing proposition IMO).

The reason no one in this thread addressed the Rorqual dying is because that was a large part of the point of the miner and boosting changes, that Rorquals and other ships that never actually got used would come out of their POS shields and see use, abuse, and unscheduled rapid disassembly.

If you don't think the risk justifies the rewards then no one is forcing you to use a Rorqual. Part of Eve is risk vs reward and deciding what risks you're willing to take. If you're not willing to field a Rorqual then nothing is forcing you to.

If you want to make lots of ISK there are plenty of ways to do that, look up a guide or think on it for a bit. If you want a game that you can just casually pick up and put down without worrying about losing ships then I think Eve may not be the game for you...
Rowells
Blackwater USA Inc.
Pandemic Horde
#529 - 2017-02-14 21:33:31 UTC  |  Edited by: Rowells
Ok, I've been able to use the Rorqual quite a bit more and I shall list my opinions and impressions below.

Cargo/Bays:
- increase in ore hold is nice, overall not very consequential, but still a welcome change.
- increase in the fleet hangar was definitely welcome, however I stil believe that we should allow fleet members to access the ore hold. Fleet hangar is currently a bottleneck that serves no real purpose other than unnecessary complexity and click-fatigue. Once you get beyond a small squad of 4-5 people it becomes a game of queues as the rorq pilot plays ore shuffle online.
- Collectig ore remotely, this has kind of been an odd scenario that probably falls under a QoL change. Utilizing jet cans to collect ore from across the belt definitely gets the job done, but it's limitations can sometimes be annoying especially as fleet size increases. I would much prefer a kind of ship-to-ship system that allows ore to be transferred directly. Even if it still requires input and reactions from both sides, it does save a little trouble and would also allow pilots to utilize compression services without needing to keep odd lists or needing to always be in access range. This probably also applies to ships like the orca and porpoise as well, but a bit more so for the Rorqual since it's forever stationary.
- changes to the ship hangar (namely the barge size) is a decent change, however I can't really comment on how much impact it really has.

Mining:
- obviously being the king of yield has been a very nice plus, but I still hold on to worries that it will slowly push regular barges into les relevance over time.
- I do, however, dislike how utterly dependent drones are on speed in the overall equation. Even if it costs more theoretical yield I do believe giving excavators a higher base speed or an MWD would make using the Rorqual easier overall. This also ties into another idea regarding siege, which I will discuss later.
- one other issue I've seen is that outside of ore anomalies, it can be extremely difficult to use the drones on normal asteroids. It's just comparison of asteroid size and drone yield which leaves an extremely large amount of mining potential wasted. Of course it's easy to just stay in the anomalies, but this seriously hampers any use outside of sov-null and wormholes.

Drones (Excavators/Combat):
- the drone dps is honestly very dissapointing. Iirc the initial devblog quoted 2000dps, which seemed pretty reasonable, however I have not yet found a fit (even using rediculous fits and gimmicks) that could actually reach that number. In reality the dps is significantly lower.
- the excavator HP is really nice, even if my attention has been drawn elsewhere for the moment, I not have to worry about my drones getting sniped. The shield RR bonus also helps in this avenue and has saved my drones in quite a few close calls.
- the excavator size can be annoying, but I understand the purpose it serves. However it does leave some room for abuse on the combat side (huge amount of replacement drones), which is worrisome.
- Excavator cost. Won't get detailed, but it's way too high.

Boosts:
- boosts are very nice.
- the above comment aside, I am still very against the need to siege for max boosting. We can keep tweaking the values and benefits, but by itself I think the difference needs to be scaled down. Particularly so that an unseiged rorq isn't just a slight improvement over an orca. I honestly believe that the two should simply be separated and balanced from there.
- the range is phenomenal. I can be on the opposite side of the belt and still provide for my fleet members. Haven't yet found a belt so big where I have had to consider positioning as an issue. And considering the bonus that applies to the survey scanner, I'm not sure what to do with 400km+ scan range.

Tank:
- aside from capital rats, I haven't had much of a chance to use it in a high-pressure combat scenario. Looking at the theoretical numbers, I can see and understand some desire to scale that back a bit.
- PANIC, haven't needed to use it so far. Aside from non-mining abuses, I can't really comment on it much.

Industrial Core:
- thing is a fuel hog if there ever was one.
- while not entirely an issue, the lack of mobility can be a bit of a PITA, especially considering how slow the drones are. I've found I need to keep an MWD fit in an attempt to minimize the impact of distance that the drones are prone to. While I wouldn't call for it to be totally removed, I really would like to see the rorq maintain some modicum of on-grid mobility so that it can act similar to how barges currently move as they mine (should they need to). It's a constant cycle of sieging and unseiging, coasting into position, and generally trying to rush movements between sieges.

General Usage:
- I'm starting to think more and more that compression should also be disconnected from siege. It's a quick, one-time action that requires a 5 minute siege. It's simply quicker and cheaper to use an astrahus to do the same thing.which brings me to another point...
- while the increase in overall power and general "being a capital" has made it necessary to keep the Rorqual out of astras and other structures, unless access to hangars inside the structures is soon made possible, getting ore into or out of the smaller structures is a real PITA. Needing multiple characters, extra haulers, or even using cans is just way to complex and annoying. And all of those options still remaining cheaper than just upgrading to a fort or sotiyo really puts an enourmous bill on such a simple task, with no real drawback against some other options that currently work.
- the jump range increase is a welcome return to its use in logistics of all kinds.

And that's pretty much all I have for now. Overall it's got plenty of great additions and changes, however I do believe some areas didn't change enough or were overzealous in their improvements.
Daide Vondrichnov
French Drop-O-Panache
Snuffed Out
#530 - 2017-02-26 18:21:58 UTC  |  Edited by: Daide Vondrichnov
Rowells wrote:

- the drone dps is honestly very dissapointing. Iirc the initial devblog quoted 2000dps, which seemed pretty reasonable, however I have not yet found a fit (even using rediculous fits and gimmicks) that could actually reach that number. In reality the dps is significantly lower.


Atm, Rorquals are what BO class dream to be, they can do pretty much everything better (but the dps) so giving them a DPS buff would make them more OP than they already are.