You can already travel gate to gate with it. It’s just generally not a particularly good idea.
Why should it be convenient to use such a powerful ship?
This is an MMO, the requirement to be two or more people when using the most powerful ships in the game seems reasonable.
They should be removing cynos from the game completely. The reasons for their existence are no longer substantiated. It’s enough to have an ansiblex project a fleet on to a receiving titan or BLOPs. Cynos are miserable game design and rooted in fixing problems created by changes to mechanics that have since been reverted.
So no caps in low sec then? No JFs? No Rorquals or BLOPs? Just screw low sec and all the content it’s been generating?
Take gates like everyone else. The freighter lanes have gone almost completely unmolested for 20 years, force projection allowing groups like SC, LSH and Snuff to totally stagnate lowsec for decades. The entire point of jump fatigue was to slow down projection, a compromise because they knew that removing cynos would cause too much drama.
But that was 10 years ago. Many of those affected don’t even play any more. We could go one step further and break the welfare chain of lowsec alt blocs funneling metenox ore back in to their nullsec alliances in a perverse closed loop that has caused sustained downward pressure on every single mineral and moon goo while speculative assets like PLEX have grown in price (when viewed over all, they’re still much more expensive than 10 years ago) because when you can’t make money off real production, you turn to speculation.
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I’m definitely not for this, but then you think I’m part of the problem, so we can expect that.
I get what you are saying about Force Projection, and Bridging certainly does massively increase that. But what would you do with Blops, give them covops cloaks? and what about carriers or the new command carriers, which are really just conduiting machines, what role would you give them?
Or are you just going to rip them all out and give us nothing?
All that sounds a way to just bleed players and lose income for FC. I’m in a small corp and what you are proposing would also hurt what we do. Larger groups would just camp and block access, you would have us have no counter to getting around that.
You don’t think that a blackops battleship already has enough advantages? Why do you think they were made in the first place? To justify a use for covops cynos, which were made to justify the artificial need for some way to headshot capitals, which was justified by the artificial need to have some way of moving capitals without support fleets, which was justified by the artificial restraint on them taking gates, which was justified by the artificial need to stop caps moving through the world and proliferating too quickly, which was justified by the artificial threat they posed in the very early days of the game when most corps were too small and disorganized to make a capital, which was justified by the assumption that these ships were going to be rare and overpowering.
The entire house of cards has already started unraveling because caps can take gates again. They’re still banned from highsec and carriers are now much less effective at running missions.
As for command carriers, can they not just be more competent or have unique command bursts? No, apparently not.
No, if I have to take gates, I’ll take a real battleship, why would I nerf my dps and ewar output if it wasn’t for the ability to do the “Suddenly Spaceships” thing?
Because you get to cloak without targeting delay?
While that might be handy in some situations, it doesn’t match the power of projection, or the power of more tank and more gank, which is the current power of Blops and the power of non-blops BS.
Your entire argument is that cynos need to exist because their existence is self-justifying? Were you even playing the game when the jump changes were initially announced? You got the watered down version, originally jumping twice in the same day was going to hurt, a lot. Cynos are a well known problem, are at odds with the games basic design principles. They don’t need to exist anymore, trying to say they’re a valid gameplay style because redundant design priorities from 20 years ago, which have been rendered obsolete, introduced a couple of items and ships uniquely to benefit from them is quite literally chicken and egg circuitous reasoning that requires cynos to exist because there are ships that can use them. Instead of changing the ships, we get stuck with cynos because institutionally invested entities and lazy entitled jump freighter pilots want to move things around in almost complete safety.
The game is receeding, this is a fact, getting rid of some convenience to spark more dynamic relationships between players and game mechanics is not something that gets discussed often enough. Even citadels had a hurdle thrust upon them with the upwell cores because they were a problem. Cynos can get retired from the game, the borders of big groups can shrink to more realistic sizes and freighters will need to negotiate protection from either their own people or the owners of the lands they move through. The economic stagnation of the game can be reversed.
I wasn’t playing the game before cynos existed (2006 if the AI overlords are right), but I was before jump fatigue did.
I play the game with a group who use BLOPS a lot, and whilst the ability to project power over a large volume of space is part of the reason, there’s a lot of fights/kills we get where if we gated to the target it would dock up before we got there. So I think removing cynos (and jump drives/bridges) from the game would detrimentally affect the amount of content we can have.
So my question still is, if you are going to remove this mechanic from the game, and these ships, what will we get instead to provide us with the content which is being stolen?
?
If you can’t get “content” without cynojumping on someone from lightyears away, you should try out non-hotdropping combat. You know, where you have to actually show some skill in baiting and escalating slowly to make sure your initial squad stays alive but your opponents don’t extract too early… and then using the geography to your advantage like estimating warp times and angles, placing delay bubbles on the path of possible opponents reinforcements etc. etc…
I actually did play at a time when (effective) hotdropping wasn’t a thing in small- to medscale warfare and almost exclusively used to move Capitals around or reinforce big structure fights - and it was a far better gaming experience. Hotdropping kills probably much more content than it generates, because you never see all the fights that didn’t happen because people just don’t undock and roam any more if the local big landlord has his BLOPs fleet online and the Cynorecons lurking around.
But tbh, I don’t care any more. CCP/FC has been told about that cyno cancer for decades. But every change and nerf is half-hearted to prevent a shitstorm from the big blob groups that can’t imagine any more that classic tactical warfare is even possible.
You seem to misunderstand.
I am not arguing that hotdropping content is better than other content, or that EvE is better with it than without. I have never played EvE without hotdropping so I cannot have an informed opinion on that matter.
What I am asking is what use is a carrier which cannot conduit, what use is a Titan but as a bridger? Why would you fly fleets of BLOPS if they couldn’t hotdrop?
Or to put it another way, what should these ships be able to do if we take away their fundamental role now?
What they did when they were first implemented. Today they are just convenient “insta-escalation tools” for the bigger groups, totally violating a fundamental gameplay principle. More power / bigger size always needs to come along with lesser agility / mobility / flexibility.
Capital ships main purpose shall be capital warfare, structure warfare and regional warfare (I am explicitly not calling it “sov warfare” because in Lowsec there is no game-supported “Sovereignty”). And to a degree, special endgame-NPC content, like HighClass WHs or Incursions, FOBs, CRABs whatever.
So, if the enemy is using Capitals (usually in some immobility mode to be effective) against your structures or to hold a strategic position like reinforcing a gatecamp with a FAX, that a scenario you use your own Capitals against him. If he challenges your space, use your capitals to defend them. If you invade a heavily fortified area to take it over against overwhelming resistance, you use Capitals and Supercap to break that opposition or establish footholds.
But they should be unable to jump within ~10 seconds into a small- or medscale subcapital battle and even take dozens of other subcaps with them to completely obliterate the grid. That is ruining fights and actually turning skilled ongrid combat into a pure “escalation game” of who-can-bring-more-through-the-cyno.
And they should also unable to create an insta-umbrella over a whole region to threaten anyone who dares to set a foot into there to actually do something. If a larger group has problems defending border constellatiosn against roaming skirmishers, well, either strengten local defenses and not just rent out space to carebears that can’t/won’t fight on their own or shrink their space to a size they can defend with a moving subcap fleet on demand. If it’s more jumps, yeah, use lighter ships. Thats what HACs are for. The Roman Legion didn’t teleport Siege Turrets and Ballistas into every border skirmish. Thats just nonsene gameplay.
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You talk about capitals, which is a generalisation, and ignore the BLOPS.
In a non-bridging game I can see a use for Dreadnoughts and Battleships, but not carriers or BLOPS.
Why would anyone use these specific craft if there was no cynos/bridging?
Where did you read that I would want to competely remove Cynos? BlackOps should be used to get deep into hostile terretory without being stopped by camps or noticed by scouts early. And quickly get out once a response gets too harsh.
That doesn’t mean they need to instajump, instalock after doing it and bringing dozens of DPS, EWAR, Logi and Neut T3Cs with them. It’s just too much, too quickly. With more delay and more limitations in what/how you transport other Covert ships you would still be able to ambush a Mining Operation, a Ratting Marauder or Capital or rob some Skyhooks/ESS and get out before the opponents can react.
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Sorry I appear to have got you confused with Caleb somewhat.
So what are you saying about Cynos?
Fewer ships can light them? you can’t light them on grid with enemies? you have some kind of targeting timer so the crab has time to exit siege and warp off?
I am saying that Cynos have a purpose in the game to
- move around Capital and Supercapital fleets strategically. For example in preparation of a defense or conquest. That is not directly a combat purpose, but military logistic.
- reinforce BIG battles tactically. Aka countering enemy Capitals on grid, reinforcing a blockade on a strategical postion like a gate, defending own stations or sieging hostile stations.
They should explicitly not be able to instantly jump into a small-or med-scale fight and escalate it, there has to be a delay (aka spool-up timer) for JumpDrives (similar to MJDs and MJFGs on grid) that makes sure you will not kill very much this way, because the other gang will simply warp off and show you the finger for being an asshole blobbing a small/medium fight with Capitals. This is btw. exactly as it was pre 2010, and it was very well balanced and allowed LowSec to be a smallscale Piracy Paradise instead of a barren Hotdropland™, dominated by big Blobgroups.
A Capital in Siege is fixed for 5 minutes, so on average he will have 2.5minutes left once you encounter him. Do you really believe I would suggest a 6 minute targeting timer so he can safely warp off? I mean, we cannot have a honest discussion if this is what you assume out of my words. The targeting delay timer would of course be just similar to the one using a cloaking device. Which is 10, 5 or 0 seconds depending on the ship. It would literally make zero difference when Ambushing a Capital, an Orca or even a Ratting Marauder.
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