now something I would be in favor of, that may help curb their more reckless usage, would be reducing or even getting rid of insurance on them completely. with platinum insurance they are damn near free. and the way I see it, insurance is there as a way to enable newer players to engage in pvp without worrying as much about loosing absolutely everything… by the time you get into a capital you aren’t exactly a new player anymore. (And if you are one of the fairly rare people who would inject/plex your way into one as a brand new player… welcome to eve learn rule 1)
Getting rid of insurance would mean only the biggest alliances (with associated rental income) get to use them, which certainly won’ t be an improvement. Also don’t forget the fittings and fighters which take a decent chunk of ISK.
Wow…you totally missed the point. The point is that those using the “think of the [insert special interest group]” really don’t care about that group. They are a means to an ends. It is pure cynicism.
It is why the political process is so horrible and toxic. Thankfully EVE is not run by democracy and CCP pretty much ignores pleas for special dispensations.
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Exactly. Caps have an anti-sub cap, but sub-caps do not have an anti cap.
As far as what that could be and in what form ? There are many, many many things that can be done. I’ll just give some thoughts off the top of my head, but people have come up with some real good ideas if you just look through the threads as well.
There could be a line of battleships just like the battlecruisers that can equip large weapons, except these battleships could equip XL weapons.
There could be battleship equipable ECM that specifically works only vs caps or a sub group of caps, this could come in different grades, have different fitting reqs etc.
There could be an equivalent of a HAC ADC, but it would work only vs ceirtain ammo types, specifically those used by caps and against fighters.
Could have a sub-cap deployable drone type that is specifically designed to take out fighters and does poorly against other drones or ships.
Marauders - rebalance them a bit. Maybe shorten the siege timers, both duration and cooldown, so they don’t sit there dwindling their thumbs up their butts while everyone else moves off, or, leave it as is but introduce a whole new siege module that would be faster cycling, give it its own skill line if needed.
Rebalance costs all around, make caps actually cost capital investments and capital amounts of ISK, sub caps should not be same or more expensive (when fully fitted) then caps. Address whatever is needed to accomplish this, building resource costs, BPCs, whatever.
There are so many other things that could be done, I’m sure if some people got together on this and brainstormed a bit and if the devs did as well we could at minimum have a large positive improvement when it comes to this.
there is an anti-capital sub-cap, the marauder, but players decided that they would rather use capitals for that job. the tool exists, players choose not to use it.
ship market cost is also determined by players. as I pointed out before, the investments required to build capitals is FAR higher, in both isk as well as time. but market price doesn’t reflect that discrepancy, because players have pushed it that way. its not ccps job to regulate the game economy and force items to cost what 'you" think they should cost. (you can build 5-6 battleships for the same material cost as a single capital, if you factor in the cost of blueprints you can build several hundred battleships for the same cost, and you can do it in the safety of high-sec. as far as time goes, you can build roughly 100 abbadons in the time it takes just to do final assembly on a carrier, even more in the time it takes to build the components) so if the price is as low as it is, thats our choice as players.
and what about the other effect that would have, you really telling me you think the game as a whole would be better if we returned to the days when only the large alliances could afford capital fleets? because trust me, if you doubled, tripled, or hell even increased the price of capitals by 10 fold. the large alliances would still have them, but the small groups would have even less of a hope in hell of competing.
and just because the large alliances have the capital force, doesn’t mean that we commit them in every single battle, we might throw 5 or 10 in here and there. numbers that even single corps, hell even single pilots can match that helps to even the playing field and at least give them a fighting chance. you increase the price of capitals 10 times… we’re still gonna have enough that we can easily throw a few into the fray, but instead of going up against similar numbers, now smaller groups would have MAYBE one… how do you think that skirmish would go. (and end of the day, its the skirmishes that determine who lives or not more than the big battles)
do large groups benefit from the current low price of capitals, sure, but small groups benefit from it as well. and yes, increasing the price would hurt large groups, but we can absorb it. smaller ones can’t.
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How realistic is that CCP will make their whales and Goons and much of null sec unhappy by introducing something that would easily counter the stuff of legends, like arrow to the heel of the Achilles?
To contradict, I’ve seen many games where players like where they are at and don’t want change because “change is bad”. from past experiences, changes hurting them, or games crashing because of so. There are numerous reasons people hate change. But to rant about how asking or suggesting change is “dumb”, well that just shows narrow minded people can be.
To to negate the arguing about how people hate change lets do this:
Pros to Changing Capitals to have increased Jump Range and Remove HAW fits
- More Cap vs Cap fights
- Giant alliances would reign supreme against other caps
- Smaller Alliances/corps may stand more ground and create more fights.
- Sub Caps may stand more of a chance in fights
- Capitals will potentially no longer reign supreme against sub caps.
- Prices of Capitals COULD potentially increase due to them not being used as much. Meaning you could make more isk.
- More content for sub caps without fear of dread bombs, this doesn’t stop carriers.
Cons to changing to increased jump Range and Remove HAW fits
- Caps potentially can’t be used to welp sub cap fleets (this is what carriers are for.)
- More alliances/corps would have capitals dropped on.
- Alliances/corps will have to be more cautious with caps and may have to play more defense.
- Not as much escalation in fights, may cause mundane fights.
- Caps may end up costing more due to them NOT being used more.
- Capital Powerhouse alliances/corps may not get as much content with caps.
When it comes down to it REALLY, thinking about it. Dreadnoughts are the issue. Carriers being used for sub-caps, well that’s how it was intended initially. But to use dreads against subcaps. Really? Is this what everyone wants?
What’s wrong with having carriers d o the job they were intended to do? Leaving dreads to fend against other caps?
Granted every scenario is different and we can “what if” all day. But, when it comes down to it. Everyone should keep an open mind. I mean after all, we all play the same game. Why shouldn’t we all collaborate and put ideas together to make changes to a game we all love (I think)?
Instead of stiff arming every suggestion of change and pick sides, what was it. “children” or “vets”, “left leaning” or “right leaning”. Why don’t we discuss what could be changed for the better.
My Ideas may be great or they could be the worst ideas in the world. But what matters is that ideas are still coming out. Sway others and myself to think of other outcomes to make the game more fun. Not keep it stagnate for the next 5-10 years.
“MORE SKINS, LESS CHANGE!!” Doesn’t make me happy. I like seeing communities get involved with what they spend most of their day playing, trying to suggest the best and the worst of the game. The “for the children” argument doesn’t exist in this post. This is something that someone stated because it was a question in a lot of questions to get what other’s opinions.
To make valid arguments, you can’t sit on one side of a fence and only complain about your side. Put yourself of both sides. What balances it all? What makes both sides mad? What could change to create a semi-fair playing field? What are both sides strength and weaknesses?
The “children” argument only shows 2 things that are different, both of which has to happen to make this correct. The difference between children and vets, Numbers and Skill.
But that’s my opinion. So who cares 
Personally I’ve never understood the hatred of caps a lot of people have. I guess people hate what kills them, but then why not hate frigs, cruisers, etc. because more people die to those than anything else.
There is a certain segment of players who hate ‘big’ ships. There was a lot of hate some years back against battleships, a lot of agitation on the forums, etc. “Bigger should not be better! Blah blah blah…” Nevermind the fact that what they wanted was “smaller is better.” Regardless, CCP responded, and battleships were put in a bad place in my opinion. Then everybody started flying cruisers, jackdaws, and whatever else. Not me. I wanted to fly battleships, and that’s what I still fly. Damn the meta.
Well here it is all over again. Same thing, but instead of complaining about the other big ships (battleships), this time it’s capships. “Waah! Too big! People hot drop on me! Waah!” And when caps are nerfed, those of us to aspire to sit in an ‘end-game’ ship will just have one less thing to aspire to, and one less reason to log in and play.
I don’t get your beef. So you got hot dropped, and you’re pissed. Well why is it any different than getting ganked by a tengu? Why is it any different than getting killed by a gatecamp? A station camp? Caught by a saber? Seriously, why is it different?
You say you want to remove HAWs from dreadnoughts. So if your subcap had been killed by a carrier, would it be any different? Or would you demand fighters be nerfed so they couldn’t kill subcaps?
What if I demanded that subcaps be nerfed so that they couldn’t threaten capships?
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?? This?
…right? Dreads were initially intended to fight caps. Carriers were intended to fight off sub caps. I don’t understand. I don’t have a “beef” nor am I crying. Again, it was merely a post to get others opinions. But I guess people go straight for the gut and point fingers rather than discussing things.
So you are saying if you were hot-dropped by carriers instead of dreads, everything would be fine? No complaints?
And as far as dreads go, who cares how things were originally intended. The original intention was retarded - having dreads be cap killers, useless for anything else, and having no defense or use against subcaps.
Because Jenna and Teckos tried to use their own real life ideology as an example to explain why asking for any kind of change is always wrong.
They insinuated that OP is asking for nerfs on capitals to help the new players, which he didn’t. From that they derived that whatever arguments were brought up, must automatically be wrong, not even worth a consideration.
In the end I think it’s pretty simple: some people are okay with how things are currently in the game. Some people are not. The latter tend to think about reasons, try to find alternatives. Naturally depending on their experience, they might propose things that EVE already had and someone with enough experience can tell them about it. But also, they might bring interesting ideas or simply asking (like OP did) for other opinions on the matter.
To be fair, there are threads which are strictly anti-something. Anti-ganking, anti-capitals, anti-fun. This is not such a thread. Solutions that OP is putting out for discussion might be wrong, but instead of insulting him for it, it would be better to bring up some actual analysis of the situation rather than spitting out some highly-individual and necessarily biased experience.
This is what this thread lacks a bit. Numbers.
I’ll offer this approach. If we are willing to trust Zkillboard a bit, let’s look at PVP rank of capital ships currently vs. alltime.
Notation: Ship(Recent Rank / Alltime Rank)
Carriers
Archon (76/89)
Chimera (111/148)
Nidhoggur (30/116)
Thanatos (19/71)
Dreads
Moros (108/86)
Naglfar (56/90)
Phoenix (90/130)
Revelation (67/104)
Supers
Aeon (123/126)
Hel (49/153)
Nyx (36/77)
Wyvern (164/181)
Titans
Avatar (74/129)
Erebus (106/138)
Leviathan (128/185)
Ragnarok (96/169)
Now these numbers don’t tell us the reason for the increased % use of Capitals.
What seems to be worth nothing however, are the stats for each group. You’ll remember that caps were the primary tool to shoot all things related to POS. Each sentry, each POS module gave a killmail. Clearing a POS could mean 100 structure killmails, cleaing a Citadel means 1.
Now, Dreads for instance have almost half of their 593 thousand killmails on Zkill in POS and POS structures. Carriers more than 25%, Supers close to 45%, Titans around 33%.
Since Citadels the number of those killmails went down significantly.
And yet we see all Capitals (apart from the Moros, lol) in higher use, despite in the past they would harvest massive amounts of killmails by taking down POSes.
A further look on the group stats reveals that Capitals kill Subcaps more often than they kill other Capitals.
Do your own conclusions.
Personally I think this just shows how significant the advantages offered by Capitals are at this point. It will have influence on how new players experience the game, but it doesn’t mean they won’t like it. I think the pressure-lines are: joining the largest groups asap, living in areas without caps, becoming a-class small gang pilots who take down caps or avoiding PVP. It’s not overly negative, but also far from perfect.
The last bit, avoiding PVP in relation to being hard-dropped, is hard to analyze without a great big set of data. I don’t think one should assume that small number of drops early one will drive a new player back to highsec. However, those who would experience permanent drops as a good portion of their first PVP experience, will be influenced by it. Not necessarily in the way that they leave, but this might be one relatively understandable conclusion: equality just in terms of relative ship-strength (let alone experience) seems unreachable, so they might start avoiding fights in one way or the other (going back to highsec, joining groups that provide safety in numbers etc.).
All in all, I think it’s okay to recognize the changed conditions for subcap players (where new players are a sub-group of that), in regards to Capital vs. Subcapital warfare. Does this automatically hint us towards necessary changes? No. After all, that can only be answered as part of a vision for the game / wanted game experience.
The answers to that will be different.
I could think of a number of ways to allow for more interesting counter-play for subcaps against being dropped. But this will influence both the lone/small gang subcap gang as well as large fleets.
It’s may be fair to acknowledge that the gameplay experience of casual subcap players and most new players is so extremely different from non-casual players, old players, highly organized large group players, that balancing the game for both groups is not possible.
I said I wasn’t sure about it, didn’t say that I was very interested in whatever reason those sperglords have to mess up the forum. Sorry about your wall of text.
Don’t worry, other people will read it. Only the first two sentences are a reply to you, the rest is for the thread.
Very unrealistic, but it doesn’t have to be easy, it could be actually well balanced. Also the zerglings would not necessarily be unhappy as their zerg would be even bigger due to increased viability.
14 Posts have been removed as they were discussing RL Politics/Religion. Beyond that, pretty good discussion going on.
Heh
I somehow missed or didn’t pay attention to these parts of your post, but that’s exactly what is happening.
New players coming in venture out a bit, and then either resign themselves to areas without caps or feel a lot of pressure to join the big blocks, which then in turn has a lot of negative consequences. A lot of us older players also ditched it. Before I left NS I was actually going for Rorq, but I sold off my orcas and drained all the SP to allocate it to more rounded combat focused toons, no cap or indy stuff.
You can’t really gather data on it, you just have to talk to people in the game and see how it goes for them and what happens.
The worst part for me was that all this stuff was greatly accelerated by botting, multiboxing, AFK ratting, etc. which to me is really all the same crap, with the exception of maybe some multiboxing where the people actually do play 2-3 clients at the same time, hands on.
I do really appreciate the little synopsis ye’ve started giving these days.
Cheers for the work
Really, I think all of this wailing and gnashing of teeth is nonsense. New players have far more to fear from gate camps than hot drops. I’ve run into gate camps a million times, but I’ve never been hot dropped once. And I’m an ‘old’ player these days, and yes, I’ve played in low and null a lot.
Either way, it doesn’t matter how you die out in null. Whether from a gate camp, a bubble camp, a cloaked stalker, etc. you are just as dead. For the sake of argument lets say all capships are removed from the game tomorrow (I’m not claiming anyone suggested doing that, I’m just saying pretend it happened). Do you think there would be less people dying out in low/null?
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I think in the context of this post, removing caps would just ruin the game. However, the issue I see with caps is the immense power gap from sub cap to capital.
I don’t know what ratio, but take all pilots have equal maxed skills and FCs are like minded. Equal results on grid. Sub cap vs Sub Cap it’s a 1:1 ratio.
Now take the same scenario, But remove subcaps from 1 side. How many sub caps does it take to = 1 cap? If that makes any sense… lol. So i’ll pull a number out of my ***, Lets say it’s a 6:1 ratio. 6 Battleships vs 1 Cap (No logi, for scenario sake) This would mean that a fleet would have to have 6 battleships for 1 cap. And this isn’t promising they will win. Those 6 battleships, together, cost more than the cap does.
Now Remove HAW from dreads, bring carriers in for anti-sub cap. Cap side still has the advantage, but now they aren’t getting 2-4 shot shot by dreads and may kill some fighters and if they are lucky, kill a carrier or opposing dread.
With the above proposed, dreads have a more defined role now, capital/structure fighting. Carriers maintain the sub cap role, this would make fleets, IMO, more fun. Now, I’m not saying that the Capital guns can’t or shouldn’t hurt sub caps. They should pack a punch, But not as hard as HAW.
Now, I have lived in Null my entire life in eve and only recently moved to high sec. Null is adventurous and “balanced” in the sense that if caps are dropped, alliances will counter drop.
In High sec, going to lowsec pockets, these alliances that hold these pockets are power houses for the region. But they have no fear other than the occasional counter drops that happen 1-2 times a month. PLENTY of time to rebuild w/o any issue.
So now you have pilots in Highsec, trying to build a member base up. Trying to expand a little, not wanting to join the massive alliances. Well, they get boned. They end up staying in high sec, mining and doing PI, getting bumped and ganked. Why? Well when they try to expand a little, going into lowsec pockets, they get cap dropped. But they can’t do anything about it because they can’t build caps because there is no low sec pockets near by to set an azbel w/o the fear of it being destroyed.
So what do they do? They leave EVE, they join other corps or attempt to form small alliances, but can’t fight the cap powerhouses, they stay where they are like good little miners and join NPSI roams for some content, or at the end of the day, they join much larger corporations/alliances and leave their dream behind of building their own corp.
IMO, I think the reason this is a problem is simply the overuse of capital ships. So change em a little. Give subcaps a little more to play with. Smaller corps growing and having fun = more content for everyone. But again that’s IMO. But my opinions are always subject to change with good arguments against my points.