Player Features and Ideas Discussion

What you fail to realize is that being on the receiving end of a gank is the end result of multiple mistakes made the freighter pilot. When flown by competent pilots, freighters are actually rather hard to catch. I've walked my five year old Charon through many gank fleets. Then again, not being a douche and treating people who enjoy ganking like they're lower than pond scum got me into their chat channels so I have great intel on where they're setup.

As for the ship Vincent wants, I don't see where it's needed. You can get high tank, large hold, and good agility out of the existing freighters. You just can't get it all at once, which dips into the OP side of things. Honestly, there needs to be more of a drawback to this ship than simply the smaller hold size, considering it improves on every other aspect of the existing freighters before adding the low slots.

I fail to realize this? Oh boy. Traditional response against traditional carebear proposals. Rest assured though- I am quite aware. A tidbit saddened all conversation about, well, anything really always has 85% gankerspam in it; let's not do that in this thread, shall we? I know. You know. I know that you know and given the time I've spent on the forums I assumed you knew that I knew. Briefly put: gankerdegank. Irrelevant. I'm talking about Cargo Space, align time and hyperspatial velocity.

A bit of tank is obviously required but how much tank depends on the value of the ship plus its cargo. For example, a 150 mil ship with 50k tank is acceptable. It's somewhere in the HAC ballpark, it's fine. A 700 mil ship with 50k tank is not. Until now, nobody's even mentioned a pricerange for our new hypothetical ship because up till now, we're still stuck in the "but why would you want one" phase.

And then there are some jokers who think 8 bil for 400k tank is okay. It is not. 8 bil pays for the Jumpdrive, not for the tank -- tank is largely irrelevant on jumpfreighters.

So until we can actually come to terms with the general idea some of us need to haul less cargo and would like to get there faster, we haven't even begun balancing EHP / price yet. We've spent the last 7 or 8 pages debunking morons claiming "those already exist". When asked "Oh yea? Which ship does" there was ONE post detailing how a freighter could achieve this provided it had more lowslots.

I've proposed a variation on the Orca, I've proposed adding rig slots to the freighter basically boiling down to the same idea as adding more lows (and, obviously, reviewing the base stats to bring it back to where it is today with 3 lows) -- but that's it.

The only time ganking was mentioned, was when some Lolsmurf was trying to be funny by proposing a 700 mil ship with 100k tank on it, to carry 140k in cargo. This definitely classifies as one of those "mistakes" pilots make, does it not? So I told him that.

Rest assured: we know. The so-called alternatives (JF? all-cargoextended Orca? inertial stabbed, dual hyperspatial freighter?) are very failfit on purpose, and rather than telling me the freighter pilot made a boo-boo, please tell that to the guys proposing such ships in the first place. We're the ones trying to demonstrate they're wrong, remember?

One one hand, they say "we don't need such a ship, it already exists" and when asked to elaborate they come up with the most ridiculous of fits. "how is it ridiculous" they ask, well ... would you put 140k cargo in a 700 mil loot pinata with neither tank nor align speed? I sure wouldn't. It is, as you so eloquently put it, the first in a line of mistakes.




Ah, now we come to the point: you can get high tank, large hold or good agility. This is nice if you need to move upwards of 450k m3. What we need is half that, offset by good agility AND good hyperspace velocity. Same principle, but more room for maneuvering. We're already at the lowest end of cargo capacity and it's still double of what we need. I'll re-iterate several options "the crowd" has largely ignored:

(a) make Cargo Expanders affect both cargohold AND fleet hangar. That way we can get more out of a DST by sacrificing align speed on them.
(b) introduce an offshoot of the Orca, replacing ship hangar and orehold with more fleet hangar. Can't imagine why this could possibly be bad since I'm literally not changing any other stat except replace "50k ore and 3 fitted cruisers" with 80k fleet hangar.
(c) introduce a battleship-sized minifreighter to fill the gap between cruiser sized industrials and capital ship sized freighters.
(d) review freighters and allow rigs, so that it gets 200k space but transverses the warptunnel considerably faster.

As you can see, none of these are even remotely related to improving gank resistance. I want a ship that can hold less, but is faster. That's all there is to it. Hardly an OP mobile.

How much such a ship would cost, depends entirely on which of the given options are used. If (a), then it's a 150 mil DST. If (b) we're probably talking 700 mil. If (c) probably also 700 mil. If (d) it'll be 1.3 bil. What is for sure unacceptable, is 8 BIL and the requirement to use multiple characters, because at that point it's painfully obvious you can just use 2 DST runs on two characters and be done with it.

Unfortunately ..... we're bogged down by lolsmurf and HTFUman. I'd very much like to go over the values and see where we end up, if we could at least finally admit a ship bridging the DST - Freighter gap does not currently exist. In fact, freighters are among the least fittable ships in game, second only to the Covetor. They deal with volumes 450-900k m3. We're really talking about 120-250k here. It'd be like the PvP shiptree stopped at cruisers, had one specialty BC and then jumped straight to dreads. Something is missing there, imho ...

Thank you very much for not insulting me directly if I don't agree with you 100%.

Honestly, giving a price tag to this is a bit diffucult. But one can look at the price of implants, The +6% Hull HP implant has a price of 600M, the +8 costs 2.4B.. The +15% Warp speed implant is also of the order of150M, the +18% is 500M. The 6% agility implant is also 600M. This is EVE, look at the prices of faction or officer mods compared to normal mods. If you want to have something slighly better than normal, you have to pay a lot.

Adding more lows or rigs to a freighter would be ok, if you reduce the base stats accordingly. Then it's up to you.

According to that logic a Badger should cost several billion more than a Tayra. It has 50% increased warp speed, 75% more EHP and infinitely more safety due to being able to fit cloak/MWD.

Reasoned logic and facts I'm perfectly fine with even if people disagree with me. Uninformed dumb "logic" I discard as such.

I think you make some reasonable points here.

The one thing I would question though is that much of what the OP wants; and also eluded to here, is a ship that increases safety for the solo hauler, primarily against the risk of being ganked in a Freighter because the align time is too long and the size of the cargo hold is overkill for many needs.

So something smaller with more tank and agility, for much less cost than a JF.

My question with this is what is the point where we accept that it takes more than 1 character to move certain cargo?

If it only takes 1 gank ship to kill something (eg. poorly fit T1 hauler), then I totally agree that a lone hauler, properly fitting and using his ships should have a counter (eg. MWD-cloak trick).

However, there is no way a single ganker could take down this proposed ship. As with Freighters/Orcas/Bowheads now, it takes a fleet of gankers to affect a gank.

A single webbing alt can overcome all of that. Just the addition of 1 character eliminates the align/warp disadvantage all together and makes a Freighter/Orca/etc. max tanked, virtually immune from having an issue.

So why add another ship, when it's already possible to max tank a Freighter, carry the package in the 140,000 m^3 range and be virtually unstoppable doing so?

This proposal seems like little more than a request to allow risk free solo hauling v fleets required to stop it. That doesn't seem like a good addition.

Sorry what?

Empty freighter or JF drops 0 ISK worth of cargo. At best, it will drop 3 lowslot modules worth a few thousand ISK (bulkheads if the freighter pilot is smart, cargo expanders if not).

To gank said empty freighter still takes around 19 odd Catalysts depending on fit, at 6 - 10 million (most recent loss on zkill is 9.90 million for the standard gank fit: https://zkillboard.com/kill/56030249/).

So that costs the gank fleet 180 million for virtually 0 return.

Cost equation is not inherently wrong.

Still doesn't answer the question, at what point should it be accepted that more than one player is an ok counter to upwards of 19 trying to kill you?

2 characters is all it takes for virtually perfect safety. Isn't that already an adequate counter?

Still no answer to the question I asked:

Isn't 2 characters for virtually perfect safety already a sufficient counter to the risk of being ganked by a fleet of gankers?

Two characters for near perfect safety against much larger fleets of characters.

No it doesn't assume flying solo is wrong. That is demonstrated every day by Freighters successfully flying solo.

So answering it is not silly at all. It's a genuine question.

This proposal is about reducing risk. A perfect counter to ganks already exists, by using 1 other character vs the large fleet required to effect the gank in the first place.

Why is introducing a new ship a better solution than that which already exists and which provides virtually perfect safety vs any size gank fleet?

As a Freighter/JF pilot I don't see the need for this ship, so I'm just trying to understand how this is justified versus the existing options.

Earlier in the thread I suggested that a JF or Orca already delivers on the ability to haul in the range of package size this proposal covers; and with better tank. That wasn't accepted, so fair enough. Too expensive and/or not the right cargo size. Ok, I can accept that as a counter.

But what's the counter argument in favour of this ship over 1 other character for near perfect hauling safety?

Answering a question with a question. Ok, whatever. I feel I'm running up against it. Trying to have genuine dialog to understand the need for this, but it's only a one-way thing.

Firstly. it shouldn't be any different. People choose to fly solo in Freighters every day.

That brings with it, certain risks.

This proposal is about reducing that risk.

A perfect solution to reducing the risk already exists, so why is introducing a new ship a better solution than the existing solution that offers near perfect safety using just 2 characters versus the much larger fleet required to gank?

There are lots of examples of play in the game where flying solo brings with it more risk than flying with more characters and/or where solo activity isn't even possible.

For example, delivering cargo into lowsec and nullsec with a Jump Freighter. That requires a second character to ensure safety as the option of solo flying a freighter/jump freighter in lowsec and nullsec is an almost assured loss.

Same here. The risk can be reduced by adding just one more character and on the basis of the current discussion, I can't see how that is not an oppropriate solution. No reasonable counter to that has been offered, especially when all similar sized ships in the game operate better or only effectively at all, with a second character involved.

In the end, this current proposal seems like increasing personal convenience for haulers by making it more inconvenient for counterplay to hauling. That's a weak basis in my view, if that's what this is about.