Then destroyers would become either a lot like frigates or cruisers, because there isn’t much leeway in terms of stats between frigates and cruisers as is (unlike the difference between cruisers and battleships).
You’ll just end up with a ship that does about 500-600 DPS and would need to have near-cruiser amounts of slots to compensate (because there’s a minimum amount of slots needed to make a ship viable for PvP, and frigates already have that figure monopolized).
If destroyers become a lot like frigates, then players will switch to cruisers to gank. If they become a lot like cruisers (which they kind of already are, minus the glass cannon part), then players will continue to use them and bring 1-2 extra gankers per gang.
Your idea will not have any effect on ganking. All it will do is destroy an interesting ship class.
Resulting in a useless ship class. No reason to even bring a Catalyst over a Thorax for example, since the latter is a straight-up upgrade.
The reason that people use destroyers today is because they bring cruiser DPS in exchange for sub-frigate survivability. You would be destroying that trait.
it will affect the solo “lol just bagged a retriever on my alpha alt” sillines, it will affect ganks on small ships (cruiser weapons hitting moving frigates makes them less easy targets) and it will move the cost a bit so not every 3 week newbie with 30 mil in his badger gets ganked.
Slower to target, especially when combined with needing webs to counter tracking issues so you can’t just fill it with sebos (unless it’s a big target but you couldn’t know that before hand).
Slower to accelerate and move into a more favourable position if need be
increased cost that increases the gank threshold FAR above the “it’s 10 mil more lol”
So gankers can still go after big lumbering and valuable targets but smaller or less valuable targets drop off the list. People making dumb mistakes in expensive ships or valuable cargo, ie older players, are still a viable target. People who have to or choose to keep it small and/or cheap stop being a target. Pods also stop being a target in most cases unless they specialise in that.
Ganking for profit is still fine, ganking for the lulz less so.
If that’s what you want to believe (out of what I can only assume to be wishful thinking and a lack of experience in ganking gameplay), feel free.
But be aware that if your argument is that dropping destroyer DPS would impact ganking smaller targets, you’re overlooking one very important aspect of the activity: scope. Gankers are able to bring many shooters to ganks, and attacking small targets requires them to field only a percentage of the maximum firepower they can field. If all you do is drop destroyer DPS by 30%, then they’ll bring enough additional destroyers to compensate, which would still be vastly under the maximum amount they can bring. They’d ship up to cruisers against bigger targets with large EHP pools.
Also, you can kill pods with a single frigate volley, so I fail to see why you’d even bother bringing that up.
That’s completely fine. That means that more organised gankers, the ones who put in actual effort, still do just fine.
Increasing cost, increasing organisation, increasing logistics. Sounds good to me.
Again, I’m not against ganking as a concept but the needle needs to be moved a little bit to a point where “professional” gankers still do fine but the random “lol I bagged a random retriever and he raged, lets do it again” becomes more difficult/costly.
How about increased skill and attentiveness by ganking targets?
No, you very much are against ganking, but are trying to mask it with talk of “compromise.” People have been doing what you’re doing for almost as long as the game has been out, and the needle has in fact been moving in your direction all that time. This is the “just one more nerf” mentality that has defined debates about gameplay mechanics such as wars and ganking for many, many years now. “Just one more change, just to make it more balanced, all we’re asking for, we promise.” We know what this is, and it’s not going to work, trust us.
Anyway, my argument against your nerf is that it would unduly hurt destroyers in all other forms of gameplay (which you obviously don’t care about since the grand majority of those forms involves PvP). I’ve said all I wanted to on that matter.
Yes, they nerfed can flipping, mission busting, wardeccing and ofcourse ganking. Things I’ve been doing since my first “pirate” character in 2007, minus the ganking unless it’s for aforementioned reasons. After a long hiatus of “sometimes logging in but not really doing anything amazing” I’m finally going to be active again.
My point is that ganking for profit or area control is completely fine.
However the vast majority of gankers are risk averse carebears using faceless alts, so there’s no risk their mains get any backlash, and as risk free as possible. It really doesn’t get any more carebear than shooting people who you know won’t shoot back while knowing the exact outcome of the “fight” before hand.
I’m very much FOR pvp but I’m against carebear pvp. Most ganking is carebear pvp.
Sold in 2011 because I rage quit about CCP doing dumb ■■■■. A few months later I came back and had a short stint again on this one:
RL kinda made me quit after that, came back in 2014 but the game had changed so much I gave up real quick (partly for the reasons you mentioned). Now I have more RL time to spend and I’m back in full.
I see a lot of null-sec large fleet warfare activity, and not a single trace of the piracy, wars, and ganking that would give you necessary background information to comment on those gameplay elements with a reasonable degree of objectivity. Are/were you (allegedly) a PvPer? Sure, but your thoughts on ganking ship viability, profit tolerances, et cetera are mostly conjecture.
I recommend that you actually enter the field for a while, because it will give you insight that you don’t currently possess.