Yeah agreed, which is why I think new content is the better answer instead. T2 frigs, T3C, T2 BS, T1 caps have been endgame for 15+ years at this point. Plenty of room for T3 frigs, T3 BS, T2 caps to buy another 15 years.
One thing I’ve noticed is CCP is going with the path that requires no new art assets, animations, engineering (code) and infra (hardware) i.e. things like tweaking numbers to make current content last longer (scarcity, indy and ratting changes)… It’s almost like they have diverted all their dev resource to another game!!
They then use narratives like ratting nerfs or scarcity being needed to balance the economy and players lap it up without undertaking even the tiniest research to see if that is true WHICH IT IS NOT, faucets are higher now than 2019 pre BRM / ESS introduction:
. * _ * my gosh t3 frigs would make my year especially if it was command burst frigs. Even Faction desis would be freaking amazing.
I hate caps personally (because they get cynoed on me lol) but I would not mind seing some new types of caps for null dudes to try get their hands on so its a bit more exciting for them but I have no idea how the meta works there and what would break things so cant say lol.
In my experience I find abyss in a solo frig super fun to run but running out of time is very easy with bad spawns and kills the fun, dropping to a lower tier kills the challenge thou. So in a way you have to be optimized otherwise its not really possible and in this case optimized = finding people to run them with which is super hard for a solo player.
In this instance is not ships but amount of ships, but its limited to hawk and retribution’s mostly, It’s possible with other ships ofc but at 4x the difficulty because you have to tank instead of kite.
Yea for sure, nothing is imposible, but it becomes very impractical after a point.
The challenge is always there but its hard to feel good about something when you are using a more expensive ship and running things 4x slower than a cheaper ship that is just natually better at that task.
I can throw some numbers quick that would help:
A 80mil hawk can run t3 dark 90% of the time making 120m an hour around.
A 1bil hawk can cleat t4 dark 40% of the time making 300m/h but you loose more than you make becuase of ship losses.
If you wanted to run the t3 in something like an enyo you will need a 1b fit to be able to brawl. And running a site making 120m/h in a 1b fit that still has a decent chance to die seems bad when there is a 80mil alternative.
If you bling it the mwd and damage is the only thing thats worth it, so you might increase the efficiency by 10 to 15% but then you get those waves which is insta death so you will start to loose money at that point.
Cheaper works out better becuase there is that 1% spawn that is crazy. The Angel wave.
Yea I tried all types of ship’s and the hawks success rate is much much much higher by 3x around.
But the sites are balanced around cruiser’s tbh, so that is the reason its not balanced well for frigs.
CCP have not separated the 3 instances of Frig/desi/cruisers they all use the same spawns.
Just run a few on the test server and you will see what I mean, they are super fun thou. I tried in the cruiser and the much slower pace is kind of boring in comparason to frigs.
I kind of wish CCP gave a solo bonus of 20% increase to damage or something, that would help ton’s.
Wait, sorry, just so I know what we are talking about.
These sites are set up for cruisers but your using a frigate?
Doesnt that kind if at least semi-agree with my point, that you dont have to use the ship thats optimal? You at least have some chance of success in a ship of your choice? Or am I getting that wrong?
I’m making it worse than it sounds tbh, Ikitersa / Vagabond / Cerb / Gila / Ishtar / Hawk / Retribtion / Jackdaw / worm are all viable, O and that edencom cruiser but you have to fit it with a 10b fit or something.
Every other ship is maybe half to a third as decent as these thou.
So there is still a few options.
The biggest thing killing ship options is how much these npc’s tank vs the 20 minute time limit.
The thing that all these ships share is big damage that can project.
All blaster ships are terrible in general even thou they have the damage once they have 2 or 3 tracking disruptors on them they cant even kill the things webbing /scramming them at 9k.
And everything else that can project but doesn’t have the dps runs out of time.
There are lots of bad design decisions in EVE, but this isn’t really one of them. Plus most higher missions aren’t designed this way, probably around half of them.
This style of encounter means that solo players either need to be in strong ships with strong fits and decent skills, or bring a friend or two, or multibox/multiaccount. All of which would be a ‘win’ from CCPs design viewpoint.
It’s also the case that most EVE encounters are quite static - the same foes show up at the same spawns and behave the same way every time. This is a design problem, and if you do it this way you generally make the NPCs tougher because players will soon figure out all the best strats.
It’s a tricky issue in a lot of games. Content that can be reliably completed in a lot of ways simply becomes “too easy”. Players will still tend to optimize to the “best solutions” that boil down to using one strong build to defeat multiple scenarios as fast as possible.
The only way around that is to create very dynamic encounters where multiple different mixes of spawn can occur using different offense types, and they need to have varying different weaknesses. This will still lead people to optimize towards the strongest multipurpose ships. Which is basically what has happened (and what CCP did, to their credit) with Abyssals.