EVE General Discussion

Quoted to OP

I think it's worth pointing out that we have tiers and then we have tiers.

What I think most people think of when we're talking ship tiers is the progression in level and build requirements, and the increase in abilities that one would expect to come with such increases. These made sense back in the day when it was tough going to build a battleship, and when it was far from obvious that you'd blast through to lvl IV – V in the skill because you're training at 2700 SP/h.

On the other hand, for most ship categories, the tiers also hide different roles, but these aren't really tiers in the classic sense. So I think that a lot of the back and forth we've seen in this thread is people aggressively agreeing with each other…

So isn't this a question of “remove the old progression, because it is no longer relevant to modern gameplay realities, and instead focus on the roles seen within these tiers”? I.e. both parties are actually largely in agreement, just from different perspective. The issue the old tier thinking causes is that it, for no particularly useful reason, makes some ships weaker than others and “disallow” them to be made better in ways that would further support their role.

For instance, among the frigates, we have six fairly distinct roles: mining, astrometrics, ewar, speedy combat, combat with primary racial weapon and combat with secondary racial weapon. It gets a bit muddy with the races that don't really have a primary or secondary weapon, but by and large, these are the classes of ships (and when turned into T2 ships, these roles are largely maintained and refined further). However, due to the tier system, the mining frigate “must” be weak as hell… just because it's low-tier. The tiers restricts what can be done with the hull, since buffing it would make it better in some way than its higher-tier cousins. Likewise, the “secondary weapon combat frigate” is forced to be worse (stats-wise) than the primary-weapon one, again, just because of the now largely irrelevant tier system.

Same thing with the cruisers — four rather distinct roles, but the lower-tier ones are forced by history to be pitiful specimens, even though they could probably use a buff or attribute reshuffle or two to further clarify (and function better within) their roles.

******* forum ate my post.

Since I can't recover it, and I don't feel like typing all that again, I'll just say.....

Only morons are against buffing ****** ships.

Possibly. But not with a Ferox. Harpy and Eagle would do that so much better. An even more interesting option would be the Cormorant after the expansion.

So the only reason to fly a Ferox over a Drake is its slightly better abiility to pop pods, but at the same time there are a handful of ships that does that far better than the Ferox.

So in the end, still no Ferox.

There's been a recent thread about this in Ships and Modules if you'd searched for it. https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=24582

I'm just gonna copy my main post from there for the sake of this discussion;

I've been mulling over this again since the announcement of the new bruisers. My thoughts are that the tier system does have some noteworthy merit to new players, but is far too pervasive at the moment, so I would suggest this change.

The starting point for balancing ships should be that all ships in a class are equally potent, albeit with their own specialities in that class. For instance, the Omen and Maller should be similarly useful, with the use of either depending on choice of gank or tank.

Secondly, once a class has approximately 3 ships in it, it should then be considered that a stepping stone into that class is required, and a low tier option or two should be added.So using Amarr cruisers as the example, once the Maller, Omen, and Abitrator are balanced against each other, the Augoror would remain low-tier and low-cost.

Frigates (again, Amarr for simplicity), would have the Punisher, Inquisitor, and the Crucifier at the top, with equal potential. Beneath them would be the Magnate, Executioner, and Tormentor.
You'd have three viable combat options for older players, with their roles intact, an entry-level combat frigate (Executioner) as an upgrade for the burgeoning combat pilot, and similar entry-level ships for two other professions.

This is a well populated ship class, so it works out nicely. What about when the class has alot fewer ships in it?

Let's take battlecruisers as an example; currently we have tier 1s and tier 2s, and essentially, tier 1s are useless as the training time and cost difference between them for anything other than a very cash-strapped and rushing new player is meaningless.

With the new 'logic', you would assume the class didn't have enough ships to warrant a low tier option (cruisers basically serve the bruisers in this way anyway), and balance them accordingly.

Well ... is there anything more to say about it? I don't have anything. I just hope the staff have seen it and taken this into consideration.