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I hate always having to be a negative nancy, but every time a new balance thread comes up these days it scares the living crap out of me - because they are never explained, they never seem to look at how ships are actually used or envisioned how to be used instead.

It's common among players to throw out statements without proper definition and it's also common for players to look at if ships get used but not how or why.

If you are game designer at CCP, i demand more from you: you are a professional.



Yet here we are looking at devblogs and we see comments such as "the problem of shield versus armor tanking" and "the problem of active versus buffer tanking".

What god damn problems? Motivate them!

I mean, those are issues we have been discussing quite alot in the community (without CCP participating), yet they are still highly disputed topics recurring from time to time. The simple assumption that these are issues without any depth and motivation, that is the most shallow standpoint representated by the least intelligent and discoursive players. Yet that's the standpoint assumed in the devblog. It's appeasing stupidity.

The balance of active versus buffer for example, is entirely tied to scale. It's simple math and logic. Regardless of how a ship is tanked: any ship will die if it's buffer is volleyed. As gang sizes grow, and volley damage stack, it thus become natural to raise the relative buffer of your ships (and buffer tank them, aided by remote repairs).

As long as scale (the size and setup of gangs meeting each other) remain below what you can volley on an unfit ship, there is no "problem" with active tanks over buffer tanks.

The balance between armor and shield is even more complicated, so when you throw out a random assumption of problems in it's balance, you better explain to us what the problem is and how you intend to fix it.

Without those fundamental concerns adressed, there is no possible way you could hope to achieve a good final balance.



The same goes for analyzing ship use (the how's and why's).

Your take on the Command links serve an excellent example. It's an exhausted topic. It's been discussed in several lengthy threads here on the forums. It's been discussed in various playerblogs and it's been up on the popular community news sites. There's been little participating from the developer side and now you roll in with a very final idea without commenting on any concerns raised.

One of the most important factors Tech III command links play now, is that it's superior bonuses allow smaller groups to bridge the gap required to interact with larger groups. That creates content, as they have a chance or purpose to engage. I'm not necessarily speaking of the most common concern in this regard. Several players have raised the issue that if links are required on grid a larger gang will just pop the smaller gang's booster while they are unable to respond. I'm not sure if i entirely agree with that statement, instead, i look at how the ships are used now.

The superior bonuses have up until recently primarily been used on smaller agile or flexible gangs that can't commit. That last bit is important, they can't commit. Seeding those links over to a ship class with much less flexibility in how it commits will just further chafe off "up engagement" from this game. It will discourage attempting to engage a gang you can't commit to. This is important, because logic tells you that it should be on the advantageous gang to take risks and play offensive. Large gangs rarely do that today, in this buffer-projection era.

Notable examples include fast gangs, where the Tech III ships either are speedy enough or cloaky enough to keep up. This include bringing a booster to supplement various frigate and cruiser gangs. If you look at the two CS that traditionally have seen alot of use, the Claymore and the Damnation, their use is motivated by the same reasons: the Claymore was fast enough to stay with shield-tanked cruiser-sized gangs (the Vulture wasn't, so it has only been used as a fleet dispenser) and the Damnation was tanky enough to stay with battleships (the Eos wasn't, so it was kept as a specialist small-gang, small-ship booster rarely seeing the light of day; in part also because the Proteus did all that better).

They also include cloaky gangs, and that is perhaps where the example is most visible. With speed and reach losing it's ground as equalizers, cloaking - and more importantly: control - have for quite a while now remained as the last bastion. The ability to engage a larger gang with an advantage in speed or reach shifted over to engaging a larger gang with superior control (it became all about not making sure the few lynchpins got to play their role - when a gang had many basline ships and a few important lynchpins). That's how a cloaky gang remained functional, because everyone was a lynchpin and the gang retained a higher control thanks to a higher amount of total EW and better bonuses to the EW (they pointed, webbed, ECM'ed and damped from further away - not necessarily shot from further away).

Give strength bonuses to slower, larger and more cumbersome CS and you shift that dynamic too, in favour of a larger and more bulky gang. The smaller gangs (wether they are speedy or cloaky) can not bring a CS so they will have inferior bonuses to things like speed and control which they rely on. Funny thing, isn't it?

Don't you want smaller gangs to have a reason to interact with larger gangs? Everything you've done recently suggest the opposite. All extremes have been rounded off to a middle ground: where faster have become slower, expensive replaced by affordable and further apart have been put closer together - apart from the most important thing - the community is fracturing further apart because it loses more and more incentive to interact over different scale.

I think you're missing the point chief.

The question is not wether small or large gangs use boosters.

The question is what kind of gangs a Tech III and a CS respectively can fly with, what kind of tactics those gangs are able to pull (only after that, wether that in turn have an effect on scale).

So it's not really a question of a large gang using Tech III links versus a small gang, it's the difficulty of a smaller gang to use CS links against a larger gang - wether you look at the composition of the gang or the situation for a CS on the field.

More importantly, it's a question of wether we want cloaky gangs (that rely on control) to have equal bonuses to a more general gang, or if we want a fast gang (that rely on speed) to have equal bonuses to another gang. Don't we want specialist gangs to retain an advantage in what they specialize for?

The day a CS + Interceptor have the same point-range as a Tech III + Recon, why should those expensive covert ships even attempt to engage? They will shift over to not taking risks, not engaging against odds and just going for ganks or fighting people in their own size- or price pool. That's not interactive.

CS are not fast and they are not cloaky. Tech III can be both.

The same thing goes for the gangs themselves. Nothing stops a large gang from flying an evasive concept (cloaky, speedy or w/e) - but gangs with less resources generally can't commit tanky gangs because the scaling of gang sizes in EVE is well beyond what most ships are able to tank. That's why PL fly Supers. Control is much more difficult to stack.

The notion that offgrid boosting is good for the game because it allows small groups to fight "the blob" is a big lie. It's an attempt to associate the cheesy OGB with small gang PvP that everyone respects, as if larger gangs never had access to OGB (in reality the likelyhood of a gang having OGB grows with its size).

In reality OGB has already done massive damage to small gang PvP because if you don't have OGB you're not competitive. This drives people into blobs, into getting OGB themselves (worsening the problem) or out of PvP alltogether.

The OGB apologists present OGB as the solution to the problem OGB itself has contributed to creating.

It's less that large fleets don't have T3 links. It's that they tend to make worse / less use of them.

ie. When the only ships making full use of your skirmish links are your tackle and they're getting mercilessly webbed and blapped; the fast gang is at an advantage.

or, when an EWAR based gang is getting Info Links and your gang isn't.... then targetting anything with your key ships is going to be tough.


All that being said, I'm holding judgement on "on grid boosts" until I see what a max link T3 looks like, what the new Command ships look like and what the precise implementation of the changed boost mechanic is.

Quick question...

Will the Rokh finally get a small upgrade on drone capacity so it has 75m3? I never quite got why it had so small a drone bay. Probably a very minor detail but it's bugged me for a while now.

Rokh +25!

You too are assuming too much and missing the point, chief.

I'm not talking about OGB.

I'm talking about the Tech III being a cloaky and fast cruiser.

The CS is a slow and bulky battle cruiser.

The change in command links will provide slower and bulkier gangs with better bonuses (which they already have through Titans).

The fact that a large gang is usually slow and bulky while a small gang tend to be fast or cloaky is of secondary importance. The fact that you can offgrid a Tech III easier isn't really much of any importance.

A small specialist gang have less use of "more yet weaker" bonuses, they don't have enough ships to make proper use of more bonuses and they rely on having superior bonuses to function, because they are specialist ships. With this change their engagement envelope goes down. Regardless of who they fight. So they will fight less.

OGB can die as far as i'm concerned, i'd rather have mains on grid do it. That does not mean they should be CS.

i was asking myself a question about the BC / destro skills.

i understood that, since i have all cruiser 4 and BC 5, i will have all BC skills granted.

BUT, i couldn't find if they will be granted at level 5, allowing me to still fly naga, myrmidon and hurricane the same way i do today, with the same bonuses.

if no, then don't even bother bring this on TQ CCP

given i have BC 4.5 (trained 50%) and all cruiser skills at V, will i get all BC skills at 4 or at 4.5 ?

Not sure I liked this section. There were earlier comments about making all t1 BS's have an EWar bonus. I do not like have an entire role held up by a single battleship.



The command changes look pretty good. If you are looking at forcing them on grid to give boni then maybe the answer to the tank problem would be to add a slight tank bonus to the ship received from the link itself that way they are extra tanky and it's offset by the reduction in DPS from the loss of a high slot. Alternatively, you could give the mods themselves a restriction similar to probe launchers and smartbombs to which they cannot be activated within an online pos. I've been thinking that we should get the majority of the boni from the links and not the mind-links too, there is too much focus on an implant for the role - in my eyes.

The real test will be if those command ships can fit a full tank and all 3 links.

Additionally, you should look at removing command processors as a whole with this change, just an idea.

But unless that sexy ship gets some serious bonus to tank, you will be boosting for a very short time before it becomes a sexy wreck and you a sexy frozen corpse. I would think the first target priority will be the on grid booster and it wouldn't take much to dust it. Just my opinion.