Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The crux of it is; all things considered, getting tackle is harder than evading. Its an apple orange thing so such direct comparisons don't apply.

You've got things like local, d-scan, cloaks, stabs, nanos etc all these things that can work together to make you one slippery devil. Tackling on the other hand requires you to get in range to even work. And even when you succeed in tackling something you have to try and kill it before it kills you.

A point also gimps a ship. You lose a slot to do nothing but keep the other ship on grid. It's not as hard a gimp because points aren't as abusable as warp stabs.

Did you know warp stabs didn't used to have such penalties? But they were used with sniping ships to bounce around the grid whenever enemy ships got close (hence the lock range nerf).

Well yeah thats the cost of getting away. But how does that mean we need more powerful warp stabs? If the only answer you have us 'cause warp scrams' that doesn't cut it. Apples and oranges.

Is it even difficult to evade atm? Does evasion need a buff? Not really.

Ship loss is *good* for the game. With WCS as they are, there are enough tools to avoid death to give everyone a fighting chance. Making it even easier to avoid loss can't be good for the game. I would make a counter-proposal that ALL WCSes have an agility/mass penalty, because nerfing the combat abilities of a ship that doesn't want combat doesn't make sense and isn't a good enough penalty as is.

Well, yeah. Warpstabs work best if you don't want to fight at all. Because why the hell would you want to cripple a PVP ship with a stab?

And if you don't want to fight, you can take a lot of them. Also please remember the heavy variants of the warp disruptors and scramblers are expensive and fit only on at least battleships. It's not like every ship in the game can carry them.

But sure, let's add heavy warpstabs to the game. 5k power, 200 CPU, +2 warp core stability. Also your ship still gets crippled when equipping one.

This is not where I would kick it, but yes.

Is this a good time to re-mention my warp core reinforcer idea?


Warp Core Reinforcer
1 MW 40 Tf
-50% scan resolution
-50% targeting range
+0 warp strength

When activated, the module cycles for 3 seconds and at the end of that first cycle, it provides +1 warp strength. At the end of its second cycle, it provides +2 warp strength. It will keep running cycles and costing capacitor while providing its bonus. If shut off, the bonus immediately fades and it must be re-charged for two cycles to get the bonus back. At the end of the two cycles you may overheat it to let it run a third cycle, at the end of which it grants +3 warp strength.

Multiple warp core reinforcers must wait their turn to charge up, so there is a minimum 3 seconds per +1 warp strength, and more modules simply means you can continue stacking the effect higher for a longer amount of time. They also wait in line to overheat.


How it balances with Warp Core Stabilizer:
WCS gives an immediate bonus while WCR takes time but can build to a higher amount. WCR can be shut off by draining the ship's capacitor. WCR is more effective on larger, slower, tougher ships which already need a significant amount of time to align but which have enough hit points to survive until the WCRs charge up. They would be especially good for Deep Space Transports. Frigates would largely ignore WCRs.

The idea behind it is that the game currently makes it far easier for smaller and more agile ships to escape gate camps. With WCRs, it would still be far easier for smaller and more agile ships to get away, but it would lean the vast divide just slightly in the larger ships' favor.

Their penalty is that they take up a low slot and cost CPU. The scan res/target range penalties are merely to prevent abuse of the module (or balance the abuse, depending on how daring your fits are).

Any more penalties added should target defense rather than agility, to keep the module a trade-off rather than have the penalties directly counter the bonus.



It must also be balanced against frustration driving away people who would otherwise fly the ship. Sometimes too much danger = people stay docked. Sometimes increasing safety increases targets.

I think there is a problem here: the larger end industrials have such difficulty making their own safety they just give up entirely and rely on external safety such as CONCORD, active intel, or jump bridges. It's good that they experience danger when stepping out past the safe areas, but not so good that they have almost zero chance of escape when caught.

Part of helping people know how to survive is giving them enough tools to do it with.

It is a trivial task to make a frigate safe for travel in nullsec, but making a battleship safe for travel is actually impossible. Even with the best intel, skillful map-scanning, and a stellar fit, surviving any trip through nullsec of any significant length relies more on luck than anything else unless you bring enough friends for it to not be worth the trip. Might as well hire black frog to move your battleship at that point. People transport large ships exclusively in big fleet movements in nullsec, in which everyone has their own ship to take from the same start point to the same end point. There's no room for individual needs there, and you can only bring as many backup modules and ammo as you can fit in your cargohold without expanders because you're fit for combat.

Many times I've wanted to move a ship but couldn't find any friendlies going the same way, so it ended up being more efficient to just leave the ship there and buy a new one at the destination, since it's not hard to get one hauled over on a jump freighter.

Industrials suffer from the same problem; nobody hauls any significant amount of supplies through nullsec. Aside from short-range trips in a blockade runner, only newbs do it, and blockade runners don't even hold much. They're mostly used for hauling small things, while anything with any significant bulk is moved exclusively via jump freighter. Deep space transports are generally used only to haul from station to citadel or something like that, never leaving the safety of your friendly turrets. Some folks use them to haul supplies through a wormhole but most folks prefer an Orca because they need so many escorts just to make sure the coast is perfectly clear that the DST's pitiful capacity just isn't worth the trouble.

I think it would be nice to buff short range logistics to the point that it was ever reasonable to use industrials to move supplies around your local space. Imagine if we could have lots of markets all across an alliances' region, instead of having everything packed in at one or two major hubs of activity. It doesn't have to be impossibly difficult to catch them. They merely need a large enough margin of safety to make the trip worthwhile. At current, your survival is 10% dependent on your fit and tactics, and 90% dependent on whether or not any hostiles actually find you.

That's my point. Warp core stabilizers aren't really all that effective. Even with a fully-stabbed industrial, a small roaming gang has upwards of a 75% chance of taking your ship out while even if you get away they'll probably chase you down and catch you once more friends show up or their tacklers don't pause for the two seconds that allowed you to get away last time. The DST has a better chance of escape due to its ability to fit a MMJD but even that isn't enough to make up for how pitifully it can run away from a gang giving chase. Most likely they catch it before its MMJD has cooled down, so it better be within about 1 jump of safety to stand even a slim chance of getting away.

25% chance to get away from a gate camp isn't a reasonable margin of safety. 75% chance to get away isn't too much. With good intel and routing skills, there's already maybe an 80-90% chance you don't meet anyone in the first place. If you were able to run away most of the times you did get found, the aggressors can still try to chase you down. Sure, campers will whine that everyone is getting away, but in reality they'll be forgetting how many more total targets they have. Instead they'll focus on what percent get away, and they'll run to the forums to complain they can't get kills anymore but truthfully they'll probably get more kills than before.

Industrials are generally unused for shipping outside of highsec; they're basically useless for anything but single-warp cargo transfers. 95% or more of shipping to low/null is done by jump freighter, most of which are never in any significant danger. Short-range logistics are trivial in highsec but virtually unheard of outside highsec. Supply is critically low in nullsec while things produced exclusively outside highsec are cheap in highsec. 98% of trade goes through highsec. There are no nullsec-to-nullsec logistic lines. All of this allows for huge amounts of profiteering in the safety of highsec, while folks in nullsec just pay a fee to a pro JF corp to get their stuff shipped in virtually risk-free. Where's the risk/reward in this?

I want to see long-range logistics nerfed, and short-range logistics buffed to the point it can fill in the hole. I want to see a nullsec and lowsec that hold on to their own resources and become fat and rich from it. I want to see highsec become an impoverished region devoid of rich business opportunities. I want to see the prices of tech II products higher in highsec than in nullsec markets. I want to see the price of tech III products higher in highsec than in Thera. I want to see the price of ice higher in highsec than in lowsec. I want to see the goods drain out of the big highsec markets and out into fresh new markets in lawless space where they belong.