Implants
So training implants are a benefit to Highsec… and everywhere else. That doesn’t sound like they’re a benefit to highsec, it sounds like something that’s the same everywhere. Obviously, highsec pilots get the greatest benefit out of any one, exact implant (ie: this particular Ocular Filter - Improved). That’s because the odds of having your pod blow up is theoretically lower in HS. But any removal of attributes would need to retain the ability to improve training speed. That would come from something like the implants we have now. A that is what the discussion was about: removing attributes, not removing implants.
The discussion around implants arises from the idea of ‘without attributes, these implants obviously can’t be increasing your attributes to let you train’. Because, you know, there’s no attributes to increase. So people have been suggesting alternative ways to get the same performance improvement and preserve the ISK/LP sink. And I think we can all agree that the sinks need to hit the space-rich harder than the space-poor.
Insurance & Minerals
Removing insurance really hits the poorer characters in HS harder, per-ship. After all, I can afford to lose a Hel. I’ll just get a new one. The guy who’s been saving up months for his corp’s first Orca, then gets ganked as soon as he parks it in the ice belt? Not so much. Quite a lot of the time, nullsec players don’t even bother insuring our ships in the first place.
Where insurance does help, though, is in providing the perception of recovery. As the toys get pricier, people are less willing to throw them away. Giving them a sop to let them feel like ‘it’s ok, you’ll get something back for it’ helps to offset that. It helps encourage them to put those things in places where they can be blown up.
As far as mineral costs go: on what are you basing your assessment that dreads are ‘perfectly balanced’ in terms of mineral costs? Most of the CSM are extremely well-acquainted with the issue, so in evaluating your position, it’s helpful to know your qualifications and the basis for your assertion.
Skins
Yeah, pretty sure that’s more or less what CCP said in the minutes, too.
Navy Ships, Drones, and Interceptors
The progression from T1 to Faction to … (what is ‘pilot issue’?) is just one of the progression lines available. And that progression isn’t going to change. Getting the Navy hulls into a good spot is extremely difficult, though, considering they have to balance against both of the other progression lines as well.
By this, I mean the T1->T2 line, and the Size -> Half-step line. For example, the Caracal progression is Caracal to [Caracal Navy Issue, Cerberus, Drake]. Each of those progression options requires different things, (money, or different skills), and each one provides different benefits.
Getting the balance on the Navy ships can be… tricky, and even if the Navy hull you like is in a good spot, that doesn’t mean others are. The Griffin Navy, for example, is kinda horridly gimped after the ECM changes. Pretty much everyone seems to agree that the drone bay addition to the Caracal Navy is adding tits to a bull, but the VNI changes are blatantly aimed at combating AFK ratting bots.
Which segues nicely into the drone issue: there is only passive and aggressive. And guard. And assist. I can’t speak for the CSM, obviously, but I think I’d like the option of letting my maintenance bots be set to ‘guard’ on a target. Then again, I’d also like to be able to set them ‘limpet’, where they latch onto their target instead of coming back to my drone bay. That way when we come out of warp, they can go back to repping the damn FC.
But, you know, that’s just me. And really, I think a limpet mode could provide some interesting applications, especially if there’s penalties (example: limpet drones add their mass to that of the ship, slowing it down slightly) or other benefits (they provide a bit of armor ablation). Either way, it could provide some interesting options on either side of the math. Including another (possibly better) way of rebalancing logistics so we’re not so god-awfully powerful.
As for taxi-ceptors… you’ll find the split there is: some people just want a travel ship, in which case, a bubble-immune T2 Leopard would be fine. Others want a way to slip into relatively secure space more easily to kill things. And for that, they need a combat ship. I dunno why they need it to be bubble-immune, but they do. Many have been around long enough to remember moving around before interceptors got their immunity, even sneaking whole fleets of non-cloaky ships into enemy space. But that’s the point of contention, there.
Wars and Retention
You are absolutely right that the aggressor’s information should be more available than the defender’s. It’s also my understanding that it will be, and that every structure an aggressor designates as a ‘War HQ’ will be visible on the ‘wars’ tab of their corp ‘Show Info’ listing. So Goons, for example could go around destroying every war HQ Marmite or PIRAT put down. Who knows, maybe we will.
Maybe we’ll even hire out to do that. ‘High Sec War Police’ is a concept a few of us have kicked around in the past.
But forcing a corporation to disband and reform in order to decide ‘ok, we’re ready to risk a wardec’ is just silly. It pushes people toward not taking risks, and builds in that kind of mentality. If anything, that would prevent growth. But I’m also curious: why do you think large-scale alliances in HS is a good thing? I can see a few sides of the issue, I’m just wondering what your take on it is.
Bumping
They keep saying they’re going to do this with a 3 minutes bump-timer or something. Really, if they haven’t put it in by now, I have to think there’s a technical problem preventing it from working. More info on ‘why not’ wouldn’t suck though.
Rorcas
Clearly, they’re attempting to move the Rorq back to a mostly-support role. But when they engaged in a blatant and all-but-admitted bait-and-switch to get people into Rorqs, and get them spending 5b+ per rorq on just drones, doing that too quickly is just going to provoke even more of a hue-and-cry. And it won’t be an unjustified one, especially as long as CCP continues to be incapable of saying even so much as ‘we’re sorry for the inconvenience’.
I mean, yes, nerfs are part of any MMO, but when you make a change you know is ridiculously OP, and one you know in advance you’re going to walk back—both of which, devs have admitted—that’s kinda dickish. Expressing just a little bit of acknowledgment and remorse that you were being dickish to your customers can go a long way toward mollifying the freakin’ sugar addicts when you finally do take their candy away.
Well, maybe not a long way, but it’ll at least help. And setting the precedent of ‘if we’re dicks to the people who pay our salaries, we’ll apologize’ doesn’t hurt, either.
As for the Orca… isn’t it already in a support role? Sure, they can use the smaller mining drones, but that’s not going to compete with the throughput of an Orca-boosted Procurer, much less a Mackinaw or Hulk.
As for the Excavators… you’ve said you used to multibox rorqs. Which was more of a worry for you? A hotdrop, or a half-dozen bombers nuking your drones? You can say the Rorq’s durability is a problem, but when roughly 3/4 of the cost of your mining operation can vanish to 6 guys in under 10 seconds, and there’s nothing any supercapital umbrella can do about it… that’s really not all that ‘safe’.
PLEX
Your suggestion here would directly harm CCP’s bottom line. Remove the ability for players to get SKINs etc w/ISK by purchasing PLEX and buying the SKIN with that (as opposed to buying the SKIN on the market if someone has put it up), and you remove those purchases completely. Part of what makes CCP as successful as they are on the microtransactions end of things is the ability for ‘whales’ to basically subsidize everyone else’s gameplay if they choose to.
Remove that, and a lot of the revenue dries up. It also hurts the people who don’t necessarily have the cash to afford wasting it on frivolous crap like SKINs, but do have time to make ISK—for whatever reason. I know a fair number of people playing EVE, successfully, who are on one form or another of medical disability, for example. Fixed income, but plenty of time. Remove the incentive for those people to spend all that time playing the game, and maybe they find something else to do with it… and then there’s fewer people in space, which hurts everyone in the long run.
That said, Skill Farming is 100% an issue of CCP’s making, and needs to be addressed somehow. As long as it’s profitable, it will scale. As long as it scales, the major SP farms of over 1000 accounts will continue to exist.
Radial Menus
Saying they’re inherently ‘better’ is… flawed. I’d call it disingenuous, but there’s a good chance you actually believe that. Radial menus aren’t ‘better’ and they aren’t ‘worse’. They’re a specific way of presenting options. Usually, they rely on iconography rather than text, which does let them present their information in a way that allows slightly quicker recognition and navigation. However, they take up more space on-screen, and they’re simultaneously more limited.
As an example: I have 2 dozen bookmarks in a system, because I have perches on 4 different gates and multiple structures. That’s in addition to all of the planets, moons, asteroid belts, etc in the system. Trying to present all of this on a radial menu would get clunky, slow, and take up a massive amount of real estate. But all of that presents fairly compactly on the right-click drop-downs, because of the nesting presentation.
That’s because text is compact, compared to iconography. Icons need to be large enough to be clearly distinguished. Text, on the other hand, has the advantage that you use it every day. Even now, as we become more and more of a network of societies that no longer rely on the written word (and are losing our proficiency at writing, and potentially a fair chunk of our history because of it), text—like this—presents the preferred way to convey detailed information in a clear and compact way.
We moved away from hieroglyphs for good reasons, after all.
That’s not to say I disagree, or think radial menus should be removed. I think the option of radial menus is important: people should be able to get their information in the format that gives them what they need, how they need it. But saying they’re ‘better’ is just short-sighted and foolish, and makes it easier for people to dismiss what you’re saying. You never want to make it easy for people to dismiss what you’re saying. It weakens you on other points where you’re on otherwise solid footing.
Your Hard-On For Aryth And Negative Assumptions
Really, I don’t know how else to put that. You seem really, really put-out by anything he suggests, even going so far as to assume terrible things about what’s being suggested.
You get bent out of shape at his suggestion of ‘collective events’, when no, he’s not talking about changing EVE’s ‘core structure’. He’s talking about ways to get people interacting with other people. Give them things to do that bring them together. Why? Because the numbers show pretty unsurprisingly that the players who establish social connections—talk to people and make friends, even if they don’t fly with them—stick around longer.
It’s a way to facilitate things you are pushing here, like growing high-sec corps. You even identify the problem: people in HS are used to doing things alone. Ok, so, give them more reasons to meet people and socialize. Maybe they’ll keep socializing. Maybe they’ll start working together. Maybe they won’t. But it gives them another avenue to start.
Then the reactive hardener… honestly, what are you smoking there? That’s not really a tool for the attacker, it’s a tool for the defender. The attacker knows what he’s shooting. As soon as he kills something, he knows how the enemy fleet is fitted. It tells the defender ‘hey, idiot, he’s punching you in your Kinetic resist’. Sure, if it’s rails or Energy weapons, we knew that already. But if it’s missiles or projectiles, variable damage type is a thing. I don’t necessarily think it’s a wonderful ‘omg, this changes everything!’ idea, because it really doesn’t achieve anything… but it’s hardly ‘let’s see what the defenses are’.
It’s also not going to make ganking easier. The RAH has to cycle after you get into armor to adjust anything. Before that, it’s just evening out the resists. If you know what ship you’re shooting, you generally know how the resist profile looks, and how it’s normally fitted to plug holes. Gankers don’t use catalysts and coercers because ‘zomg, resists’, they do it because ‘cheap, disposable, high-dps’.
ISK through the NES store doesn’t help RMTers at all. CCP tracks all of those transactions just like every other transaction, and they’re going to keep applying the same methodologies to catch RMTers. And good on them, I hope every RMTer out there burns right along with the bots.
But at this point, you’re literally getting mad about people just sitting around going ‘anyone else got any ideas? Nothing’s too stupid to spark discussion, just toss out whatever comes to mind’. For that matter, you’re getting mad about the idea that CCP is asking their player reps ‘what problems do you guys see?’ instead of blithely dictating everything. Isn’t that the point? Isn’t that why you’re even posting? Because we want CCP to listen to their customers?
You keep saying that highsec players ‘love’ attributes. Why? What about attributes do HS players love? Not implants that increase training speed, mind you, attributes themselves.
