Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The MTU is a nice little gadget that can help players out a lot but I feel like it's a little over the top in it's current iteration and changing it could allow for more variation in the line of available MTUs.

The two things I would like to see changed would be, the rate at which they gather items from wrecks and the rate at which they tractor different wrecks.

The first one doesn't make a huge difference to most MTU users (mission ratters). They could easily deal with MTU's dragging in wrecks and looting them at a slow speed of say 1-2 items every 5-10 seconds. Others however could have faster or even instant looting of wrecks into the MTU. Those with a higher pull would be used for those in LS or NS to quickly gather loot as these are more dangerous places.

As for the second idea, wrecks should be tractored in according to their weight. Frigate wrecks would be easy as they have very light mass. Titan wrecks on the other hand might only travel at 100-500m/s unless you buy a stronger tractoring MTU. It could also be a potential trade off between long range and wreck pulling power.

Adding these variables to the MTU would open up their market and allow for more choice and focus for players utilizing MTU's. That and we won't see massive clusters of wrecks form almost instantly from supers and capitals after large engagements.

Pretty much what I'm suggesting. In fact tractors on ships should have their pull speed done by wreck mass as well. Since the noctis is kind of THE ship for this niche role, it would probably get a hull role bonus to further boost tractoring speed if this change was implemented.

Since you didn't seem to understand what my suggestion was, this would SLOW most large wreck pulling. Similar to warp speed changes, cruisers will remain at a similar pull speed to now, frigates faster, battleships slower, and caps/supers very slowly. If my numbers indicated otherwise I apologize, they were just placeholders.

This means for most uses or the cheaper MTU's would have slower pull speeds than currently, while other higher grade MTU's, one's people would invest decent isk into and thus be worried about losing them, would pull as fast as current or slightly faster.

You guys either can't read or choose not to. This change affects MTU's and the noctis, saying use a noctis doesn't really affect the idea one way or another.

This isn't a "I want wrecks to move faster when tractored" idea, it's a "change how wrecks, MTU and tractors work" idea.

If that's what you got then you didn't read nor understand it.

The only things that would move faster after this change are frigate and destroyer wrecks. Everything else would tractor slower.
Also loot faster? I said loot slower, and never anything about it looting BEFORE it reaches the MTU. That was your own crazy addition.

Don't see the reasoning in changing the MTU's, they are fine as is. Changing the way they work just to have an excuse to add more of them in the game seems forced and unneeded, even though the idea of adding more types in the game for players to pick and choose what matters to them most has its appeal. MTU's are run on a concept of something in the game that is normally a matter handled manually being relegated to a form of automation, and since there are already a ship and various modules dedicated to that process before MTU's were about, this means they are and must be intentionally kept in check by making them take more time and be less efficient than a Noctis or even another ship with a tractor beam or two.

The wreck mass affecting possible tractoring speed is an okay idea since larger wrecks sometimes means more valuable loot (at least for a mission runner, that is). I've never really been reluctant with that idea anytime it gets brought up, it's just never been a definite "Yes, we need this" feature. This is I dare say not as likely the case in PVP, though. It also makes a bit of sense in terms of consistancy when you consider a Titan's wreckage will likely have bigger, more massive, and more voluminous contents than the wreckage of a frigate (again, unless the Titan was fit be responsibly cheap to afford with T1/2 mods and the frigate drops an officer mod worth a fortune).

You could even go a little nuts and suggest that the general worth of the contents of a wreck somewhat affecting the wrecks allowed tractoring speed. By value, it could be the estimated ISK worth of the contents where possible, which would mean many items would need another way of assigning the "ISK weight" since not everything has an estimated value (contract-only items for example). Then again, that's getting into making something overly complicated for no legitimate, or at least practical, reasoning beyond another notorious "it would be cool if ___ worked this way" suggestion. If wreck mass should affect tractor speeds, it should probably be kept to a simple difference in the actual wreckage size rather than contents for the sake of simplicity and/or sanity.