EVE Information Portal

Really? Really?

Tell you a secret EVE Uni. You probably train people into Drakes (and then Tengus) for PvE. You probably train people in to Rifters and then Hurricanes for PvP. I'm guessing because I'm not a member, but please, share.

We'll have to agree to disagree.

First, realize that like this very Dev Blog says, half the ships in the game are suboptimal. Meaning very rarely flown. If they balance the system so that each ship becomes just as desirable for a specific role as its equivalent of another race, it will lead to MORE variety in the game world, not less!

Go to some random high level system, preferably one with popular L4 agent. Sit there and count how many strategic cruisers go past you, and their type. I guarantee you that Tengu will beat any other by at least 2 to 1 margin. But if they are balanced, suddenly you'll start seeing not just a 4 Tengus, you'll see a Tengu, a Proteus, a Loki and a Legion. How is that bad if variety is what you want?

Plus, people like myself are not asking that the devs copy the ships over, along with stats and slot layout, which is what Bioware did with their classes in SWTOR. All races can keep their designated styles. Gallente can still have more drone bay space on average, Caldari can still mostly use missiles and shields, etc. What needs to be done is obvious imbalances being ironed out. Half the ships in the game are currently hopelessly outclassed by an equivalent ship of another race, which virtually forces people to cross-train.

I'm not against variety. I'm for variety. And making all of the game's ships equally desirable will increase variety of the ships you see flying around, not reduce it.

let me fix that for you:

They were talking about “moving all the BCs far enough up the training curve to put them out of the reach of noobs”. Now you're talking about something completely different.

N00bs do not need all four BC skills. BCs are not moved out of the reach of n00bs. You're also misinformed about the costs. Compared to the current setup, they will need to train a rank 5 skill to IV (186k SP more than before), and a rank 3 skill to IV (136k SP more than before). That's 322k SP more, which can indeed be trained in a matter of days.

If they do indeed want all twelve BCs, it takes 1,384k SP more than before — about three weeks extra, but again, that's not really a n00b goal.

It's worth reminding that there are quite a few axes that “balance” can work on, and that balance does not need to mean equality or complete identicalness between the various races.

One race could simply be good at “large ships” (Gallente and Amarr have classically been quite close to this), where their battleships and caps are better than the others for various reasons, meaning that if you slog though all the slush at the bottom, it gets really good at theend. Another race might have the opposite (for all the talk about winmatar, their caps have always been considered woefully inadequate, and the only thing that saved their battleships was the arty-alpha doctrine), meaning it was kind of a dead-end path to go down… and even the Caldari trilemma (pvp/solo/successful) needs to be contrasted against their vastly superior, and memetastically popular, ewar capabilities.

Balance can be had by simply ensuring that each race has enough going for it to be worth-while in most circumstances, and you can have balance just fine without necessarily having the kind of boring sameness you're talking about. Racial balance is a good target; it's just something completely different than racial uniformity.

Ok so maybe calling minmatar the PvP race is misleading and I should not have said it. It's a specific type of PvP. They are brawlers or scrapers what ever you want to call it. Minmatar ships typically have the worst tank and the weakest electronics but the fastest speed and most falloff and are immune to neuting at least dps wise. So that will dictate a specific style of fighting that has a specific counter. If that style suits you then great.

Caldari have awesome tanks and specialize in sniping and ECM. I'm not going to go over all the pluses and minuses but if you like that style then great.

Amarr are awesome tanks high damage but slow and very sensitive to capacitor warfare ( neuting )

I'll skip Galenete for TL;DR sake but if looks are important to you and you think the Amarr ships look great then fly them for their looks and their looks only. If fighting style is what is important to you then pick the fighting style that is important to you and ignore looks. If you want to compromise and pick a race that you like the look and style then do that.

But when you remove what makes the different races special from a functional standpoint and make looks the only difference then you are indeed dumbing down the game and removing much of it's complexity

If all the races looked the same or similar that would be bad. If all the races performed the same or similar then that would be bad. As things are now all races can and do PvP. All races can and do PvE. I'm just asking to not dumb down. The different styles which give the game some very interesting aspects that make it fun.

What it seems you are proposing in removing one type of variation to make the other choose-able by all and what I'm saying is leave the different type of variations so different people can choose look or function or both and not make the looks based people all important.

you do realize, after your clarification, we want to achive the same?
i wanted to emphazise, that based on the dev blog you can not determine wether ccp wants to make it all the same or if they want to achive a balanced state and ceeping the racial flavors intact. i say the latter is the goal which is a good thing.
but you have to agree, that having a race which is de facto the best choice for pvp is not a good thing.
you voiced concern, that making other races than minmatar more competitive in pvp will leave minmatar in a weak spot and overall not desireable. that will not be the case ;)
but minmatar can really afford to loose some edge in pvp, especially in small gang pvp.

and projectiles are a powerful weapon in pve. believe me :D

Best in class at what? At PvP? so you are telling me that a skilled ECM pilot in a griffin with racially appropriate ECM mods could not win against a rifter? I've flown hurricanes into PvP before. Due to their reputation they are usually primaried and you often can not get 2 or 3 cycles off of your autocannons. On the other hand the drake pilots with their huge EHP are allowed to live until the end and deliver more total damage at a much lower dps. This is just one example but the differences make you fight differently. If what you said above was true then you would only see those ships in PvP and that is most certainly not the case with maybe the exception of the sabre.

Because ATs are not an accurate reflection of real PvP. They are a make believe contest. In ATs you don't need to keep a point on the target. There are no worries of your opponent warping or cynoing in the rest of his corp or alliance. You know your opponent has certain restrictions on the make up of his gang. There are restrictions on how far you can mov-...

Oh wait... I just been trolled. LOL, nice one.

This is interesting !

Please bring out new role oriented ships first

One alternative to making Destroyer and Battlecruiser skills racial is to make the ships dual-skill. Put half the bonuses on racial frig / cruiser and half on the core skill. It still leaves some oddities, but helps mitigate the current issues with Battlecruiser skill. Essentially, BC becomes a "role" skill.

(I assume this is coupled with other ship rebalance stuff like removing tiers)