Player Features and Ideas Discussion

how about a guaranteed burnout, massive bonus, one-shot alpha strike option. there's places to go with heat.

Very well then: What is your alternative to have the 99% damage switch and still keep the pilot error possibility in place?

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@Altrue

You can estimate the next cycle's probable heat damage to your module by taking the damage steps of the previous cycles into account. If you are at 95% damage and the previous cycles added damage between 3-5% to your gun, it's very likely that the next cycle destroys them, hence you turn overheat off.

there is one, it's called "awareness".

1 as far as I can tell. Your first suggestion, the reduced overheat for a failsafe, which would make the overheat mechanic even more complicated as you would have 1 overheat without failsafe and 1 overheat with failsafe, which in turn brings us back to Altrue's brought up problem of "battling the UI". That problem of an UI cluttered with even more choice and chance to click the wrong option without realizing or in the wrong setting at the wrong time might qualify as "failsafe switch while retaining chance for pilot error", though I have my doubts that making the UI worse is a good approach to achieve that.

Your second suggestion has no failsafe and no risk, as it destroys the weapon regardless. Next?

I don't need to come up with something "creative regarding heat" as I am with the folks who don't see a need for change. There is no need for different modes, as overheat works as intended already: You have the bonus damage by damaging your guns. How far you can damage your guns is easily visible on the module and the tool tip of the module, and by watching your modules during fight and overheat you can see how far you can overheat and when to stop. That little bit of taking various effects of overheating into account is called "learning" (by experience or from others), something that has seen a short straw in recent EVE history. If you overheat, you have to pay attention to it and the details to overheating, which requires watching your modules as well as the fight around you. Overheating is not an Easy-Mode On-Switch, where you just get more damage and can continue watching movies, it's an advanced feature of combat requiring skill and knowledge. If you don't have that, you would do better acquiring it first before you use overheat and fail at using it.

Now, as for your "creative something regarding heat": How do you turn on the reduced heat cycle? How do you turn it off? How can I tell my weapons not to go into reduced OH at all if I don't need that? What point has an alpha strike on weapons which don't have alpha damage capabilities, such as short range pulse lasers, missile launchers or autocannons? Where is the risk of pilot error if every heatcycle follows your described pattern? I take it that the safety switch turns on when the heat reaches a certain damage level and continues the heat with reduced damage and bonus, then bursts in an alpha strike and turns heat off automatically? Or destroys the gun, making the safety switch pointless?

yup the UI sort of removes the "player skill" and confuses newer players to a point where they are stuck in space with a dead module and it just kills the fun. Also i enjoy flying all sorts of ships and when i hop into a smaller ship and i am in the middle of a fight its easy to forget to turn off overload quicker than i would have to in a cruiser for example, cant all ships have similar overheat timings at least?

Their own fault for not asking other players. It is not like there are no other players around who couldn't teach them how to read the overheat damage on modules.

That you forget to turn it off is exactly the point of it. You are not aware of your ship's systems and these mistakes cost you your ship or kill. Therefore, you have to learn how to keep track of that and how to manage different ship classes. Having all ships cause the same heat damage does not make sense for a variety of reasons:

• bigger ships have more capabilities to store and dissipate heat than smaller ships;
• smaller weapons are more fragile than bigger weapons, which means the overheat deals more damage quicker to them;
• small weapons cycle a lot faster than bigger weapons, which means that they subjectively suffer more heat damage than bigger weapons. However, they all suffer the same amount and all modules have the same hit points.

Homogenizing that just takes off even more flavor from the game and makes it less challenging to fight. Instead, players should make more use of the much touted, much loved social aspect of the game and ask other players or at least read the manifold resources available in the internet about things they have not tried yet before they try it and fail. Asking for a failsafe just because they don't do it, does not help to make the game better.

I won't deny that the UI could be improved, but completely removing the element of pilot mistake and error and the variety between different modules and ship classes does not help the game at all.

no.
as others already said, you overheat at your own risk and knowledge, burning out modules is the cost. This is all fine.

variable overheating? ok

as it is, the chance of breaking your mods creates entertaining risk/reward scenarios, hilarious comms and flapping commentators during tournaments. So there should never be a point where you can overheat forever and no system where the overheat turns itself off, no matter how much youve 'toned down' the heating. Otherwise there is no point in not overheating as normal to the point of 99% and then switching to a reduced heat and still getting benefits for no trade off.


As for 'Alpha' overheating, id be careful how far you go with this. Sure more control sounds good, and it'd be a healthy buff to ganking in hi-sec but i have an issue with it:

Are you saying you can over heat normally to the point of 99% damage and then switch to 'alpha' oveheat and benefit from the full effects of that massive O/H bonus and only suffer 1% module damage? Because by doing so you're almost completely removing the balancing factor of overheating so heavily. Again, there is no reason not to do this.

So id say you can only alpha overheat with a mod with full HP. But an option for over-over heat with a slightly bigger bonus with more damage could work.

How i imagine overheating is that you decide to overheat(modeled in the UI as the click of a button) and your clone begins constantly mentally telling the heat warnings to shut up. If you forget to stop overheating then thats the same as your clone forgetting. Your mods are already running at 100% capability, why would they not be? You are disabling the safety limits so there shouldn't be a 'No really Dave, you should stop that now...'.

On the other hand a simple gieger tic mechanism that increases in frequency (20kHz per % heat) . Imagine trying to stay calm as the pitch raises...much like the sonar scanner in Aliens...a very effective way to induce panic in players!