Player Features and Ideas Discussion

TL/DR

This post does not attempt to address intel balance. Intel balance is tied to this issue, and IMO needs to be addressed. However, in order to focus discussion, it has been intentionally omitted.

1. Make small, medium, large and capital-sized versions of cynos, larger versions can move more and larger ships.
2. Give cynos a warm-up delay, when they are lit but no ships can pass through. Larger and covert cynos have longer delays.
3. Tie the ability to light a cyno with jump fatigue, so you can't light a cyno until your jump reactivation timer has finished.

Reason:
In Eve, there is a term: Risk vs. Reward. You can't run level 4s in a Rifter, because it would break the game. You would be risking too little in order to have too large of an impact on the game. Much of Eve is balanced around this concept. However, when it comes to cynos, there is no risk vs. reward balance. Using a Titan that is sitting in perfect safety inside a POS in friendly space and any ship with a highslot, to include a free rookie ship (excuse me, corvette), you can instantly give perfect positioning to any fleet. Effectively no risk and a huge reward. This causes constant issues, the most prominent of which is the "AFK cloaker" issue, where a single covert ops frigate can create enough risk to shut down an entire system for days or weeks at a time.

Proposed solution:

1. Make small, medium, large and capital-sized versions of cynos, larger versions can move more and larger ships.

Simply put: If you risk a bigger ship, you can move a larger fleet. However, hitting your limits won't turn off the cyno, you'll still have to wait until your cyno has completed its cycle in order to light again in order to prevent people from moving large fleets by quickly rage rolling a single cyno. Here are some specific numbers to start a conversation.

Small: 15 PG, 10 CPU, 30,000,000 kg single jump and total mass limit.
Medium: 150 PG, 25 CPU, 400,000,000 kg single jump and total mass limit
Large: 1500 PG, 45 CPU, 4,000,000,000 kg single jump and total mass limit
Capital 75,000 PG, 60 CPU, 15,000,000,000 kg single jump and total mass limit

2. Give cynos a warm-up delay, when they are lit but no ships can pass through. Larger and covert cynos have longer delays.

In Eve, being slow is a standard tradeoff for being big, it impacts everything from lock times to warp speeds, and it makes sense for cynos as well. Covert ops cynos are much more powerful than standard cynos because you can bring a bridge with you (in the form of a BLOPS battleship) and can safely cloak in hostile space. A longer delay to get through would help balance this mechanic. Again, here are some numbers to start discussion.

Small: 5 seconds
Small covert: 10 seconds
Medium: 10 seconds
Medium covert: 20 seconds
Large: 20 seconds
Large covert: 40 seconds
Capital: 60 seconds

3. Tie the ability to light a cyno with jump fatigue, so you can't light a cyno until your jump reactivation timer has finished.

This is here to prevent people from jumping through a cyno and then immediately lighting another one. I used the jump reactivation timer, because it's the simplest solution I could think of and easy to understand. Covert ops and T2 industrial ships would have a significant advantage here. I don't think this would be game-breaking, but I am interested to hear opinions on it.

IMO, little to no risk + huge reward = Issue.



It depends on your opinion on the purpose of cynos. I see them as a way to bypass gate-to-gate travel, in which case, this does not defeat their purpose at all. If you see their purpose solely as a ganking mechanic, it may defeat their purpose.



That does not work against covert ops cynos (the most common type)



This is a PvP game, a module that makes you effectively unengagable by others in your class is broken



That's not why they exist anymore than nullsec and lowsec exist to support the use of cynos.

SHow me on the rifter where the hotdrop hurt you...

The point of a cyno with a warm up is to give a beacon that the enemy can warp to and blap a stationary cyno ship, this renders cynos TOTALLY ******* USELESS for anything even remotely like a combat drop and would render them ONLY usefull for ganking people with a heavily tanked cyno ship...

Thus defeating your own point #reported-for-redundant

EDIT: found it! He got dropped by PL! https://zkillboard.com/kill/58472715/

Fit your own cyno and counter-drop them.

See, cynos are balanced because they work the same for both sides.

"warp to and blap a stationary cyno ship..." 5 seconds, you can't warp, land, lock and blap in 5 seconds, and it would be tough to do in 10, which would allow for a tolerable-sized cruiser fleet to jump in. If you want to drop a cyno in the enemy's optimal in a large fleet fight, why should you have a guarantee that you'll survive long enough for your fleet to come through? If you want to use the cyno to your advantage, light it at your fleet's optimal opposite the enemy fleet. Then they're faced with a choice: Warp to the cyno to prevent reinforcements, and lose a bunch of ships engaging at a disadvantage, or let the reinforcements come.

lol what? N+1 this is not.

you don't need a bigger drop to counter drop. in fact since you know what they have you can normally counter it with less.

however yes having more ppl does give you better odds... that's how **** works. N+1 normally comes in in large fleet fights where you win by being the first to alpha off more dps than your reps can handle this is where literally 1 ship gives you the win.

... did you just say blops is easy? Have you ever done it before?

Not to worry if you are not in range she will let you know

you... you do know.... like you understand that...

once your on grid the hard part is over.....


how about before you comment on a mechanic actually use it and don't just pull anecdotal numbers

When you look at the stats, they seem to tell a more nuanced story. Over the last 7 days, almost as many pilots killed or were killed in BLOPS as those who killed or were killed in Cerberuses, despite the Cerbs killing more twice what the BLOPS did in December (sorry, I can't seem to find weekly stats). As a result, it seems that there are plenty of people who aren't being priced out of their stupidity, and despite the fact that there is a broad group of people playing with them, it's not negatively impacting BLOPS stats in any significant way. On the flip side, The top BLOPS players do bag a somewhat higher percentage of kills over the top Cerb pilots.



As I looked at the statistics, you're correct here.



On the BLOPs side of the house, the risk is extremely low (which is the reason for the incredible K/D ratios). Very few player organizations are capable of fending off 30+ man fleets with less than a minute to form, and making that the standard to do PvE / mining in null / low is damaging to the game IMO. Once the gank is over, everyone cloaks up, waits out their jump reactivation timers, and then cynos out on the BLOPS. The time that people have to be decloaked is small enough that it's effectively risk-free.

When it comes to normal cynos, there is risk in moving a fleet far forward, but that's not actually what we're talking about; we're talking about the mechanic of a cyno. If you could magically move from one place to another without a cyno, what risks have you mitigated by doing that? A 20 mil ISK interceptor that may die after it lights and a few minutes of jump reactivation delay? IMO, that cost is far too low for what you're getting.



Covert ops classes have plenty of viability going gate to gate right now. A moderate nerf to cynos won't make the class anywhere close to irrelevant, and they will still be very strong if it's combined with adjustments to intel.

60 seconds was for capital-sized cynos, and was a starting place. I don't expect you to be able to light that in the center of a large-scale capital brawl and survive, and that's by design. Being able to reinforce to the center of a fight is very unbalanced compared to other ways of moving and eliminates a lot of potentially interesting gameplay involving strategic blocking actions and positioning.

If you read what I suggested, a cheap cyno frigate would only have a 5 second cyno delay, but wouldn't be able to move a JF; you would need a battleship for that and 20 seconds. If you're in such dangerous space that a battleship can't survive for 20 seconds, with your opponents dealing with the same cyno delays as you, should there really be some expectation that a non-combat ship should be safe to move?