Interceptors and Upwell Structures: Reintroduce opportunities for pilot error

[Cade_Windstalker]

Sorry for the delay in responding, I’ve been busy IRL and haven’t had the energy to check the forums. Still enjoying this discussion, just needed a break and to focus on IRL things.

@Ganthrithor

I think you may be misunderstanding my purpose here: it’s true that I camp gates and it’s true that I enjoy blowing things up, but blowing things up is not the primary purpose of our gatecamping (or ratter-camping, or anything else we do). Our primary objective with living in enemy space isn’t to farm up favorable killboard stats: it’s to steal our enemies’ agency.

Right, I get that, but there’s two factors at play here.

One, most people don’t really think this way. A six hour gate camp with no activity is, in my experience at least, one of the more boring activities in Eve. I still remember the amount of complaining I’ve heard from various people over boring gate camps, especially if they were on the receiving end of one.

Second, people will adapt, just like they adapted before. Generally speaking if someone needs to get somewhere for an op or something pressing they will find a way around or through your gate camp, and the lack of activity doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re successfully denying your enemy, it likely means either what they were doing wasn’t pressing enough to push through with, or they’ve found a way around the problem you’re creating.

If CCP removed travel 'ceptors then people would likely just adapt around gate camps in some other way, or simply log out for the day if they can’t do some optional thing they wanted to do because of your camp, and they don’t have anything else to do.

Which brings me to another point…

@Ganthrithor

We did our job. Our job is to prevent the other dudes from playing the game.

This is, frankly, not a great dynamic. Mechanics, systems, and strategies that just say “no” to activity and gameplay aren’t great for the game or fun for much of anyone. And yes, I realize that Travel Inties are one of these mechanics, I just think they’re the lesser evil here.

The problem with the dynamic you’re describing is that it rarely actually works how you’re describing it. Sure sometimes you make a big difference, but most of the time people either work around you or find something else to do that doesn’t involve your gate camp. If they can’t do that though, then they likely log off, and that kind of dynamic is one that will slowly kill the game.

Sure this dynamic sounds great:

@Ganthrithor

Gatecamps may be one-sided, but if we kill a slew of hostile players, preventing them from reaching the form-up for the strategic fleet they were supposed to go on, resulting in ten fewer logi pilots for the enemy team, which causes the hostiles to be unable to hold reps in their fleet fight later on, which causes them to cede the field? Then we did our jobs.

But how often does that really happen? Your side may win the fight, but can you really say it was because of your all’s harassing and gate camping, or did the other side just have less guys in general?

My guess is most of the time it’s the latter, not the former.

The problem here is that a gate camp like this basically just says “no” and even if I get a bunch of people together to crash it then I probably won’t kill many, if any, of your campers, and you’ll be back in place 15 minutes after the fleet warps off.

@Ganthrithor

The side that wins usually isn’t the side with the most ships, or the most stations, it’s the side who’s willing to keep logging in month after month to do the same, shitty, grindy, thankless tasks.

Which… really isn’t a great dynamic for a game. Like, that’s a pretty good description of my job right now, but it’s not something I want to do for fun.

And I get that stuff like that has often been a part of Eve, but I’d really question if it’s a good or healthy dynamic for the game to be trying to promote. If the end results of every large Null war are a few hundred long time veterans quitting the game for good do you really think that that’s maintaining the health of the game?

I’m not saying that everything needs to be easy and wars should just be those big set-piece battles, but I think all of this is getting at some fundamental issues with the way these mechanics interact, and it kinda gets back to the Cov Ops issues you brought up earlier. If the only way to interact with your enemies is through one-sided fights then it’s going to create this race to the bottom of the barrel of fun. Whoever can hold their breath through the ■■■■-heap longest wins, and that’s not great.

The response to a provocation like this should be some kind of escalation, a running battle… something. Not a camp that stifles fun for hours by having no fun themselves, and then runs off at the first sign of a real fight.

In that kind of dynamic you can still have your shutting down of a region or whatever, but it’s two sided, not one sided, and there’s actual stuff to do as a result.

@Ganthrithor

I really don’t think this is possible with a North American ping.

Yeah, this is likely the limiting factor. I’m not super surprised TBH.

I don’t think the guy in question is hacking or botting though, I think he’s just got a really good ping, and he’s catching Intis that are doing stupid stuff with their fittings that either drop their align or bump their scan res. At worst he might be using a click macro that lets him spam lock a bit faster.

And yeah, it is pretty dumb and depressing, but there’s also not a great way to fix it as things stand.

[Ganthrithor]

We made an effort to prevent traffic traveling through Delve to reach the FWST mega-battle yesterday. Here are some quick stats to help illustrate the problem with inties and today’s ship meta in general. Note that the system was very much locked down-- I think only one non-cloaking ship of any description made it through (a Sunesis which insta-warped when our dictor pilot tried to delay-bubble it). We had insta-lockers, dictors, and tons of tackle on one gate to catch anything with an align time over 2 seconds, and smartbombing BS at the other end of system to deal with travel fit ceptors:

Total Kills: 140
Pods: 44

Total Ships Destroyed (No pods): 96
Interceptors: 63

Total Ships Bigger than a Frigate: 24
Total Ships Bigger than a Destroyer: 17
Total Ships Bigger than a Cruiser: 1

These numbers are conservative: they exclude a fair number of ships that were able to evade both the gatecamp and the smartbombers. Apart from a handful of lucky bombers, one yacht (basically impossible to catch if fit correctly, although at least it’s a bit expensive and it’s totally useless for PvP), and a Sunesis who managed to catch our dictor off-guard, most of the surviving ships were travel inties who simply put in the tiniest amount of effort and warped to a celestial before warping to the out-gate (which anyone with any sense should’ve known was camped by smartbombing BS, as people had literally the whole day to report the information into intel channels or look at zkill). Even discounting the number of interceptors that made it through by bouncing, interceptors still represent a whopping 66% of ships killed. Only 18% of ships represented were bigger than a destroyer. Frigate and destroyer sized ships made up 82% of the dead traffic (again, since numerous inties escaped the actual percentage of ships flown through the system that day is even higher). Eighty-two percent. That’s staggering.

If you look at the region of Delve as a whole this past week, eight of the top-ten most flown ships are destroyers and smaller. The Ares, Malediction, and Stiletto are all in the top ten; hell: all three are also in the top five. Three-fifths of the top five ships flown are nullified interceptors. By comparison, there is only one interdictor-- a ship class that is almost universally useful in every kind of nullsec PvP-- anywhere in the top ten. Keep in mind that Delve is also a best-case scenario in terms of variety of ships fielded: it’s full of ratters, miners, and industrialists. It’s full of massive fleet battles-- one of the last areas of gameplay where larger combat ships actually see any use. Yet still, 30% of that top ships list is occupied by nullified ceptors. If you look at actual number of ship sorties, nullified ceptors make up 13,556 of the 43,391 total sorties by top-ten ships: 31%. That’s in a region that’s been seeing its other-than-interceptor numbers hugely inflated over what’s normal by the occurrence of strategic fleet fights with thousands of players flying bigger ships. You know what’s absolutely nowhere to be found on any relevant list? The interceptors that CCP took nullification off of.

To make matters worse, a number of the interceptors we killed were fitted with burst-jammers. So: nullified, insta-warping ships designed specifically to cause lag during major fleet engagements (even seen the most charitable light possible: un-catchable ships designed to flit around with impunity, breaking everybody’s locks in a TiDi environment where it takes fifteen minutes to lock a target in the first place, effectively making it an un-counterable form of ECM-- not exactly a good look for the game). There’s just no argument to be made that nullified, insta-warp inties, “Aren’t combat ships,” or, “Aren’t combat effective”: yes, some of the inties that were combat-fit weren’t insta-warp and got pointed. But a ton of the interceptors that insta-moonwalked past the gatecamp and blew up in our smartbombs were combat-capable. Many had tackle fitted. Some of them had burst jammers. The vast majority of them were clearly intended for combat use, one way or another. All in all, I still feel like this is a ship paradigm that wholeheartedly deserves to be shot in the back of the head. It’s not the only thing that needs to change (jump drive / bridge gameplay also needs to be kicked in the teeth), but it would be a good start.

[Bronson_Hughes]

@Ganthrithor

It’s all fun and games and a feature that’s working as intended until Goons do it at scale, right?

Dropping my 0.02 ISK in on this absolutely lovely conversation:

I would take that at high praise. It’s not that people are out to get Goons (I mean…they are, but that’s beside the point), it’s that Goons are so damned good at figuring out how to do things better than everyone else that if anyone is going to figure out how to do something that’s broken, they’re likely to do it and put it into a fleet doctrine.

Back to the topic at hand, summarizing my reply to a long and fruitful discussion (which a welcome change for PF&I):

I don’t see interdiction nullification as inherently broken. There are legitimate uses for it in combat.

I don’t see insta-warping ships as inherently broken either. Some ships are just meant to be that nimble and hard to catch.

But combine the two onto a single platform, especially one that is relatively inexpensive and can retain full combat capability? That’s an issue. I am not afraid to admit that I didn’t think it was an issue for a long time, but I’ve been out of null for quite a spell and after catching up with a few folks and getting a better feel for how Travelceptors are being used, I really do think that they’re broken.

(And yes, I’ve changed my position on this since I first posted in this thread back in August. Mea Culpa…)

[Ganthrithor]

Thank you! Appreciate the response

[Ganthrithor]

Posting for another day where 80% of the ships we see in space are Stilettos, Ares, and Maledictions, and both sides in the “big epic war” are routinely using fleet-ceptor gangs to conest sov because this ship meta is literally cancer.