Jita Park Speakers Corner

Since this seems to be a hot issue I'd invite other candidates to discuss their opinion of the proposed changes here:

Myself, I'm shocked that not even a first draft of this seems to have passed before the existing CSM, this is once again a breakdown in communication that needs to be addressed. The Devblog is relatively vague on some parts and I believe the actual ship balancing will be an ongoing process with a lot of player commentary. It is fantastic to see this happening nonetheless.

The skill redesign however seems much more fleshed out and is causing a lot of anger from the wrong people, largely due to poor communication.

I personally welcome the notion of racial Destroyer/Battlecruiser skills, however, any transition is going to cause pain for either new or old pilots, and I don't believe

Take a pilot with level 5 in all subcap skills,
Option 1 gives him all the skills needed to keep flying his ships at the same level, which means he'll get a huge bump in skillpoints. However, the younger pilots without highly trained Dessy/BC skills will get less of a bonus and thus they will be negatively impacted by this scheme.

Option 2 simply reimbursing SP would leave him/her unable to fly ships, it will however be fairer to the younger pilots.

So, putting on my CSM hat I offer a Counter Proposal to the Skill Changes:
1 Keep Destroyers and Battlecruisers as a non-racial skill, so CCP doesn't need to poke at character skills
2 Make Destroyers 4 a pre-req for injecting racial cruiser skillbooks (not for flying ships)
3 Make Battlecruiser 4 a pre-req for injecting racial battleships skills (again, not necessarily for flying BS)
4 Modify all destroyers and battlecruisers to take bonuses from the two relevant skills:
Coercer 10% Bonus to Small Energy Turret Tracking Per Level Of Destroyer Skill, -10% reduction in energy turret capacitor usage per level of Amarr frigate
Brutix 5% Bonus to Medium Hybrid Turret damage per level of Gallente Cruiser, 7.5% bonus per level of Battlecruiser.

Another problem now for new pilots is the dearth of choice in the destroyers available, now that pilots willl be required to train them we need to realise that many pilots skip over destroyers completely because they are of little use to them. In particular, most caldari pilots have no interest in railguns, instead they are concentrating on destroyers, now they're going to be forced to spend time training on this gunboat with only one missile slot. Similarly many gallente pilots might want to focus on drones and the Catalyst can only field one.

I would propose adding a second racial destroyer to ameliorate this problem:
Caldari would get a tech 1 missile destroyer, Gallente would get a drone based destroyer, Amarr would get a destroyer with a laser damage bonus (and swap a low slot into a mid slot!), Minmatar would get a destroyer with a falloff bonus (and swap a mid slot to a low, drop its shield and give it more armor). These could be as easy as reskins of the existing vessels for a first iteration.

A lesser proposal is to simply give the cormorant many more missile hardpoints without any missile bonuses. The Catalyst would get a 20m^3 drone bay, but would lose a turret hardpoint (and let's face it, the Catalyst is looking a bit OP right now when it can spit out 90% of the dps of the thorax, losing a little bit might make it more balaced).

So while the existing pilots are up in arms about retraining that has already been confirmed to not be an issue, nobody seems to be speaking up for the exacerbation of the disparity between old and new players. Eve can always use new blood, and I'm forever hear4ing new pilots quitting because they realise they'll always be stuck behind old pilots in the skill training game.

So some immediate positive is lowering cap training time and Covetor to LvL4. Goodness.

Also so long as they really do make this "you can still fly tomorrow what you can fly today" I am in the direction suggested in the dev blog.

The planned ship lines are a lot more logical the way proposed as compared to what we have today.

One thing some folks miss however, Ok, bushy tailed young pod pilot of Eve, you can fly that shiny new BS finally saved up to buy, but should you. Sadly the answer is a capitalized and bold-ed NO.

Just because you can make it active and undock doesn't mean you have any business in it! I can't count the times I'd had to point out to younger players that you need to be able to fit is and have the skills to fly it effectively. So training times for the hull are just part of the problem.

So again, so long as they deliver on the promise of not preventing us from flying what we can now once they do this, I think it looks good.

Issler