Player Features and Ideas Discussion

1) What is it and what role should it have?

A ship made specifically for exploration that is not dependant on a base, means docking to switch modules/subsystems/replenish ammo. The ship is able to scan out and take on most sites and comes with a covert ops cloak and a large cargo bay. Its combat performance lies below a T3 and above a Pilgrim/Ishtar. I am thinking at around 500 well appliable DPS and 500 DPS tank. Ideally a T2 hull based on lasers and drones. Gives the possibility to go on extended roams through different areas of space (low, 0.0, wh) without the need to dock, thus gives the feeling of a nomad/explorer. Your ship is your base essentially.

2) Why?

We already have T3 cruisers which can do all of these tasks. In some configurations they can even do it all at once. Such a fitting is crap however. Players with 2 or more accounts can use a combat and a scan/salvage ship at once and have the benefit of scouting forward and do all tasks not related to combat. A single account player needs to dock and switch modules every time he wishes to do a different site or he needs to pile up sigs and do one type of sigs at once until refitting and taking on the other.

A single account player is also severely limited in his ability to freely move through zero sec (bubbles, camps, scouting ahead with cloaking ship, making bookmarks, come back and switch ship etc.) and his ability to exploit a lesser wormhole with one ship.
The proposed ship does not replace specialized ships in their role or is able to complete more difficult tasks than you can already do- but gives flexibility and more comfort to a single account player. The player with 2 accounts still has the benefits of a more powerful combat ship and a scout at the same time. I feel that it is bad game design to force a player to rely heavily on alts or constantly redock in order to effectively do exploration.

3) What speaks against it?

What comes to mind is that such a ship takes away interaction with other players by offering easy ways to circumvent gatecamps, camps on stations and much independence of infrastructure in a system. The truth is, that it doesn't matter in any case if the explorer knows what he is doing. If he wishes to play solo and not to be caught, he won't. Such a ship doesn't change anything besides making the life more comfortable for him. Of course it should cost quite a sum and can have hefty skill requirements for the advantage it offers.

TL:DR: I am writing this because I'm getting lazy carrying all the **** I need with my Tengu and switching ships for scouting

Prices would go down a bit surely, but ruin? To prevent averybody flying it it can have a T3 cost and skill prerequisites similar to a Marauder for example. Besides, most serious explorers have 2 or more accs anyway, they wont be affected. The indicated combat performance wouldnt be that stellar anyway, you can reach way more than that with a Tengu.

It's more of a "comfort" ship than "isk printing machine"

I'd rather see a nomad-base version of the Orca developed to support small nomadic groups in deep space. Orca so it's small enough to use gates (unlike carriers)

I think you don't quite get the point I was trying to make. Read OP again. T3 can do everything I suggested but either need to be refitted constantly or be severely gimped if you fit analyzers, codebreakers, salvagers, probe launchers together with tank and dps at once. Only Legion and Proteus to an extent are able to remain in space without refiliing ammo and Proteus would be severely gimped. Also, their cargoholds.

I also try to keep the ship reasonable. It wouldn't be nullified (thats T3 territory) but only covert ops. DPS and tank would remain under T3 niveau but above Pilgrim/Gila/Ishtar (which are good exploration boats but lack appliable DPS due to drones)

This is an example of how such a ship could look like:

BC size hull w. T2 resist profile

6 highs / 4 mids / 6 lows
3 turret hardpoints

Role bonus:

+100% damage and range to medium energy turrets
- 96 to100% cpu requirements per lvl for fitting covert ops cloaks
+ 10% scan strength bonus per lvl

Attributes:

300m³ drone bay/ 125 Mb bandwidth
low scan resolution like with marauders
good cap regen
marauder- like cargohold

This way it would have a good range and 6 effective medium laser turrets and the drone bay to carry 5 sentrys with 5 heavies. Drones are not bonused so you should achieve around 500 DPS together with medium pulse lasers and sentries for example. Can be tweaked to reach these numbers. Can reach a reasonable tank but not too much since you want maybe 2 heat sinks in the lows. Mids are for fitting a prop mod, analyzer, hacker and a module of choice. Highs for 3 laser turrets, covops, probe launcher and salvager. Ship is not pretty agile and has a low scan resolution to prevent it from being used in PvP like with marauders, also gives it some chance to get caught on gates since it's not nullified and aligns slowly.

Sounds like a reasonable deal to me. Has its strenghts and drawbacks and explorers would have a ship tailored for their profession like miners with their Hulk or missionrunners with their Marauders.

What "drawbacks" are you seeing in that thing? The only "drawbacks" I'm seeing are the BC size (so slower align than a T3) and the fact that it can't be nullified like the T3 can (but that is such a rarity that it can't properly be called a drawback). And explorers already have their own ship tailored to probing, it's called a T3 and it does great at the job. Yes, I would like to see a bit larger cargo hold on the T3s, but other than that they really are amazing ships and work perfectly for exploring unless you're stupid/lazy.

Okay, maybe it becomes more clearly what I want when I write down how exploration looks like for me now and how it could look like:

|---> I decide to go on a longer exploration run in lowsec. I grab my Tengu, fill it with everything I need. That is an amount of heavy missiles, exploration modules and an additional subsystem. I travel and scan with covops one and switch to accelerated ejection bay for plexes.

I travel a couple of systems and scan. After finding a plex and docking in order to switch subsystems, I need to leave the covops cloak in the station because its too large to fit in the cargo. After completing the plex i warp back, refit and continue.

Due to no luck in several systems I travel farther down my route. Finally there are another plex in one system, a mag and a radar site in another. However, the nearest station is 4 jumps away. I fly there, refit to accelerated ej. bay and complete the mag and radar sites first. Since the plex is pretty hard, I need to fit my full tank back again together with an ECCM for Guristas, instead of hacking and analyzing module, so I need to fly back and refit again.

I find some nice BS meta loot and an arbalest launcher in the wrecks. I could take them with me. However, my cargo cannot store them all and in the station nobody buys them for a decent price. Bugger.

Upon continuing my route there are quite some wormholes and I would actually be interested to checking one of them out. However, I cannot efficiently complete sites in there alone, since fitting a tractor beam and salvager gimps my DPS way too much. Flying in an' out to a station to refit takes time and the ISK/h isn't great. Also, the wormhole has already had some mass passed through. I decide to let it be and continue.

My next findings are near a busy system. There is a station but also several pirates and already quite a sum of destroyed ships in the last couple of hours as the stats window tells me. A safer station is again a couple of jumps away. I already start feeling lazy because I would need to go there and back to refit again, the risk of invoking the will of scanning for me by the pirates is not worth the reward, I decide.

I look at the starmap and see that I already flew quite far away from my staging system. Since I got some cargo free by now due to the dwindling stock of missiles I could fly on and collect some loot in another plex. It is not sure though that I can actually sell it deep in lowsec and it's unsure that there are kinetic heavies to be bought to resupply my ammo. I decide to fly back and call it a day.

How it could be:

|---> I decide to go on a longer exploration run in lowsec. Since my new ship is an all- in one package for exploration and independent from a base, there is no need to be concerned about station count in the area I fly into. I make my way down my route, scanning down and completing all the sites I can find. It works a bit slower and I actually have to pay attention in the harder plexes but it feels way more comfortable. The damage is decent and appliable over longer distances and I can go deep in lowsec because I don't feel bound by resupplying or too small cargohold for my loot.

The wormholes I rejected earlier are now explorable way more comfortable. I visit a C2 and add some nice sleeper salvage to my loot since I had bad luck with plexes lately, it's a nice compensation. I even manage to find a shortcut to a system near a trading hub after my exploration run which I didn't bother with earlier, since WH's didn't offer any advantage for me.


TL-DR: compare exploration to a cruise in a car. For me right now, it's a road where I have to hold every 500 meters for traffic lights. Instead, I could travel on a nice long road where there isn't much traffic and I don't have to hold and brake all the time, just the car isn't that shiny. I prefer the second option.

Notice that this problem concerns single account players. Once you have 2 accs, this problem is nonexistant. I won't pay twice the money for a game however, just to harvest ingame money more efficiently, this is the dumb.

I've suggested a T2 version of the tier 2 battlecruisers (Drake, Harby) that would fall under the covert ops grouping and be designed for exploration. The key issue is giving them solid balance between their roles and their combat abilities. You *should* give up something to get a ship that can handle exploration, like you do with a T3 if you fit covops and ELA to get the same capabilities there.

Also, they should be more accessible than T3s and Command ships. More like a step up from the HAC.

1) No. I repeatedly stated that I aim it to be around 500 DPS and my fictional fit above was just an example. How is 500 DPS OP? My Tengu does 700 at max locking range with far greater tank so would be still first choice for combat related things. The Ishtar can do 500 already, just with worse application. Given that the intended ship is supposed to be a T2 BC (with according skill prerequisites and cost) it seems just right. It doesnt need to fit in the PvP world, it has just the same drawbacks as a Marauder and you dont see them PvP'in much.

2) Lowsec sites are not for teamwork. I easily complete every site solo I find there already. I did never state that I want it to be able to run the hard zero sec ones. Those are the sites intended for teamwork, not lowsec ones.

Basically I am just repeating myself over and over again. Read the damn OP and following posts more carefully.

Thanks for proving that you can already solo intended teamwork sites. Then we don't need to discuss overpoweredness further, do we?



So you mean I should need 2 accounts in order to effectively play a part of the game? And this is good game design? Tell me another MMO which needs 2 accounts to complete a non- teamwork- part of the game without lots of hassle.

No thank you, I'd like to play the way I have fun. Also, incursions bring in so much money, how can exploration possibly top that? It can't and this is why I don't see why such a ship would be a big deal.


I want that people skill reading comprehension up and don't entirely miss the point.

Thanks for ending your pointless and obviously lacking argument with pure comedic irony.

It doesn't require ~teamwork~ it requires a ~timesink~ and was a standard metric during the early days of this
game that you were no doubt not present in. Going back to loot sites after you clear them is a common thing in
EvE, you can do it yourself with a second ship, or you can do it with a second character presumably while you
run another site, to maximize efficiency; since the Tengu requires an occasional alt tab to push F1 at this point.

Multiboxing in MMO's has been rampant since before MMO's had graphics (Salute to you, oldschool MUD players)
and if this isn't your particular cup of soup, thats fine.

In all seriousness though- you don't expect CCP to introduce a new PvE solopwnmobile that you can loot, explore,
scan, hack, salvage, codebreak, and maintain PvE viability all in one semi-convenient package thus negating
its reasons to damn near literally FORCE 90% of the playerbase to Dual, Triple, or Quad box.



For all needs an purposes, the introduction of your ship would also bring forth beautiful incursion bear tears.

Here's a fun fact Did you know in Null-Sec, Cloaking Devices are a viable weapon system? (Wrap your head around
that before you start sperging all over the damn forums about how ~wrong~ I am.) Theres people in this game besides
you highsec scrublords that can see the impacts of these idiotic 'changes' you keep daydreaming up and the detrimental
impact it has on everyone else actually playing the game