Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Please explain why you can't carrier rat anymore? Or you mean you can't keep your carrier safely off grid while gaining more than normal DPS & tracking on fighters from a max DPS/Tracking fit?
Just take it on grid and rat with it. Still works.

CCP have not screwed your playstyle, you don't want to take the risk that should have always come with that play style.
Also your overhead has dropped since you can gate jump the carrier with a scout (Hey you have two accounts even) so moving it around no longer needs cyno's.

Just wanted to throw in my two cents on this subject. Overall, I agree that fighter assist and even drone assist, as it exists in recent memory, need to be either heavily modified or removed. That being said, heavily modified would be far more preferable to outright deletion. A full mechanic should not be cut out of the game simply because it doesn't function correctly and fixing it would require a fair amount of work. I also believe that fighter warp is one of the cool and unique things about owning and flying a carrier. It isn't broken or overpowered in a stand alone sense. The fact that your fighters can follow a craft through warp and reengage, while annoying to the guy/gal who is hightailing it, is a function in the game that is just fine the way it is in my opinion.

Solutions:

1. Really simple and needed. Remove the ability to assist fighters to a subcapital ship completely. If they could control fighters, they would have the bandwidth to use them in the first place. On grid or off grid, I don't think it matters, just get rid of it. I would argue to allow fighter assist between capitals, or at least carrier class capitals, but only to a certain degree.

2. As someone previously stated, and in line with my #1 solution, create a module that allows a certain amount of FIGHTER ONLY bandwidth, but only say a maximum of 2 or 3. That way, they would receive limited assistance and wont be able to use the module to pad their own drone bay and be buffed without the assistance of a carrier.

3. Even if not removed outright, disallow the use of fighter/drone assist anywhere near a POS. No one should be able to assist a fight from the inside of a POS. Nor by poking the nose or ass of their ship outside the shield.

4. Drone assist is a great mechanic, but being able to assign a hundred Bouncers to a Fleet Commander in a fight is not the way the game should be played, again in my opinion. The fleet should not be able to kick back and orbit while one guy keeps hitting a big red button on his control console. Therefore, I think that there should be a maximum amount of drone assists per ship, say 5, and then they can receive no more. Or as an alternative, create a new stat that will govern how much bandwidth a ship has available to receive assistance. So say the stat is named Drone Assist Bandwidth and the stat reads 50, then that ship can receive 5 medium drones as assistance and no more. I think this idea would transfer over fluidly to carriers by renaming the stat Fighter Assist Bandwidth and thus limiting the number of fighters a carrier can have assisted to it. This would add another level of depth in small and large fleet engagements as this stat would/should vary wildly with different ship types. Maybe even have a ship with bonuses to assisted drones, but that seems like a far fetched dream all in all.

All things considered, I think there should be a number or stat limit to just about everything you can do in the game, and for the most part that is the case. Just not Fighter/Drone assisting. There are numerous ways things could be reworked to keep drone/fighter assist while nerfing it (appropriately), keeping fighter warp, and removing the safety net of POS shields in these situations without just throwing hands up and saying "You know what? We're just deleting it." It will require some hard work, balancing, and testing. But this road, while harder, will ultimately be a more rewarding experience to gamers and a richer game in general.

Just my two cents. And since I only have two cents, can anyone spare any change?

*Edited for spelling

Delete please. Double posted.

Can we also add that carriers and dreadnoughts basically can't really defend themselves against even a small group of attackers?

Personally, I don't like how fighters behave like mindless drones.

I'd far prefer fighters to behave as if they actually had pilots in the cockpits, which, in reality they actually do. I'd like to see them maneuver intelligently and independently. I'd like to see wings of fighters from opposing carriers in a furball trying to gain space superiority. I'd like to see fighter pilots being an actual "thing". I mean, imagine, you get your rookie pilots and grind up their experience to become "Ace" pilots who can fly faster, turn tighter, shoot more accurately meaning that if you lose your fighters, you lose your pilots too. But you could expand on this..... A carrier will always have SAR operations for their downed pilots. You would have to launch your search and rescue "helicopters" to go and save your ace pilots (these would work like salvage drones).

You would then simply assign them a "mission type" instead of "Attack my target" or "Assist my target" and the AI would then decide the best course of action to take.

Currently, fighters are just big ass drones with stats that are out of whack cause that's the only way to balance them.

Overall, fighters could be reworked completely but it would be a large chunk of work.

Fighter assist was one of the fun things of having a carrier. There are many solutions to this where it does not have to be removed all together. For example, make it so that fighters cannot be assigned until 1000km from a pos shield or so. Problem solved... carriers are easy to probe and tackle and kill

The post you quoted I am referring to the use of skynet in fleet combat where it was intended, not gate camps. Which we have used the tactic against our enemies as many times as it has been used against us. It's all a part of pre-staging for a battle, or risking your assets during to get in position quickly. It is the carrier's ROLE in this game to provide ONGRID logistics and OFFGRID offensive support via their fighters. You rarely see a normal carriers use fighters while on grid because they are horrid for sub-cap warfare where you actually have to fit tank, instead you see them drop sentries. And on that note, you rarely even see super's on grid for that exact reason. If super's had a semi-reliable way to actually combat the small gangs tackling them you would see them on grid more often.


If you took the time to actually read anything else I've posted you'd see that I was not "okay" with several aspects of skynet, and as myself and many others can see the overlap between skynet and other legitimate uses of the mechanic did not want to see it completely stripped away.

I was personally a fan of making it so drone/fighter assign was based on distance from stick, not shield edge, to prevent what I see as a borderline exploit of bringing the shield up around you at an instance completely removing the slow act of boating back into the shield.
I was also for limiting the ships who could accept the fighters based on their open bandwidth, meaning only drone ships could accept them as their ships were actually equip to control drones in the first place. This would have done away with insta-lock ceptors that are near impossible to catch and kill, and inevitably pushed it to large hulls forcing them to replace their personal drones with the more powerful fighters.



Super pilots have no reward for risking their assets in such a reckless way. That's why their use has been pigeonholed into only being wielded while within in a blob now where they can rely on the logistics of those around them as they go after other capitals. There simply is no reward for owning a super outside of simply status anymore, same can be said about titans. CCP already understands that their players will always find ways to exploit mechanics, now they just need to learn how to go about adjusting these in a less harmful manner.

I don't agree with the total removal, just for the record. However his reasons to keep it are wrong.

Yes, because anything where the Devs don't agree with you is 'fake'....
Yea right, grow up.
If the entire community had been on board with your POV then you might have some ground to complain, but most people were not in favour of the assign, and a lot also weren't in favour of a simple 'Assist as if drone' mechanic either.