Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So explain something to me.

How does nerfing titans help with stopping major alliances from projecting their forces around new eden?

A major alliance on the move is like locust it will kill anything in its path making them more destructive when they are forced to fly somewhere instead of bridging right into a target system.

What exactly is it that you think the titan is supposed to be?

Think of it in terms of FPS - it's a power weapon, like a rocket launcher in Halo. You don't nerf it, because it's MEANT to be OP.

The titan is a super-cap. What you're proposing would turn it into another freighter, except with big guns, making it completely redundant if you have dreadnoughts.

You have to figure out how to fight it, not call on CCP to change the game mechanics to suit your own personal agenda because you can't handle it yourself.

Except, the way to fight it now is to figure out the passwords to the enemy POS and bump it out. Because titans are rarely put at risk. The fly from POS to POS and are only outside the shield for the time it takes to move from the jump beacon to the shield bubble.

The only time a titan or ten are only put at risk is when an alliance is absolutely sure of overwhelming force. Yeah. Figure out how to fight that.

I don't agree with nerfing hot drop quantity. Let the titan project power, that's what it's for. But I do agree with making titans more vulnerable. They should not be allowed to POS up.

Doesn't anyone have any kind of strategic ability at all?

So lure it out - give the titan a target. Give your enemy a reason to bring it out, and set a trap.

This is why you fail at titaning - it has nothing to do with the mechanics.

How about that, some player-created content - using a ship for an unintended purpose. How innovative.

I bet you just wish you'd thought of it first.

But here's the kicker - if they can do it, then guess what??

So can you!!



On that note, the extra layer of strategy that the Titan bridge incorporates in the game is very valuable - what you're doing is calling on CCP to dumb it down. What you want is an easy way to fight your enemies via the process of elimination, that is, by eliminating one method of strategic travel so you don't have to worry about it. Not going to happen, you are going to have to figure out how to prevent it, or use it to go one the offensive yourself.

Let me repost this to make sure u have read it. And if you haven't played pre titan don't even post.

The reason The Blob is so effective a weapon is the titan bridge. The Blob is currently the EVE version of the ICBM. It allows for force projection and a delivery of an epic level of force instantly on a scale that is so unbalanced as to be ludicrous. The entirety of an alliance’s forces can be committed instantly from anywhere within a minimum of (about) 8 light years. Add a few more titans and you can be anywhere in EVE within minutes.

Five hundred players undock from a station and fly to a POS to sit on a titan. They wait to be bridged to their destination. They wait till the cyno goes up, right click on their capacitor and once grid loads, they push F1. There is no need to navigate or mass forces in neighboring systems, no need to conduct logistics or even scout. Losses are meaningless to members of The Blob because losses are replaced by the tax on every T2 pilot in the game. Cake, free candy and free ships. No need to earn ISK in game or even learn to play, just get on the titan. All the action, content and emotional investment of a FPS with unlimited free respawns thanks to the vast pooling of wealth from Technetium.

The EVE version of the instant action button, aka the titan bridge, has destroyed eve’s greatest conflict driver, “movement.” The ability to dictate and control movement is a key concept of combat that reaches back to before Carl von Clausewitz and into 21st century warfighting. When EVE alliances have the ability to be anywhere, anytime, with all for their forces, it becomes impossible to effect any form of war fighting beyond the titan bridge hot drop. Gone is the race and fight to “get there first with the most.”

The ability to interact with EVE players across the EVE universe is what used to spur some of the most epic battles and fight in EVE. These fights would begin with minor scrimmages that would then lead to endless days of fighting over many systems within a region. These too would often lead to more than one major battle. This was alluded to in CCP’s “Butterfly Effect” trailer. This type of fighting hasn’t been seen in EVE for four years. The overwhelming majority of fights are all at the point of conflict, namely due to titan bridging. The ability to base out of one’s home region, move four to six titan jumps and be anywhere in EVE with an entire combat fleet with no effort has allowed leaders to become cat herders instead of combat leaders. The ability for a force to ignore all conflict driving elements in regards to logistics and movement prior to a fight, leads alliances to only focus on the point to point battles. This destroys the battlefield RTS experience that was part of EVE, which is a fun experience that EVE should be providing. The epic fights of EVE in the days of yore were ones where players would stay logged in for four to six hours, just trying to get to the front line, engaging in fights the whole way. Now, we wait for the jabber ping and then get on the titan. If we get blue balled, or if we decide to blue ball because our spy said they have 1500 on their titan(s) as opposed to our 1000, then we log off. No need to fly home, we’re already there. No need to go out and make ISK, daddy will by me a new “cat of the month fleet concept” ship. Everything these days seems to have devolved to timers and titan drops, when the game play should be invasions, fighting, and occupation.

Now, in addressing the“The Blob”, I am not picking on any one alliance. Many are “guilty” of this throughout the history of moon farming, simply now the “moon tax” in game is far more reaching than the past moon farming groups because the current moon goo setup has “one moon to rule them all” and while Technetium is geographically limited, it is not actually that rare a resource.

What is most sad is that a former CSM member and who arguably was/still is the de facto leader of the The Blob, warned CCP that moon farming was going to wreck the game and, in my opinion, has been 100% correct in his analysis. When this person was on the CSM he was very much anti moon goo, but being against something and not having the ability to change it, doesn’t mean didn’t play EVE and take advantage of the situation, the results of which are exactly what we are seeing in EVE today.

This is sad - for a second you almost hit on what the problem with Titans and then you veered off into Crazy Town.

The problem with Titans is that they have no role. They've never had a role. At no point during the Titan's design was a single moment wasted on thoughts like "balance" or "purpose" or "consequence", it was 100% "wouldn't this be awesome?". I doubt any of its designers even thought about what would happen if an alliance fielded multiple Titans, let alone the 30+ you'd regularly see before the Titan tracking nerf. Too many skills needed, too much isk - but the nature of Eve is that everything grows in time. Every day, more pilots get closer and closer to Titan skills simply by nature of skills moving forward. The barrier that once no doubt seemed massive has been rendered trivial.

The nerfs show this as well - they've never been done in keeping with any kind of role, they've been done with curbing whatever new way someone found to make them overpowered as hell this time around. They've had their Doomsday majorly changed three times - once to remove remote AoE doomsday (seriously, how insane that this even existed?) and add a 10 minute immobility period, the second to remove AoE doomsday and replace with single target, and the third to make the doomsday target caps only. None of those changes spell any kind of cohesive role or vision, just fixes to try to make Titans less ridiculous.

So now we get to today. Their capital turret tracking has been nerfed, as has their targeting. Their doomsday is caps only, and comes with a 10 minute mobility penalty. They're still extremely difficult to kill (most are lost due to espionage or pants-on-head pilot error), but so what? They certainly can't be fun to fly. Are we satisfied, though? Nope. They've still got jump portals, which apparently are overpowered as well and need to be removed - not nerfed, but removed outright. The rhetoric has shifted from "Titans are the counter to blobs!" before the tracking nerf to "Titans are now directly responsible for the blobs!" afterwards. In all this mess, nobody can agree just what the **** these things are supposed to be doing.

At this point wouldn't it be better to simply remove Titans from the game? It'd probably be the way to go if there was a way to do it without alienating the living hell out of anyone who invested time and/or money into acquiring one.

Such is the life of a ship class that never should have existed, I guess.

So they anchor corprate hangers full of fuel, those are there ALWAYS because that's what titan bridging pos's need, any good bridging pos has a massive pile of stront in a CHA near the titan.
And cynos? Again, when you invade somewhere there are always people in leadership circles that have cynos on alts in FRIGATES with a half hour skill trained, logged off in the systems, its not that hard to set up a titan bridge, stop trying to make it sound like it is.




What is the role of a titan? There is none, it had a doomsday (which is almost never used because) they have a bridge.
When was the last time a titan was used in a major battle? Probably when PL dropped on a dozen -A- supers, and how did that go? 100+ supercarriers and titans w/ support VS 12 supercarriers w/o support. Nobody uses titans in combat regularly, just as titan bridges. Which are OP.

Its OK to have an OP ship or module when there's just a few in the game (ie. Adrestias, Frekis, Malices, Vangels etc.) But once you have over a thousand like there are titans, they become a problem. You can't let an OP ship/module get out of hand, like titans and titan bridging has.

Solution:
Why don't we just remove Titans, reinburse the SP & isk and call it a day.
Should we be able to s**t in someone's sandbox? Yes.
Should it take 30 minutes to cross the galaxy to do it? No, that makes it too easy to get 1000 man blobs up and to a target system, whereas gate travel would take ages (especially since the addition of Tidi, which can be caused simply by a blob flying around a system)

Flame away at the guy who wants to get rid of titans.


Edit: Instant transportation should be an advantage the defenders have, via jump bridge connections, not something that EVERYONE has, like in the Titan bridges.

Two factors:

1) "A" Titan is fine and I recall when they were individually tracked. A power to be, having one was an important goal for the wanna be prominent alliance. It was also a symbol of power, a bit like those huge medieval cathedrals or castles that shown how powerful a certain town was.

It's the impossible spamming of Titans that creates an issue. The hugely powerful platform is fine if their numbers are compatible with the galaxy's extension. They passed that limit since years now.


2) It's true that setting up a bridge is not trivial and requires time and effort.

But then, why do alliances still do that?

Simple: because despite it's not trivial and requires time and effort, it requires a tiny fraction of the organization, time and effort of actually flying multiple fleets to the destination. Having been in some of those "pre-bridge" large fleets I know how time consuming, error prone and even dangerous it could be.
The bridge just removes all of that, exactly like JFs (another dire CCP mistake) remove the risk from logistics and allow for "logistics projection".

EvE should be 10 times as large to really accomodate these advanced mechanics without secondary effects.

+1 for that, it is like all ever needed to be said in this topic.