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Ok, I see your issue now. But let me reiterate, even if this does happen, I don't feel it will be particularly bad depending on how it's done.

But it is broken, or does everyone suddenly love the cyclone, prophecy and ferox?

yeah... they make you more badass at that one particular weapon system (ecm, tp, whatever), but it doesn't make the ship or me "more competitive". Being able to use less cap each cycle my ECM runs is all well and good, but only if i'm flying an ECM ship. If I'm in my geddon, all the EW skills in the world won't matter.

The point of having skills that do different things is to give you a choice in where you want to specialize in the game. The only thing playing the game longer gives you is more opportunities to cross train and more chances to make money to buy cooler toys.

If they redefine the ships tomorrow, my drake is still going to be max skilled for tank and dps, no matter how many new skills they add. And if they add support skills that change any attribute... if i care about them, i'll train them. If not, I won't. Maybe I'll train the skill that makes my arazu better instead. So really, adding these new skills gives players even more of a chance to out specialize the old vets like me who seem to have everything under the sun trained up. And as it's been said many times, those millions and millions of SP i have more than the average player mean pretty much nothing if I'm in a gang and you're in a gang, and you have superior tactics. And if I train up my tanking skills instead of my DPS skills, I probably won't be able to break your tank anyway.

Since this gives you more of a chance to get your buddies together to come kill me (since I'll be worried about training everything up over all races and all classes and all ship types and all everything, and you'll probably pick the FOTM and boost it to hell and back), you should be happy about these changes, not pissed.

And that's exactly what I'll tell my friends who constantly ***** about the SP gap between their new characters and my ancient character. They can catch up to or even surpass me quickly in a particular spec tree if they go all out. And if they have one other person with them, I'm as good as dead. This game is more about having friends with you than about being the end all be all solopwnmobile badass.

Tactics and Allies win the day, not expensive ships and monstrous SP totals.

CCP, this is why we need the ability to downvote posts . . .

NVM. tl;dr and suffered for it.

-1 on the idea of replacing "tiers" with "roles", for T1 ships.

The general-purpose "tier" system allows the players to determine which ships can be best fit to fill specific roles - in large fleets, small gangs, solo PVP, and/or for PVE. Many ships are well suited for a wide range of activities, depending on the fitting. And, a degree of unpredictability exists, since you cannot be certain how a general-purpose ship might be fit when you engage it. Ultimately, the "sandbox" - not the devs - determines which ships and fittings are best suited for each role.

Switching to a specific-purpose "role" system, wherein CCP devs pre-determine which ships are best for each role and bias each ship's stats accordingly , is a poorly considered idea. Specialization limits the number of optimal fits, and the ability of a ship to be used outside of its designed role (BS as a mining ship, anyone?). Ships become far more predictable, more ships will go unused, and FOTMs become even more likely.

And, there are already plenty of examples of failed role specialization in the game already, esp. among the T2 ships, ex. EW frigs. Let's not expand a bad idea further.

Rather than increased role speciaiization, the game would actually benefit from increased generalization. I think that this preference can be seen in most T2 vs T3 ship comparisons. T3 ships are simply more fun to fit and fly than T2 ships.

its always been that way . . . all ships have roles, in fact i submit that it would be impossible to make a ship without a role.

The fact that you CAN take a ship and do something with it that isnt in its role is what makes it a sandbox, IE a battle badger, shield brutix or a hauling thanatos

currently all the ships have roles, just some of them really suck at what theyre supposed to do (prophecy, cyclone, brutix)

i love how everyone loves this stupid change now that you'll get a few million free SP to dickwave with

Maaaaaaaaan.

You say: "This new support skill gives my assault ship 10% more DPS! It makes it better!!"

What I'm trying to tell you is: "This other new support skill gives my combat ship X% more EHP, to cancel the effect!! It makes no ******* difference!!"

If this is supposed to be balanced, the new support skills have to cancel each other out. Completely. As if they did not exist in the first place.
If they don't, then you have a line of ships that is clearly better than another line of ships. And no, it doesn't matter what their specific role is. It's either completely balanced against each other, or one line of ships has a huge advantage, that only multiplies with larger fleets. So those ships with the advantage will be used, the others won't be used.

Ironically, this is also the same problem we currently have with Tiers in BCs. So they either balance it and the new skills mean absolutely nothing other than added training time to fly the same ships, or they didn't fix the problem.

There is simply no possible outcome that is beneficial for the players.

I see what you're trying to say, I comprehend it, and I don't want this to sound harsh but you're wrong. It does not have to be a 'zero sum game' to be balanced. And it won't be.