Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It's a pretty common PvP problem. Like you said, focus fire tactics are the only logical way to handle most encounters.

However it almost always makes pvp a lot more boring than it could be once the fights get big enough, and unlike most games EVE does have the concept of target limits and lock times to play with. This would, however, represent a HUGE departure from the way fleet battles are currently fought. Now, personally, I don't think that's a bad thing. I'm absolutely certain many people will disagree.

I think, maybe, a better way to go about it would be not to rebalance the TSB, but introduce a new size-specific module as a utility high (so more ships can use it, since mid/low often have less wiggle room)

Call it a "Reflective Interference Device"

Tiered/faction versions are differentiated primarily by fitting cost and cycle time, with a Reflective Interference ECM skill that reduces cap drain and unlocks the t2 stuff at 5 (with the T2s having 50% higher fitting costs, but 50% reduced cycle time, using a T2 may be tight enough to have to forgo another module)

Lorewise it just relays incoming targeting systems to a single wide band transmitter, basically using incoming targeting systems to create a local noise bubble, which make the ship untargetable past a certain point. Kinda like a more haphazard version of existing EWAR systems.

What this guy does is enforce lock limits when active. It comes in small, med, and large versions (but not XL versions because capitals are kinda immune for "instant alpha" syndrome and need some kind of subcap vulnerability)

When you switch it on, all locks above its limit are broken, and locks above this limit fail while it is running. In addition, like a cloak, you can not maintain target locks or control drones while it is running. The locks chosen to break when it activates are chosen at random. You could break all your logi locks and have to tank the full incoming, or you could luck out and break nothing but hostile locks, but basically waste your logi in the process. Logi in this case would be useless keeping that lock on you. You are no longer contributing DPS while running it, and your drones are basically dead in the water.

The basic idea here is that its your panic button. You get redboxed by the entire enemy fleet, you cycle this guy, you still get shot at, but its not a great idea for 70 enemy ships to keep trying to lock you up. It encourages a smaller group of ships to target you based on the known limit of your ships size class, which, theoretically, leads to multiple fleet subgroups/squads targeting different targets rather than entire fleets targeting the same thing.

Cap drain for this thing is fairly immense, talking bigger than unbonused RR levels of cap drain here. Additionally, you can not fit wrong-sized RIDs for your hull size. You can be pretty handily neuted right out of it, and trying to use it to guarantee friendly logi while denying hostile locks is going to seriously gimp your fit if you plan on perma-cycling it.

Small (frigs) - 4 lock limit
Med (cruisers) - 6 lock limit
Large (BC/BS)- 10 lock limit

Drone locks count as .2 for the purpose of this calculation (so 5 drone locks counts as one lock)

Thinking about some fairly long cycle times here, or even have it use a similar ammo paradigm to cap boosters, with very heavy ammo and very long reload times to balance it. The goal being a module that is unsustainable to just cycle endlessly, but can successfully cut instapop levels of hostile lock down to a somewhat tankable level with the drawback that it's going to shut off your ability to deal DPS and possibly impact your ability to get friendly reps.

With such a module in play, you could see fleet maneuvers that actively tank themselves, and have a limited ability to shunt alpha. Focus fire would still be important and valuable, but the larger your fights get the more you're going to have to focus fire in smaller subgroups rather than an entire fleet simultaneously throwing alpha at a single battleship.

This wouldn't completely remove the utility of logi either, but it would require building around in the fleet comp to successfully use. You'd need more mobile logi, or more mobile fleets, sebos, etc. and using these at a fleet level would require a much higher level of individual pilot and FC skill, but used properly a fleet choosing to employ said modules would have an interesting advantage against a more vanilla full fleet alpha approach at the cost of being more difficult to run and logi.

An interesting topic. I have long wished for a bit more dynamic gameplay relating to focus fire. It's boring. FC calls primary, secondary, fleet burns primary, then while burning secondary, new target is queued. Talwar alpha fleets, I'm looking at you :(

In addition to focus fire, I would say anchoring up into a ball is also a problem. It discourages active gameplay.

Not commenting on any of the suggestions so far, I agree in principal that some form of hard limit on focus fire would increase the "fun" of the game, by decentralizing the fight.

Yes it's an effective (real world too) strategy, but it's boring. If you get rid of it, you will most certainly have more dynamic gameplay.

As an aside, you may also find that if fleets are no longer able to simply alpha targets off the field with 50 of something, you may find an increase in fleet composition diversity. If a target can only be locked by X number of people, it makes more sense to bring something that can most efficiently apply dps to it.

Lastly, the drawback.

Roaming.

A 20-50 person roam will most certainly result in people sitting on their thumbs. Everyone warps to tackle, and only X number of people can lock up. Will probably lead to the death of moderate and larger fleet roaming.

It shouldn't be too terribly difficult... it would probably dramatically increase the amount of server horsepower needed (not only are we calculating weapon trajectories for early impacts, but something like a missile has a dynamic trajectory.

I agree that it's not likely to happen... it would be hilarious seeing a little piece of spacedust blocking a 1200mm arty, though I guess in principal it would probably be enough to deflect it enough to miss most targets over the distances involved (assuming an off-center impact to the projectile).

Putting a damage incoming and rep incoming cap does nothing for cap incoming. Throw away all the tank expansions, the shield extenders and Armor plates, and replace them with batteries or injectors. Add on the right rigs and ships are unbreakable because they're locally repping with 2-3 reppers staggered and have that many more slots and rigs to devote to resists. Because they can rely on cap transfers, and know they only have to survive x amount of raw dps and thus have not fleet fits, but evewide standard fits for each hull to become permatanking.

Then you'll talk Cap transfer limits, and then you might as well say fleets are too big, cap those numbers too.

Really how could you really justify having only x# of ships target you? Just get x# of your friends to pre-lock you at all times. Non fleet members only? well have a sperate fleet for max range and number targeting.

Don't bother trying to "save the phenomenon" just leave well enough alone, the system DOES work. Range, falloff and transversal can be tricky things for FC's to manage with such a wide selection of ships, weapons, ammo and fleet comps.

In order to kill a supercap, you effectively need supercaps. 3v1, I'll let you guess who wins. The "damage cap" wouldn't be such a good idea, but limiting the number of target locks would certainly not make any ship immortal.

Adding a friendly target lock cap would make sure logi couldn't just laugh their way home.

Consider two 50-pilot fleets. 35 battleships and 15 T2 logi cruisers.

Existing gameplay:
FC - Primary Bill, secondary Bob, tertiary Jedediah

DPS all locks up Bill, logi all lock up Bill, and it becomes a simple numbers race - can they out-rep the damage, or can they out-damage the reps?

New gameplay:
FC - Wing 1, Bill, wing 2, Bob, wing 3, Jebediah


DPS lock up their respective targets, logi lock up their respective targets, and now you have 3 different number races.

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The difference between these two mechanics, is that you've got 3 different chances for "something" to go wrong. A logi pilot being slow to lock for example could spell doom. EWAR breaking a cap-chain and/or disrupting a single logistics pilot all of a sudden becomes substantially more important than interrupting 1/15th of their logistics.

If anything, it ensures that there are more chances for things to die without just being a single boring dps race.

It's hard enough to get 50 people to shoot the same target. Getting those same 50 to shoot different targets without wasting shots to damage caps would be a nightmare.
I think that would kill off large fleets.

Bringing real military tactical discussion in to a discussion about fake internet spaceship mechanics is meaningless. Targeting isn't quite so perfect and effortless in real life, and more importantly, real life has concepts like not actually being able to hit a target because other targets are in the way, including allies. On top of that, the EHP of any given unit in a real fight is excessively low. In general most real life units can successfully 1v1 each other in a matter of seconds.

Focus fire in real life is directed at an area, not a single target, and is more commonly done for supression purposes, not to directly neutralize them. This is because having all your guys shoot at one dude is a dumb idea, because your guys can be easily taken out of the fight in a matter of seconds by any one of those enemy targets if it positions itself properly.

Obviously that doesn't transition to EVE, because the design of TTK on spaceships, lock times, lock limits, and the server limitations that prevent collision detection prevent it from simulating that environment.

I've played a lot of PVP games. There's one constant with most of them. Small fights are more fun than large fights. Usually, this is because small fights generally contain both passive and active mitigation sufficient enough to nullify incoming DPS, which requires smart target selection on the fly, while large fights typically consist of alpha-centric strategies the make most of large fights boil down to "kill whatever target is closest to your DPS ranges" because at that scale the individual utility of said targets is meaningless, only their proximity to enemy fire and ability to apply damage to them is at all important. In games with good/unlimited AOEs this in stead morphs in to "nuke that area" and completely pushes most single target damage right out of the meta, again creating a pretty boring fight that boils down to prioritizing decisions based on target density rather than target utility.

Or, to put it more simply, you don't target enemies based on their function in the fight past a certain point, you target them based on their liklihood of getting healed, because their tactical utility doesn't matter at that scale. Thus, the only targets that are actually useful to prioritize are the healers, which, in such systems, have to be designed to basically screen themselves out of range of opposing DPS to not get immediately destroyed.

What it comes down to, really, is that in a large fleet fight (or a comparably large fight in any MMO really) the vast majority of the combatants could easily be on autopilot. Their job is "assist target caller and DPS" which is, strategically, the superior tactic, and the force that employs it better does well. However it doesn't create fun gameplay. The FCs are having fun. The Logi is actually pretty involved. The rest of the fleet is only there to enjoy the scenery of exploding ships. people don't talk about f1 monkeys for no reason. It's the optimal strategy to heavily employ f1 monkeys. The OP's point is that its not necessarily the best experience for all involved, and turns fleet fights in to FC versus FC affairs with very little room for the skill of most individual pilots to make a difference.

However, it is entirely too entrenched in the overall design to be totally removed. We could theorycraft about it all day, but realistically large fleet battles are going to be mobs of f1 monkeys until the EVE servers shut down because too much of the game is designed around that idea, and the server architecture and overall game design don't offer any really solid avenues to get around it.

The game does not REQUIRE you to have a primary target, the game simply provides us with a set of tools we can play with in the sandbox. How the players choose to use those tools dictates what you have to do. Instead of crying to CCP to change the game because, how about you stop being lazy and try something different, you know force your opponents to play the game YOUR way instead of playing it their way. And yes if you use the brains you have you can easily defeat a fleet set up based on the focus fire method by being unorthodox and attacking them where they are weakest. No I do not accept that this is not possible because we do it all the time in our fights.


No that is what you want, what myself and the rest of the group I fly with wants is to WIN the fight we simply do not care how long it takes or what happens during as long as we win. And to that end we use every single tool this sandbox gives us and yes that means that we use focus fire to take out a single target, we also use it to draw reps to a specific ship so they cannot be applied to the real target. And by the way this tactic of drawing reps off the real targete would be impossible with the OP suggestion, even if we could find a way around it the limit on incoming DPS would kill this tactic.


Again that is your idea of what keeps people in EvE. The guys I fly with could care less about impending doom and all the rest of that crap, we simply enjoy a good fight with another group of players, we want to win and we do everything we can to win but in the end it is about the fight and testing ourselves against another group not about some idiotic impending doom crap.


People should be rewarded for using out of the box thinking, and for trying new and different tactics all of which the OP idea of DPS caps etc would penalize and yes in some cases make it impossible.

And please do not tell me that you cannot overcome the F1 bunny primary target style of fighting because we do it all the time. Maybe we are more creative in finding ways to overcome these things, or perhaps we just have a little more luck at it I do not know.

Also I challenge you to think seriously through the DPS / Reps cap thingy you support.
How do you balance this?
If the incoming DPS versus incoming rep caps are equal then you can NEVER destroy a ship because local reps combined with resists make it impossible.
If you give the advantage to the DPS side then you simply put more emphasis on having local reps and / or resists to counter. At best you end up with a slow and miserable death on one side and a painful and not very fun grind on the other before the ultimate end is reached and the target dies. And at worst you end up with this balanced and you cannot kill the target because you cannot do enough DPS to overcome the reps. I do not know or to be honest even care what you think but neither of these options sounds like fun to me, I would prefer to die quickly to focused fire that way I represent a chance for my FC to change the make up of the fleet and a chance to shift tactics in hopes that we can win.

Interesting Topic. Would be more like Star Trek fights where guys are shooting **** all over the place.

Remote Target Spectrum Breakers please.