I don’t know anything about T5s (I’m assuming that’s what you meant), but I can’t see fighting three devoted hunters in a frigate without manual piloting.
Probibly using a gila, the ship is just broken in so many ways that you dont need to even fly it.
The difficulty between solo cruiser and solo frig abyss is huge, was trying solo t4 dark’s today in a hawk and 2nd time in a stealth bomber got to the last room but ran out of time.
My friend that ran a Gila for awhile said you just approach can, the difficulty is knowing a good kill order.
I may have to buy a Gila one of these days. Lost two worms and two hawks in a short enough period of time to be losing way more isk than I was making.
Yea thing about the abyss is it is initially balanced around cruiser’s, they can’t change cruiser abyss without effecting frigs and visa versa. If you can multi box 3 accounts then 3 frigs is better for isk but if you only have 1 account cruiser seems to be easier and more rewarding.
Frig’s don’t have the dps to compete unless its a stealth bomber but then the application to frigs is a nightmare. Surviving is not actually too bad, especially if you abyss a faction mwd and get the sig bloom down.
I’d like to see a progression of obsolescence. Lemme sketch this out… and keep in mind, I’m just spitballing here.
So, right now we have T1, T2, T3, Precursor, Navy, and Pirate. Add 3 more categories: ‘Aging’, ‘Outdated’, and ‘Classic’.
Step 1: Skill Updating
- These are relatively quick trains, but they’re there for the vets. Those skills are basically ‘Renew Certification’ skills. Like how your IT guy, your doctor, etc., all need to keep up with developments in the field.
- They don’t need to be actual skillbooks, either, now that we’re moving to a ‘you get SP over time, and then devote the SP to skills’ model. All they’d need to be is 'ok, devote X SP to keeping your skills with [ship class]1 up to date.
- The impacted skills (ex: [Racial] Frigate, Marauders, Covert Ops) have a new hidden data field to show when they were first trained. This determines the base level of ‘certification’. When you renew your certs, it updates. Maybe have that as a ‘most recent certification’ field that starts with the original training date as well, so you can track them separately for things like the ‘Classic’ category. (Imagine, when ‘T1 frigates’ are what we’d currently think of as ‘T5 Frigates’, seeing someone flying around in a Rifter. It’d be like seeing a classic car on the road.)
Step 2: Obsolescence
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X months after the system is introduced (not after any given ship class is introduced), current T1 frigates moved from T1 to ‘Aging’. Current T2 frigates of various classes (AF, Interceptor, etc) get moved to ‘T1’. New ‘T2 frigates’ of various classes get introduced.
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Release / Reassignment date is tracked on ship types.
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Using these ships requires either having certifications on the relevant skills (ie: ‘Assault Frigates’, [Racial Frigate]) newer than the Release / Reassignment date, or having the skills that had applied.
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- Example: The Harpy. If obsolescence rendered the Harpy a ‘T1 Frigate’ on Dec 3rd, 2023, then you’d need to either have Caldari Frigate V + Assault Frigates (as needed now), or have trained / recertified on Caldari Frigates no earlier than Dec 3rd, 2023.
Larger ships would, for obvious reasons, have slower cycles of obsolescence, but follow basically the same pattern. Navy and Pirate hulls would need some finagling (like I said, this is just tossing it out there in a ‘I dunno, something like this’ form), or possibly their own set of categories, I dunno.
Was it? Because the ‘grind’ as you describe it (getting into caps) was literally ‘I have the isk to buy the skillbooks, and now I just wait’. Was that engaging, or was it the things you were doing and the people you were doing them with that kept you doing more than just throwing $$ at CCP for PLEX to turn into ISK and then skillbooks, and updating your queue?
Re: Bartles—I’m mostly an Explorer, and slightly a specialized form of Achiever. The irony in that is that as a director in one of the largest alliances in the game… I don’t like people. I mean, I have friends, obviously, but I’m pretty misanthropic in general. I prefer solo play in most games. RL friendships got me into EVE, and then got me into Null, because my friend said to me almost literally ‘we’re going out to null, and I need someone out there I trust watching my back’. From there, I befriended other people, and took on commitments to help make sure my friends had a good gameplay experience. Once that happened, I just… refuse to not honor my commitments. I really hate dealing with most people, and don’t really like to ‘join forces’ and do stuff co-operatively… but I took on responsibilities, and I’ll be damned if I won’t uphold them.
The Achiever type comes into play in the large battles. I don’t like being a face in the crowd. I don’t particularly like shooting people, either. So I fly logi. I lead logi. I’ve run logistics wings in the largest subcapital fights in the game. I’ve successfully guided my guys between four full hostile enemy fleets while keeping our DPS in range for reps. It’s a kind of achievement that takes advantage of the responsibilities I’ve got… but it’s not really social in any way, if that makes sense?
And yes, in a gila, because again… kinda anti-social. And let’s face it, the issue wasn’t ‘can you make PvE something active where you’re doing all this STUFF’ it’s that you don’t have to. The majority of human beings will always take the path of least resistance. If they can do it the easy way, they will.
1. Where [ship class] is things like ‘T1 Frigate’, ‘Heavy Assault Cruiser’, etc, not ‘Thorax’.
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I just wish thing’s where not balanced around the easy way thou, which for the abyss it obviously has :] accounting for how high of a dps you need to run it and how you need that downward high projection that super buffed medium drones bring. Kind of limit’s any creativity of ship fits.
Oof, my brain is almost off I don’t think I can take this in now ill try answer tomorrow xD
It’s not! Heh. That’s the funny part! It’s supposed to be balanced around ‘how do we make this active?’ except people found a way to make it easy. This is the problem of <100 developer brains vs >50,000 player brains.
Brute force will win.
Every tabletop RPG gamemaster has run into this problem. You can’t beat it. You can’t solve it. The players always have more physical brains to throw at a problem than you had designing it. So they’ll always come up with solutions you didn’t think of. And that’s for one-time scenarios. Make it a repeated scenario, where they can experiment and try to solve the same problem over and over, and they will always come up with not just an unexpected solution, but the optimal solution, eventually… and once someone does, that optimal solution will propagate.
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could always harvest the best brains and build a mechanical system where those brains analyse everything the players are doing, wait…
CCP has already done that, they have already added rise, swift, kestrel to the machine. xD
Actually I see what you mean about the training, yea that could be cool. So basically everything gets shorter to train over time.
Lol.
But the issue isn’t just one of ‘the best brains’. The other part of the problem is that the more you get those same players trying to solve the same problems, the more they iterate on one another’s improvements, then more and more… you’re training them to beat your design style. It’s a feedback loop where you start off outgunned and teach them as individuals to be better than you are… and then they work en masse again.
It’s why players can tell CCP what the second- and third-order effects of changes will be before the changes even get made. Some will be wrong, but if you look at the dats and weight it by past performance, you see the pattern of ‘these groups here know WTF’ emerge quickly.
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I’ve actually seen this in the latest abyss as well, everyone just running punishers with mini weaponry forgetting that hybrid’s are mini weaponry counters up close.
And everyone complaining that its punisher mini meta.
It was the skill train and everything that led up to it e.g. setting up new accounts, designing skill plans, grinding ISK to buy a set of cap component BPOs and researching them up, training reprocessing, building the account infrastructure to support flying caps and be able to replace them so training up and learning super ratting etc. My day 1 aspiration as a new player was to fly one into battle some day.
I have never once purchased PLEX and doubt I ever will. I subscribe my accounts, always have. I have purchased the odd skill injector, perhaps 5-10 in total across all 5 accounts over the years, minimal investment in them and all fed to my subcap main to meet skill requirements for doctrine qualification.
Far from being put off at how far “ahead” such vets were from me, it just incentivised me more to put in the effort to join them. I genuinely don’t hold negative emotions about vets in the same way as others, I know a lot of players feel entitled to near immediate parity, I fundamentally don’t get it, for me that diminishes the journey, if you can have it all quickly, where’s the sense of accomplishment?
I have very little motivation for social status hooks, whilst I wanted to fly my caps into battle with other players, my journey to flying them was strictly solo, I didn’t rely on anyone else for mining resources, reprocessing or building anything. My main social hook was more low level, chatting on comms or Netflix watchparties. I get a sense you might be more of a Socializer Bartle Type? Probably much of what I’m saying doesn’t really compute as your motivation lies elsewhere?
To give another example, I started playing Albion Online a couple of years after it launched. I was getting owned by players in T8 setups with the wealth and full indy specs to support that style of play. Far from campaigning to reach parity with them through a helping hand from SBI, I got to work and grinded the heck out of the game. In 1 year I managed to reach 3b silver, have fully mastered crafting specs that provide 1m silver per 1k focus (so 10m/day income to play around with) and all the key armour and weapon specs maxed including 700/700 daggers - all of that might be meaningless if you don’t play, but it’s a bit like a newbro grinding to a titan in Eve. I loved every second of it.
SBI recently increased max spec from 100 to 120, but with those 20 new spec levels taking more time and silver to complete than 1-100, which for me was a BRILLIANT change. Best thing they’ve ever done, overnight over double the amount of available content for my player type and I immediately set to work.
Albion Online and their design philosophy is spot-on for me, I wish CCP would learn a trick or two from SBI.
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Then you might want to re-read what I wrote. The thing I’m most likely to say on comms is telling everyone to STFU so we can have clear information flow in command comms. Watch parties? Ugh, no. I want to do my job and get done so I can get the hell off comms entirely.
As far as getting your ore etc from other people… that’s just called ‘efficiency’, man. I don’t need to chat with the guy I buy my ship from. Hell, I don’t even want to know who it is. I just want the tools I need, again, to do my job.
Here, for the sake of clarity, I just went and filled out the Bartle test. Any questions left blank are literally ‘neither of these options means anything to me at all, why should I care?’
Shockingly1, the Bartle test is full of its own biases. It makes assumptions that people find the choices offered to be significant.
1. Yes, this is sarcasm. 
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Very interesting…
Might be too hard on the old dusty grumpy vets. They have their Null space and they ain’t coming out.
Point is…it’s not just the stuff. All of space needs to be stirred. Buuut…that would result in alot of rage quitting.
…after 16 years you kicked me out of my system…
Yes, all of space needs to be stirred, but it can’t be done artificially. It has to be things that incentivize us to stir it ourselves.
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I have heard rumors that faction / pirate / navy ships will be turned into T2 ships from a skill and alpha vs. omega standpoint with these updates. Can anyone with authority confirm or deny that rumor?
I noticed…
Fair enough, why is it you like to mention your Goonswam roles in your forum posts or on INN out of interest? Seems to be a source of pride?
All we can do is provide our feedback about what engages us and then its over to CCP. I’d personally like more long term aspirational goals, preferably linked to pve.
Oh my, thank you for pointing out the sarcasm[1], but there’s really no need.
[1] Also sarcasm.
Like supernovas ?
Or like Drifters destroying our suns so the trig’s can’t gain energy from it. And planet’s /belt’s /stations drifting off into the darkness. (scorched earth tactics)
With the loss of these systems we might have to go rescue all our stuff from stations that are getting further apart from the gate’s and everything else AU wise over weeks/months.
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No thank you.
One of the things I like about Eve is it doesn’t have obsolescence. Obsolescence is just useless grinding for the sake of it. There are plenty of other ways to make new mountains to climb other than adding more time wasters and making items (or even whole areas of the game) useless over time.
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