You’ve misunderstood, or misread. At no point did I say that content wasn’t happening, I said that making it easy to block reinforcements from fights would kill Capital Content in Null and that the difference between cyno blocking and a dictor bubble was that one keeps things in the ‘Content’ while the other keeps them out. Neither of these in any way meant, implied, or other that ganks aren’t content.
But what you’re asking for here isn’t so much tactics as an easy “I win” button because you’re making it incredibly easy to block reinforcements.
And yes, to answer one quote up, that is a problem, at least from my perspective. Not because it gives one side or the other an advantage, but because it cuts the massive unknown out of a fight and significantly reduces the opportunity for fights to snowball.
If you can’t take a fight because your caps are out of position then don’t take the fight. Not taking losing fights is going to happen no matter what, except you want to turn a potential counter escalation into “we can’t go roaming there because if they drop caps they’ll just blops-ball us and we can’t counter that”.
No, the only time this works is when you would have won anyway against what was currently on-grid when you dropped.
And this is flatly false or neither of us would be having this discussion. People take fights without knowing for sure what the enemy might counter with all the time. Either because it’s fun or the enemy pulled a sucker or something else entirely. You want to cut all of that out with the push of a few buttons.
Honestly I could go through and respond to the rest but most of it’s off topic, especially the whole cap umbrella thing. That’s its own novel length thread about Alliance level organization and all that other fun.
Your argument here seems to be that abusing this doesn’t matter because those fights would have been won anyways. My response is that that’s utterly ridiculous because no one ever has perfect intel in this game, and people take bets of various risk levels all the time. All that goes out the window if you know you can block their cynos completely from the word go on grid.
Yeah, there might be counters to the abuse, but most of those counters work on your whaling too. Since most systems have multiple ratters for example you can drop a cloaked ship somewhere mid-system and have him warp in at range to drop enough support to whack your Blops fleet.
At the end of the day this comes down to a difference of opinion.
You think escalation should be very easy to block. I don’t. Previous decisions on CCP’s part seem to suggest they’re on my side on this.
The reason they’re holding at 50 instead of warping to zero and lighting is…? If they can light, they can light right at zero if they want to.
It would only kill capital content where cynos weren’t readily available to warp in. “Capital Content” should not be blobbing the ■■■■ out of anything that tackles one of your members. Anything that blocks that improves content by giving roamers a chance to actually hunt and kill something in those blocs where they would otherwise just get gibbed moments after they land tackle.
“Capital content” should be fleets of capitals supported by fleets of subcapitals. Carriers providing anti-subcap and anti-fighter (their role), dreads and titans providing anti-cap (their role). If they have subcap support, I find it reasonably hard bordering on impossible for this to be used to block a traditional fleet from cynoing in reinforcements when they will be spread out enough that many cyno ships, many bridgers, and many ships taking the bridge are needed.
If there’s a ratting ship out alone without subcap support (ratting), they deserve to lose their ship. Not all the time, just when a blops crew happens by, and just when they can kill it.
You claim it is easy, I claim it is hard. Eve pilots are like cats. Herding cats so that you can simultaneously light half a dozen cynos, create half a dozen bridges, and bridge half a dozen ships into a fight to jam all of their cyno ships is insanely hard. This ignores the potential that they’ve just got a cloaked ship at a safe somewhere that they can warp in at a desired distance, light their cyno, and jump in their reinforcements.
“we can’t go roaming there because if they drop caps they’ll blops-ball us”. No… that would be “we can’t drop caps because they just blops-balled us”. Meaning your fleet just got ambushed, which is exactly the role of blops.
Pending their lighting off-grid cynos, or warping off-grid cynos on-grid, yes. That is the intent.
I’m adding a sucker punch here, not cutting it out.
My argument here is that abusing this by using it in fleet fights isn’t realistically ever going to happen in a large fight, because there are simply too many moving variables on the board to successfully pull this off.
To which their reward is a capital reinforcement to delete the blops gang. I’m never against rewarding the people expecting the unexpected. This is valid-counterplay, one I expect to see used. Just the same it provides blops with an edge.
Not at all. I think that blobbing a roam with caps the moment they tackle something should be easy to block, because in my opinion it abuses force projection - something that CCP has taken pains to nerf.
I maintain that a real capital escalation in a fleet fight is still very possible, even if someone intends to abuse this, because it is simply not easy to reliably pull off. Maybe they can in certain instances, but I can promise in some instances they will not; which means the people who were trying to ambush end up getting murdered.
CCP was unhappy about long range projection. They never said anything against local tantrum area being bad. The ship has a jump drive so I’m pretty sure CCP expected it to project at least within 1 jump worth of range…
Because if your enemy is being smart about this they’ve done this jamming trick at 0 and put a bubble on it so anyone trying to warp in at 25 or whatever can’t.
See, this has always struck me as a bit ridiculous. If you’re out ratting you should have some ability to counter or escalate against someone who drops on you. Otherwise your only available options are to dock as soon as there is the barest hint of enemy action or not rat, because the alternative is, in your world, a guaranteed loss whenever “a blops crew happens by”.
If your Blops crew wants a kill then work for it, you’re working in relative safety by way of complete freedom of choosing your engagement and with way fewer assets on grid than a dread drop.
Also it’s pretty unreasonable to expect a fleet to be waiting around in every system to protect ratters. That groups have started running standing response fleets at all is fairly novel and has mostly been made possible by cynos and coordination. If you take away the Cyno that completely falls apart.
I’m going to dip one more toe into the whole “organization should have payoffs” pool and point out that it’s not just organizing the fleet that goes into this. In order for you to have that fleet you need the Alliance behind it and all of the organization and trust that makes that possible.
Again, that’s why renters never manage anything like this despite it being “brain dead simple” as you put it. Things like more ratting safety are the payoff for the line members for everything that goes into making a major 0.0 bloc work.
Which is pretty unlikely if what you’re doing is stomping a roam that had cap backup on the phone that you just cut off.
We can play Calvin Ball with this all day, but what it comes down to is that you’re fine with potentially taking a sledgehammer to Null cynos if it means your Blops get some free Super kills. Personally I think that’s a pretty hard sell for CCP, never mind the rest of Eve’s players.
Then let me clarify, because this seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle somewhere. What I’m saying is not that this is going to get abused in the middle of a large fight. What I’m saying is that this will be abused at the small and medium scale in a way that makes it much less likely that those small and medium fights will snowball to the L and XL scale, because you’ve just made it incredibly easy to block reinforcements.
You seem to be confusing force projection with jumping a cap fleet anywhere between 1 and about 5 jumps. Those are not the same thing. One is in your back yard, the other refers to jumping a large mass of caps quite a ways away from your own space.
In-fact CCP has pretty clearly taken pains not to block local force projection or make Cynos an easy or consistent thing to stop or block. If this was something they wanted there are a dozen easier or simpler ways they could do it. They don’t want it, they want people to be able to reinforce each other and make it easy for fights to escalate.
Show me a blops ship that can drop a bubble. Anchor bubbles have anchor times, which gives them more than enough time to warp in at whatever distance they want.
In normal cases, I agree. I’m only talking about blops drops, which by their nature are the epitome of stuff messes up your normal plans. Your average roam won’t have blops in range. I fully believe that more people will use blops to do their roams, but if you’re roaming far from home with a traditional fleet, you probably won’t have blops within jump range unless you make the effort to stage your blops crew(s) somewhere in range.
Anyone not doing this in null is doing it wrong. Not saying they shouldn’t take a fight ever, just saying they won’t take it in a ratting ship if they have a choice. Ratting ships aren’t fitted for pvp, and they’ll lose quickly.
I agree. Hence the reason people either rat less with capitals to reduce their risk exposure, or rat in tighter clusters with faster response times. There are a lot of clumps of space within 2-3 jumps of each other. If they still choose to fly whale-class ships with no tanks on them, that’s where blops can capitalize on that risk.
I see what you’re saying here. I agree it is fairly easy in those cases to do exactly the abuse you are referring to. I am of the opinion that in those instances however, where you’ve brought not only a conventional fleet which you believe will win for a fight but also a blops crew to maintain cyno jams throughout that fight, that it’s a deserved win at that point.
I maintain that if the attackers had foreknowledge that a fleet would be present and they should stage their blops, the defenders have foreknowledge to stage extra cynos. The only time the side being attacked will be caught unaware is when they aren’t formed for an objective (they’re out drunken roaming for example) and they don’t know where they’ll end up.
I contend that at this point it is simply too easy for large groups to escalate things beyond that of a roaming group, providing perfect safety for large groups of ratters to go with max-tick fit ships and really not be worried about it. If you’re roaming in any of those large bloc spaces, the moment you tackle anything you’ve got enough caps on you to blap you so fast that the people with shitty computers haven’t even finished loading their screen before your fleet is gone.
It’s a 100% certainty, for example, that if you roam in goon space, you’ll get dropped on. It’s not “if” it’s “when”. Forcing them to use their intel to set up an offensive gate camp and catch the roam, rather than just sit safely on a tether and wait for “CYNO UP” in comms does not at all seem unreasonable to me.
Again you seem fixated on this idea that this is only going to be used with and by cloaky ships. Just because there’s a covert cyno on grid doesn’t mean that the only things on grid with that cyno are covert ships.
Except we have at least one NPSI group dedicated to doing pretty much exactly that already.
Blops and cloakies in general already have special tools at their disposal, they don’t need a special free-pass against counter-drops to get kills.
Also as I’ve been saying this won’t just get used by Blops crews. It’ll get used by dread-drops, cap-drops, and probably even regular drops or anywhere else there is significant value in preventing an enemy from escalating.
Except that the cap-umbrella provides an illusion of safety that can and has gotten pilots killed. They feel better about doing stupid stuff, whether that’s intentionally letting someone drop them or just paying less attention, which works great right up until the thing dropping them is 40 dreads and they die as the first Fax lands.
These fights can and do escalate though, which is more than your proposed Blops-trick allows. It also creates a situation where there’s a known “you are screwed” button that completely neutralizes the cap umbrella, which is a significant increase in perceived risk compared to the relatively low perceived risk of a dread drop.
A travel time of 2-3 jumps isn’t long enough to actually save anything, especially if you need to bring capitals to counter what was actually dropped. Even in a Battleship 3 jumps in Null is 3 minutes or more on average. That’s about enough time for a Dread drop to almost be out by the time anything that’s a threat lands on grid. Carriers or Supers will be out well before that, as will a cloaky drop with enough DPS.
That’s part of why Cynos exist, because gating in reinforcements is incredibly impractical at the best of times.
What you’re talking about is a massive increase in Null PvE risk with no compensating factors and no real counter. I don’t see CCP putting something like that in. If they wanted to increase Null PvE risk there are tons of ways they could do so, but so far they seem quite happy with the risk levels, they’ve just focused on the income rate.
Except that most small and medium fights aren’t explicitly staged. Either they’re the result of a roam where one side or the other has defenses, or they’re something like a drop on miners where one side is trying for surprise.
Also you’re acting like bringing a single Blops and some Cov Ops frigates along is in some way difficult. It’s harder to get a 60m ISK bowling ball through its two minute anchoring timer than it is to have an ~2b ship and ~100m in frigates on standby, especially when you’re talking about a fight that could easily be dropping 10-20b in dreads and still be considered small.
Plus the Blops is at just about zero risk in all of this.
I’m just gonna cut the quote off there, because perfect safety is BS. Goons lost 15 Supercarriers in August and only killed 4 and quite a few of those kills included cloaky T3s on the kill mail, at least one exclusively no dreads involved.
That’s also not counting all the Rorquals that have died down there, or any of the regular Carriers.
The idea that a response bubble projects perfect safety is a myth, largely one perpetuated by those who have one to keep anyone from poking holes in their bubble. You can talk all you want about how theoretically safe people are here, but CCP are just going to keep looking at the actual loss numbers and going “nah, it’s fine” because the theory doesn’t match reality, at all.
Okay, lets say they bring dics or hics. The bubble range is 20-40km. The number of bubbles they would need to deploy BEFORE the cyno ship even gets into warp (as once you’re in warp it doesn’t matter) makes it still quite feasible for capitals to land as close as they would ever want to land.
Yes, bombers bar is doing the lord’s work. Point being? They’re still not a conventional roam.
You do keep saying that it will get used in conventional drops. I keep agreeing that it’s possible in the context of a small or medium sized “defending” group. In any case where they can pull this off, I don’t see a problem with that. It’s not like the very group who just dropped on someone and blocked their reinforcements won’t have someone else drop on them and block their reinforcements.
Ambushes should be allowed to happen. “Lol cyno up” prevents any ambush from happening, because they just call in the cavalry and then the bigger group wins.
Right, if you’ve got 40 dreads to drop, you can absolutely do this with incredible success. You don’t drop dreads on a blops drop though, which is what this thread is about.
I fully recognize that it becomes a murky topic when you consider that this mechanic can be used in traditional drops, and truly I would love to find some way to tweak this so that it cannot be used in such a fashion.
Nothing says this better than 40 dreads. Well… 41 dreads would say it better, but you get the idea. They drop 40 dreads on you, kiss your ass goodbye cause you’re toast, as is a lot of whatever jumps in to help you. Dread bombs are remarkably effective, with or without cyno jamming their reinforcements.
Counter #1: Cyno alt
Counter #2: Reinforcements in faster ships.
counter #3: Kill them on a gate before they find their target. These groups who would actually be notably affected all have intel networks that they could use to be proactive rather than reactive. Proactive efforts deserve much more reward than reactive ones.
As for the increased risk… I live in null. It’s null. It’s not supposed to be safe, ever. Players make it safe by working together… but it’s still not supposed to be safe. The increase in risk is well deserved, I believe. By increasing risk, you will certainly cut into the krab’s bottom lines.
And if the miners knew their cynos could get jammed, they would plan ahead for cyno alts. The side that is on the defensive, and thus at the disadvantage of initiative, has the advantage of their home infrastructure. If we had a rorq or a super tackled and cyno inhibbed, we’d be able to get a fast ship to them in about a minute worst-case. If we knew we needed to have them ready because of rapid inhibs, we could do it sub-minute easily.
Right… go ahead and look at the battle reports for them though… I just did and I didn’t see a single one where they jumped in reinforcements. This is literally what my idea would look like, just with the ability to reinforce taken away rather than not exercised (given that all of those losses appear to be krabs that got left behind during deployment).
All of these losses show what would happen when there is no capital umbrella, because nobody came to help these pilots.
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Now compare those losses to say… April of 2017, before they were deployed and their umbrella was around. Do you see how many fewer supers they lost? Substantially fewer. And in each case, the attacking party had to have capitals involved in order to get anything done.
Not really, if there’s only a few ships on grid to warp to and you deploy a 20km cyno jamming field with a 20km bubble on top of it then anyone warping to that grid is pretty much F-d unless they manage to get a warp-in that is neither in line with the bubble nor inside the jamming field.
When you’re frantically trying to get stuff onto grid and respond that’s actually not easy to do.
They’re hardly the only ones running around blowing stuff up as Blops, and if Blops are suddenly the way to get easy kills that’s what everyone will start running. FotM is a thing, and you’re asking CCP to set up probably the worst case of it ever.
But, again, this isn’t that hard to use offensively. If you can stage Capitals or a bridging Titan you can stage a Blops easier than either of those. In fact some of those examples I mentioned of recent Goon Supercarrier kills had a mix of cloakies and Capitals.
In theory, sure, in practice noooooope. Again, this is pure pie in the sky “lol response fleets stop everything” fantasy, not the reality of the game as it actually exists. The reality is sometimes you get the bear sometimes the bear gets you, and which is likely to happen is in direct proportion to your ability and planning vs that of your opponents, which is how Eve should be, not ‘push button for blue balls’.
You don’t even need 40 dreads. Go read some killboards. Cloaky Legions and less than 10 caps (I’ll confess I don’t have an exact count right this second, but easily less than 10) have killed Supers under cap umbrella in the last month.
Is questionable at best and not hard to counter via bubbles pulling the cyno alt into the anti-cyno zone.
Anything that can actually kill a decent sized Blops/Cap drop isn’t going to get there fast enough to matter. Anything that can get there fast enough to matter is probably a frigate or maybe a Cruiser, and will end up as killboard padding against anyone remotely competent because the competent players will drop Carriers or Dreads along with their Blops if they have any expectation of this kind of response.
Staring at a gate trying to maybe catch a cloaky who might go through it is one of the most absolutely mind-numbing and soul crushingly boring activities in all of Eve, and even then you’re likely as not not even going to catch the bugger. I can teach a month old Eve Uni pilot to get their Cov-Ops through a gate camp in a day. It’s not hard, and absolute worst case you try again with another scout/tackle.
This is a bit of a fallacy. Null is supposed to be shaped by the players. If the players put in the effort for safety then that’s something the players have built.
Null is also supposed to be somewhere people can actually live too, and that requires a certain amount of safety. We’ve done the whole “Null is so dangerous you can barely rat” thing. All the Null players had High-Sec mission or Incursion alts and just earned their money in High Sec. Easier to avoid CTAs too.
IMO if your answer to a mechanic is “this mechanic now absolutely requires an alt”, especially one doing nothing other than sitting and waiting, then it’s a bad mechanic. Even current Cynos don’t flat out require an alt since you can feasibly pay someone you trust to go light a cyno for you.
CCP have, generally speaking, been moving away from things that require alts and there were never that many of them in the game to begin with.
It’s far better for a mechanic to involve active and engaged players and some degree of counter-play. Like, for example, the current Cyno Inhibs. You either have things ready before it can anchor or you kill it. Your mechanic offers neither of these.
Then you didn’t look very hard? That is literally the first kill if you go to “Goonswarm Federation” → Stats → Supercarrier. Somehow I don’t think 26 pilots were all ratting in the same site, and the dropping side still came out well ahead despite having fewer pilots.
Also, if a lot of successful kills aren’t seeing a response, then that kinda shows that this isn’t needed. The umbrella you seem to be so convinced is perfect isn’t, so we don’t need a hard shutdown on it.
Fml, gonna reply to the last part first and separately because I must have forgotten to take my anti-stupid pills yesterday. I looked at the battle report loss summary as though it were a participation summary. That kind of stupidity requires that I specifically own up to it lol.
That’s a good part of the issue. Some people probably got countered real hard and think goons always manage to land the same sledgehammer on anyone’s head every time. It’s obviously not the case but if someone never saw a failed rescue OP, then they take for granted it does not exist and base their balance discussion upon that bad info.
I appreciate the honesty. I’ve done the same thing and worse before, and it did seem a somewhat out of character thing for you to have done. Gods know I’ve done as bad and worse before, no worries!
People also like to talk a lot about theory and ignore that perfect play is, in many cases, a fantasy. It’s the same thing as the argument that Carrier Ratting is “perfectly safe”. Sure, in theory, if you’re a bot with infinite patience, but people aren’t and there are a lot of dead Carriers to attest to this. Ditto for Incursions and most other “perfectly safe” things.
Oh and don’t forget that one 40 man Rorqual massacre that happened because PL figured out when the standing fleet was thinnest and there was no one online to manage it and dropped then.
I agree that carrier and super ratting is broken, mostly because these ships can run sites aligned and insta-warp out of a site in a single server tick, but also because, like you mention here, they can drop a cyno get help from other capitals.
However, what you’re describing is basically uncounterable covert hotdrops. Hotdrops, and covert hotdrops in particular are already extremely strong. For example, the average Panther participates in 58 kills before being taken down itself. Compare that to a Nidhogger’s 24 kills. Also, the counter to a hotdrop is generally a hotdrop. In games, when the counter to something is the same thing, that thing is generally badly overpowered and needs to be nerfed.
In my opinion, the solution is not to make cynos more powerful for one side, but to make them weaker for everyone. I personally advocate for warm-up timers and mass limits, but there are multiple ways to do this. Also, before anyone mentions it, I’m not advocating for more jump fatigue. Being able to move super fleets across the map is very different than being able to move ships directly into the middle of a fight, and I think the two can be balanced separately quite easily.
Not only would this have a detrimental effect on other areas of the game that don’t involve suppers at all but it doesn’t even solve that problem. Like you said of someone light a cyno you would just light your own with this if something showed up that can fit a covet cyno just light a cyno of your own fist.
Not to mention the people complaining about how hard it is to hunt supers are greatly exaggerating. Even when out comes to goons the umbrella isn’t as solid as reported. It’s the fear of the umbrella that prevents people from getting super kills more than the umbrellas themselfs
The engagement profiles of these ships are entirely different. Capital ships are inevitably going to be countered by capital ships (it’s only a matter of time until you get countered with capitals)… and carriers do not fare well in a capital fight. Dreads, Supers, and Titans can all face rape them pretty quickly (once the fax logistics is off the field).
A blops drop on the other hand, is about gank and run. You’re literally dropping an obscenely asymmetric force on a target, skullfucking it, and then cloaking up and warping out.
As mentioned above, blops is asymmetric; if you add a warmup timer, I can promise any target that’s worth dropping on will be able to kill your cyno unless the warmup cycle is too short to make any difference (and then what’s the point). Sure you can still drop on VNIs and other ratting cruisers, but the moment you self-tackle with a cyno, their damage application against you approaches 100%. Even a ratting battleship will make a T3C have a very bad day, saying nothing of ratting capitals. As for a mass limit, the first ship I bridge in will be a second cyno, so that the second bridging battleship can send in the rest of the force.
Yes, their engagement profile is different; they’re different classes. That doesn’t mean one class can’t get overpowered in relation to another class, and with a kill ration of 58 to 1, Panthers are clearly extremely strong. In almost any game but Eve 58 to 1 would be considered grossly overpowered. Eve is a little different, so maybe that doesn’t apply quite as much, but I wouldn’t say it’s entirely invalid either.
I probably should have explained my idea more. In addition to warm up timers and mass limits, there would be different sized cynos. Smaller cynos would have short warm up timers, but low mass limits, while larger cynos would be the opposite. There would have to be a cyno activation delay after you went through a cyno to prevent people from rapidly chaining cynos. I would also advocate some bonuses to covert ops cynos, so they can light a new cyno after going through a cyno faster than a ship going through a normal cyno. This would allow covert ops ships to escalate more quickly than normal ships when using cyno mechanics (serving as a decent, but not absolute, counter to capital umbrellas), but would still leave them vulnerable to ships warping in to help for more than a handful of seconds.
In other words, in order to drop a carrier, you would either need to be very efficient with the ships you bring through the cyno, have multiple cyno ships, or have a multi-stage drop. However, this isn’t some crazy, impossible task, because that carrier will have to wait for quite some time to warm up it’s own capital cyno and get a capital umbrella on top of it. More often, the carrier will have to rely on people warping to them to save them.
Sure it does. This is effectively cherry-picked data. Not cherry-picked by you, cherry-picked by the people who generate the data. You’re assuming each ship has an equal opportunity to shine, it does not.
You don’t drop blops on something that you aren’t wildly sure you’re going to kill. You NEVER drop them into fights (unless you dun ■■■■■■ up). You drop these on ratters. Their ability to GTFO is wildly superior to that of a carrier, having every tool that a carrier has plus that of a battleship, plus that of a cloaking bonus.
Carriers, otoh, get countered by other capitals AND by subcapitals. They can’t GTFO. One of their principal use-cases is major fights, where in the present meta they’re all but expendable if it means saving supers or titans. They’re basically a bottom-tier capital, only slightly less so than a dread which is jumped with the expectation that it will die.
A kill ratio is moot without context. And the context between the two groups is so wildly different that any straight comparisons between them are meaningless.
My whole idea was that a covert cyno would prevent other people from lighting cynos. Nearly this entire thread was about people shitting on the idea. If you don’t prevent people from lighting other cynos, they’ll just bridge additional cynos through first, and your idea accomplishes nothing. If they DO, then you need to contend with the points already made on the subject.
If it only blocks people who are in fleet, you can bet that the people bridged in will all be in separate fleets.
I agree, BLOPS get such an impressive kill ratio precisely because this engagement profile is available to them. I would also argue that this means the engagement profile is overpowered, which is why I advocate nerfing it. Of course someone would simply bridge additional cynos through first, which is why there would have to be a delay after you go through a cyno before you can light one yourself.
Adding a cyno blocker to an engagement profile that is already one of the most powerful in the game is just asking for some pretty wild balance issues. After you rob a defender of one of the only tools they have to counter BLOPS drops outside of non-participation (i.e. docking up), I could easily see the efficiency of BLOPS exceed that of supercarriers or even Titans. Right now, the only category of sub-supers that come close to BLOPS kill efficiency are HICs, and I’m pretty sure that’s only because they get on the killmail of anything that’s in their bubble when it dies, friend and foe alike.
I say nerf cynos in general, and you’ll tone down capital umbrellas without launching BLOPS into the stupid-overpowered level. In my opinion, they’re already dangerously close.
