Eve fundamentally favors agility (speed/align time), range and nuke (alpha * n+1) in large fleet warfare.
Players (linemembers, not FCs) don’t need to worry about movement or positioning. Targeting is from a list. There are no line of sight checks.
The only thing that matters is F1 killing more ships/value than you lose.
Compared to other MMOs, Eve kiters do have their range, speed, and nuke. And they get tankier the faster they are!
Actually interesting MMOs have debuffs, stealth, melee brawlers, charge/initiation abilities, dots, stuns, pets; all combat viable. None of these apply (to a significant degree) to large fleet fights in Eve.
To keep the meta “fresh”, every now and then CCP moves the slider on how many Muninns a large fleet needs to alpha other Muninns (tank changes). Other hulls can be viable, but only if they are good at doing the same thing.
Add in the fact that whenever some group find novel and interesting ways to conduct fleet warfare, other FCs find them hard to counter, so they get eventually culled out of the game instead of remaining somewhat viable. That’s how you get a stale meta of Muninns Online.
Problem with most FCs is that they pick a simple hull with the highest application, that they don’t have to make important callouts based on engagement range. Most incompetent fleet bosses just simply warp their fleet to 0km and become highly successful for it. Rework Electronic warfare to better work against brawling fits.
I don’t know many space MMOs. Other MMOs, generally speaking, tend to be about toons wielding iron age weaponry and magic. This makes things easier to balance.
You cannot focus-fire 100 sword&board toons on a single target.
Archers and mages have a little range, but they all need to fit on a permanently zoomed-in 2-dimensional plane and the players don’t seem to mind their long bows only shoot 10 yards. Much easier to balance.
In a 3D space, focus fire simply makes too much sense.
I agree and disagree because it ultimately comes down to the players. You could have alterac valley potentially with like 30 mages on one side that literally run up to the front lines and primary someone with an instant cast putting them down and then retreating behind their front line and repeating the cycle every cooldown but in wow most people don’t think like that and thus don’t want to play like that. In eve, you got the types of people who do want to play like that and thus it’s how it forms. Like old fashioned wars where everyone had a rifle and en masse fired together.
I think it’s not so much psychological but mechanical.
In a game like WoW, requires a lot more coordination to make 30 mages to attack the same person. There is no list to choose from. And if you bring 30 instant nukes the game mechanically makes it likely to lose to a more balanced composition.
I saw arcane mages doing aoes while preists healed them as their warriors would charge to do their aoe yell. Was usually two and a couple of mages with like 4 healers. It’s alot easier for a group of mages to insta kill anyone and then teleport behind their front lines. The most coordination needed is for them to call who to target.
The root of the problem is one of scale. You will never make big fleets interesting to the individual player because he’s just an input interface for the FC: there is not a single tactical consideration for the players in the actual ships. The player is just a less dependable, voice-activated input controller.
It’s always blap the primary. Understandable from an N+1 perspective, but ultimately boring gameplay for most people involved. As if somehow, the game expects it to be fun having control over 1 unit in an RTS and being told exactly what to attack. I do not understand why so many players are into this stuff but they are. I say let them have their fun but I don’t want to participate.
I’ve always preferred these small scale engagements which players can start to “play it by ear” once they are accustomed to their role. Nullsec coalition gameplay is just terrible for people who want to play an actual game.
I totally disagree with the OP. A well thought out fleet with DPS, scouts, ECM and a backup is very engaging. Yeah, the TIDI is crap but take a small, well thought out, fleet into a WH where you have no idea what you’re going to come up against and that’s great fun. Ploughing into a stagnant NS tidi battle is genuinely dull but it’s not the only option.
Well said some people like this stuff and some don’t Who are we to judge? What more can you get out of EVE pvp? It’s like people want to create stuff out of nothing.