EVE General Discussion

You seem to have mistaken what I want, and I think also what constitutes a well balanced game.

I don't believe everything will every be "perfectly" balanced. That's an unrealistic goal for a game of any complexity, let alone one as wide and varried as Eve with such a wide ranging and constantly shifting meta. There are things in the game that have stayed in one state for *years* and only became a problem after someone figured out a unique way to abuse them at a certain scale. That's never going to change.

The example I like to bring up for a well balanced but interesting game is Starcraft 2. Generally speaking SC2 and its various incarnations have been quite well balanced but they've also had a lot of variety and Blizzard has continued to make balance changes to them to promote that variety and ensure that multiple options are available to a player at every stage of play and every unit has a use, even if it's not always a very prevalent one. Some units literally only exist to be used in niche strategies or as counters to them. That's fine and the game is one of the best balanced RTS games to ever see competitive play.

I'm all for niche ships and not everything needing the same level of use across all aspects of the game. Some ships are only going to be popular for missioning, Mining ships don't need massive PvP applications, and a ship that's good for solo or small-gang play doesn't need a strong showing in fleets. The problem is that T3Cs are and have been for *years* incredibly prevalent and oppressive across a huge swath of the meta. CCP knows it, most of the players involved in pushing the meta know it, and the CSM has certainly known it for years now.

On that note I think we're taking our samples of player sentiment from *very* different parts of the playerbase. Pretty much every time T3 discussion has come up seriously, especially in Features and Ideas, but even in unrelated ship threads, T3Cs get mentioned, often in the same breath as T3Ds. You don't have to look particularly hard to find people who don't like these ships, whether because they feel forced to use them or just find them frustrating to fight against.

The only time you find people jumping up to defend T3 hulls is when the serious prospect of them being changed or nerfed comes up, but you see this with every change no matter how justified or well supported by available evidence of OP-ness. That doesn't mean that the balance of public opinion lies against the nerf, it means that people are more likely to speak up about something they don't like than something they do.

That's why you see people ranting about how CCP should get around to fixing T3Cs/Ds in unrelated ship or module balance threads, but the T3 support is generally limited to threads explicitly calling for or discussing nerfs.

There were quite a few Reddit threads discussing the leaks from the summer when we first got confirmation that CCP was looking at changing T3Cs. Go take a look and you'll find that the *vast* majority of support is either calling for or assuming a nerf is going to happen.



See, this is what gets me, you can list off all of those ships that the Proteus is *strictly better than* including several with comparable total hull costs, and look at that and go "nah, it's just fun to fly, it's not imbalanced!"

That's ridiculous and an absolutely blind way of approaching the game and the meta. If a ship is amazing in a way that almost every other ship struggles with, and it's not an amazingly specialized roll that requires a special bonus, that ship is almost certainly OP.

Best of luck with that approach - the reality is you'd be ******* in the wind trying to use any other ship the days when say the Brutix, etc. would have been a viable choice for that fairly fundamental game and race role have long gone as the game has developed - yeah you go chose that Megathron* and see what happens ;) typically in those fleet the t1 BCs and BS, etc. get primaried and blapped off the field in short order - the end result of taking the Prot out of that equation is just going to push gameplay even more towards high mobility ranged fleets.



* That isn't to say Mega fleets, etc. aren't viable but that is in a different context where the Prot wouldn't really be an option.

If you actually paid attention I outlined why none of those are a particularly good alternative let alone the next best option for that specific role.

Take away the prot and you are left with a bunch of very poor choices for a fairly fundamental role - some of them might have suited the Eve of yesterday in that role but things have moved on.

In a serious fleet role they need to be able to stand their ground - in a serious engagement the t1 stuff will go down hard, the deimos lacks the ehp to survive fast target switching and the bigger stuff will get blapped by bombing runs, carrier fighters, dreads and so on.

Oh I paid attention. That's just it though. You are saying all the other choices are very poor choices blah blah blah. Well SURE they are... of COURSE they are... compared to the Proteus.

I'm not saying this in a mean or insulting way, I'm just saying, you're so blind to the issue here that your brain is automatically skipping over the obvious 'but that's just it!' part of this.

It's like you have a bunch of cavemen back in the stone age with thrusting spears and bow and arrows. But we arm you with handguns and a rifle. And all of a sudden you are saying "what you guys don't understand is that thrusting spears and bows and arrows and blah blah are very poor choices... that's why I use these guns." It's like... what?

Ah, one of my favorite forum regulars! Good to see you.

I have a question about the quote above. I don't keep up with places like Reddit where stuff like this probably already got hashed out, but your reference to the rigs seems oddly phrased, or very deliberately phrased.

"...that was a much needed fix"

That makes it sound like something already happened. I'm not aware of any announced balance changes for T3C yet. So are T3 ships getting rigs removed completely? I remember someone on the forums long ago made a very convincing argument for removing rigs from T3 ships. Is that something CCP is going to do?

That's called a trade-off. If you want tons of EHP you sacrifice other things for it. If you want tons of speed, you sacrifice other things for it.

If you can get all of the things at once the ship is OP.

You also seem to have missed that a good chunk of the ships out there being kitey and playing the high-mobility ranged game are, in fact, T3Cs, and you're overly focused on the Proteus and what you can get away with in a fleet setting with Medium Blasters. That's a bit of a square peg you're trying to jam into that round hole.

Basically you seem to be salty that the meta currently favors kitey ships, and your 10km range Medium Blasters aren't measuring up. Welcome to the meta, don't let it hit you anywhere sensitive. It'll swing around eventually to something friendly to your preferred style of play, in the meantime I suggest adapting or stepping away from it.

For the proteus, that would give you the option of a deimos that requires a whole new skill tree or a stratios that requires a whole new skill tree, level 5 skills and has no cargo capacity.

Which has to go into a hauler mode to carry enough gear to do the clark kent thing at destination, and then when it does, its going to barf up a ton of stuff that it has to leave at a depot or your local docking option if you've got it because the flexibility doesn't fit in the cargo without expanders and a cruiser with expanders is not a combat fit.

I also think it has ramifications for the current "most systems are occupied" phenomenon in null (ie a great many systems became useful to run anoms and escalate from, after CCP changed the composition of ihub generated anoms in bad truesec systems - along with the sov changes).

If the covert/nullified ship isn't good enough to actually do the escalation anymore, most people would be far keener on abusing the predictability of the walker to keep the escalation in blue space - ie cluster up into the same old deadends they used to and fly an interceptor to the citadel containing their rattlesnake when they get an escalation, which might have to be moved 1 or 2 jumps tops. I certainly wouldn't do what I did before, which is go fetch them from red space.

Why should SoE have an equivalent pve exploration ship when they're pretty much specialised for that purpose? Not to mention that you can, also, get at least decent pvp fits for Astero or Stratios.

There are way too many aspects of the game where T3 cruisers are by far the best option available.

I agree that, like the name strategic implies, they should be a valid option, just not the best. Especially when there are ships designed for the respective role.

More like between a thorax and a navy exequror



Nah. You don't need a huge number of mods to radically change the ship.



Quite frankly I'm not too bothered if this makes doing things like 10/10s harder and riskier. If fewer run them then supply of the rewards drops and the people who do put in the time and effort get greater reward. I honestly think exploration was swung too far towards being easy.

A lot of it should purely be in the realm of team up business - that is half of what is wrong with this game :s