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At first i was worried about having to train BC V again three times.


Then i realized if they changed Desy and BC, then it would set a precedent to change all of those classes too. Why not while you at it have racial interceptor, racial hic, all the general ship skills. Heck while there at it what about Black Ops.

Or i am just over reacting?

I am looking to the new ships this bring in

I would love to see a Capital Collection ship. Specialize in collecting low end ores for easier production in Null sec.


Mining Veld in Null sec really sucks

Dude. Just make the ship requirements Frigate or Cruiser or Battleship level I for ALL in that class and then F with whatever slots and HP you want for each ship... you're gods so you can put whatever you want on ships if your prime directive is to get rid of tiers and balance ships.

Drop the whole racial dessy / bc BS. Benefits? Ok, so it makes things "tidy" and pigeonholes new players into a racial line (which is criminal unless you do some serious rebalancing at the same damn time). Negatives??? Creates SOOOOOOOOOOooooo many issues. You're either going to **** off a ton of old bittervets (which you promised not to do), or you're going to give old bittervets a huge buff relative to newbs (newbs get to play catchup on a free 6mil SP?! to get the same benefits later on)

... unless you nerf skill multipliers to hell and let everybody train these ships faster, there is literally no way to cut a decent middle ground here.

It's impossible to say how this is going to shake out until CCP rolls out a test. The devil is truly in the details, here.

This may be entirely impossible to do, but:

EVE canon says that cruisers were among the very first ships. They're also among the most flexible, and they're easy to fit. So why wouldn't Cruiser be the first skill trained, then BS (also an old kind of ship). BC, Frigate and Destroyer would be next, which makes sense: Great skills benefit a cruiser pilot, but anything less than great skills makes frigate piloting even more hazardous. n00bs could start out with a rickety old cruiser that's worse than any of the standard lines, but which has settled into retirement as an educational platform. Among other things, this would dispense with the notion that bigger ships are better, right at the outset, and build the canon into the game. (However, you would not get a new one every time you docked!)

In any event, CCP should either give the Destroyer class a full slate of options, or just make them require Frigate IV (or V for the T2 Destroyers) and eliminate the category altogether. (And while you're at it, could ORE Industrial be useful for more than just the Noctis? Thanks!)

That's what I'm talking about. The roles are fine as is. Mining cruisers will still mine, logistics cruisers will still be useful to new pilots doing group missions... etc... I don't want the game to increase the mining role of a mining cruiser to make it more viable for mining. If it's suffering from uselessness, change those arbitrary limits to make the ship as a whole more desirable to fly.

As an example, I don't want the mining bonus to increase for an osprey, because CCP want more people to use it for mining. I want it to get another high slot and turret point. This can open up a whole new set of possibilities for the osprey to be used for more than just mining/logistics.

What is being discussed in this thread implies the former case (CCP sayeth this ship shall do this). CCP is a successful company, because they leave the game so open ended. Pigeonholing any t1 hull into a specific role is detrimental to the one thing that sets eve apart from all other successful MMOs: The Sandbox.

I'm really worried about the changes you guys are considering. A lot of them sound great in theory, but CCP has a long track record of not understanding the finer details about the PVP that is happening in EVE, especially large scale fleet combat (why alliance's choose certain ships over others, how exactly fc's use these fleets in combat, etc. etc.).

I know you were probably just throwing ship names out there, but your "EVE examples" of long range bombardment, calvary ships, and pretty much everything on that list worried the **** out of me. Maybe you were saying what those ships would be used for after the changes were made, but even if that's true i'm still worried because some of the roles you defined don't even make sense in the context of how EVE combat works.

I would hope that the players get a significant chance to test out all of these changes you are considering and I'm confident you will follow through there, but this worries me as well. It is very important and i'm vehemently hoping that you also get a smaller group of more experienced players together to consult with on these changes independent of the public forums or mass testing(mostly FC's preferably), because a large portion of the general EVE population does not understand the finer details of what is going on in the fleet fights they are themselves participating in. I know the CSM is there, but they are only 9 people, and I think only a few of them even have more than a small amount of FC experience.

A great example of how the EVE population's opinion for pvp can be dangerous is the "Drake is overpowered" rage that came out at the end of 2010-2011. People whined constantly about how OP drakes were at the end of 2010, because a few alliances were using them in large fights and winning. What most of the pilots didn't know is that drakes were getting a significant advantage in lag because missile launchers were cycling significantly more often than guns in lag instead of getting consistently stuck. Once a few improvements were made to gun cycling thanks to team gridlock, a lot of this complaining went away as drake fleets were getting properly murdered again.

Now the Drake whine is slightly there again, but not nearly as loud with the CSM is suggesting a few changes that are at the very least much better than the old changes that were suggested. Even now though, the drake is not as good as people make it out to be, and maybe in need of only some very minor tweaking here and there. (By the way here's a hint, drakes get a lot of there OP from heavy missiles, if you are going to consider any changes to the drake, looking at heavy missiles is a better start than the ship itself.)

So yes in conclusion, Fleet combat has evolved significantly and very quickly over the past 2 years despite there being only moderate changes in balancing. The number of competent FCs in this game who can win at the highest levels of combat has been dwindling due to innovations in fleet combat building on one another. So it's important that CCP talks not only to the general eve population but also to a certain group of people who understand fleet combat, because minor tweaks and add on's to pvp often end up creating new dominate fleet comps or obsoleting other parts of the game, and it sounds like yall are trying to avoid doing that this time.

P.S: Another thing that needs to be explained, is that a lot of changes have occurred to fleet combat over the years, despite very little changes in mechanics, and it's important that CCP understands why this has happened (and is still happening.) Once again for example, the drake has not changed at all since quantum rise (I think that expansion was 4 years ago now, can't remember) changed missiles and signatures etc.etc., yet the drake was widely regarded as a terrible pvp ship for years. It is only over the past 2 years that drakes have really become regarded as a viable pvp ship by some people. Despite having the same bonus's, attributes, slot layouts, everything the same 3 or 4 years ago, no one would have thought to start up a "nerf the drake" thread during that time, and in fact many people were saying that missile PVP needed to be buffed. Now there are multiple caldari based fleet concepts that use missiles as their primary weapon system. Missiles 3 years ago were regarded as useless because fleets of the time were almost always made up of ships from all races, and did not rely heavily on logistics. This meant that high resist ships were not as important as they are now, and that a mix of gun's and missiles from having ships of different races meant that the guns always hit first, giving the missile ships their "useless" title at the time.

P.P.S: No i'm not making this post just because I'm an FC, but being an FC has allowed me to see some of the fallacy's in what the EVE population occasionally calls for when it comes to PVP balancing, which is why I felt the need to make this post.

I disagree with this. Increasing the combat abilities of T1 special-purpose ships to a competitive level is impossible from a balancing point of view. What would happen to the pure combat cruisers, if the logis and ewars had equal combat stats? Right, the combat ships would not be used, because they wouldn't have anything special.

Celestis with more drone bay, grid, turret slots and tank? Obsoletes Vexor.

Celestis with more damping? Makes it a viable addition to a fleet.

Also, consider the bigger picture- do we want more, similar general combat ships and fleets consisting mainly of those, emphasizing numbers and F1-F8 tactics?

Or combat that emphasizes the efficient use of force multipliers, requiring more tactical planning and rewarding competency?

In the end I find specialization the right solution.

Bringing Destroyer and Battlecruiser skills in line with frig, cruiser and battleship skills? Awesome.
Lowering the cap ship requirement to BS IV? Also awesome.

Tiericide! Oh god YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. Finally CCP is doing something about this. The specifics of tweaking currently useless ships to become useful can be talked about later, just the fact that something is finally being done about this is absolutely amazing.

I agree With the streamlining of the current skilltree, but making BCs a requirement is annoying. It is an intermediate stage, and splitting it into 4 groups and forcing us to train it for a BS I definately do not like.

And also the addition of shiplines is a rather backwards concept in my opinion, as eve has always been about the ability to jump from one ship type to another no sweat. But the shiplines idea reverses on this notion and throws it into a threshing machine by forcing players to specialise BEFORE they can use the goodies. Sure we can always cross train, but MORE training is one of the things that scares alot of new players away.

Unless the specialisations ONLY apply to T2 ships then I would prefer no change at all.

Moving away from tiers is something that has been suggested for years now so I like that part of the concept and like the fact that it would provide more breathing room for balancing and new ships!

However I personally don't like the idea of having to train battlecruisers before I can train battleships for instance. The whole idea behind the fact that you can specialize early means that you are not obliged to train one thing to achieve another. It puts in a barrier for "neatness" sake.

I like most of your ideas in terms of tweaking the skilltree, but I'd very much prefer it if the destroyers and battlecruisers skills remain as they are, independent of the "skilltree". The other enhancements I can live with.

I don't like the naming categories or the way they are implemented in the last part of the dev blog though. While I understand the reasoning behind it I very much doubt that they are useful in any practical way and add more confusion then they solve.