Sure, and I hope the rest of the CSMs and @CCP_Rise et al are actually reading these replies, too.
Here’s one, and it’s kind of an elementary thing, but it’s not just important, it’s sorely lacking so far:
CCP needs to figure out what they want these ships to do. Not some big nebulous ‘REP ALL THE THINGS’, which is where they are now. You don’t, for example, use titans in J-space. You don’t use carriers in high-sec. You don’t go on a small gang roam with 5 supercarriers and a dude in a Scalpel. So:
Idea 1: Come up with a clear and consistent function for these ships. What scale are they supposed to operate at? Are they meant for capital warfare? Are they meant for subcapital warfare? Are they a small gang tool? A large fleet tool?
Should they maybe use different ships to cover all that ground, instead of trying to balance ‘everything from subcaps to supercaps and POS repair in low-sec, null-sec, and j-space’ on four hulls?
I mean, call me crazy, but we’ve got more than 1 battleship per race, more than 1 frigate… the sheer bewildering array of cruiser-sized hulls we have… holy balls, batman. Without including the Industrials… 13 Minmatar Cruisers of varying hull type and tech level. 52 between the Empires. 9 more with the pirate factions, Trigs, and CONCORD. 63 different Cruisers for 4 different types of space.
4 Force Auxiliaries.
Seriously. Figure out what these ships should be doing. Figure out if that job is too big, and too varied, for one hull from each race. Do that first.
Aiming fixes at the “small guy” gameplay has always been proven to be an error. Stop it before it comes to TQ or we will have to wait for years until next balance pass.
You want to hear from us about these proposed changes?
I think what is proposed is absolutely unnecessary, uncalled for and unwanted by the majority.
If any thing, local reps should be buffed on ninazus and lifs.
But that aside, Why and who proposed these drastic nerfs? For what reasons?
If you want to change game play mechanics by shifting people into more faxes, look at the other capitals, make their need for reps more important. Reduce buffer, or resistances etc.
If you really want to change capitals in some drastic way,
Make subcap damage to capital class ships reduced based off their size… a frigate the size of a window should do 25% damage, maybe bc/bs can do 75% damage. This will force ppl into cap vs cap fights.
If that’s the opposite of what your trying to achieve, then look elsewhere for changes but leave the faxes alone, they are already vulnerable as it is.
If PL/NC etc is mad they can’t field fax pilots in numbers they can Titans or supers, maybe they should try asking their pilots nicely to reship.
hey heres a good idea. lets not nerf everything into the ground. i swear you guys manageing eve. have 2 darts and a spinning dart board. one red. 1 green. the green one increases the stats of the ship it lands on via the dart board. the red nerfs. NOW the quality of the darts is as followed. red has been replaced many times. the green one has a 2 inch layer of dust on it. stop. ruining. the game.
Oh, I agree that some mechanics changes would be good to get. And they’re being asked for. I’d say this is an instance where “perfect is the enemy of good enough” applies. Get this nerf in place, and revisit later when more development bandwidth is available.
How about ‘not again’? Get this nerf in place, and later, it’ll be another tweak that isn’t consistent, and doesn’t move in the same direction.
Free up the resources to actually be able to look at an aspect of the game. Hell, don’t free them up, recover the ability to have those resources.
Hire more damned people already, CCP. The layoffs were bullshite to appease the banker who’s on the board of directors now and doesn’t understand a goddamned thing about game development, and we all know that. Your devs are working their butts off, but you’re asking half a dozen guys to put out fires across an entire city.
We have to fix the problems we can fix, not the ones we can’t. We’ve got a proposal here that addresses some of the issues.
The question shouldn’t be “does this fix everything” or “is this the best prioritization of time/resources CCP could use right now” - for what it’s worth, that’s their call, not ours and I don’t think I’m going to get very far if every time they bring us a proposal I respond with “is this really what you think you should be working on?”
In law school we called this “don’t fight the hypo.”
What everybody needs to be looking at here is whether this fix will do what it’s intended to do - namely, fix FAXes in a couple of situations where most people agree that they’re overpowered. If so, say so. If not, tell us why not and what they could do instead.
Is the nerf too high? Is it too low? Is 37% a good target nerf or should it be lower/higher?
That’s the kind of feedback I think Rise is looking for specifically in this instance.
It’s not. It’s not because it’s not going to get at the root causes. And the root causes begin with the one I outlined in my prior response to you. This is, at best, another Band-Aid™, and I dunno if you’ve tried putting a Band-Aid™ on a Band-Aid™ before, but it really don’t work so well.
If all you’re doing is addressing a few use-cases, and you’re addressing them with sweeping changes that affect all use-cases (not just the ones you’re targeting), you’re only going to introduce more problems, as people work to compensate for your unintended consequences.
Give me a day or so, and I’ll likely have a full analysis of these changes out. But right off the bat? Everything here is pointing to Force Auxiliaries being too strong against subcapitals. These changes will affect how effective Force Auxiliaries are in supercapital fights. This means that you will need more Force Auxiliaries in supercapital brawls, which means more Force Auxiliary proliferation, which means more of them showing up in subcapital fights because people want to use the ships they own…
… which means more problems trying and failing to kill things in subcapital fights as the increased number of Triage overwhelm you. You think breaking one Mino was bad? Imagine if there were two of Holmsey in that fight. 5 minutes of damage, and they switch who’s in Triage, and the other guy gets reps.
Now imagine if every HAC roam brings half a dozen.
Okay, then we need ideas to fix the root causes - and preferably something that doesn’t require them rewriting the game.
I don’t think the slippery slope argument you’re presenting is likely, though. With Alliances requiring supercap pilots to have at least one FAX alt, it’s not as if this change is suddenly going to force them to require two FAX alts. If folks can run two FAX alts, they’d are doing that now anyway. I’ve got two FAX alts, for example. In the supercap meta, you always need more FAXes, and I don’t think this is going to change that - nor do I think it was meant to.
You’re also unlikely to see these getting towed along in subcap fights unless they’re used by defenders because they’re too slow. I understand your point but at the same time, I need more than just “this won’t fix anything” because not doing anything leaves the status quo in place and we all recognize that the status quo is broken.
Here, another idea right off the cuff… no promises that this is a good idea, mind you…
Signature Radius.
Make it affect remote reps, just like it affects the thing the remote reps are working to counter. Fax trying to rep a frigate? You only get like 10% effectiveness because it’s just so damned small. (Oops, sorry, Monitor, but you’re a bad design anyway). Add the equivalent of a tracking enhancer or something, too, if you want, so the force aux can sacrifice survivability in order to apply better reps to subcaps.
But be wary of unintended consequences. Because they will bite you in the ass, just like they have every. single. time that CCP has done this half-assed crap.
Big alliances, sure. Smaller ones? Smaller ones may well start replacing their subcap logi with force auxiliaries as the proliferation curve accelerates.
I’ve got a Lif fit that’ll do 1km/s stable, rep to 200km with the strength of a logistics cruiser, and warps at battlecruiser speeds.
just an idea, instead of nerfing the reps (remote) why not apply a sig size penalty like cap guns/neuts have, effectively leaving capital logi mostly alone, while reducing the effectiveness of FAX useable in subcapital fleets (seams this is the major issue everyone has) makes sense to me as it would put capital reps in line with capital neuts and capital guns (other then HAW)
A well bit buffer minow has ~2,100,000 EHP omni (for simplicity). A well fit active minow has 1,400,000 ehp and self reps ~30,000 ehp/s.
If your fleet is lacking the 30,000 dps to break a T2 minow you have issues. In order to break a buffer minow, you need ~7000 dps, before any other factors.
So lets say you have a fleet with 10,000 dps. You will take ~3.5 mins to kill a buffer minow and fail to kill an active one. If you instead brought 2 bhallgorns, which can eat 300gj/s+ off a fax each, either type of fax would be out of capacitor in ~2-3 mins depending on if you are shooting the fax or something else, almost 100% faster.
Now tell me what needs more ships, 10,000 dps, or 2 bhallgorns?
Next factor in that the fax jumped in system, and ~2-3 mins is now 40-60s.
