At FanFest it was made clear that CCP was unhappy with Carrier and Super ratting. They feel it is too much. Changes are coming. I’ll add my two cents before said changes are announced.
There’s a very simple solution:
Change aggro tables on rats in existing anoms and put fighters at the top of the list, 100% of the time. If this is insufficient to wipe the floor with their fighters, give the battleships stasis grapplers.
Add new sites for carriers, and new sites for supers (where the rats aren’t going to decimate fighters).
In carrier sites, small ships would continue to have current aggro tables (frigs -> cruisers). BC and BS would all have heavy weapons on them… rage torps and the like. Stuff that will actually force carriers to fit something resembling tank (I mean, seriously, my ratting carrier uses 2 mods for tank and I never have any worry - I could probably get away with one mod). If carriers warp in outside of optimal, said battleships will “get a warp-in” and warp to zero on whoever they’re attacking.
In super sites, the the waves would all be capital ships (one or two dreads for example - I don’t super rat so I cannot say how much threat this would cause, but the idea is to make it far above the current zero risk). There’d be nothing to stop a super from running carrier sites, but the isk/h would and should be higher in the super sites.
These sites would be relatively uncommon, forcing large groups of players to take additional space to support their super ratters. I’m thinking that a -1 system should be able to support 5 carriers and 4 supers.
The advantages of this approach:
Granularity in the sites allows isk income to be balanced more finely.
Generates conflict as groups expand to appease their krabs
Has no significant impact on “normal” ratting, something CCP has not indicated they’re unhappy with
Thank you for the pointless comment. As I stated in literally the very first sentence, CCP has indicated they feel the ISK generation of carrier/super ratting is too high. That very specific statement is what this thread is to address.
What Arthur is implying is that it isn’t the ship itself that is necessarily the problem. It is simply the latest example of null-sec dwellers min/maxing ships to harvest obscene amounts of ISK.
If Carriers/Supercarriers are nerfed, people will go back to Vexor Navy Issues until they can find something better.
It would actually be smarter in the long run to address ratting as a concept in Null-sec rather than play “whack-a-mole” with various ship stats (with the risk of the latter potentially affecting the usability of said ships in other areas of the game).
And what I’m implying is that the concept of nullsec being an isk faucet cannot and should not be treated as a single topic. Carrier ratting is absolutely a problem. Reducing it reduces the problem. It doesn’t resolve it, but there is no “single fix” for the isk produced in null.
Trying to shut down the conversation with “it doesn’t fix everything so why bother” is a pointless comment. The problem is a sum of its parts, and this is a part that CCP has directly indicated they intend to change.
No, that would depend on VNIs becoming better than carriers. People will always use optimal ratting… you’d have to reduce carrier ratting to ~20 million isk ticks before they’d swap. Regardless, if they’re switching to VNIs you’ll see a reduced income as a super at this point in time can easily churn out billions of isk in a single ratting session. Goal accomplished, in a sense.
There’s nothing wrong with ratting as a concept. Ratting as a concept is just fine. It’s just balanced around a previous generation of Eve.
“Conventional” ratting (like in a rattlesnake for example) is perfectly balanced. VNIs are a problem because they can solo sites AFK, and capital ratting is a problem because it produces too much isk. Both are issues that should be directly targeted, without impacting the methods that are not broken.
I dare say that the addition of grapplers to battleships would break most VNI ratters. Invariably, waves will spawn within 20km of a VNI. A few battleships grappling you, your VNI is toast. The original post offers a very direct fix to deal with capital ships as well.
On the other hand, this is necessary since CCP focused all their development efforts on promoting and necessitating capital use (citadels, new ratting, camping, response fleets, etc). Somehow, you have to make the money to be able to afford them.
The idea is not original, though. Someone already suggested increased NPC aggro on fighters over time a while ago. That makes anom running a bit slower; it costs people more fighters, which increases industry and market activity (by extension more isk sunk in taxes); and it is very straining on the pilots as they need to pay attention to their fighters continuously.
I think I made a comment either here or in the new old forum (the topic was about isk not circulating but getting piled up in the pockets of the already rich, I think), in which I was questioning why exactly does Concord pay bounties in null.
My idea there was to split the bounty: Concord would pay maybe 50% of the current amount, and the sov holder could decide how much extra they want to pay. Better paying regions would attract more people, which could have 2 benefits: the sov holder can lure PvE people in and catch them, and the sov holder could pay PvE people to increase the defense multiplier.
Also enemies of the sov holder could send in people to drain their money and hopefully make them more vulnerable maybe.
Either way, the result should be less isk printing, and more optional content generation.
Carriers and dreads aren’t expensive. Supers and Titans were intended to be strategic assets, so a single player was never intended to finance them personally. Of course… the typical Eve happened and players started financing their own.
More the combination of aggression changes and new sites to funnel capitals into that makes it “more unique” (I won’t say nobody else had this idea because it feels like a very organic solution that others would also think of).
By adding new anoms for caps, not only can you control the bounties in those sites, but you can control the number of sites. It allows for less impact to areas that are not problematic.
As well, the loss of fighters is quite expensive. At the rate I’m talking about, you’d never break even. Then you need to consider the volume of fighters… they’re expensive to ship at most logistics rates, which means you’d only be promoting local industry - largely avoiding any impact to the economy as a whole (potentially even damaging it as fighter production increases in localized areas, reducing the need for many players to ship them from market hubs if they were previously doing so).
Killing fighters should be used to make existing sites sub-optimal. Not to reduce the overall income.
Which increases sunk ISK by taxes. It also puts miners at risk since the minerals for the fighter production needs to come from somewhere and tackled miners require response fleets, which in turn takes time away from the carrier ratting time (unless you are in Delve where every system has their own super cap umbrella anyway).
Not to mention that you do not have to lose fighters if you are good. I can tank entire Forlorn Hub waves with my carrier’s fighters just fine.
The isk lost to market taxes is trivial… the advantage to localized production is that you’re all in the same group most of the time. If taxes became significant, they’d just use contracts or direct trades to circumvent it.
As for the increased potential for rorquals to get tackled, that’s debatable. Miners will continue to mine as they have. You might get a few more if the price goes up, but I really doubt that we’ll turn the mineral market on its head enough to inspire waves of new miners. As we really wouldn’t see any increased number of miners, there would be no greater exposure than there already is.
Which is why my changes assure that being good has nothing to do with it… grapplers on battleships would web your fighters down and they’d get decimated regardless of how you pilot them.
I haven’t lost a fighter to rats in ages… last one I lost was while I was warping back to a fort when a neut entered pocket.
It wasn’t in the OP, but the addition of new sites for capitals opens up a new possibility… HICs. I’m not sure how often you personally roam null but I know that carrier ratters (such as myself) are always aligned out. The very second someone enters local, I enter warp and recall my fighters. Which is why you’ll NEVER tackle me.
A HIC (or group of HICs), on the other hand… that would be alarming. Tanky, and you’re tackled. Neut enters, neut has time to locate you and tackle you for the rest of the group to enter pocket and attack you.
Do you mean NPC HICs? At first I thought you meant capital anoms would speed up how fast people would warp to you, but that’s irrelevant since you’re aligned and warping out the moment someone comes in regardless of what they fly.
Also, specific anoms that make sense for different ship classes makes so much sense it’s surprising CCP hasn’t implemented it yet. +1
Yes and yes, actually. NPC HICs would certainly add an element of risk to carrier ratting, assuming they’re tanky enough to survive for a time.
The addition of new sites would also make it easier to hunt capitals too… all the more relevant with the addition of tackling mechanics such as HICs. Combined together, those two items will hopefully result in more dead capitals.
That is the kind of market stimulation I’d personally like to see. Fighters are small fries comparatively.
I think that if they pilot their fighters well enough they deserve the ticks they get. Besides the more carrier and super pilots have to focus on their fighters the easier it is to hunt and kill them( unless they’re in Delve ofc)
~2-3 seconds before your target dies, you select the next target and tell your fighter(s) to orbit it. That way the action is queued and happens slightly before or as the target dies, allowing your fighters to keep moving.
Doesn’t sound very hard, does it? That’s cause it’s not hard. I absolutely agree that rewards should be based on merit, but in this case, there’s really no merit for reward.
to be honest they already have since they are easier to multi box
as to the idea. want to nerf carrier ratting? put cyno inhibs in the site and disable warp of capitals if they have damaged an npc in one in the last 60s.
FWIW, whenever I’ve used a carrier for ratting, the fighters WERE the priority targets. Battleships getting grapplers arent the answer either. It’s just going to make carrier ratting untenable in the first place. Increasing the spawn counts, via increased numbers of cruisers and smaller ships, is more likely to have a more meaningful impact because those are the ship sizes that are legitimate threats to fighters.