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New dev blog: Rebalancing EVE, one ship at a time

First post First post
Author
Sable Moran
Moran Light Industries
#1441 - 2012-03-08 09:10:17 UTC
Krystal Flores wrote:
At first i was worried about having to train BC V again three times.
Miss President wrote:

CCP, can you confirm you will have no intentions in the future to screw "Recon", "Heavy Assault" and "Logistics" into racial skills?


Then i realized if they changed Desy and BC, then it would set a precedent to change all of those classes too. Why not while you at it have racial interceptor, racial hic, all the general ship skills. Heck while there at it what about Black Ops.


Frigate, dessy, cruiser etc. skills are for tech 1 ships, interceptors, logistics etc. skills are for tech 2 ships. The former are racial the latter are not. I find it hard believe CCP would introduce racial T2 ship skills.

Krystal Flores wrote:
Or i am just over reacting?


Most likely, yes.



Then again this is CCP we are talking about so... Funny things have happened before.

Sable's Ammo Shop at Alentene V - Moon 4 - Duvolle Labs Factory. Hybrid charges, Projectile ammo, Missiles, Drones, Ships, Need'em? We have'em, at affordable prices. Pop in at our Ammo Shop in sunny Alentene.

Oxylan
Blood Fanatics
#1442 - 2012-03-08 09:23:00 UTC  |  Edited by: Oxylan
Nikuno wrote:
Ship balancing has gradually become a more and more polarised issue with an ever decreasing proportion of ships being used by the majority as time and tweaks have progressed.



How aboout Meh Golem and big ship unification, since t3 relase meny ships lose own roles espetialy marauders and commands, i remember time while people still uses ravens and commands in mission now every player use tengu, also tengu is like win button.

Another wired thing Amarr electionc frigate got 60m3 drone bay and 20 drone bandwich while Gallente electronic frigate as we know (drone ships) only 10m3 drone bay 5m3 drone bandwich... :D

Ps.Tengu on my alt whtaut any nano items and aglility implants, got same agility like my buzzard on my main (cov ops frigate) with one nanofiber t2 + one implant to ship agility on my main... i dont need to algin to gate with both ship to get fleet warp, they always warp togewer, this is balance ? t3 strategic cruiser with agility compared to small t2 frigate ?

If it bleed we can kill it.

Tallian Saotome
Nuclear Arms Exchange Inc.
#1443 - 2012-03-08 10:05:12 UTC  |  Edited by: Tallian Saotome
Oxylan wrote:
Nikuno wrote:
Ship balancing has gradually become a more and more polarised issue with an ever decreasing proportion of ships being used by the majority as time and tweaks have progressed.



How aboout Meh Golem and big ship unification, since t3 relase meny ships lose own roles espetialy marauders and commands, i remember time while people still uses ravens and commands in mission now every player use tengu, also tengu is like win button.

Another wired thing Amarr electionc frigate got 60m3 drone bay and 20 drone bandwich while Gallente electronic frigate as we know (drone ships) only 10m3 drone bay 5m3 drone bandwich... :D

Ps.Tengu on my alt whtaut any nano items and aglility implants, got same agility like my buzzard on my main (cov ops frigate) with one nanofiber t2 + one implant to ship agility on my main... i dont need to algin to gate with both ship to get fleet warp, they always warp togewer, this is balance ? t3 strategic cruiser with agility compared to small t2 frigate ?

Funny thing, Gallente isn't the only race meant to have pwn droneboats, we just have more of them. Amarr has one or 2, as well as the Khanid missileboat platforms.

The races do have a fair amount of diversity in them.

Edit: also, ever notice the proteus is a terrible droneboat? Even if you fit it for drones, its pretty sucktastic next to an ishtar for a fraction of the price.

Inappropriate signature removed, CCP Phantom.

Infininte escher
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#1444 - 2012-03-08 10:22:54 UTC
would tracking dissruption/missile's and ewar/lasors and nos/drones and sensor dampers/projectiles be a better compliment to each other
StoneDwarf
Absolute Order V
Absolute Glory
#1445 - 2012-03-08 11:19:26 UTC
For now, I can fly Caldari+Gallente+Minmatar ships. All of, them begining from frigates and ending the BS. All of them, T1 and T2.
After this update I will have to learn all of them again separated race by race?
This smells like ****!!!! What is this for?
Crucis Cassiopeiae
Ministry of War
Amarr Empire
#1446 - 2012-03-08 11:24:44 UTC
StoneDwarf wrote:
For now, I can fly Caldari+Gallente+Minmatar ships. All of, them begining from frigates and ending the BS. All of them, T1 and T2.
After this update I will have to learn all of them again separated race by race?
This smells like ****!!!! What is this for?


PLEASE TRY TO READ THREAD.
Its said that if you can fly something, you will fly it.

They will give you for dessy skill, all 4 dessy skills.
and for BC skill, all 4 BC skills.

So you dont need to learn anything.

Vote Issler Dainze for CSM7! http://community.eveonline.com/council/voting/Vote.asp?c=470 

Tallian Saotome
Nuclear Arms Exchange Inc.
#1447 - 2012-03-08 11:26:04 UTC
StoneDwarf wrote:
For now, I can fly Caldari+Gallente+Minmatar ships. All of, them begining from frigates and ending the BS. All of them, T1 and T2.
After this update I will have to learn all of them again separated race by race?
This smells like ****!!!! What is this for?

Go read the OP/devblog. If you can fly it now you will still be able to fly it.

Sheesh people, if you are gonna get worked up about something, make sure it hasn't been resolved already Roll

Inappropriate signature removed, CCP Phantom.

Kahz Niverrah
Distinguished Johnsons
#1448 - 2012-03-08 11:42:14 UTC
I know I'm late to the threadnaught, but this proposal just seems like it's making things different and not necessarily better.

I think we can all agree that getting rid of tiers and rebalancing ships is a good thing. You don't need to change the skill trees to do this. They're fine, leave them alone, imo. Different != better in this case.

I don't always post on the forums, but when I do, I post with my main.

Mike Whiite
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#1449 - 2012-03-08 11:43:04 UTC  |  Edited by: Mike Whiite
I am amazed at the old players comming to the "rescue" of the younger players, Usualy the answers are when I started playing it was way harder bla bla bla.

And now when the older players fear (not even justified at the moment) they might lose a couple of days training, it would not be nice towards the younger players.

I consider myself one of those younger players about 1.25 years old, and I'm realy thrilled to see this change.

I'm Caldari, yes with in 3 months I could fly a Drake without to much troubles and then came the long waiting, little to nothing happens then for a long time.

This would give you a more gradual way of progressing, the fact ships get role bonusses which in a way they already have, makes it more intresting for younger players to enter the world of eve since you can become a rather usefull asset in a short time instead of being pushed in to the tackler role when you enter a pvp group. It's more fun to get a new toy every other month then get half in 3 months and then need to wait half a year to fly somthing else that can be used more than on a few occasions.

a second pro I see in these changes is that it might no longer be intrsting to fly cane of drake blobs;
1) it takes longer to fly them
2) with specialisation of (bombardment ships, Ships of the line, and attack vessles) it might not be so wise to put your bets on one horse, so more diversion of ships in a fleet, new tactics ect ect.

The fact every body flies them very often (almost every players guide tells you to rush to your racial Battlecruiser) points out exactly why it is broken.

And to every one that fances with the streamlining and dumbing down of EVE because of the roles, realy using EFT to calculate what does the most DPS against EH is a "very" complex system. Now you will need to think more about the ballance your fleet or the capacity of your piliots
Tallian Saotome
Nuclear Arms Exchange Inc.
#1450 - 2012-03-08 11:56:37 UTC
Mike Whiite wrote:

The fact every body flies them very often (almost every players guide tells you to rush to your racial Battlecruiser) points out exactly why it is broken.


You do realize that this is because BCs are the largest ship that are still fairly forgiving of a lack of skillpoints in support skills, right? Once you get into BS and T2 ships, those 2s and 3s in armor comp skills and navigation skills just don't cut it anymore.

BCs are the current ship of the line for smaller gangs of less experienced players, while battleships are for larger fleets (where a few people short on SP is averaged out of existance) and more experienced players in small gangs tend to favor T2 and faction frigs/cruisers.

That is why you are told to rush to BC when you start the game(also, :drake:)

Inappropriate signature removed, CCP Phantom.

CCP Ytterbium
C C P
C C P Alliance
#1451 - 2012-03-08 12:06:24 UTC  |  Edited by: CCP Ytterbium
We have been following this thread closely and compiled a Q&A list to the most commonly asked questions, we hope this helps a bit.


  • Q: Will all of these ship balancing changes be applied in one go for Inferno?

  • A: No, the nuance is we will begin this general ship balancing plan with Inferno. Not only trying to revamp everything for Inferno would require a massive commitment, but even if it was possible, doing so in one move would be quite risky as ship balancing is a delicate process.

    That means we will proceed slowly, one step at a time, starting with the ship classes that need the most love (most likely tech 1 frigates and destroyers), then moving our way up. This blog is describing future vision changes in an effort to increase transparency. We definitely want to have more blogs, discussion and feedback along the way.


  • Q: With the skill changes, I will have to train for [racial cruiser V] and [racial battlecruiser V] to train for a Command Ship, how does that make it easier for me?

  • A: This is a misunderstanding, the changes don't work that way. While training for the next tech 1 ship class size will require that you train the racial skill to 4, training for the tech 2 version will only require the main racial skill at 5. That is the whole point with splitting destroyers and battlecruiser skills into four variants in the first place.

    Example:
  • Before, training for a Harbinger required you to train for Amarr Frigate 4, Amarr Cruiser 3 and Battlecruisers at 2
  • Before, training for an Absolution required you to train for Amarr Frigate 4, Amarr Cruiser 5, Battlecruiser at 5 and Heavy Assault Ships at 4
  • Now, training for a Harbinger requires you to train for Amarr Frigate 4, Amarr Destroyer 4, Amarr Cruiser 4 and then Amarr Battlecruiser at 1.
  • Now, training for an Absolution requires you to train for Amarr Frigate 4, Amarr Destroyer 4, Amarr Cruiser 4 and Amarr Battlecruiser at 5. There is no more need for the Amarr Cruiser 5 and Heavy Assault Ship at 4.


  • Q: Isn't forcing us to train [Racial Destroyer] at 4 is lame considering there is only one ship for each race?

  • A: absolutely, we have been discussing that before this blog went out, and we will keep considering options until we come up with a solution that improves this situation. One way could be adding more destroyer hulls, if we can find a role for them.


  • Q: can we opt out for skills we don't want during the reimbursement process?

  • A: well, again, it depends on how it is done. We may just bluntly give all four variants at V if you had battlecruiser V for example, or maybe require that you also add the relevant Cruiser skill trained at level 3 to be eligible. On the latter case, just don't train the cruiser 3 skill, and you should not receive the new racial battlecruiser at 5. Not sure why one would do that however, it's like skipping free candy or cake while visiting your grandma.

    Example:
  • If we go for option 1: you will get Amarr, Caldari, Gallente and Minmatar Battlecruiser skills at 5 if you previously had the generic Battlecruiser skill at 5.
  • If we go for option 2: you will get Amarr Battlecruiser skill at 5 only if you previously fulfilled all conditions to fly Amarr Battlecruisers, which means having the generic Battlecruiser skill at 5, PLUS the Amarr Cruiser at 3.

  • To remind it again, there are other options to consider, but no matter which one which choose, you won't lose anything out of the skill reimbursement plan.


  • Q: Are you going to split the tech 2 skills into four racial variants as well?

  • A: No. Tech 2 skills already are specializations over tech 1 hulls, there is no need specialize them further. The skill change main purpose is to make the progression between tech 1 and tech 2 clearer and more consistent, not to create more skill variants for the sake of it. Besides, training for a tech 2 vessel already requires you to train for the relevant tech 1 racial ship skill anyway.

    Example:
    There is no point splitting Recon Ships to Amarr Recon Ships, because flying a Pilgrim already requires you to have Amarr Cruiser at 5.
    This also covers the question with the Jump Freighters. While Freighters may only require [Racial Industrial 4] to train, Jump Freighters will not be split up.



  • Q: Don’t you believe requiring [Race Industrial / Battleship 4] to train for Freighters / Capital ships make them too easy to aim for?

  • A: Possibly. Most likely. Again, there is nothing preventing us from increasing other skill requirements on Freighters or Capital Ships to keep the average training time identical if that is an issue. Such a change is quite far ahead in the future anyway, there is plenty of time to discuss and reconsider this.


  • Q: You said in the Dev Blog that Amarr would be the first to be looked at, does that mean they are going to be screwed with Inferno?

  • A: No. This line of Dev Blogs presents our theoretical, long term plan for ship balancing. Such changes are just too massive to be released in one go, thus we need as much feedback as possible before going forward. As said before, we want to implement this massive change into small, iterative steps, focusing on one ship class at a time.


  • Q: Fail!!11!! Shouldn’t there be a Naga instead of the Rokh in the Caldari ship tree?

  • A: There is a Rokh instead of a Naga because we used backgrounds from last year Fanfest presentation as they were looking great and suiting each tree theme. This choice was purely cosmetic.

CCP Ytterbium
C C P
C C P Alliance
#1452 - 2012-03-08 12:06:42 UTC

  • Q: Isn't such a skill change and reimbursement defeating the very purpose of getting new players in, since they will now have to train four times as much to get all destroyer and battlecruiser variants?

  • A: if you only consider raw skill requirement, certainly. We estimate that with the changes, training for a battlecruiser would jump from 5 to 11 days. However, flying a ship properly means much more than just being able to hop into it. You have to consider weapon, tanking, engineering, electronic, navigation skills as well, where 6 days aren't that much in the grand picture.

    Besides, we always encourage players to specialize in a specific hull to be as competitive as veterans, and this will not change here. Splitting destroyers and battlecruisers into four racial variants is aimed to achieve exactly that, as we assess the current, generic battlecruiser skills is giving access to too many ship hulls (12 for training one skill), while being inconsistent with the Frigate, Cruiser, Battlecruiser and Capital skills, which all are race based.


  • Q: If you want to make skills consistent, why don’t you make all of them generic instead of inserting racial variants for destroyer and battlecruiser classes?

  • A: That is mainly because turning all ship racial skills into generic copies would achieve the opposite of what we want to fix here: having access to too many hulls by training one skill. Besides, it would create even large skill reimbursement issues, as we would now have to merge all four racial copies of frigate, cruiser, battleship and capital skills into one.


  • Q: Are you not afraid that creating and sorting ships by arbitrary lines is going to achieve the same results than tiers in the long run?

  • A: Yes, we are, and that is a point we want to keep in mind during all this balancing aspect. However, unlike tiers, ship lines have the advantage of being more a flexible guideline than a fixed restriction. With tiers, slots are arbitrary decided between two ships of the same class depending on when they were created, while lines emphasize role, which is a far better metric in a sandbox game, where every ship is supposed to have a purpose.


  • Q: Why are you not balancing ship by individual role instead of using lines then?

  • A: While, in theory that would be a very good move indeed, in practice it is simply impossible to follow. EVE has hundreds of different ships scattered all over the place, whose size, roles, purpose most often than not overlap closely. Not having guidelines to follow and bound ships with would quickly degenerate into chaos, as it would be much more difficult to ensure ships are not overstepping their purpose from another one closely related. As an example, this specifically is the situation we have right now with some battlecruisers being too broad in their purpose, which thus overlap and make Cruisers, Heavy Assault Ships and even sometime Command Ships redundant.


  • Q: Why are you doing this, don’t you have anything more important to do with your time?

  • A: What could possibly be more important? EVE skills and ships are one of the very core elements that make this game unique; however, they haven’t been touched in years, mainly as our attention was focused elsewhere. This is a part of our long-awaited effort to improve Flying In Space gameplay, requested by our player base for years, so how could this possibly not be worth our time?


  • Q: Are you not aware you are dumbing the game down with such changes?

  • A: Dumbing down implies making the game simpler, easier in the long run. We are not only considering specializing skill trees, making sure they are consistent, implementing visual representation for them and the various EVE careers you can undertake, but attempting to rebalance most of the currently useless ships to provide more combat, industrial options in general. This actually is the opposite of dumbing the game down.


  • Q: Training turret specialization requires you to go for small and medium skills first, are you considering changing this to make it consistent with this plan?

  • A: We haven’t considered this yet, but this definitely is something that needs to be extensively discussed indeed.
Grey Stormshadow
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#1453 - 2012-03-08 12:15:10 UTC
CCP Ytterbium wrote:

That means we will proceed slowly, one step at a time, starting with the ship classes that need the most love (most likely tech 1 frigates and destroyers), then moving our way up. This blog is describing future vision changes in an effort to increase transparency. We definitely want to have more blogs, discussion and feedback along the way.

Thanks for keeping us in the map and letting us to provide the comments we have. Lots of emotion in this thread and around this issue, but it will end up fine when corner stones find their places.

Get classic forum style - custom videos to captains quarters screen

Play with the best - die like the rest

Tippia
Sunshine and Lollipops
#1454 - 2012-03-08 12:16:35 UTC  |  Edited by: Tippia
Tiger's Spirit wrote:
-30 days capital ships training time ? CCP ruined this game with capitalships, but they need more capitalships in the game. Really we need this or they just want to create another ISK sink ???

For one, it'll only be 20 days by the time you get there as a new player — the new requirements for destroyer and battlecruiser make sure of that. For another, -20 days compared to the 1–2 years required to get a proper cap pilot trained is just a rounding error and will be gobbled up by accidentally straying from the plan every now and then anyway. Also, people planning to go for caps will do it sooner or later anyway so the ISK sinking won't be any different.

Oh and…
CCP Ytterbium wrote:

To remind it again, there are other options to consider, but no matter which one which choose, you won't lose anything out of the skill reimbursement plan.
This still leaves the question of Jump Freighters. They're pretty much the only ships right now that don't require the base hull skill at lvl V, and if you're going to apply the schema all over the place, this will have to change…

…but doing so will require you to pretty much bump all Freighter IV-skilled characters to Freighter V if you're going to go with the “keep what you have” philosophy, and it has a similar kind of “qualification bingo” as BCs — does the character have Freighter IV, Jump Freighter I, and Jump Drive Calibration I? If so, bump to Freighter V; if not… bwahahahah!
Kahz Niverrah
Distinguished Johnsons
#1455 - 2012-03-08 12:25:02 UTC
Tippia wrote:
it has a similar kind of “qualification bingo” as BCs — does the character have Freighter IV, Jump Freighter I, and Jump Drive Calibration I? If so, bump to Freighter V; if not… bwahahahah!

Shocked

Remind me to buy the JF skillbook for my alt with Freighter IV...

I don't always post on the forums, but when I do, I post with my main.

Revman Zim
Infinite Point
Pandemic Horde
#1456 - 2012-03-08 12:26:57 UTC
Patient 2428190 wrote:
I love how you are going to give everybody who currently has Destroyers V and Battlecruisers V 6,144,000 skillpoints out of thin air.

You guys are truly idiotic.



What would be TRULY idiotic is for any current player, that has this knowledge, not to immediately start skilling Desy V and BC V.

I don't know how this will all play out, but CCP is basically telling you what to do to benefit from this, but only if you act.

I personally already have Desy V and BC V, however, I only have the the Amarr frig and cruiser skills to support flying those Destroyers and BC's.

Only 6 days to get the other 3 races frig and cruiser skills up to support flying their respective BC. Just in case....

If you are reading this and not preparing for the change, then you are the idiot.

Of course 4 months from now when they abandon this line of thinking there will be another 70+ page ragethread about how everyone got screwed.
kyrieee
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#1457 - 2012-03-08 12:39:13 UTC
You really shouldn't remove the BS V requirement for caps.
Caps are the main reason people train it to V.
Tippia
Sunshine and Lollipops
#1458 - 2012-03-08 12:40:23 UTC
Kahz Niverrah wrote:
Tippia wrote:
it has a similar kind of “qualification bingo” as BCs — does the character have Freighter IV, Jump Freighter I, and Jump Drive Calibration I? If so, bump to Freighter V; if not… bwahahahah!

Shocked

Remind me to buy the JF skillbook for my alt with Freighter IV...

Actually, that raises another important question: what are you (CCP) going to do with any free-floating or player-resold BC and Dessy skillbooks on the market and in people's hangars when the switch-over happens?

For those in hangars, one could imagine that a simple solution would be to simply replace them with a full set of racial BC books; for market-orders, maybe just cancel them and once again replace the returned books with a full set of racial variants. Or maybe just leave them be and set up a one-month (or whatever) respite period during which there are NPC buy orders for the books at the normal sell prices so people can trade them in for whatever new book(s) they would like.
Nagarythe Tinurandir
Einheit X-6
#1459 - 2012-03-08 12:40:44 UTC  |  Edited by: Nagarythe Tinurandir
ytterbium, thank you for your q&a. it clarifies the big questions. maybe you can link it very prominently in the very first post of this thread, so that guys who just read the dev blog do not rage-spam the same questions over and over again?

i really like this ship lines idea getting more refined and put into context with the rest of eve.

CCP Ytterbium wrote:


  • Q: Fail!!11!! Shouldn’t there be a Naga instead of the Rokh in the Caldari ship tree?

  • A: There is a Rokh instead of a Naga because we used backgrounds from last year Fanfest presentation as they were looking great and suiting each tree theme. This choice was purely cosmetic.

    [/list]


    i guess it is not the rokh in the backround which triggered the lol, but the one which replaces the little picture representing the naga next to the drake and ferox in the ship tree.

    edit:
    kyrieee wrote:

    You really shouldn't remove the BS V requirement for caps.
    Caps are the main reason people train it to V.


    thats not quite true. it may be true for every cap-ship alt, but there are a lot of people who have other reasons.
    but lets here your arguments, if you have any despite "the training queue for caps is 30 days shorter. everybody will fly caps now".
    SwissChris1
    Stimulus
    Rote Kapelle
    #1460 - 2012-03-08 12:44:29 UTC
    I got Battlecruiser V / Destroyer V and crosstrained all races...if you give me SP for all 4 races: 4x 1'536'000 + 4x 512'000 = 8'192'000 skillpoints ROFL...I doubt that's going to happen and you are just going to screw over all vets. The capital ship requirement skill change is very awesome though but please stop smoking crack