All I’m seeing from this thread is a whiny crybaby OP who is mad that he needs to exert some amount of effort if he wants to be able to catch and kill every single interceptor that comes near his presence.
(Not) sorry, OP. Your personal gameplay is not more important than anyone else’s. If you want to be able to catch every single interceptor on every single perch in every single celestial or bounce, go subscribe some Omega alt accounts to sit as smartbombing traps. Otherwise, stop whining like a little crybaby about how you can’t get easy kills.
You can try to make pathetic arguments like this, but at the end of the day, everyone can see that you’re just crying about how you can’t easily kill 'ceptors. My recommendation would be to not make it so obvious that you’re bad at the game and are whining to CCP to change the game so that you can continue to be bad.
Yes. If you want to 100% guarantee it, you’d better be willing to cough up the ISK for it. Again, you’re not going to be handheld and spoonfed by EVE Online, no matter how many tears you shed on the forums.
Wow, you mean, other players in EVE Online might have a brain and adapt to your obvious traps?!!? Say it ain’t so!!
Why does there need to be? You’re the one crying and whining about it. Everyone else, including CCP, has figured out how to play the game and realize that you’re not entitled to easy kills 100% of the time. If you want easy kills, then again, cough up the isk for it.
Sorry kid, maybe at some point you’ll grow up and stop being so entitled. Until then, you’re gonna have to play the game by the same rules as everyone else. No special treatment for you, little triggered snowflake child.
Also wow, apparently you guys can come in here and tell me I’m bad at EVE over and over again, but if I point out your hypocrisy it’s considered “innapropriate” and my posts get hidden. And you guys claim ~I’M~ the triggered, special snowflake?
Jesus christ it’s a f–king game man, chill out. You can’t catch an interceptor, big deal. Go shoot something else. Spewing out personal attacks and calling the entire forum pathetic is pretty ridiculous.
Yeah, let’s pretend I’m the one who came here to spew personal attacks.
I frequently do shoot at other things (by definition I must, since you can’t shoot travelceptors). In fact, it’s actually been a pretty successful couple of weeks since I posted this thread. But the fact that I am able to kill other things doesn’t make nullified interceptors good game design. And nothing excuses the kind of blatantly hypocritical troll-posting coming out of people like Choco. If he wants to mouth off and call me names, fine. But don’t go reporting my posts when I return the favor.
(Apologies for the late reply. Forum notification reading fail.)
Re: Taxiceptors, there seems to be something that you and other folks who want them changed seem to overlook.
The “bubble immunity” role bonus of Fleet Interceptors actually has a valid and useful purpose in combat.
The Malediction and the Stiletto in particular have been sitting in the “top ships” category on zKill forever. And they’re not there because they can be used as Taxiceptors, they’re there because they are incredibly effective tackle; they get used to kill stuff, and get killed, quite a lot. They can either be used as fast scouts, or fast tackle response to others who are scouting for them. Not being hindered by things like bubbles aids them in this role. Whether their bubble immunity makes them OP in this role is another topic entirely, but if that bonus gets removed or altered, it should be due to its utility (or OP nature) in combat, not in travel fits.
tl;dr: Ships often get used for unintended roles, and those unintended roles generally shouldn’t be considered for game balance.
I think we’re still in general agreement regarding the current state of Upwell-fu. Having what amounts to an unassailable perch (at least outside of major fleet actions) to wait in space from while on-grid with permanent celestials like stations and stargates seems like a massive advantage for those owning the structures.
Yeah, I absolutely see where you’re coming from as far as nullification being useful for pilots using inties primarily as tacklers, and I honestly the nullification in the context of tackling doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I just think that the scouting and taxi applications of nullification are so overpowered that they kind of demand that nullification be rescinded. And the fact that inties makes such ideal scouts and taxis also reinforces their value as tacklers-- generally if you see certain, specialized ships appearing you can make some inferences about what a player (or gang) is up to. Because interceptors are so useful in all these very-different roles, it becomes really difficult to predict if they’re a threat or not. As you said: they’re extremely effective tacklers. But as it stands, there’s just so many of them milling around everywhere all the time that it becomes impossible to anticipate what’s going to happen when they show up. I’ve had fights where I’ve engaged a target and suddenly local jumps up by five and a bunch of interceptors show up on scan (and of course land on grid 2 seconds later because they’re so fast)-- you literally can’t tell if they’re the spearhead of a gang that’s responding to kill you, or if they’re just some dudes more or less autopiloting through space. And because they warp and burn so quickly, you don’t really have time to hang out and see what they do once you realize they’re coming: even if they just land innocuously on a gate ~100km from you, they could just auto-jump that gate, or they could have you pointed in like ten seconds. Hard to tell who’s a scout, who’s just a guy trying to get from A to B, and who’s actively trying to kill you. And because they’re so fast and nullified, there’s no way to take any kind of precautionary measure either.
Nullification is definitely nice to have if you’re flying an interceptor as tackle (trust me, I know-- I like flying Stilettos a lot), but at the same time, I feel like if you look at all the possible ships in EVE and which ones would gain the most from being nullified vs which would only be marginally improved by it, interceptors are definitely at the marginal-improvement end of the spectrum. It’s definitely nice to be able to warp through bubbles when it’s convenient. But of all the ships in the game, interceptors also happen to be those least-inconvenienced by not being able to warp through a bubble due to their crazy speed. And this applies to using inties as scouts or travel ships too: interceptors are really, really fast ships. Unless you happen to jump into a gatecamp that’s full of insta-locking arty Svipuls or something, you’re really, really unlikely to die to while traveling in an interceptor. If you jump through a gate and there’s a few kitchen-sink ships on the other side, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re able to just burn away from the gate and warp off without much trouble. If you jump into a modest gatecamp (the kind with a fast tackler and a Rapier / Arazu that might prevent you from burning away, for example) you’re still probably capable of just crashing the gate and warping off back the way you came. The only time you’re actually likely to die is if you jump into a really specialized gatecamp running things like arty Svipuls and RSBed inties / Daredevils. IMO, this is a fair balance: the interceptor is very hard to kill, but if you have a bunch of hostile players who really put the effort in to hard-counter you, you might die. It makes traveling / scouting pretty convenient, but not a guaranteed success.
Also, if people really value the ability to warp through bubbles as part of their tackling repertoire, that could easily be accommodated by just decreasing their agility so that their align times can never be under two seconds. The difference between 1.8 seconds and 2.2 seconds is highly unlikely to significantly affect the performance of an interceptor as a tackler, but it would immediately put an end to their use as brain-off travel / scouting ships. I could absolutely get behind an implementation like this (I happen to think a similar arrangement is probably needed for T3Cs-- nullifiers need to incur a bigger agility penalty so their align times become long enough to allow them to be decloaked and tackled by competent players). If the ability to warp through bubbles really is that important to the playerbase, this could be a great compromise.
Another alternative could be to allow heavy interdictor bubbles to stop nullified ships. Again, this would allow interceptors to flit past static defenses like anchorable bubble blobs, as well as avoiding regular dictors. These players could be stopped though by someone willing to field an expensive, specialized ship (and one that’s uniquely vulnerable to attack, by virtue of having to sit dead-center in its own warp disruption field at all times while in use).
At the end of the day, there are several ways this imbalance could be addressed. Break any one of these conditions and inties are no longer a problem, but invulnerable to all bubbles + align time shorter than minimum lock time supported by the server = problem.
Honestly it’s not even the fact that they can be used as a perch that bothers me the most: it’s the fact that perches themselves are now obsolete because so much of the time all the relevant bits of infrastructure are all on the same grid. Like, if people had to warp from their Keepstar to an Astrahus near a gate in order to see the gate, that would be less of a problem than “I undocked from my Keepstar and can already see the gate… and the jump bridge, and all the other stations, and the cyno beacon” etc etc etc. The co-location of SO MANY THINGS is what really diminishes the opportunity for creative drag bubbling (although apparently some people occasionally still manage to land in bubbles even when the hostile interdictor and their bubble are both sitting in plain sight right in front of them, which never ceases to amaze me). With regard to perch structures though, the tether is kind of a deal-breaker. I don’t mind having a structure someone can warp to near a gate, but having them immediately turn invulnerable there is pretty annoying. I feel like the easiest way to fix that is just to disallow Upwell structures near stargates-- people already have access to the improved shared bookmark system if they want to perch off a gate.
I don’t really have a horse in the game here, I was just reading through because I’m curious (and holy walls of text batman) but…
This isn’t correct. Eve is a very player driven game and there’s tons of emergent uses that have cropped up over the years for various ship types. These absolutely need to be considered for game balance though, and quite often they’re the primary cause of major balance issues.
Like:
Sub-cap blapping Dreads and Titans back before HAWs.
Almost every nerf ever made to T3Cs
Nerfs to Drone-Ratting
Nerfs to the use of Carriers as heavy tackle.
This just seems like one of the privledges of owning that space to me. It’s not like a roaming scout is going to have an Astrahus on any of the gates he’s scouting. The “home team” are the ones who get to have their stations sitting off gates.
I think my definition of “unintended roles” is much more narrow than yours. I see Travelceptors in the same category as things like salvaging destroyers and 500MN MWD bumping Nomens.
Everything you described, while not necessarily intended by CCP, was still a ship and/or module doing something it was intended to do, just in an way that CCP hadn’t expected. They all definitely needed the balance passes they got.
Generally speaking CCP’s design philosophy is very heavy on tools and not terribly heavy on “intent” except as it applies to re-balancing existing things. Generally speaking if an existing use isn’t a problem they try not to harm it too much when rebalancing or reworking existing ships.
When new stuff is added, or old stuff that’s not getting too much use is reworked significantly, they’ll frequently add new things and see what people do with them.
The “intent” in this case is, essentially, “see what people do with this”. Like how CCP made specific changes around certain ships and mass to allow Wormhole players to continue to roll holes using established tactics. Precision HIC rolling was never “intended” but CCP determined it was valid and good and therefore has taken pains to leave it alone.
Yeah, I’m a little torn about it as well. I definitely believe structures should offer benefits for the sovholder, and I don’t think the structure providing an alternative, on-grid warpin for some far-flung stargate is necessarily a bad thing (again-- people have long had the ability to do this using bookmarks… even before the new sharing system there were enterprising individuals who sold tactical bookmark packs for regions, which many pplayers took advantage of). I just think the way you can subsequently use the tether to to provide long-term intel is frustrating to deal with. Covops pilots could do this in the past, but they had to make a pre-meditated decision to fly a covops first. Now you can just show up in whatever and if you want to stay and lurk risk-free for as long as you want, you can. I think that’s a little much.
CCP could fix the intel gathering aspect by changing how tethers work (by allowing ships to be booshed while tethered, for example), or they could introduce a new, dockable structure just for use near celestials that didn’t have tether (thus providing a ping and the option to retreat from hostiles, but not the ability to sit there giving intel while invulnerable). IDK. Regardless, the “using Citadels as pings” issue doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the other things (interceptors, major infrastructure sharing grids with gates).
This is the weirdest part of the whole interceptor debacle for me: CCP announced years ago that they were pulling nullification off combat interceptors in part to see if it was nullification that accounted for interceptors’ popularity, and within a day of that patch Claws were worth half what Stilettos were worth and approximately eight people still fly combat ceptors, while their fleet counterparts are consistently amongst the most-used ships in the game. This “experimental” balance pass was in 2017 and the results certainly seem conclusive: I have no idea why they still haven’t acted on the data. Most of the other fad-ships have seen their days come and go: Svipuls, HAW titans, ratting supers, Rorquals, sentry doctrines, chain-booshing, etc etc etc have all been nerfed since then. Even covert / nullified T3Cs have seen some small nerfs (they’re still invulnerable when fit right, but at least you need to pack a depot, nerf your combat ability, and generally jump through hoops to make it work), and those were never anywhere near as prevalent as taxi-ceptors.
Regarding the Citadels off gates. I don’t think it’s that big of a decision to “intentionally fly a cloaked ship”. It’s not hard or expensive to train into one these days, and if you have a Citadel in the system you can just store a cloaky in there for the cost of around 30 million ISK, give or take.
Also bumping used to be a thing on Citadels, it was removed because of the various abused and problems it created, especially in High Sec, where it was possible to bump someone to the point that they couldn’t dock up and forcefully move them out of tether range.
Regarding Interceptors, I couldn’t find anything regarding the change being temporary or going to be carried forward into other Inteceptors. This Dev Blog just references it as a compromise solution arrived at with the CSM: https://www.eveonline.com/article/pf7gpi/october-balance-pass
There’s also some of the logic in there, which basically amounts to “there was value to giving Interceptors Nullification but we want to reduce the power of these roving fleets somewhat because they’re where the problem is”
Ultimately I suspect the reason travel-ceptors haven’t been nerfed is because they’re not much of a problem. A cloaked ship will let you do most of what a travel-ceptor will with even less risk under most circumstances, and just traveling somewhere doesn’t actually let you do much. Especially since those things can’t fit Cynos anymore.
If someone wants to travel past a camp, especially in their own space or to their own space, there are other tools like Jump Clones that also allow this sort of thing as well.
Like, I’m just struggling to see the harm here. “AFK Cloaking” has a bigger potential threat profile from what I can see.
I read this as: “We worked with the CSM to come up with a test to see if the prevalence of interceptors was due to the ships being overpowered or due to nullification being overpowered.” By leaving it on (arguably) the “weaker” ship hulls and seeing which hulls got utilized post-nerf, you’d be able to take an educated guess on the value placed on nullification. I just don’t understand how the other inties have remained nullified when the clear answer from this experiment was that players almost exclusively value interceptors for their nullified insta-warp ability rather than anything else: nobody nerfed the combat ability of Claws or Crusaders, and yet they became almost completely worthless immediately upon the removal of nullification. If that doesn’t suggest that nullification is an OP stat, I don’t know what does.
That’s not the only thing that can be meant by “sentiment” or “impact” though.
CCP, and the playerbase, have known that Nullification was valuable since the T3Cs introduce the ability. That was never really the question.
The issue was the behaviors that resulted from that nullification, and taxi-ceptors were never really mentioned as one of those issues by CCP or, as far as I’m aware, by the CSM. As I pointed out previously a taxi-ceptor does literally nothing. I can grab one and see how long I survive flitting around Delve until someone manages to smartbomb me or something, but I won’t actually be more than very slightly annoying. Even an IRL mosquito actually bites, but a single inty can’t do anything of substance.
Insta-warp interceptor fits barely require any compromise: I can convert my standard tackle Stiletto fitting to insta-warp in exchange for -300m/s and -400 ehp (swap an overdrive to an istab and one shield rig to a low-friction nozzle joints rig). That’s a completely trivial “tradeoff” to make compared to the benefits of being un-catchable. If an insta-warp inty couldn’t fit a cloak or tackle modules, I’d say sure: valid argument. But to say an insta-warp interceptor “can’t do anything” is just not correct (unless your argument is that interceptors in general, or frigate hulls in general, “can’t do anything”). They can still scout and tackle just fine, which is what they were designed to do. They don’t make any meaningful compromises to become un-catchable. If CCP want to rework fitting requirements or something so that insta-warp ceptors can’t tackle or scout, that would be a partial win. But until then it’s hard to argue that taxi-ceptors are “useless” in terms of the capabilities of the ship.
There’s also the second-- and possibly more-important-- fact that merely being able to move around is itself a benefit: even a tank-fit, weapon-less taxi ceptor has strategic value in that it enables players to move around almost as effectively as jump clones. Sure, it’s not instantaneous like a jump clone is, but it’s still very much possible to cross New Eden in an hour using a taxiceptor, and there’s no restrictions on how often they can be used. If you don’t see this as a benefit in and of itself, then explain to me why things like jumpclone cooldowns and space-aids exist? In other instances, CCP have had the common sense to realize that players being able to teleport around the map has strategic value in and of itself-- even when you can’t bring any ships or items with you. A taxiceptor is just a marginally-less-convenient jump clone.
BTW: for anyone in this thread who insists you need nullified interceptors to scout-- I jumped this Cheetah into a 20-30 man gatecamp fielding multiple Sabres with interceptors on gate with a cloud of light drones assigned to them. The dictor pilots delay-bubbled like they should, the interceptor and his drone cloud decloaked me like they should, but there was nothing they could do about me crashing the gate. Got out with some armor damage. This is how you scout without relying on the crutch of nullified ceptors.
Fair point, and bad wording on my part. I meant that an interceptor being used as a taxi can’t do anything. That means the ship isn’t attached to a fleet and is, at best, scouting on its own. And as your post below pointed out it’s pretty hard to keep anyone out of your space. Sure these intis lower the skill threshold a bit, but I wouldn’t say they lower it so much that it has any kind of major gameplay impact.
The skill required to catch a cloaky scout has always been greater than that required to evade a gate camp.
Sure, some, but moving around isn’t inherently valuable, you have to have something to move to and thanks to jump bridges, jump portals, and the generally contiguous nature of Null block space these days I don’t think this is the massive deal it might once have been.
I think if this was causing an actual practical problem then CCP would do something on these grounds, but this hasn’t had much in the way of practical consequences that other travel methods and player cleverness haven’t already created.
Well, yes and no: you will note that in order to not die, I had to turn around and crash the gate. I never was able to get where I was going (it was a dead-end pipe). This is what I mean-- with previous scout ships you could avoid dying, but only by giving up on your mission. If I’d have tried to run the camp, I’m pretty sure I’d have died eventually (probably after another 1-2 attempts).
Again, anecdotal example here, but for the last month one of my main focuses has been trying to harass TAPI’s jump-bridge network that runs through Esoteria and Catch. Traffic has been mostly taxi-ceptors the entire time, but in the beginning we at least got a few kills now and then. Since they’ve more or less figured it out, the percentage of traffic that is other-than-taxiceptors has dropped to almost zero. For the last two days, TAPI have been trying to send people to fight in Fountain (I think?) and traffic has been entirely a constant trickle of interceptors. They’re using them to move between fronts so they can fight in two parts of space on the same day.
You’re not wrong about JBs, titan bridges, etc also contributing to a lack of targets, but at least those require investment and coordination-- someone has to buy the bridges, install them, keep them fueled. Pilots have to buy and position titans for their alliance mates. Interceptors require nothing: no meaningful ISK investment, no forethought, no paying attention while traveling. JBs can be reinforced by a small-to-medium-sized gang. Titans are a little more invulnerable (assuming the pilot has access to Keepstars, which most do), but those at least seem more time-sensitive (if someone is late and misses the titan bridge, they frequently have to travel by gates or JBs, which presents an opportunity).
I know people don’t believe me, but take a scout interceptor some time and go watch a chokepoint system or JB system. Inties inties inties inties inties. It’s dumb.
