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I like the idea of removing ship tiers and shifting attention to ship lines.
This will allow them to rebalance underused T1 ships. (buffing tier 1/2 cruisers/frigates slot layout and stats?)
By giving (tech 2) ships more specialized roles and tying them into the ship lines they open up the option for more ships to fill different roles and gaps in the current ship lines.

New players will need more time to train up to a BS but after that you need less time to get in some T2 hulls that will have reduced requirements.

It also puts destroyer and battlecruiser ships in line with the rest as full ship classes instead of being halfway between the real classes of frigate/cruiser/battleship.

edit:
By changing destroyer and battlecruiser to racial skills they are giving acess to a reduced number of ships from before. This opens the option of creating more ships for these hull types without making the skill an overpowered must-have-at-rank-5 that it would be without this fix.

This change creates room for a whole lot of new hulls and rebalancing of the old ones which is exactly what a lot of players want.
Gotta love it when everyone fears change and is distrustful of CCP. Just post your feedback here, talk to your local CSM representative and your voice will be heard. Someone might even listen.

I want to be able to fly what I can now or be compensated, etc. just like everyone is already talking about.

Other than that...I LOVE IT.

Like: De-generification of DD/BC skills (pending solutions to the "existing skills" issue as everyone seems to be aware), standardization within the ship-skill progression, allowing specialization by specializing.

LOVE: Plans to obliterate tier system. It's gonna get scary once the changes start to roll in but in the long run things should get a lot better.

Not-So-Sure: T2/T3/Faction.

"Faction is generally better," I can understand (though I think in a lot of cases a few ships are WAY across the line) so long as we're not making things obsolete. Right now, Faction doesn't *seem* to really obsolete anything outside of a couple areas that are themselves problems (*glares at incursion shiny fleets*). They're pricey, and the pirate ones in particular are a pain to replace. Make 'em good.

"T2 (as pertains to ships, at least) is specialized," on the other hand, I think is not currently the case, at least not how I'd expect it to be. Part of this will hopefully go away with the tiers, but partly I think some of what T2 ships "get" means they tend to be specialized *and* just plain better. I'd really like to see the T2 ships to be particularly good at ONE aspect of their base hull's role, but not all-round better. So, if the Caracal moves into the "artillery" line for long-range cruiser-sized bombardment, the Cerberus wouldn't hit harder, from further away, and with better defenses: it might hit more accurately (radius/explosion bonus in exchange for some/all of the caracal's straight-up damage bonus, so it hits fast things harder but slow things not so much) from further away (bigger range bonus), and gets used much as it does now with the exception that it doesn't get a bunch of extra resists and slots and other stats. Or maybe as a "heavy assault" cruiser meant to shoot up BCs/BSs it does hit harder (damage bonus or extra launcher+fit), and has significantly improved defenses, but has a penalty to its radius/speed and maybe range (via lack of bonus) scan res so it isn't nearly as effective against smaller targets as would be a "normal" Caracal.

The notion of "T2 resists" basically needs to be replaced with resists based on roles IMO, with extra-heavy values being reserved for emphasizing specialization, not just as part of being "T2." Similarly with extra slots and hardpoints- they should make sense for the intended role.

Ships built for a specialized purpose should fulfill that purpose, and very well. Command ships are another example where the hulls try too hard to just be "better" and oh by the way here's an extra function. Lots of talk about the how people thing reining in the drake will make the nighthawk more attractive. Strangely, much of this talk seems to be about getting people to use it solo, or to provide missile-based death, and a number of people will happily point out that even if the drake were deleted the nighthawk would still be lackluster. It *should* be underwhelming solo, and as a damage platform- it's a command ship! As the "middle of a big fight" version it should be all about running links and refusing to die, and it might happen to also have some weapons. If it's set up to out-tank and out-buff the base ships, it shouldn't also out-damage them, even at an increased cost. Likewise the "faster sneaky" versions like the vulture should tank and hit like a basic BC at best, but be especially nimble.

As this gets sorted, costs should be adjusted to reflect the fact that you're getting an expensive vessel to perform a specific task, rather than an expensive vessel to "also" perform a specific task, and the roles themselves should be examined to make sure they're relevant (EA Frigs?) and sufficiently attractive to be *worth* the expense/tradeoffs (Command Ships?).

Which leaves T3, the hyper-expensive hyper-effective new toys that seem to do everything... the blog mentions them as "generalization" but in reality they're able to be *quite* specialized and in situations where you aren't afraid to lose them (either because they're not at direct risk or because their cost is no longer significant) the're very often a better choice than a T2 ship for the T2 ship's supposed role. Flexibility in and of itself isn't a problem, but they really *shouldn't* be as good at whatever they're currently doing as a ship entirely built to do that. Perhaps making some adjustments so they could more easily change roles at the expense of being able to excel could be studied... (thus becoming more generalist, and appealing in situations where that really is the best, like wormholes, and possibly being able to do several things at once, and so be better than a T1 cruiser at a number of things at any given time but never quite as good as a T2 at the particular thing the T2 is good at)

td;dr (too disorganized...)- T2 shouldn't automatically be better at everything than T1 so all ships get continual use, T3 should be more about doing lots of things well than about doing one thing great, docking, and going back out to do another thing great.

Err isn't one of the purposes of this dev blog to let us know what CCP are currently thinking?

Do you actually play this game? Did you actually read the blog?

The roles suggested in the dev blog are basically design objectives for one ship in a stable supplied by a particular faction: ships designed for assault (i.e.: short range, high DPS, low mobility), sniping (long range, low DPS, moderate mobility), support, etc. At present we have ships that area designed in "tiers" where, for example, you have a useless ship that nobody uses (Ferox), then a better ship that a lot of people use (Drake), then an awesome ship which the better pilots will use (Naga).

You already know that capsuleers are not restricted to flying just one ship. Why the comparison to fantasy role playing games with their rigid class structures?



Caldari Achura were popular because they trained all useful skills faster (where "useful" is defined by the jarheads as "not leadership or marketing" ;) - different flavours of ships would not have changed the popularity of that bloodline, simply because the bloodline was superior at training speed and would be able to fly the new FOTM ships faster than anyone else.



That is exactly what they're doing.

For the most part, yes. This is about right. I just want to emphasize the importance of avoiding pigeonholing either in theory or practice (while a ship could do something else, it would be so much better suited to it's CCP defined role that using it for anything else would be as practical as using Carriers for hauling stuff over multiple light years POST carrier hauler nerf).

I too have strong concerns about this becoming the new model for Eve. This will honestly drive every player who has ever played an MMORPG even loosely based on WoW. If they wanted WoW, Rift, EQ, etc... they would play it. They play Eve, because of the differences that I'm worried this change would remove.

I am wondering if after ccp will split destroyers and battlecruiser into racial they will continue to do so with the other skills that affect all races as:

assault ship, heavy assault ship, black ops, command ships, covert ops, electronic attac ships, heavy interdictors, interceptors, interdictors, jump freighters, marauders, recon ships and transports ships.

Will we get in time to train another zillion skills to be able to fly what I can fly now? And also to buy all those new skills that will may be implemented later if they will start with battlecruisers and destroyers?

Yes that would be the best solution indeed.

Important consequence though, everybody would train all races cruisers and frigate to III to get max free skill points.

Re-balancing ships and the elimination of the tier system = goo
Changing generic skills to racial skills = ba
Changing pre-req on Covetor to 4 = goo
Changing pre-reg of caps to BS4 = Me

I like generic skills they allow a pilot to gain a lot of capability for a low time investment. BC5 is generally considered such a great skill specifically because it offers so much bang for your buck in that one ~30 day train gives you max bonuses on all races BC's, Now I can see the argument of how this might trivialize training for Command ships but honestly you still need racial cruiser 5 and all those leadership skills in addition to BC5 so it doesn't seem all that awful that one can cross train a tad bit easier into another races CS

My objection to the change has less to do with how it affects me since I've already got all 4 racial cruisers to 5 as well as BC5 (same for racial frigs and dessy 5) than the hurdle it puts before new players.

Under the current system once you've trained a T2 ship skill for one race you can relatively easily add additional races for more flexibility. So if you were trained to use a fly-catcher and you join an alliance that prefers sabre's all you'd have to do is train Mini-frig up so in a week you could be flying the new ship, same for HICs.

This is a good thing, because EVE has enough pain in the backside skill training issues as it stands already, The attribute system already sucks in general since to maximize your training time you need to group skills by attribute in your training rather than by specific ships/roles.

Changing the generic ships skills just seems like a whole lot of trouble for no effective gain, if you really wanted to smooth progression out you could simply make the generic skill to 4 be a prereq for the racial specific of the next higher class. So to train Gal cruiser you'd need Gal frig 4 and generic Dessy 4 and skip the whole rage and reimbursement nonsense

This change screws over new players as compared to older players since it would effectively set every player who didn't already have BC5 at the time of the change 3 months further behind.

Hypothetically if it took a vet 12 months to train to be able to use all racial BC's at level 5 it would take the new player 15 months to reach that same level of capability. Considering the perception of newer players being persistently behind in this game it this seems particularly dumb

Covetor no longer requiring Mining barge 5 would be an overdue and welcome change the old requirement was stupid design to begin with.

Lowering the BS requirement to L4 for Caps just seems kind of meh to me. considering the number of insanely long trains required to fly a cap effectively that ~30 days is more of a speed bump than a hurdle (the real hurdle being the navigation and support skills) so I don't think changing that requirement would lead to some sort of massive influx of new cap pilots and the most likely result of such a change would simply be making it easier for cap pilots to train into different races capitals.

Understand I'm not against making changes to the skill system to make it friendlier to new players but if you are going to go mucking about with it then make changes that actually would make life easier on new players.

Like eliminate attributes completely and they serve no real purpose but to frustrate peoples training plans, "Oh I'd like to try flying logistics but oh look I'm on a perception/will map which means all those required electronic and engineering skills are going to take 33% longer to train but if I remap then I'm stuck on that for a year and I'll have to then either lose 33% to train the ship skill or find other stuff that's on map to train for that year so I still won't be able to fly a logi for another year... f -this game

Adding even more skills that add nothing new to the game to the convoluted mess that is the EVE skill system is just dumb and the person who thought up the idea deserving of ridicule.