So how can CCP provide reasons for the large groups to risk their big toys? There’s a few different options: Make them easier to get, make them less necessary, or my favorite: blow them the hell up.
EASIER TO GET
This is the fastest and easiest of them for CCP. It’s also the worst and stupidest way to address the problem. But it will address the problem, so we should look at it. If you make it easy to get the really big things, people will use them. They’ll lose them to one another in droves. People like explosions. It’s kind of a no-brainer.
It will also horribly penalize newer players. They will need to put in close to 3 years of skill training just to be able to reasonably contribute in null. Smaller groups will get shafted, too, because they’ll be facing more supercapitals.
How screwed the litttle guy gets is already an issue: to own supers, you need a keepstar. If you can’t defend a keepstar, you can’t own supers. If you don’t own a lot of supers, you can’t defend a keepstar.
You wind up with a decidedly mean-spirited bootstrap problem. Yes, small groups could use a smaller structure and simply safe-log, but that adds another layer of disadvantage: the big groups not only have more people, with more supercapitals, but those characters can dock up and fly something else. The small group has its highest-SP characters locked away from every fight.
Making supers cheaper and more disposable might allow the small group to use and lose theirs, but that probably won’t make them more likely to. They won’t want to lose what little force they have—especially considering that right now, the only way to build supercapitals is to own the space you need supercapitals to hold.
LESS NEEDED
This is less pants-on-head than accelerating supercapital proliferation would be, but there are problems here, too. The only way to really make these things less necessary is to make them less of an ‘I WIN’ button. But if you make them less useful, then everyone who’s already gotten them will be upset.
At least… that’s the thinking. Most of the people who have these things now have them because they need them. Sure, the big DD volley is fun, and it’s great to watch someone else’s big thing explode, but supercapitals are slow, ponderous lumps that take forever to align. Worse, there’s always some idiot who fell asleep, or isn’t paying attention. In a battleship fleet, someone’s not aligning, you leave their ass behind and tell them to file for SRP. With supercaps, people are more likely to feel like they need to wait for the idiot. Entire fleets can get held up because one guy in a Wyvern fell asleep after 8hrs of heavy tidi, and the FC is trying to get a corpmate who can track down a way to contact the pilot.
And then there’s tidi. Supers make more of it. They’re big things with lots of bits. The game has to look at collisions across the whole range of the ship’s hit box. The client has to render all the little bits. More fighter squadrons means more crap for the engine to track and update on everyone’s overview. Sure, the 64-bit client has helped with this, but not on the server-side issues.
Honestly, once you get past the ‘I am the biggest thing in space’ nonsense, supercapitals are more boring than cruisers.
JUST BLOW THEM UP!
#DeathtoAllSupers .
Seriously, just blow ‘em up. Introducing supercapitals to the game without a clear and consistent vision for how these things would relate to the rest of the ship tree when they hit saturation numbers was just stupid. It was a mistake, and it should be undone. CCP should give people a massive event that only ships with jump drives can take part in, get them all blown the hell up, and then have CONCORD revoke all the licensing for BPCs. At that point, refund the SP, and let the biggest thing players fly be carriers and dreads. At least until CCP figures out how to actually balance supercapitals against the rest of the game.
Another way out would be to radically change supercapitals, so they’re not even the same things they are now. That can have the effect both making them less necessary, and removing them. The new roles could be less essential for taking and holding space in null. And it would remove supercapitals as we know them. CCP could even give everyone the option for that one big brawl before the changes go in. Send them out with the biggest bang in gaming history. Thousands of supercapitals could die in a day. But what would that ‘new role’ look like?
A FOURTH WAY?
One idea that’s been batted around in a few areas goes as follows: Make them into mobile bases. Return supercarriers to the ‘mothership’ idea: jump-capable vessels that move slow, warp slow, and have little to no offensive capabilities. But they do have the ability to dock subcapitals. Dozens of battleships. Hundreds of smaller hulls. A single supercarrier could provide a beachhead. A supercarrier fleet could be a legitimate invasion force. But only because of the other players docked up inside. The supercarrier itself would represent almost no threat.
At the same time, titans become something similar: jump-capable emplacements. As they undock, they have jump drives, solid defense, but no offensive capacity as a ship. The pilot pushes a siege-like button, and the titan’s a station until it comes out of siege. In station mode, it has lots of defense, and a good amount of offense. No warp drive. No sublight drive. And they can’t enter station mode within 100km of another titan in station mode. But they can dock everything up to normal capitals, and carry cloning services. They become another component of an invasion force, or a supplemental defensive screen: put a few titans around a station under siege, and force your enemy to go through those first.
But we all know they’re not going to do any of those things. So they’re not going to fix the stagnation in null.