Player Features and Ideas Discussion

These guys pretty much explained it all. It's about balancing for different situations. In the situations you've encountered so far, you might not have fared well against Gellente ships, but there are plenty of situations that a Gallente ship would get dominated.

One thing I did want to address:
One other benefit the Tristan has though is it's devastating drone ability. I've seen more than a few ships ripped to pieces before the speed or tank of a Tristan even got called into question. Of course, it is defeatable, but its on paper stats make it look tougher to balance that it really is.

You pretty much defeated your own argument here. An F1 car is designed to race in the type of races it performs. As a car in general, an F1 car isn't inherently better. It's got a high max speed, sure, but I'd hate to be in an F1 car in a tightly packed city or on a twisty country road with potholes every 2 meters.

The AT gives a false impression of the abilities and balance of the ships because of the other restrictions of the tournament.

Who cares how F1 car perform out of tournament?

Well apparently you do, because you are complaining about ships in the actual game, not in the AT, yet you are arguing that the AT is evidence of an imbalance. If you are a part of the AT, then yes, perhaps Gallente have an advantage. In the game, the actual game we all play, they are pretty well balanced. You are comparing apples and chairs.

Think he's using the tournament as a point of reference because the players within that tournament should be fairly skilled, which is a reasonable way of looking at it.

Problem with balance is:

For a ship to be balanced they would have to be identical in configuration, they could look different though. Of course this would lead to a fairly boring game.

The more configurations you add to a game the more likely the components will become more unbalanced.

You will never ever have balance in a game that has variety, best you can hope for is a happy medium.

Of course in an MMO it's not just the components of the game that make a difference it's also the technology that the players are using.

I agree to you Minmatar ships are not bad, Slepnir is quite good, they have like Gallente big drones bandwidth to carry sentries and plenty of turrets. But Caldary and Amarr have much less good ships. Caldari cannot carry enough drones and Amarr is limited mostly to lasers. They have some descent ships like vengeance and Armageddon which are not very bad, but again Dominix and ishkur are still better.

For example, let's compare T1 battleships.
Gallente T1 battleships have big drone bays and many turrets, you have a choice between having more turrets or drones. If you choose Dominix you get great increase in sentry range, if you choose Hyperion you still get 5 sentries with turrets and armor repair boosts. You have no problems with long range weapons, rails are perfect, reasonable capasitor use, heavy damage and long range.

If you play Amarr you have no choice other then Armageddon, cause Abaddon and Apocaipse are just crap, their drone bays are small, so no room for 5 sentries. They have capacitor problems,they have no descent long range weapons cause beam lasers are double crap. The only fit possible to Apocalypse and Abaddon is just medium drones with pulse lasers, which is kinda gimp for pvp. Armageddon is better but still cannot compete with Dominix and Hyperion, dps is just lower, less points for turrets, no turret bonuses and drone bonuses are not as good as Dominix has.

That part I agree with.

True, but there is the balance given by how the players overall tend to fly the different ships

To be a good football analyst you do not need to play football yourself. May be you are good at pvp but you do not realize the whole picture of how stuff works here. In fleet pvp the key to victory is to tackle and dps one target with the whole fleet, first target is the weakest. It is much easier to do with drones because all drones can be assigned to one person so one person himself decide whom to attack. It happens quite often then fleet leader decide to attack one target but members attack another or switch to primary target with delay, even few sec delay matters a lot. Having many drones assigned to one person made even small fleet made of of tristans, algoses and vexors a real force, To outplay it the opposite fleet needs to have better or more ships or way better organisation, that just simple.

Just for example you can put 5 tristans, equip them with sensor boosters, drone link augmentor and drone navigation computer, assign all drones to one person. As a result just having durty cheap T1 frigates you'll be able to attack targets at the range of 80 kilometers by the will of one person, without additional voice communication to let fleet members know about primary targets. There is no tactics which can counter this at the same amount of money spend. You can use smart bombs or cruise missiles against this, but it is way more expensive.