Ships & Modules

Another way to look at it would be putting it into context of current events.

Yesterday a 30-man Exodus gang stopped the Brave newbies roam in Lowsec and killed 100 assorted small Tech I ships.

Their feat sunk just over 1b out of the economy.

Around the same time a Goonswarm gank-squad killed a single Freighter carrying 90 Tengus.

That single kill sunk 45b out of the economy and made another 10b trade hands.

You don't have to spin the clock back all that much, until you would have seen that 30-man Exodus gang fighting those 90 Tengus in deep nullsec instead and they would have fought them with HAC instead of BC3 or Cruisers, having both sides risking a considerable amount of resources to make the fight meaningful - destroying resources and having them trade hands through PvP.

In a recent discussion on "Wargames" on one of the two larger EVE newsites a commentator compared that artificial initiative with fighting on SiSi. Do you see how I am making a similar point here when it comes to ships and balance? Is it surprising that we see proposed "Wargames" when our ships don't cost anything to lose anymore and our towers don't cost anything to erect? Shadoo is musingly suggesting putting all excess resources in an ISK-pool instead and distributing it for kills through some out-of-game composed system since CCP won't listen and nerfs HML instead.

Is it surprising? When fighting that larger low-cost gang (Drakes, Prophecies, w/e) involves a much higher risk without any credible gain, or when attacking that tower takes a much longer time with your smaller gang or smaller ships to it's hitpoints (begging for Supers), while the inevitable timer will let the owners amass their larger number of larger free ships.

Yet the simpletons celebrate "Because of HML"

Soon the same people will complain about Prophecies and Slowcats, because those are ships that use Sentries, amass numbers and grow popular. They will demand nerfing both Prophecies and Carriers plus Sentries because they are too stupid to impose transversal on the immobile L-accuracy drones (while yelling F1 noobs and no-skill blobbers), or can't deal with the Webs and Painters that stop them from utilizing transversal to mitigate the damage (because clearly, ECM is also for no-skill blobbers). The same people who wouldn't listen when argued that Droneboats were good against BC (HML) and undertanked (Shield) BS a couple of years back. History keeps repeating itself, and it's pandering to fools.

You are not getting my point : you cannot prevent people to use conservative strategies, and these strategies allow people to suffer less loss than they earn isks.

And you just cannot have more destruction than creation, because things must be created before being destroyed.

Irony is that we may agree on what need to be fixed, though I disagree with your statement "HML and Drake were fine".

Economy may have some problems, and destruction-creation balance may be screwed, but that don't mean the Drake was balanced. You seem to believe that the Drake nerf was supposed to solve the "cheap nullsec fleet" problem, but it wasn't IMO. Drake nerf was only a balancing move, on a ship to ship basis. Its performances were too good compared to its peers.

I agree that nullsec economy need fixing, but forcing people to use more expensive ships is not a solution, because you cannot force people to do anything. It's a game.

But I think you are confusing, mixing some problems (ship balancing, economy, nullsec economy) together while they are not necessarily linked together.

Nullsec economy problem is a problem of passive and hard to disrupt income ; global economy of creation vs destruction is, IMO, a problem of incentive to risk assets (not easy to balance though, because of risk aversity and safety of highsec) ; and ship balancing is a problem of its own that Fozzy, Ytterbium et al. are working on.

There may be links between these problems, but I don't think a fix to one problem would solve another one.

Not quite. The origin is both, yet everyone loves free ships so they divert their eyes away from that problem.

Low-risk income being so close to high-risk income, or possibly even better in some regards is an issue. The low-risk value of tech one ships is a larger issue, as it's left ignored. The whole basis of my argument is that dealing with the first issue (bottom-up economy: ie., phasing income from moons over to player-activities, and having those player-activities in nullsec more rewarding than those in highsec) is simply not enough. Alot of people today have a tendency to put almost all blame on moons.

Moons however is a fixed income, there is a total amount of moons in EVE and they generate fixed resources. They always have. You may game the market, but the basis is a fixed amount. What first and foremost have changed over the past few years (with the top-down economy of moons) is alliances getting better at exploiting the cost-effect of certain ship-classes; the imbalance in the ship-balance that occured when BC (rig changes) and insurance (higher tier coverage) was overhauled. This fixed income from moons get propped up when the ships it's meant to cover bottoms out. The cheaper ships get, the relatively more valuable those moons become (and the more rare and specialized Tech II items become, the more valuable those moons producing Tech II components become).

In essence, insurance generate more resources than moons.

The 100m/hr example is simply there to point out that any top-level income is available anywhere in the game. Running nullsec anomalies is not better than running FW L4, Faction L4, Rare corp L4, L5, Plex10, Sleepers or Incursions. It's not in the hands of some "old" conservative player. Anyone is capable of yielding such income, it's not some unfair advantage stacked against new players or given to old, rich, nullsec, coalition players. So, in short, this is not where the disparity between old and new lie.

Instead the disparity lie between the passive income and the bottomed out prices. Highsec mining provide a bottom, always has, but it's not necessarily a problem within itself. When the playerbase have identified that in combination with a lack of more rewarding options in lower securities, effective organisation of insurance and improvement to ships that benefit more from all these issues - then you have a problem.


The bottom-up economy discourse aim to deal with moons, seeding of Tech II components and risk-reward scaling. It does not however deal with ship-scaling and that's where the discussion is pertinent for the ships & modules subforum:

That is when we can begin to argue that without insurance a BC2 being effectively 33% better than a BC1 was warranted on the backdrop of it also being 33% more expensive on average, prior to these drummed up ideas of tiercide. Ships in EVE used to be balanced per cost-effect and once CCP started to meddle with that we saw the rise of insurance-doctrine and resulting fleet-scaling, that has ultimately lead to the diminishing of up-engagement. Up-engagement is crucial for interactivity in the sandbox. CCP have tried to overcome that problem by dipping into themeparking.

This is what has lead to bigger becomming arbitrarily better both in the sense of pilot numbers and the size of ships. This is why so much of the game today is influenced by two large coalitions and the number of Supers they can field. Structure hitpoints and timer mechanics have their own impact of course, but the underlying economy is definately the larger culprit in hollowing out the game into meaninglessness of excess resources. I made that example when referring to Shadoo's price-pool. I've made it before when i compared the hitpoints and cost of POS to the hitpoints and cost of Supers to point to why Supers are a conflict-driver while SOV is not anymore.

It ties back to another example i made several months ago when people complained about the Harby. The best buff you can ever give the Harby is fixing the economy bottom-up. If ships are not so inexpensive that "more" become arbitrarily better and objectives are moved from timers and structures to ships and a larger span of time with daily interactivity, then it's lower buffer begin to matter less and it's higher mobility begin to matter more. The Drake actually do poor damage, but that doesn't matter when you have enough of them. Damage scales with numbers, reach does not.

The problem here is that CCP turned to a direction of cool big scale, bottomed-out ships, passive top-down economy and grids, structures and timers because in some lapse of stupidity they thought it would help new players and lead to more content and cool explosions. Today most of us seem to agree that they encouraged the opposite, with a fractured themeparked community in need of constant jump-starts.

Simply having these cheap ships out in belts again, will not sufficiently solve the issues. They still need a meaningful use and be meaninful targets. As long as ships are low-resource they will be an antithesis to creating resources and to destroying resources or having resources trade hands. Lower consequence also means less meaningful *doing things*. It doesn't help new players, but it helps building coalitions where we win by discouraging opponents to play because human is the undisputable resource and we pool ISK trophies.

In all fairness, i don't think my last post managed to shed anymore light on how one thing leads to another. Hopefully it gave Bouh something in the early paragraphs as to our little discussion of those specifics.

The issue Kodama, which is the issue i've argued since the start, is that there never was a problem with HML. The problem is with a number of things around how HML, on a select few ships, work. When CCP decided to re-balance HML they equally decided to ignore those other problems. It's the same manoeuver they pulled when they created BC3. It's the same manoeuver they pull when they are tierciding and buffing smaller ships. They are adressing results, not causes.

In summary i guess you can say that instead of fixing the existing balance between ships they are taking ISK-factors out of the equation and rebalance ships with the popular BC-class as the ideal, and the popular sit-still-and-shoot approach also as an ideal in some regards. They are creating a new balance between certain ships that is pushing the risk of using them down. As price-tags drop we move closer toward SiSi, and we experience meaningless interaction at all scales.



Game-wide results: (Moons, Supers, Wargames)

This is why we have the Syndicate Competetive League and proposed coalition Wargames: we lack natural conflict-drivers (such as meaningful ship-explosions), so we look for other ways to give our PvP meaning.

Supers and Moons actually are conflict-drivers, but they are exclusive to the groups that already own them (they primarily exist and build in sov-space), and there are no other conflict-drivers to impact them. It's not Supers being "too good", it's other ships not being conflict-drivers anymore. Supers are essentially facing the same problem as HML: they are good at the one thing EVE encourages. Titans are terrible at saving miners in belts, but awesome at saving POS holding moons or holding grids for timers. The same goes for large, cheap fleets. They win the grids they amass on.

What i argue that most people have yet not come to realize is that by turning the blind eye CCP are reinforcing the issues that made the HML popular on that one particular ship in the first place, instead of dealing with those issues. They are keeping the BC- and BS-classes as the popular bottlenecks and the sit-still-and-shoot with large ships approach that favour long-range, low-accuracy weapon systems (bolstered by webs and painters) as the coveted tactic. They are reinforcing the status quo of large coalitions and themeparks that don't interact.



The extended discussion: (HML)

HML had direct drawbacks of slow damage, low accuracy, predictable damage, destructible damage and so forth ... it's just that every other change done still encourage sitting still and following primaries which will continue making either HML popular or whatever other weapon-system that remain best at that specific thing once HML has been hammered. If you assume we should all be sitting still, then no, slow, predictable and low-accuracy are not equitable drawbacks. If you assume a dynamic and scale-balanced world, then they are. In a 10 vs. 10 fight they definately are - because when HML do not have alpha-power then the higher dps, accuracy and application of a system such as H-pulse is better at ripping through hostile support and winning the fight. This is also why anyone arguing that HML was a problem at small-scale seriously just need to L2P. We don't need to debate the possibilities of it, as i have already linked movies that show it.

So not only is it logical in theory, it is possible in practise and has been done.

In an environment where we sit still, the environment encouraged by not adressing the underlying issues: slow damage, low accuracy, predictable and so forth matter much less than the advantages of long range, high potential damage and alpha. Until we adress those real issues: long range, high potential damage and alpha will be the most important offensive factors in the entire game regardless of weapon system. That is what things like Artillery and Sentry drones have in common with HML which is why those systems are popular too. When CCP rebalances the BC-class and nerfs HML and Arty while improving drones, those are the likely platforms to grow popular.

When we have dynamic content (eg., miners in space) then HML is no better than H-pulse at those objectives than Titans are. Wether you are fighting over a POS, POCO or for honor on a bubbled gate you are fighting over fixed content.

you bumper you !!!

Saying delayed damage is a significant drawback is simply dumb. Doomsday mush be a ****** weapon then, with the spool-up time. After the first missile volley hit there is no longer any drawback, really.

I like to fight up close with drones and blasters, but I have some missile skills on my alt. The joy of always hitting, oh lawds, it's so sweet. Plenty range with LML for kiting and no need to think about tracking. yeah the DPS is a bit lower than I would like, but the range makes up for it. If you know your ****, you can even extend the range way beyond theoretical max. Make them chase you with bait-tanking etc.

Don't be silly, if you can't even lock the target how the **** are you gonna kill them with anything? This is no argument, it's only making you look silly in your arguments.

What the Hell are you shooting at? And do you have any missile support skills trained?

Anything smaller than a cruiser, yes light missiles will do more damage than heavy's. That is how missiles work. Use the right size missile for the right size ship and you will do maximum damage.

Heavy missiles were broken and needed a nerf. The way it was heavy missiles could out DPS any other missile in applied damage no matter what the target size. When heavy missiles were not only hitting frigates and destroyers for near full damage, but also hitting BC's and BS's almost as hard as cruise missiles, that was a problem.

Ia am sorry if you were so used to heavy missiles being your goto weapon no matter what your target. But that is not balanced. Heavy missiles are now in line with the damage they should be doing to the ships they should be shot at. Using heavy missiles against very fast cruisers or smaller ships, yes you will not hit them hard, at least not without really good support skills. Just like a medium long range turret will not hit them hard and will miss a lot more often. Shooting heavy missiles at BC's and BS's they should be doing max damage and never missing. But they should not out damage the larger missile that are meant to be shot at that size ship.

If you are fighting smaller ships with a cruiser or BC size ship you should not be using heavy missiles. You should be using a rapid light missile launcher. this is a cruiser size weapon designed to hit harder against smaller ships. if you are shooting larger ships like BC's and BS's then you should be using heavy missiles or heavy assault missiles. But you can not have the best of both rolled into one weapon, that is what made them OP.

True many missions contain both size ships. That is where the choice comes in. Do you want to more easily hit the smaller ships, but take longer to kill the larger ships? Or do you want to kill the larger ships faster, but have more trouble hitting the smaller ships? This is how it should be. Paper DPS and applied DPS are two very different things. Just because one ship has more paper DPS does not mean it can apply it better. When I first started running level 4 missions my Drake with heavy missiles could out damage my Raven with cruise missiles. Not just against small ships but against BC's. Even though the raven had about 150DPS more on paper the drake always out damaged it. Why? Damage application. Heavy missiles were hitting everything for full damage, while the cruise missiles were only hitting for 60-80% of max damage, even against BS's. It made mission running very easy when I could hit everything with one weapon type. But this is what made heavy missiles OP. It needed fixed.

Once I had all my missile support skills to 4 or 5 and T2 cruise missiles my raven hit a lot harder, even though the paper DPS did not go up much. Damage application is a mechanic you need to understand to do well in EVE. The old heavy missiles did not follow that rule. Get your missile support skills up and you will see more of the numbers you are used to. The are several of them. Guided missile precision, Missile bombardment, Missile projection, rapid launch, Target navigation prediction, and warhead upgrades. get them all to 4 if you want to do good damage, 5 if you really want to apply damage like you did before.

First, I think that economy problems and balance problems are not necessary linked together ; they can live separately. For example, you could solve your economy problem, and the Drake and HML could still be OP. And reversely, fixing the Drake and HML do not fix the global economic issues.

And second, I don't see how your a fix to economy and a powerful but expensive Drakes would be good for small gang and bad for nullsec. My be that's related to the firepower and staying power required for strategic nullsec stuff ?

About wealth :
Everything can be summed up by the EVE first rule : "don't fly with what you can't afford to lose". This rule is not someone's fancy advice to help noob, it's the core of the game because you lose things definitely when they are destroyed. Someone not understanding this will simply leave the game.

And you can afford something when losing it do not damage your wallet. That's almost the definition of cheap BTW. Hence, your way to earn isks need to be cheap enough. So you usualy build up your wealth relatively to the way you have to earn isks, starting with something cheap, and growing. If you lose something, you should have something else to build this wealth again to its original level.

To decrease people wealth, you need to *force* them (because they won't do it otherwise) to use "expensive" ("" because it's always relative) ships or risking their assets.

Here, I think I still agree with you (with a perspective difference maybe).

But I still don't understand how expensive Drake would save the EVE galaxy... Nor how cheap cruisers spell doom to it.

Unless you threaten territory or in space assets, you cannot force someone to risk expensive things outside.

I never thought the Drake was a problem because of nullsec blob but because of its almightyness. A Drake could do absolutely anything, and such versatility came with no other drawback besides not always being the best. And a good part of this overpowerness came from heavy missiles.

HML were OP : at 60km, they were as powerful as large LR weapons (or a little less), but they had no problem dealing with small targets or short range target (and even an Ares couldn't tank a Tengu for more than one minute). They had virtually no weakness. Hence, this weapon was too versatile and too capable.

Nois, I suspect you are way ahead of our time regarding the game-design matter. I wouldn't mind if CCP deeply reads your posts in this thread and does work around them to reevaluate its decisions.