I am addressing here recent ship balance changes. Part of them were caused by the fact, that null sec semi-afk PvE in some ships let produce large amount of ISK, cripping EVE economy.
So PvP capabilities of carrirers, VNI and Gila hulls were nerfed.
All those have one common feature: null sec NPC are too dump to effectively destroy fighters or drones.
What do you think about upgrading null sec NPC anti-fighter / drones abilities instead of nerfing player ships? I know there was already upgrade like that in the past. And it caused many salt in carrier pilots, yes, but apparently it was not strong enough cause bot carrier or VNI ratting is still a thing.
I do not believe, that supposed nerfs will really help getting economy back to human players. But the change of null sec NPC behavior against drones to much closer to Abyss NPC behavior(drones are webbed and primaried by dedicated NPC teams) can help , IMHO.
One downside to that is that it would effectively rule drones out as a PvE weapon type, which would be unfortunate. Nobody would continue using drones for missions or anom ratting if they were attacked in the same way they are in abyssal.
Abyssal is different in that you have to kill a relatively small amount of rats for a much larger reward. Mission/anom ratting depends on killing a huge amount of low-value rats, which wouldnât be maintainable if you lost a drone per every wave.
To be fair, PVP carriers were specifically targeted by the announced changes, not just as a side-effect of the PVE changes. The NSA nerf will be just as welcome a change (if not more) in PVP as it will be in PVE.
These things existed long before Abyss space. The are called standard NPC. Forlorn Hubs and Gas Havens (any forlorn and hidden anoms, basically) have a very nasty tendency to go for your drones/fighters instead of your ship. Whole waves do that. And in addition triggers are harder to pull because they are not the last ship dying but another specific ship class being completely removed from the field, which can trigger new waves early. In Forlorn Hubs in particular not just elite NPC go for your drones/fighters but whole waves. Forsaken anoms sometimes have this, too, but normally itâs just easily disposed of elite NPC.
This is all already there. And I suggested in the past that this should be standard behavior for all anoms. It would also be considered to create challenges for too much success by ramping up NPC aggro, HP and damage depending on how many anoms you complete in a tick. If you complete 3 anoms within the same tick, the next anom will start to go ballistic on your drones/fighters. If you keep finishing 3 anoms per tick, the NPC aggro and ship HP will keep increasing. That would limit incompetent people from easy farming, and create a challenging environment for more competent people. Just like Abyss space, but in normal K-space and without any excessive coding magic as the code is already there and actively used in Forlorn Hubs et al.
The only coding magic that I would introduce are low bounty mass dread spawns when a titan is present in an anomaly. If the titan keeps finishing more than 3 anoms per tick, 10 or 15 dreads with 5M bounty spawn on them, heavy tackle them and pound on them.
I doubt thatâs what would happen. At least not when it comes to ratting. As it is, drone cruisers like VNIs and Ishtars have kind of crap DPS compared to more active setups like Rattlesnakes and other missile based battleships (Raven and Typhoon spring to mind.) A constant need to pull/deploy drones would make that even worse, and when you factor in that it would require 100% attention to even work there is literally no reason why youâd ever use that method of ratting.
The major attraction of VNIs/Ishtars is the low input requirement. You can easily multi-box several of them, or play one while watching Netflix or whatever. If that gets removed and you can no longer semi-AFK the thing, you may as well just abandon the concept and go for a ship with better income potential.
Thatâs a pretty bad comparison, tho. The difference between PVP and PVE in EVE is so great you may as well be talking about two different games. The way you use drones and fighters in those two areas isnât really comparable.
Abyssal space may be the exception there, because those rats play smarter than the average NPC. But then in Abyssal space you have to eliminate relatively few rats for a high reward. Youâd have to vastly increase NPC bounties, along with their intelligence, in anoms to make that equation add up there.
Multiboxing is just a fact of life in EVE at this point. Supporting it or not supporting it isnât really a question anymore.
You can argue that running multiple VNIs is somehow âworseâ than other forms of multiboxing, but I donât really see the difference. Iâve used alts to VNI rat on several accounts at once, as part of a Dominix sentry drone swarm, as a mining fleet, and as scouts/backup while I carrier rat. At the end of the day the end result is always more or less the same.
I think it would be good for the game if the game didnât support easy low-input multiboxing.
Sure, teaming up with people will always have a benefit over solo play, which means that multiboxing has that benefit as well. But if playing each single character in such a group required enough thoughts and actions to keep a normal person busy, weâd see fewer afk ratting multiboxers.
We can make npcâs more effective against drones to make this kind of ratting less effective. And that way we donât have to nerf certain ships into the ground pvp wise.
I agree. There are already a plethora of scenarios how to make rats more dangerous and they works well. IDK why CCP DEVs donât change the RNG ratio of spawned adds, to add some elite things there, to make the game harder not only for possible bots, but for players also. I do not remember since when, I donât like the acronym ânerfâ. It has nothing to do with rebalancing things, but to completely broke some strong or OP things.
we must destroy drone ships!!1 we must destroy other peoples play styles that do play to strike at botters!!1
or you know we can limit accounts in a way that actually works (But but but ccps moneies!) they talked about it anyways a few years ago before deleting it from the blog
Also no we dont, i cant even deploy drones without anything itâs size category going for it, even after scooping and dropping 10-15 times. ive set all of my ships now to run without the use of combat drones.
also if you make npcs really go after drones im sure there will be a great null sec uprising. maybe itll result in all the nul secs returning to empire to right by murdering everyone everywhere.
All these arguments For and Against whether multiboxing is ruining the gameâŚ
And yet, the developers themselves authorize multiboxing (as long as theyâre getting paid that Omega money). And they even remade the Launcher after a while, to facilitate launching multiple accounts at once. If they didnât want people multiboxing, they wouldnât have given you the tools to do it even easier.
If you allow multiboxing, then of course people are going to figure out ways to simplify interaction so they can maximize productivity. Iâm not saying Bots are a good thing by any stretch of the imagination. But they were a natural evolution from CCP saying âSure, go ahead and play with yourself as much as you want. As long as weâre getting paid, and nobody complains too loudly about it, weâll just look the other way.â
Thatâs why they occasionally punish a couple of bots once in a while to keep up appearances. Meanwhile, you see posts out there with a FLEET of ships all named âMinerBob01â and âMinerBob02â and âMinerBob42â. And even when you see the posts about how MinerBob accidentally spammed Local chat 50 times with the same sentence b/c his input broadcast crapped out, they donât do anything to stop it. Theyâre getting paid 50 Omega accounts a month from MinerBobâŚ
