EVE General Discussion

So says the guy whining on the forums about people talking on the forums...

Skins have nothing to do with ship balance.

Nerfing does not necessarily "create another uber ship somewhere else" or anything of the sort. If one ship is over-performing in a number of areas, especially specialist areas, like the T3s are then nerfing that one ship will see its role taken up by a number of other ships. It's also unlikely that the ship will completely fall out of use either.

There will always be some things that are used more than others, but variations in usage are a different thing from one ship or ship class being an obvious and severe outlier in terms of use and effectiveness.

Games can't just use buffs for balance, there have to be nerfs as well. Otherwise you end up having to buff everything rather than nerf one thing, and that's just not viable and ends up being *way* more work for no added benefit.

Your OP toy is getting nerfed. Get over it.

Exactly. Training up to be proficient at flying Tech 3 Strategic Cruisers is no easy task.

Check the meaning of the word 'Strategic' - Something that's carefully designed or planned to serve a particular purpose or advantage. Related to the gaining of overall or long-term military advantage.

If anything Tech 3 Strategic Cruisers are suppose to be OP due to their versatility. And because of that versatility they aren't meant to be pigeon holed or shoehorned into a specific cookie-cutter fleet role. They're suppose to be dangerous with unknown fitting options due to being reversed engineered from Sleeper Technology whereas all other Empire ships were created by K-space Technology.

Trying to compare and make Tech 3 Strategic Cruisers balanced with all the other regular Empire ships is nothing more than complete and utter nonsense. Reducing the amount of available sub-systems and slot options by using the excuse that it's required in order to make 'Skins' for them is just plain stupid and total BS.

Now I do admit that Tech 3 Strategic Cruisers need to be looked at but only in the aspect of making them equally balanced between themselves. That's it and nothing more.

Just because some cry baby players complained they don't know what type of fit up to expect when they encounter a Tech 3 Strategic Cruiser is no reason to nerf them. I swear, CCP has their heads stuck so far up their nether regions they seriously don't even know what they're doing anymore.


DMC

I know a guy who can literally fly anything in the game. Supercarriers, titans, battleships, etc. He just flies Tengus. He gets more tank, more dps, more mobility, and more resists than a battleship. He does all his null-sec ratting in his Tengu, always tells me to get rid of my battleships and get into a Tengu.

The anoms and wormhole sites he can solo in a Tengu without ever warping out a single time are outrageous. I haven't found a battleship yet that can stay in with him any length of time. He says strategic cruisers are way OP, and that's why he flies them.

One aspect here - I think it would be silly to make T3 variants of every class of ship - makes much more sense to have small, medium and large T3s that overlap the classes either side of them. If a strategic cruiser T3 has BS dmg though it should come at a penalty elsewhere - T3s should always be about versatility/flexibility but with a compromise or penalty as a balance.

A lot of what people think about T3s and their flexibility or generalisation might sound good on paper but the reality is it often doesn't work out as actual good gameplay mechanics ingame whether that is because it ends up being clunky or just a lot less interesting, especially when dealing with it day to day rather than as a gimmick, than it sounds like it would be.



Capitals are a huge investment in ISK, fitting time and other logistics such as moving them and a lot less of something you want to be flying every day if you are actually actively doing stuff and likely to be replacing them fairly frequently. The relatively slowness of battleships - align time, warp speed, requirement of using bastion on marauders, etc. tends to turn people away from them even when they have the other capabilities. I spent a ton of time doing wormhole sites in tengus but its far from the only option - a well fit rattlesnake can have just as much durability in PVE even with the bigger sig meaning it makes harder work tanking.

T3 cruisers are the "high sec lvl 5 missions" of spaceships in EVE.

Meaning that CCP know about the bug that allowed people to force generate high sec lvl 5 missions for YEARS, and they knew that this was a bad/unbaslanced thing, but they didn't get around to fixing it until people had been using that bug for years. The wailing when they fixed that bug was epic and still goes on in some pve circles.

This is about to happen with T3Cs. Some people have spent years using them and know nothing else (and frankly didn't care about how they were way too good). CCP has known for years that T3Cs make soooo many other ships obsolete no matter how much they try to buff them. The wailing and gnashing of teeth and threats to quit will go on for years after this.

TBH it will be really fun to watch

You can't see it , but I'm laughing right now. That's because what you said was similar to something I heard incursion people say.

Incursions used to be way more unbalanced than even they are now, so CCP announced a nerf was incoming. Incursion runners flocked to the forum claiming that incursions weren't about the isk, it was about the community, the camaraderie , the shared experience. Everything but isk.

CCP nerfed their income potential and like 80% of incursion runners stopped running them overnight. Whole incursion communities went extinct like they were hit by that Yucatan Asteroid lol. So much for community and camaraderie lol. I guess it WAS the ISK.

EVE survived before outrageously overpowered T3Cs, CCP getting rid of a bunch of subsystems no one uses and rebalancing the rest isn't going to kill the ship, but it should give us reasons to fly other ships. People who didn't want a nerf said the same with Ishtar's ("I don't fly them because they are way overpowered, I fly them because my play style is drone boats, please ignore the fact that I never fly other drone boats"). CCP nerfed Ishtars and EVE is better for it.

The training time for a T3 Cruiser is far less than skilling all of the T2 Cruisers it can fill the role of to 4, and it out-performs quite a few of them in one way or another. It's even less than skilling a HAC to 5, since most people only run 2 of the subsystem skills at 5 and the rest at 4, and if you run all of them at 4 it's less than skilling a HAC to 4.

Also that last bit isn't really accurate. A Pirate Cruiser *might* get similar DPS but it won't be able to tank half as well or pull off half the fits a T3 Cruiser can pull off. A T3 Cruiser is going to have way better tank, probably better speed as well, and have more utility in addition to its damage compared to a Pirate Cruiser.



I think you're going to be disappointed then, because CCP has flat out said that they're looking to make T3 Cruisers stop stepping on the toes of other ships, especially HACs. Trying to use lore to justify why these ships "should be OP" is nonsense. Nothing in the game should be over powered, because something being over powered is by definition a bad thing.

The lore is there to support the game design, the game design is not there to enforce the lore. The T3 Cruisers are supposed to be able to pack more options into the same hull as a result of the more modular Sleeper tech, not be drastically more powerful as a result of it.

You should probably also watch the Ship and Module balance panel before making pronouncements about why CCP are doing what they're doing. They flat out said they're reducing the number of subsystems because the current state of balance between subsystems is poor. Quite a few are under-utilized and the number of combinations makes the class hard to balance, so they're combining a few subsystems and moving others around to reduce the overall complexity and ensure that each subsystem has a use.

The issue with Skinning T3Cs has nothing to do with the number of subsystems. The number of subsystems *does* make the T3Cs more art intensive to support and maintain, but the issue with T3Cs and Skins was one of texture tech. If they had tried to apply Skins to the current T3Cs they'd have ended up looking weird due to the different scaling and texture orientation between hull segments. It would have essentially looked like the T3C ran through its closet blind and managed to get the colors right but its pants on backwards.

No they don't.

The vast majority fly them for one reason only, because of how good they are at doing things people want to do with them.

The Nerf crowd say they are too good at doing these things and should be less good to make other ships viable. This statement is backed up by data collected on ship types used in PvP, which showed T3 cruisers holding 4 of the top 6 positions or something similar.

The Don't Nerf crowd say they are just good enough at doing things, and should be left as is. This statement is not backed up by anything aside from peoples investment in skills to fly T3 cruisers.

The third group, the Change Everything Except T3 Cruisers crowd might have something interesting to say but it's just not going to go that way. I might even be one of these people if i thought it would help.

As it stands the only realistic team to be on is the top one, because their postulation is backed up by research and their answer is potentially possible (neither other option can boast either).

I love flying my various Protei, because they're incredibly powerful and for most jobs they just work better than other ships. This is why things must change, so that people like me have to fly different ships for different jobs again.

It's funny how things repeat over and over again in EVE.

CCP makes something that is too good and leaves it in the game for WAY too long. People get used to it to the point of feeling ENTITLED to it. When CCP moves to actually fix the thing that TBH they should have never put into the game to begin with, people come up with all kind of nonsense justifications about WHY it should be left alone or else [insert BS doomsday talk here, like quiting or new players growing horns].

Just off the top of my head:

Capitals/super capitals ("look at all the time i spent training these things, you can't nerf them!!!")

Passive income like moon goo ("you are going to break EVE and a t2 medium gun will cost like 17000 plex if you do this CCP")

high sec lvl 5 missions ("if you take lvl 5s out of high sec, most PVE players will quit, nevermind that most pve players never did them!!!")

high sec incursions ("if you nerf them, the players that prefer co-op play will quit, never mind that they didn't quit even when you super nerfed them in 2011")

And now T3Cs ("but they are unique things that fit the lore and people fly them because they are cool, not because they are so overpowered they have skewed the game's balance for the last 6 + years"!)



Peoople have said that EVE is a social experiment, but hell, it's also a PSYCH experiment. You can see clearly how people behave, how they become irrational, when you threaten to take away an advantage, even when they should clearly be able to see how that advantage is unfair to other people".

I find it cute how many people in Eve call for things to be pulled down to their level because they got killed a few times bringing a knife to a gun fight - instead of investing in a gun they want CCP to force everyone else to bring knives :D

(Not a comment directed at anyone specifically)



My previous take on the impact of changes has largely worked out as I said it would (check my older posts :( ) so wouldn't be much of a bet :| I'm not saying people would stick with T3Cs btw in the comment above - I'm pretty sure it will just lead to increasing numbers being disengaged with the game even as they move to other stuff - I just didn't want to spell out yet again that it will lead to more people slowly trickling away from the game.