I totally disagree. In Eve you face what’s out there. You have no idea in advance what you are going to encounter. There isn’t some announcement saying 'Altara is passing through Litiura in a Pulse Laser Praxis…so please everyone fit up accordingly '.
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Err what? Peope do.
I often swap my fit based on what we’re going to shoot.
Got eyes on something with a MJD? Swap that point for a scram.
Small instead of big? Swap ammo.
Got eyes on something that heavily relies on capacitor? Can someone swap to a ship with neuts?
Perhaps it’s one of the perks of blops gameplay that we often know what we’re about to fight before the fight starts, but there are other types of fleets as well where the scout can tell on comms about the types of ship you’re going to fight, so you can prepare accordingly.
Even in non-group gameplay you can prepare in advance. My first solo kill I knew exactly who I was hunting and what their fit was (cherry picking explorer that had been annoying me) and had made a fit specifically to counter his.
Yes, many encounters simply happen unprepared, but regularly people in EVE will know what they will encounter and will fit up accordingly.
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Which was precisely my point. You can never know that your 1.2bn ISK beam laser Nightmare isn’t going to encounter a 240m ISK pulse laser Praxis. And even the pulse laser Nightmare is pretty closely matched in firepower and tank. My original point was…what about the Nightmare is so much better that it costs 5 times as much ?
Or lets take another example…
Eifyr and Co. ‘Gunslinger’ Surgical Strike SS-901 …cost 800,000
Eifyr and Co. ‘Gunslinger’ Surgical Strike SS-902 …cost 7,000,000
Eifyr and Co. ‘Gunslinger’ Surgical Strike SS-903 …cost 19,000,000
Eifyr and Co. ‘Gunslinger’ Surgical Strike SS-904 …cost 118,000,000
Eifyr and Co. ‘Gunslinger’ Surgical Strike SS-905 …cost 160,000,000
Eifyr and Co. ‘Gunslinger’ Surgical Strike SS-906 …cost 700,000,000
What a bizarre price distribution…and here we genuinely are judging ‘x amount better’. Why is SS-904 six times the price of SS-903, yet SS-905 is not even twice the price of SS-904 ? And how does SS-906 get to be 875 times the price of SS-901 for something that offers 6 times the enhancement ?
Its yet another example of exponential prices in Eve that bear no relation to the actual ‘advantage’ on offer. Of course sellers know that players want every bit of extra ‘edge’ on their characters and take advantage of that, but the sheer degree of price manipulation is absurd.
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It’s not that close; 33% extra raw gunnery DPS, and in an apples-to-apples battle it would be able to avoid most of your damage even if you web it, while still applying full damage to you. But it is a very situational ship that is most suitable for a narrow range of tasks due to its cost. Stat/ability-wise it’s superior to a Praxis though, so it would always be the first choice if money isn’t a concern.
But you keep missing the actual point…that you are not getting ‘5 times better’ for 5 times the cost. Indeed, I have only to succeed 1 time out of 5 in the Praxis to even the costs.
Well, that’s the nature of min-maxing. Those additional benefits from the improved bonuses and stats can in practice result in much better odds than the ratio you get from just the prices. In an apples-to-apples comparison, your expected win ratio might not be 20%, but 2% (for example), or maybe even lower. But in asymmetric engagements with differing odds, yes, it generally makes sense to go for the more sustainable, economic option.
Let me be clear I am NOT in favor of economic controls. they don’t work in real life and they won’t work in EVE.
In real life every time a government messes directly with the free market, they make it worse. it would be no different in EVE.
What CCP CAN do though is through the game mechanics, improve the economic environment in a way that can lead to increased opportunity for beginners.
The Eve market is already being controlled…by cartels such as those that run the TTT. So much for a ‘free market’.
That’s far from ideal but it’s not the same as hard price controls from above. the cartels at least are motivated by profit, as long as theres more than a couple of them, it can never get as bad as ignorant central planning can make it.
like I said CCPs job is to create the environment through game mechanics through which such cartels can’t last forever, and will eventually split up, fall and be replaced.
Cartels control supply output, the TTT doesn’t. TTT is more like the government (CCP) giving a tax break to the wealthy.
Sounds like freedom to me, being able to control a market through sheer power and politics. Just because you, or I, aren’t able to do that doesn’t mean it’s not freedom.
You have the freedom to go after them and take over, you just need to do what they did: get strong, get momentum, make friends etc etc.
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EVE’s market is unregulated to a degree which even in the most liberal (traditionally liberal) societies, would be considered too little. this is becuase it is a space dystopia where megacorps have status on par with state governments. sometimes they form the government, as in the Caldari State. although to my understanding the Caldari megacorps are closer to the Japanese Zaibatsu. Giant family-business hybrids.
It’s still possible to rise to power and even one day depose a cartel and even take its place. But currently it feels like the game isn’t doing the best job of making this viable like it once did.
It does, you’re just not good enough to do it (neither am I).
That’s the thing. the bar for how good enough has a certain point at which it’s too high
The TTT was a result of a brand-new game mechanic that favored existing large groups because they had old money.
Freedom is good, but corruption subverts it. These groups were effectively given this thing for free, while everyone else would have to struggle with a massive uphill battle with virtually insurmountable odds in order to accomplish the same.
CCP realized this, and ended up nerfing the income cap. Too little too late, though. Nothing bigger than medium structures should’ve been allowed in high-sec from the start.
Asteros are not meant to be newbro friendly in cost. They should be a goal, it’s the ultimate exploration frigate, the pinnacle of it’s class.
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Well, no, I doubt it. The SS-906 is 500m ISK more than the SS-905 yet delivers just 1% more of DPS. I would argue that the incidents where you lose your ship and get podded and thus lose that 500m are going to be more often than the incidents where that SS-906 extra 1% saves the day.
Well, no, a cartel is not a free market. It is the very antithesis of it. A cartel is the elimination of the competition that defines a free market, and a fixing of prices to benefit the cartel overlords. Competition and a genuine free market can only arise when the customer is free to choose. There is no choice with a cartel.
And the sort of money the TTT cartel wields makes it all but impossible for any smaller traders or even a large group of them to take over.
I was talking about the ships specifically.
About the implants, yeah, I agree. The 1% just isn’t worth the extra 500 million ISK. The only possible exception I see is if I were sniping with officer-grade artillery—at that level of cost, another half a billion is marginal. Likewise, the high-grade “delta” and “epsilon” implants for pirate sets are also exceptionally cost-inefficient, providing about a 1% overall bonus over mid-grades for a cost increase between 1-2 billion ISK, depending on the set.
But for the Nightmare, yeah, for an apples-to-apples fight against something like a Praxis, I would choose it every time because it would win way more than 80% of the fights needed to break even on cost. Though in general, the Nightmare just isn’t a very viable ship for my (our) activities because it lacks movement control abilities against targets. It can kite and apply damage really well, but it can’t tackle and/or prevent enemies from running away. I’d choose a Rattlesnake or a Navy Scorpion (if going with a shield ship) for such situations instead.