Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This thread reminds me of when the blockade runners were being reworked. The devs were constructing the ships based on racial tanking theories. I responded that BRs will not be tanking. They will only want two things (besides the cov ops cloak they were getting) agility-speed and cargo capacity. I pointed out how slot assignments and active tanking bonuses based on racial theories were totally misdirected. The devs stuck with their concepts. So now we have BRs with active tanking bonuses, even active armor tanking bonuses . Raise your hand if you use those. And of course they made the base cargo space small for the ones with more lows so that you would have to fill those lows with expanders just to get the same cargo space as the "shield tannking" BRs. And, you certainly would not lose a low to an armor repper.

So now we are being presented with "science vessels." Vessels that will use medium slots heavily. So what does this new dev team do but insist on racial flavor and construct an Amarr science vessel with 3 mid slots. Meanwhile the Caldari science vessel will have 5 mid slots. Raise your hand if you would rather have 3 midslots than 5 on your science vessel.

Key question - can these frigs be used to attempt lower tier low-sec profession sites?

If not, i think they are only mildly interesting as an advanced newbie ship.

They should allow a newish player to attempt some low sec sites (not breeze through them like a tengu or ishtar), after braving gate camps / pirates / etc.

I'm guessing that means tweaking dps / tank so that a player can tradeoff between either to run the site. One thought would be to buff a racial resist for each frig, making it a little easier to tank. That wouldn't really affect pvp utility, or tip the balance...

Any way, the more the game can be designed to encourage new players to leave hi sec and give riskier play a try, the better. Cheap mini profession frig is one way to do it...

On the issue of exploration; currently it seems the explorer ships are camped into hisec in a number of ways.

Firstly we have the rats, these new exploration vessels and covops either get shot down or face serious time grinding to clear a site befor the can get the loot.

Secondly we have pirates, as you basically have to go afk you will be a prime target for pirates who see an easy kill on scan. If you want to be able to scan you need a cloak, but covops don't have weapons to take care of rats.

This means that unless covops are given a minimum of defensive weaponry the only ships that can reliably explore solo in hostile space are in fact non-science vessels (or dualboxers).

Does CCP have any plans to give covops the ability to reliably access low/nullsec exploration sites, or should I sell my cheeta and start exploring in lolfit pve ships?

....don't need covops to do exploration.... and don't go afk.

i highlighted the point where you made an assumption, not based on facts. " your logic is flawed"
the cheetah is a covert ops frigate. its ment to sneak around in hostile space. beeing a scout for more combat oriented ships like bombers, black ops and "normal gangs"
you'll find this in the description of this ship. so a dedicated exploration ship is yet to come. although you can say, t3 cruiser fit very well in this role.

Well, ideally the T1 version does two things reasonably well. In this case, scouting (PvP) and exploration (PvE). Ideally, there would be two T2 versions. One that is a better scout than the T1, but not as good at exploration, and one that is better at exploration than the T1, but not as good at scouting.

What it ought to be is:
T1 = generally good at a handful of roles
T2 = specifically and significantly better at one of the roles of it's T1 version, but worse at all of the others. Specialized.
T3 = mix and match your own pros (and for every pro, a con.)
Where none are outright better than any of the others. It should always be a game of give and take so that players have to make good decisions and choose the best ship for the job.

Sadly, it doesn't quite look like this is what's going to happen. Close, but not quite at any rate.

They already did that. That's why it melted. Those art folks have some serious laser beams for eyes!!!

Instead of four frigates with the same bonus, why not make a sisters of eve´s frigate ?

For technical reasons the 4th highslot on the Probe is getting bumped, so I'm moving that slot to a mid.

Not enough space on the model.