Player Features and Ideas Discussion

First of all I believe the whole fleet structure and interface needs to be redone from the bottom up. It's buggy (11 people in a squad, command positions don't receive boosts, etc) it's clunky and it's unintuitive. But this post is not going to have any suggestions on how to do that as that is a large change that will require a lot of development hours. This is instead going to be about the leadership skills how they effect the fleet structure. These are changes that should be much easier to implement.

1. Skill requirements
As is it right now you need Leadership 5 to train Wing Command and Wing Command 5 to train Fleet Command. The Leadership 5 for Wing Command is not such a huge deal but Wing Command 5 for Fleet Command is. Wing Command is a rank 8 skill which means even if you would remap for charisma it's a 29 days skill, without remapping you are looking a 40+ days. Just to be able to lead a fleet of more than 50 people. For us in Brave Newbies 50 pilots is a small fleet. This ends up being very detrimental to any new FC wanting to step up.

So a first simple improvement would be to change the skill requirements to level 4 instead. That means that a new FC won't have to spend 65 days to just do a 100 man fleet but instead can do it in 15 days. There are still going to be people in the fleet needed that have Leadership 5 and Wing Command 5, it just won't be the FC.

This brings me to the next thing which is the on and off nature of the fleet boosts in relation to the leadership skills.

2. The effect on Leadership skills on the Fleet structure.
As it is now if you do not have the required skills you don't get anything at all. A Leadership 4 pilot as Squad Leader for a Squad with 9 pilots in it instead of 8 means that not a single pilot in that squad will receive any boost at all. Same with higher level skills, if a Fleet Command 3 fc have a single pilot in a 4th wing none in the whole fleet will receive any fleet level bonuses.
My suggestion here is that instead of having this ON/OFF nature of fleet boosts there should be a reduced effect.

If the pilot in the command position does not have any skills the people under him will get somewhere between 0% and 50% (the exact numbers here are not important and can easily be adjusted) of the boosts with increase per level. So in the example above with the Squad Leader with Leadership 4 will instead of giving 0% boosts to his 9 pilot squad he will now give 80-90% of the boosts. This would be cumulative with the structure above, so combination of a FC4 fc with and WC4 wc and Leadership 4 SL in a full fleet will only give out 51-73% of the fleet level bonuses. This means that the level 5 skills are still useful and important but not the hard requirement they are today.

If you do this change then you could at the same time decouple skill level from the fleet numbers. A Leadership 4 Squad leader would give 80-90% of his boosts no matter if there is 1 or 10 pilots in his squad. Or it could still be tied to numbers so the bonus reduction only comes into play if you are above cut off lines. I am favor of completely decouple it from fleet numbers as it will serve to keep the motivation high to train these skills to level 5 while at the same time reducing the complexity of the system.

Personally I don't really see any downside with the above changes. Yes it does cater a bit to Brave Newbies as we are one of few entities in the game that facilitate week old players FCing 100+ pilot fleets but I feel that they are a general improvement that shouldn't be too difficult to implement.

While you can limit how many squads you have in a wing and how many wings you have in a fleet there is no way to limit how many people are in a squad. And the Squad Commander can not move pilots in his squad to another squad, he can only kick them. So he has no practical control of how many are in his squad.

It is very hard for an aspiring FC to run a serious fleet without the 100+ days you have to invest in leadership to be able to support links while in fleet command position, unless they are being handheld by someone who has (which is something most people don't want to have to do, I know from experience).

This change would make it so much easier for newer fcs to be able to compete in the current meta of tryhard, I don't see any downside other than making the game slightly easier (arguably a downside).

+1 to the change of skill requirements.

Or like the rest of the game, when you can't bring equal quality, you bring bigger number. How nice is it that it fit BNI so much to be able to just bring more pilots to fight if for some reason they can't bring equal on the quality.

That's valid - that's why I asked - I've never FCd anything large enough to need the actual Fleet Command skill.

That being the case, I'll say yes to some sort of change that lets more people try and fill those shoes.

Hello,

My name is BroodAlpha and I am the demographic that you guys are focusing on. Recently I have been trying to FC larger fleets of Moas and in the near future I'd like to give Eagles a go as well since they don't fly too differently (range, tank etc are pretty easy to grasp).

However how am I supposed to expect my military director to okay me taking out a 20b ISK fleet without links or boosts? I wouldn't do it anyway, it'd put me and my fleet at an instant disadvantage. In order for me to get good experience leading large fleets I have to do just that, lead large fleets.

Standing between me and my goal is a 60 day train. I'm not doing an entire remap and spending a *year* training for FC5. I have better things to do with my time. If I train FC3, it's a waste of my remap. So it's going to be like, 3 months of training.

Now I would be okay with this if the leadership, wing command and fleet command skills actually did something. But they don't. All they do is allow me to give my fleet boosts and put my fleet on the same playing field as all the other pilot's fleets.

I however, am a pragmatist. I completely understand that there are a lot of people out there that have WC5 and FC5 for the exact reason stated above, to get boosts. They'd be super rustled that they trained that skill for no reason if we changed the requirements for FC skills. But is rustling one group of people really that important? CCP has done it before with BC skills and recently with Drone skills. Messing with the newer players and increasing their training times to get to the same level as older players. Why not do it the other way around for once? Remember CCP, you have to think about new players and subscribers. There are people out there that want to lead fleets, they watch the advert and say, ''I wanna be a Fleet Commander''. They get into the game and train into a cool doctrine, then realize that they can't lead a fleet (without being at a disadvantage) without spending 2-3 months training something that does nothing, other than allow the use of fleet boosts. It matters even more for smaller fleets than it does for bigger ones.

I mean, in the same time it takes to train FC5, I could train my alt to sit in an Archon. Do you see how ridiculous that is? ''Here, choose between sitting in a capital ship and having all that cool content, or lead fleets that are 20% more efficient (kind of mandatory since all the other FC's have it hehehehehh)''.

tl;dr

I have 44m skillpoints, want to lead more advanced fleets, still can't do it without wasting 60-90 days of training on useless skills that don't make my game experience any more fun, they just level the playing field for newer FCs.

For 1, there are workarounds.

I agree with 2. I'd rather have it go to the first n positions than not at all. Or an effect of reduced effectiveness of links where if you have 10 but only can do 8 everyone gets 20% less boosts or such.

If you fix 1, 2 is no longer that much of an issue.

I don't think you understood what I was trying to say. Read again, sorry = /.

Maybe you should stop posting. I don't think you understand the concept that we're trying to put forth here. I'm not going to explain it here because the content is already in the posts above. If you don't understand it, then there's nothing I can do for you mate.

Guys! There is a skill in the game that I want to enable me to do X but that skill does nothing.I totally need it to do X but since as I said that skill does nothing, it should be faster to train.

Just like any other skills, you need to train them to be on a level playing field with others.