So capital ratting makes too much isk, ccp has made this issue clear in dev blogs. Simple solution would to make carriers and super carriers do 1/2 to 1/3 damage to subcap npcs, but 100% damage to npc capital npcs and everything else.
And here I thought that NPC ships were inferior to capsuleer controlled ships. But apparently they can mitigate 50% of incoming capital DPS while capsuleer ships have to take on the full brunt of the DPS.
The problem that needs fixing is certain groups are making too much ratting with supercaps unballencing the game.
https://forums-archive.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=521682
and further screw up cap ships of already screwed up cap ships? you’ve never flew a cap ship before have you? if you did, you would know cap ships are now being used as bowling balls to bounce titan ships into a hole in one, that’s not a proper fix, i find it funny how ccp loves when we use real money to buy plex to get free isk in the billions, but if we get that same isk through playing the game, it needs a nerf, if it’s that big an issue, then they need to nerf the bounties and the number of rats per site, that’s how you can tell the original ccp team isn’t doing the balancing anymore, because they would have enough brains to figure simple things like that out in a hurry
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Your trying to solve a problem not brought up in the thread, this about balance the pve aspect of carriers not the pvp aspect your so bitter about.
no such thing as pvp balance that doesn’t affect pve balance moron, any way you look at it, one will affect the other
nerfing the ability to do damage to npc ships only will hardly affect its pvp capability. It mostly will hurt its ability to make isk per hour in a pve setting. much unlike the changes ccp has done so far, which has drastically affected both.
CCP doesn’t tend to like weird exceptions like this. It messes with player expectations, doesn’t feel very good, creates something un-intuitive, and messes with overall balance when creating other NPC content.
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Yay first constructive response here. I can see your point though i don’t think this exception would be so confusing.
I did think of another solution would be nerfing long range attack heavy fighter’s explosion radius and explosion speed, thus making it less effective for ratting. That affects pvp a lot too though. I would argue its a good choice however since the super-carriers role in pvp is primarily against other caps and structures, not sub-caps.
This doesn’t fix carriers per se, but I think the main issue is super-caps. They can make 60-100m ticks while most others players cannot, this partly enabled by standing fleets. I have no issue with standing fleets being powerful, like the goons standing fleet. They should enable the protection that they do. I just think that it should not enable them to make that much isk, and ccp seems to think so too as evident in the forums and changes.
Try looking at it from the perspective of a new player. Guns, drones, ect all deal X damage to everything. Damage is damage and it’s fixed across all ships and damage producing modules and effects.
Now you’re saying “oh, but not Carriers, they deal less damage to NPCs”.
Having spent a fair bit of time myself explaining the intricacies of Eve to newbies I imagine the following conversation would go something like this:
Newbies: “So Carriers just deal less damage to NPCs? Why?”
Explainer: “Because CCP says so.”
Newbie: Is there anything else like that in the game?"
E: “Nope!”
N: “That’s stupid…”
But the long-range fighters are primarily against subcaps not caps, so that’s still a pretty significant PvP nerf.
Also that’s only really going to affect Super Carriers, and while they’re certainly part of the issue they’re a much smaller part of it than Carriers are, since a Carrier is both cheaper and more accessible than a Super Carrier.
It’s not.
A Super Carrier can make 120m ticks, a Carrier will average around 60 with so-so skills and can get up towards 80m.
So, the actual solution here is to change the sites and the spawn behaviors similarly to how they work in Wormhole space. Have the rats respond to capitals with their own capitals or something. Not like the current dread spawns that are just a sort of “you should leave now” sign, but something that a Carrier ratter wants to kill, but it pays out in drops and/or takes long enough to kill that it drops the overall income from where it is right now.
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Make the NSA disable warp and jump drives. They keep their ticks (maybe slightly lower due to the inability to warp to the next site immediately if their NSA cycle is not yet over), which are worth the accompanied increase in risk.
At 30bil, a super making 240m ticks needs to rat for roughly 40 hours (40 hours of active use) just to pay it off; if it self-tackles, 40 hours is a looooong time to be out in space.
The problematic areas and groups (looking at the Goons here) still have massive standing/response/flash fleets that can protect them, but that should be addressed separately if at all.
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Even a drop that maintains the current income might not be too bad, depending on what we are talking about and how it works. After all, a drop won’t create new ISK.
First off, the NSA doesn’t need to be left on after you make the initial locks, making this a sorta questionable solution in general.
Second, as I’ve pointed out before, increasing the risk of Carrier ratting doesn’t actually solve the problem unless the increase in risk is enough to massively discourage Carrier ratting in general, and such a change seems unlikely. If you just increase the risk then the ISK faucet remains and therefore the problem remains. Causing more stuff to go boom in the pursuit of that ISK doesn’t actually make the ISK not enter the economy.
Yeah, though personally I hope CCP move forward on making end-game Null content more group oriented.
It does have a 60 second cycle time, with no early deactivation. That’s enough to see many players in null not use marauders.
Combine that with the fact that they’re probably running the site in less than 5 minutes. If there are just 5 waves per site (pretty sure there are more) they will need to leave it on to keep locking fresh spawns. I’m sure certain sites with a bit of practice they could kill trigger spawns, but I know the hordes in my neck of the woods are all “last of the wave” triggers, save for the first wave.
While I’m sure there are lots of people who can “just shrug and buy another one”, I personally know a great many who had to scrape to get everything for the hull and fit. If they lost it, they’d spend several months at least scraping to get another one together. That’s time they’re not super ratting.
With carrier hunting groups finding more to kill, more players will be quite simply unable to rat in supers after they’ve lost theirs. For those who can, you can bet they’ll (hopefully) be a lot more careful with the next… which means ratting only during their corp’s primetime or smaller ticks (more of a pvp fit).
Hunting supers is most definitely a group effort 
just sayin’.
The people exploiting super-carrier ratting are those who are in certain large coalitions with standing drop fleets, so they don’t need to warp off. They can get rescued by 20 supers and 10 carriers instead. A good example is the rorq, its incredibly risky to mine with for most people but if your in a coalition like the goons, you can get away with it since you got a large drop fleet on your side.
I don’t think the security from a drop fleet is a bad for the game, I think that the ability for one player with one acount to be able to make 120m ticks because of the drop fleet is bad for the game.
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I would argue that with the recent proliferation of capitals and supercapitals, even smaller coalitions and alliances are capable of dropping 20 supers, especially since they generally occupy much less space and can thus focus their power projection within a single jump. Like my alliance. We’re a drop on the bucket relative to the Goons, but I will say that 20 supers is exceptionally far from a full escalation for us. (For all the people who keep giving me ■■■■about posting on my market alt, I can say stuff like this without violating opsec!)
Of course, it’s the places like Delve where the economy is getting slowly tortured to death. The smaller groups aren’t really a problem.
So, the real question is how do you change whale hunting in such a manner that nerfs rapid response. Ideally without further nerfing power projection (kind of a contradiction, but it would be nice - fatigue is enough).
I saw a suggestion for a cyno inhib on Blops BBs, that would help, but it would still be easy for them to light a cyno long before they get theirs inhib’d.
I have to imagine that a group like bombers bar would have a field day in goons space. 100 bombers, a bunch of blops BBs, and no way for goons to jump in a rescue fleet. Most of those ratting supers would get melted long before a subcap fleet could arrive.
Yeah, but Bastion also disallows movement and a Bastion’d Marauder doesn’t pull in near the value a ratting Carrier does while having something more expensive and less insurable on field.
Stuff like this tends to be pretty feast or famine too. It’s either entirely too much danger or a functionally trivial amount, with very little middle ground for most players. The first threshold tends to be too much for normal players, trivial amounts for bloc players. After that it’s too much for everyone and basically no one touches the whole thing.
You seem to be conflating Carriers and Supers here. Carriers are cheap and easy to replace, it takes about 8-10 hours of Carrier ratting to replace the cost of a Carrier. Less with insurance.
Carrier ratting is where the majority of ISK is coming from here, not super Ratting. Super ratting is certainly more profitable, but Carriers are far more accessible, and most of the people using Supers are going to be doing so under the protective blanket of intel and a standing fleet and therefore won’t be much affected by a change to NSAs and warping.
Not what I meant and you know it.
A typical marauder is half the price of a typical carrier. If carriers started self-tackling the same as marauders you’d probably see more people mitigate their exposure to risk by flying in a cheaper ship. By increasing the risk of carriers, you make marauders look more attractive, which puts more people in them. Honestly, if I have a choice I’d rather drop on a solo carrier over a marauder anyways - waaay easier to defang a carrier than a golem lol. Problem is, you can’t catch the damn things without some kind of shenanigans (logoff tricks etc).
Do you have statistics for this? Genuine ask, I was always of the belief that it was super carriers which were the “problem”. While regular carriers are indeed a significant isk faucet, I always thought supers were the firehose of isk faucets. Other than heavy fighters, what other skills are needed to get into a super after a carrier?
I acknowledge this as a problem, though view it as a separate problem from carriers themselves (people can and do rat in titans for example). While I believe teamwork should result in collective gain, there should be upper limits to the inherent safety of a dozen supers and 50 faxes within a jump of you… and that the current level of safety exceeds those limits. I posted a separate thread on something which would all but eliminate that as a problem when hunting those bigger groups.
EDIT:
Yes, that would be good. Have some anomalies in various systems that can only be run by people in fleets. Could also help address another issue that will rename nameless to prevent the whiners from showing up here.
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The base hull on a Marauder is as expensive or more so than a Carrier hull, especially at the internal prices a lot of Alliances sell the things at. Plus the Marauder needs a more expensive fit to be even close to worth that high initial investment where as a basic Carrier ratting fit can run as little as another 1-200m or so. On top of that the Carrier hull returns a large percentage of its value on a loss with full Insurance while the Marauder is barely worth insuring at all.
Even with the recent cost increases a Pirate Battleship is still the more attractive option between that and a Marauder for Null ratting.
No hard stats beyond what we already have from CCP on the subject, plus a little knowledge of who is running what out in Null but I can’t exactly cite word of mouth here. I can say with some certainty though that a Super is something like 50% better than a Carrier on average while being something like 20 times more expensive, and the vast majority of people I know are Carrier ratting, not Super ratting.
Logically, given those base numbers and the fact that most of CCP’s nerfs have been focused on Carriers rather than Super Carriers, we can pretty safely conclude that Carriers are the issue, not Supers or Titans, at least in broad economic terms.
Personally I disagree with this pretty much on principle. Not so much because I disagree with the base idea but because anything that actually effectively caps the effects of this kind of teamwork on the game has almost certainly done so in a horrible and kludge way that lands more heavily on the smaller groups than on the larger ones.
If at any point Eve becomes a game where there’s an actual effective cap on what teamwork, planning, preparing, and scheming can get you it’s no longer a game I want to play.