f13.net

Just thought a thread about Supercaps, their neded nerfs and other things that need to be fixed in Eve might be fun, especially since it wont polute the war thread. Especially since we have about as much chance of getting them as a pony.

I'll start with some idea on the supercap situation

Starting with supers, the problem is that they are far too difficult to kill and their toughness grows exponantially to their numbers. With Supercarriers each one is a logistigs ship, and with titans they have the abily to instantly remove thei number of their opposition instantly every 10 minutes.

Even more seriously they have reduced "roaming games" to a few guys flying around in cloakers and is one of them spots something the whole gang can be on top of it instantly with their full power in a perfect position. with an ordinary roaming game they have to travel normally through gates, they can be spotted, and they can only be in one place at a time. With supers you can literally have the rest of the gang sitting at a pos playing world of tanks and only 5 guys need to be actually playing eve to cover an entire region with threat.

I read somewhere that CCPs design document said that 5 frigs should be able to kill a carrier to make it fair. We all know how much a laugh that is. But to fix them you would need to have something like that, to have small ships remove a supercap gangs capability to fight. Granted this is the company that designed titans with the idea that they could be taken out by 7 nanofit minmatar dreadnaughts equipped with capital Nosferatus.

Other ranting and bitching and wishing for the sky is welcome.

Personally I'd prefer to see some smaller ship types dedicated to shooting at bigger ships.   Like a battlecruiser able to fit a titan laser or whatever.   That's my pie in the sky idea anyways.

Nerf jump bridges, that will somehow reduce force projection.

Anyway who cares about supercaps when we can walk around a sofa.

Just do the World of Warcraft solution.  Release an expansion that makes everything released prior completely obsolete. 

I can't even figure how you'd translate that concept to EvE.   It would have to be something like releasing T3 battleships and putting in L6 missions in empire.   Of course watching the user base implode would be amusing.

What? CCP do this all the time.

See also : Battlecruisers, HACs, Command Ships, Dreadnoughts, T3s, Post Seleene Supercarriers and Titans.

Not seeing any ponies. This thread underdelivers worse than Incarna.

What?  How do those things represent a money/skill point wipe?

I believe it represents "release that makes everything released prior completely obsolete". Even WoW expansions don't wipe out characters' levels and money so not sure where that expectation comes from.

Supercarriers isn't the major problem. Lag kills off their efficiency heavily, and smartbombing strips them of their dps, leaving them ... stranded. Titans are a much bigger problem as they can doomsday ships every 10 minutes and they can one/two volley battleships etc if they're setup for this.

The main problem with supers is that they're basically essential in SOV warfare today because of the massive EHP of structures, but if you haven't got more of them than the other guy, you will most likely lose the fight. And once you lose the fight, and you've lost enough of your supers, you stop fighting back, which again means you get steamrolled.

I've seen this happen in nearly every war the past 18 months, a few major battles with supers, replaced with months of structure grinding. There hasn't even been a hint of the old type of warfare where you have to grind down an enemy, and that saddens me. The problem with this is, trying to reason with PL is mostly met with "well, get/build more supers then" and "the current SOV system is better than the old", except it isn't in virtually every way.

Also, you remember the horrible POS grind that supposedly got removed with Dominion?

WELL IT DIDN'T FUCKING GO AWAY.

You still have to kill the fucking POS littering any space you take, because all those fucking POS are still orbiting all your new moons even if you took sov. All dominion did was add additional space junk you have to shoot at for 20 minutes at a time before you move onto POS shots.

Not to mention shit like tech moons fights and CSAAs, I can't count the number of times post-Dominion I've heard an FC (ok, I mean DBRB) tell us 'we're doing something fun in a minute!' and it turns out, every single fucking time, we're shooting some of these POS that apparently no longer feature in sov warfare. EVE Online more like shoot some POS Online amirite.

(http://i.imgur.com/l2701l.jpg)

It's just the context of the conversation so far.

Sir T: Talk about how to fix OP supercaps
Slog:  Wipe everyone's  existing advantages and release new bigger ships like a WoW expansion.
Me: I'm not even sure how you'd do that in EvE blah blah.
eldaec: What? CCP already does that all the time!
Me:  :facepalm:

Thank you, kind sir. fucking saved.

Well in real-world equivalent are aircraft carriers. How do you fight them? You have carrier-busting rockets that are lousy at anything but hitting Very Large Targets. In turn if you have carriers and want to use them, you have to go in with something else first and neutralize carrier-busters.

As to solutions:

-Decay on larger ships, you have about a month 'service life' then it starts accumulating "cascading failures" debuffs that are progressively more expensive to 'maintenance' remove. This way not only producing, but actually "having" these kind of ships is Fucking Expensive. This way fielding more supercaps is not always better, especially if you can't afford them in a long run.

- Create anti-cap weapons.  Call it binary blackhole generator, where you can temporarily create an immobile blackhole that sucks nearby ships in. Larger the ship, further away it has to be to not get pulled in.. but it works on all ships in the area. These black holes should take time to create and could be only deployed in advance to create "don't supercap on me" defensive zones.

Would be awesome to be a supercap pilot who went on a few months' vacation from EVE, only to come back to either an empty (or negative) wallet or a dead ship.

No, if they're going to do anything to the cost of supercaps, it would have to be moving them about.

Currently that's called a "cynojammer". If it'd be a new module, it would have to be destroyable or all of 0.0 would turn into "don't supercap on me" systems.

So there are two issues with these ships?

1) They have been allowed to blob and were never designed to be fought against when blobbed. Ships that were designed to be very hard for subcaps to kill if they were a single supercap supported by a subcap fleet become unkillable when remote repping in SC blobs.

2) They are very rarely lost.

Perhaps the solution is to make it strategically worth spending supercaps to gain space. At the moment you can gain space without spending them if you have enough of them.

Now it's worth spending supercaps if otherwise you would lose that space anyway and with it the ability to field supercaps. If you can't get them out you might as well have them die fighting.

However when NC lost to NC. it wasn't worth spending supercaps as they wouldn't have done noticeable damage.

So we need supercaps to become vulnerable to other supercap and subcap fleets. Inferior fleets. Perhaps remove or nerf the ability of supercaps to rep each other. So if 50 supercaps attack 20 you will lose a few rather than losing zero.

A more general issue is blobbing. Blobbing is encouraged by space being very hard to conquer and jump bridge networks. You don't lose space if you keep towers stronted and defend anything going into reinforced, right? This means that if you have a powerful ship blob you're not worth attack as the blob could turn up to defend any structure put into reinforced. It should be slower and more dangerous to move blobs.

Another issue is the ability of alliances like PL to dominate the sov space game without holding sov space. That seems broken, you should be open to attack if you're such a major force. Possibly the remote rep nerf I suggested might fix this - if more SCs blew up then PL would need a greater supply but everyone else would have less spare.

What? Jump bridges? Really? Are you really going to say that jumpbridges encourage blobbing?

Ask the NC how "a powerful ship blob" worked out in their last stand under an unimportant jammer system. Numbers don't matter if you suck complete donkey cock at tactics, and park your titans on the gate. For example.

He's got a point, everyone knows that jump bridges make the NC impossible to destroy. Well, everyone on the message boards who's never set foot in nulsec.

Any defender can reach anywhere in even a large empire in less than an hour. If it took, say, five hours to get from one end of the old NC space to another end someone owning the space might be more inclined to spread their military assets. As it stands everywhere, through a combination of jump bridges and cynos, is a chokepoint where a side can concentrate its entire force at short notice. This discourages combat because people won't want to risk losing a fleet to an entire enemy supercap blob.



As I said you don't lose space if you keep your towers stronted and defend. If you defend. If you DEFEND. Getting your titans blown up stupidly is not defending.

Anyway the short version is this: the fix for Supercaps is higher attrition. Industrialists and miners want more of them blown up because of profits. People who pvp in subcaps want the prospect of blowing some of them up even in a pyrrhic victory rather than simply being irrelevant. And possibly even people who own Supercaps want good fights rather than the chess like manoeuvring game they are mostly being used for.


People who are getting their arses kicked in nullsec should go easy on the random put-downs. If you were as pro as you think you are you wouldn't be losing. You would also be able to spell the word.

I don't really see a point to bringing up blobbing.  Blobbing is just too big a topic and CCP has worked on that for years.   Speaking as someone who admits he has no clue about facing a supercap fleet though I'm curious about some things.   What are the sailent points about why a super huge (like 500+ or whatever) normal fleet can't take them out?   Is it lack of damage vs repping or just that the super carriers do to much damage to normal ships so the normal fleet gets blown to pieces too fast?

Uh you better check who's winning practically all the subcap engagements before you throw out silly comments like that


CCPs solution to bblobbing were Titans and remote doomsdays. How did that work out?

This makes zero sense. As of a couple of months ago, nothing with a jump drive except for Blackops ships can use jump gates. How therefore do they contribute to discouraging combat through the threat of a supercap hotdrop?

Alliances already 'spread out military assets' through encouraging their members to have multiple caches of ships in geographically remote areas. The main military asset of an alliance - active PvP players - however aren't typically spread out and wouldn't be even if jump bridges never existed. Even if they were, jumpclones make it possible to base a long way from the front lines as long as you have ships available closer to the action - which alliances typically do regardless of jump bridge availability. Trying to get a large fleet down a long JB pipe is a logistical nightmare, most forward bases are close enough to the action to avoid needing to make multiple jumps before a fight. The main advantage of jump bridges isn't in force projection but in bulk logistics.

Um. I'm going to go right out and say this, but you're wrong.

Most objectives we've been deployed to the past few weeks have been within 30 jumps. If we're told to burn, we'll spend maybe half an hour going there. If we take JBs we'll spend maybe 10-15 minutes, and GSOL are slitting their wrists. If we're fighting a bit away from the main capital, guess what, we stage out of a system closer to the fighting. Jumpbridges aren't the bee's knees of nullsec, they're merely a convenience enabler, and if people were actually LIVING in nullsec, then they'd be used more by carebears than for military purposes.

They didn't get their titans blown up stupidly. What happened in that system was they kept their supercarriers and carriers on the jammer and the titans on the gates, the titans were bubbled, PL/NCdot/ev0ke/etc got in and took down the jammer. The NC logged off their supers when the jammer reached 50% armor or thereabouts.

They did defend. They just did a piss-poor job of it by putting their main DPS at the gates instead of the vastly more interesting jammer.

Yes, and no. Death to all supercaps and all that, but the combination of supercaps and the SOV system of today means that wars end much, much quicker than they used to. The fountain campaign I think took less than 4 weeks before IT's will to fight just broke up after 1 supercap welp, the NC lost the will to engage after they had their major supercap welp, etc.

BCs, BSs, dreads and carriers are sufficiently expensive that continued losses will hurt, yet cheap enough that continued losses can be sustained for a while. This means that you can run a war of attrition (instead of a single fight of attrition vOv), and it means that a single fight won't completely fuck you over just because you make a major mistake. This would be much better, because it would mean that campaigns like the one we had in fountain could end up as an actual meal, not just an appetizer. It was a seriously disappointing end.

Now you're just being a faggot.

Supercarriers aren't actually the main threat to subcaps right now, titans are much much worse. Supercarriers can easily lose their drones/fighters (I'm not even going to talk about fighterbombers, as they don't really work that well on subcaps iirc), whereas the titan has 2/3rds of its dps in a doomsday (if they're firing at f.ex a supercarrier or a titan, where they can do sustained dps ... alternatively they're used to take out strategically important ships like scimitars etc) and the rest is from their guns. And they can (if fit for it, instead of max tank) hit BSes etc. Basically they can one/two-shot a BS every 12 seconds I think it is.

However, one guy in PL has been screaming for literally weeks at me on kugu on how we should throw tons of dreads or neuting AC-fit tempests at them to kill their supers. The neuting tempests have been shown to work well against singular supers at least, I'm honestly not sure how f.ex 300 AC+neut fit tempests would tear through a supercap fleet when there are more than 1 of them, simply because they could then support eachother through cap transfers, making them a much harder nut to crack.

The problem I have with supercaps is how much they cost, how much work it is to take down one, and how much it affects morale when one (or more) of them dies. They take 3-8 weeks and 12-60b (I think) to build. I can afford one, but there's no fucking way I'm getting one unless we're absolutely fucking desperate, because fuck staying in a space coffin.

If i might jump in here and focus the discussion.

One of the problems in balance discussions is that role and feel are often left unspoken. Role and feel are inherent in any question of what is "balanced". They practically define it. If role and feel are not explicit it becomes hard to say why any particular solution is "balanced". But if role and feel are explicit then arguments to balance can directly be supported and argued as to how the changes effect the intended role and feel of the ships.

Since I know you guys don't like it when I go off on ships, i will spoil the rest so you can conveniently ignore it if you wish. Unfortunately you will have to look at the titles because for some reason nesting my spoilers isn't working.


What should the role and feel of Super-Caps be?

General Principles to consider when dealing with the role and feel of super-caps

A possible solution for motherships: Mobile Bases, POS replacement, on grid modification

Why this works

What to do for titans

Re: stabs

How often can Titans fire their doomsday these days?  I guess I'm not surprised they can blow away BS's with their normal guns either.   EvE's gun tracking system has always been broken at fleet engagement ranges.

Doesn't this sort of make the game not even worth playing for a year+ though?   Didn't they essentially admit they aren't going to fix them prior to WIS being finished?

A titan DD can be fired once every 10 minutes. As for tracking BSes, they are sacrificing their tank to get that capability, kind of like hurricanes do to get quick locktimes and high damage.

As for goumindong's suggestions, I'm going to simply say that I'm highly sceptical of many of the suggestions. Especially the titan one-shot titans one (as if supercap fights aren't rare enough?), and the "mothership mines all moons in a system"/"make them immune to capital ship fire" etc. I'm fairly certain these changes would make things worse.

(Questions are to help me understand the larger fleet game.  I'll openly admit I'm ignorant and still learning the lingo, so they may overlook something that is common knowledge.)

Am I understanding that part of the problem with supercap blobs that they can reinforce one another with shield and armor repair?

Why not make it so they either cannot reinforce other ships, or make it cost them significant portions of their own structure to do so?  Let them receive it, but only from smaller support ships.  Thus meaning if you want to protect the asset, you need a bunch of support craft in the area for each one.  If there needs to be a lore reason, then just say too much of their energy generation is going to maintaining the structural integrity of these massive ships.  Diverting it to aid other ships is crippling.  So it's not done, or only done at the expense of massive structural damage.

Well thats retarded. First Bombers are designed to take out dreads, and how the fuck are you supposed to maintain contact when you siege against a supercap fleet that can freely move, ESPECIALLY when they can use logistics on their units and you cant because of (you guessed it) sieging. And as for the Neuting AC idea, there's no fucking way you could cram 300 tempests on one target in an enemy fleet and keep them inside the 10km ( I think) effective range of an AC, especially when using the Neuts means your firepower and tank is crippled. And you are gonna run out of ammo in minutes, especially if you were using cap booster charges to keep your Neuts running. And the supers will deploy fighters instead of bombers so that they will be tearing you up so your projected forepower will be constantly going down...

And I think its stunning that PL never do this themselves.. The only counter they have used against supers recently is a bigger blob of supers.

It reminds me of CCPs suggested easy titan killing fleet, baslicly a mob of nano fitted Naglfars (for bumping) with Nosferatus, and some DPS. Suggested right before they nerfed Nos and nanos. Heh.

Thats part of it, yes. A carrier and mothership are like big "priests" with no weapons of their own but have slots for healing gear but can deploy smaller 'pets' called fighters and Serpercarriers can deploy bigger pets called bombers which are built to destroy other capital ships.

Deadnaughts have the ability to go into siege mode where they deal massive amounts of Damage and can repair very fast and are immune to ECM, But cant move and cant be healed from outside. Carriers can enter "triage" mode which is similar, but it boosts their repping ability and they cant deploy fighters.

Supercaps are immune to ECM, can't be scrambled, can only be bubbled or pinned with a special ship class, Titans can be freely healed with supercaps (which cant be ECMed to try and stop them) and can kill anything smaller than a supercap every 10 minutes with a doomsday. Remember those specialized Ships for pinning supercaps? Yeah they are gone instantly, followed by your logistics, carriers dreads, whatever you are having yourself. And if they took away their ECM immunity they would suddenly be vunerable to being pointed by any pleb in a newbieship, as a point is ECM, and we cant have that.

The thing about the dreads is they're going on and on about "isk efficiency" etc. They do have a certain amount of logic to it when it comes to the dreads vs supercaps, dreads are much more easily replaceable than supercaps, so each supercap is a harder blow than ... uh, I dunno how many dreads would die in a 200 vs PL's fleet brawl, but you could possibly come out on top.

As for the AC neut tempests, the only scenario I've seen that mentioned in was them against a single NC titan, because the rest of the fleet was bubbled away from the titan pilot. I'm not convinced it would work in a proper fleet scenario, but I haven't got the means to test. Basically it would be a suicide mission, though.

What's the insurance payout on a Dread these days?  I thought siege mode made it so Dreads couldn't hit even super caps very well due to tracking/etc.

Obviously, a counter to proliferation of titans would be introduction of supertitans deathstars.

Note that the "make immune to cap ship fire" would have been only for titans [so you can reduce their hit points and make them vulnerable to sub-cap fleets]

But if you don't mind me asking how would those changes make things worse? Would you really expect more motherships and titans to be fighting if titans were not effective against sub-caps and motherships had no weapons?

I was under the impression that the problem with super-caps was not that they didn't fight enough but that when they fought there were too many of them. As far as i can tell, the only way to reduce their numbers in fights is to make them more specialized and more vulnerable. So that people move to other ships [like carriers and dreads]

See that's whats wrong with EvE.   What we need here are Cruisers with spinal mount lasers of death.  :why_so_serious:  The tracking speed would be based on ship agility so they could only hit cap ships.

I was referring to the fact that this "jump bridges are an I win button" meme was basically the panic du jour on the message boards, blogs, and twitter starting last December, promoted almost exclusively by empire and lowsec players who'd never actually used a jump bridge.

If you're pimping that meme even post-nerf and you're in nulsec. Well that's just sad.

Why would players who have never used jump bridges, whose lives are completely unaffected by jump bridges want to see them nerfed? Is it some kind of vast conspiracy against 0.0 players?

You got me, mixture of nulsec envy and opinions being like assholes? Removing jump bridges was brought up at the last meeting of CSM 5 which I think had only 1 nulsec member and they heartily endorsed it. Obviously nulsec players weren't happy, particularly logistics people. But the objections were met with rabid frothing on the main Eve forums, on blogs, and in the CSM election. The two memes that really took off were the fantasy that fleets regularly moved from one side of the northern coalition to the other through jump bridges or that fleets used jump bridges to hop ahead of fleeing ships and cut them off.

The funniest suggestion I heard was an empire candidate for CSM advocating making Jump Bridges require fuel, change the amount of fuel by the size of the ship, and allow them to be damaged and shut down. All of which have always been how jump bridges work.

It was a big factor in the nulsec alliances putting a lot of emphasis on getting candidates into CSM6.

A lot of people want to move into nullsec but don't.  Thus they suggest changes with no real knowledge of what they are talking about.  Basically they are just trying to think up ways to make nullsec more hospitable.   Doesn't mean they are correct but their intentions are usually at least better than people satisfied with the super alliance blobbing.

Fair enough. It's pretty crazy that CCP actually paid attention to them though.

IMO they need to figure out a way to balance the manufacturing rate for supercapitals to the loss rate, and then give them a really obvious Achille's heel (that can be targetted / shot at even when facing a supercap blob or overwhelming numbers, so that there's a chance for a subcap fleet to destroy a few of these things).

The entire thing with CSM 5 and CCP Greyscale was weird as hell. Reading the notes (http://www.eveonline.com/council/transcripts/2010/CSM_CCP_Meetings_15-17_12_2010.pdf), there was a discussion on how to make force projection, particularly by capitals, more difficult. "the CSM referenced player discussion of changes to make capital deployment more strategic and less tactical, and asked Greyscale how, in his personal opinion, the problem could be addressed. Greyscale: The harder we can make logistics, the better for the game viewed as an abstract system." There was a long discussion of how to nerf alliance logistics, a CSM then suggested removing jump bridges and nobody objecting, CCP Greyscale replied "Sweet!"

The result was that jump bridges were significantly nerfed and absolutely nothing was done to supercaps or caps which defacto made caps and supercaps even more significant.

I can't speak for players who have never used jump bridges but the reason I want to see them, jump freighters and cynos nerfed is that I think it's a worse game if people can easily route around danger (gate camps). It also makes nullsec industrial gameplay less worth it as it's a much better option to buy in Jita and move stuff in than it is to mine, research and manufacture in nullsec poses and stations.

Effectively all that stuff provides convenience at the price of shrinking the universe.

Is it a worse game if there are fewer nulsec players and they do less stuff because logistics sucks ass so that a handful of low-sec players can go on roams and maybe catch a handful more people?

I say maybe because logistics increases flow, and that means it increases flow through choke-points. If you decrease by killing bridges you indeed do open up new opportunities that are not at choke-points but you also reduce your opportunities that ARE at choke-points.

And the choke-points are the easiest places to get to.

If you're out for "good fights" or even the ability to constrain production strategically you're going to always be going after choke-points. Living in 0.0 before jump bridges logistics was pretty much only dangerous at chokes.

In short, how does making combat less likely and life more painful enhance the game?

Note, jump bridges only allow you to navigate around gate camps in your territory and that means its easier to set up your own camps that can't be avoided by the enemy[since you don't have to fly through their camp to head them off at the pass]

It didn't nurf logistics.They all use Rorquels and Jump Freighters and Titan bridges anyway. 

It is part of the issue, but the main thing is that they have millions and millions of HP, and the capability to destroy ordinary capitals in seconds. Supercarriers were explictly designed to lay waste to ordinary capital fleets.

When they were rare, it would take fleets of a few hundred sub-capital ships to take down *one* supercap. Now they roll in groups of several dozen you really can't do much about them.

Preventing remote repping is probably part of the solution but in a fleet of 50-100, it really won't make much difference on its own.

Vast conspiracy no, but there totally are players on both ends of the 0.0 divide that would love nothing more then to shit on the others gameplay however they could.  :why_so_serious:

I would resub if I could jump into  torpedo carrying rifter and launch it down a supercap's exhaust vent.

It'd only require a separate hitbox strategically placed on a supercap - preferably at the end of a long trench that ran the length of the SC...

They should make it vulnerable only to blasters  :awesome_for_real:

The other problem with the Titan DD is it is very lag friendly. If you have enough sub-caps to seriously challenge a super-capital fleet then the system will start to lag. That starts to equalize the difference between DD and other weapons as the timing becomes lag related. In one battle the Titans DD and the sub-capitals artillery were pretty much firing at the same rate but with rather different effects. Lag also makes it rather hard to kill something that has an insane hit point pool and the possibility of incoming reps.

Another element often overlooked is the human element. 100 super-caps can drop into a system pretty much without warning. The smaller number of players, generally more trusted, and bridging giving them a huge mobility advantage. Meanwhile trying to suddenly form and gather the 300-400+ people you'd need to present a challenge to that force is slow and impossible unless your organization is monstrously large and highly active. And the jump bridge nerf did make that even less likely as travel is a bit slower and some harassment can make it even more so. Super-caps are just a massive multiplier of people available, which is of course why PL adores them so. It's also good in terms of protecting your own space which has allowed small numbers of pilots to hold massive space empires.

Plus the fact you need to hold space to fund and make them tends to lock out potential challengers which strongly encourages stagnation.

The whole system is borked and it was obviously and inevitably borked. Super-weapons in a PvP game are just a bad idea from the start, and attempts to balance them are largely hopeless.

There is no 'nullsec industrial gameplay' because it's practically impossible at any kind of scale without importing from Empire. You will not get the quantities of trit you need to feed a decent sized manufacturing operation in nullsec because nobody mines Veldspar in 0.0. Even if they did, your refining slots are in one station while the very limited manufacturing slots are in a different one and everyone in the alliance is trying to use the 4 slots available in a 'production station'. There are more manufacturing slots available in the Jita system than in all of Delve. I saw a back of the envelope calculation on Goonfleet when this discussion was going on back in December that if every single manufacturing slot in every station in Deklein were given over to only missile production, they would just about keep up with the daily demand from ratting in the region.

Building in POSs is a royal pain in the arse, not only do you have the POS logistics and overhead to add cost and risk to your operation, the way that POS modules work and interact makes inventory management and any kind of diverse production base hugely difficult. You will still have to import fuel from Empire anyhow especially if your POS is off-race for the ice in your region. Same goes for invention datacores and any other materials that aren't locally native - good luck getting Morphite if you don't live in the Drone regions or off-race carbonides never mind the rarer stuff that you use shit-loads of for ship production such as Nanotransistors.

In short you are full of shit. You bleat about how jump bridges make logistics too easy and damage local production without realising that there is no alternative to importing from Empire for anyone. You have no clue about how the game works beyond some idiotic and simplistic talking points but you have no idea of what you're actually talking about.

This puts CCP in a bit of a pickle - what can they do?

1. Massive supercap nerfage at a fundamental level? Those receiving the shaft will create a shitstorm which, given recent events, CCP can do without.

2. Introduce a counter? A supercap-busting superdreadnought?

Super?

How the devil do game developers manage design themselves into these situations - perhaps some of the developers on here can enlighten me?

Well you are assuming CCP thinks all these things are a problem.  :why_so_serious:

One of the off-hand comments from the tournaments was that sides evicted from null-sec "inevitably bounce-back". CCP are distracted and / or delusional with a side order of incompetent.

The correct time to address super-capital proliferation was in the design phase when someone should have asked, "what if one side gets a fleet of these things?".

CCP definitely does think that supercaps are a problem, they just don't have a good way to deal with it at the moment. The peculiar issue with supercaps is that they aren't simply a ship that sits in the corner of your hangar gathering dust when they aren't getting used, your character or at least a parking alt is locked into them which makes nerfing them into uselessness problematic. They need a defined and specific role that they currently don't have - Supercaps in the kind of numbers that PL and co tend to drop throw out enough DPS to kill two to three Dreadnaughts a minute while being practically unkillable. Titans are a little better since the change to DDs - killing a single subcap every ten minutes isn't that huge by comparison - but they again become broken when deployed in the numbers that we routinely see these days. They do at least have another role with the bridge module but no-one would want to dedicate a character to them if that's all they did.

They knew from the QEN that super-cap proliferation was a problem. After the buff production was exploding and losses were only a tiny fraction of new ships rolling off the lines. Super-cap fleets were inevitable at some point given that trajectory. Yet they wait until the balance of political power in null-sec is broken, and many factions simply out of the game, before they do anything about it. Which also means the amount of resources invested into super-caps is massive which they have to consider as part of any nerf.

Still, it will be fascinating to see what they (eventually) come up with. I don't think there really is a fix without basically re-thinking the whole sovereignty model. And I'm not sure they have the focus or energy to do something on that scale.

This is a circular argument. No one mines Veld because there are plenty of easy logistical options from Jita that work out more cost effective. Take away the logistic crutches and people would mine Veld as they do in W-space.


So POSes


If people had to do it they would and they would be compensated by high prices. People DO build in POSes in W-space.


Look, all this "no clue" bollocks is just chest beating. I understand very well what harsher logistics would do to the game and it's something I would prefer. I get it that you would prefer easier logistics, maybe a teleporter straight from Jita, but not agreeing with you does not make me some kind of mental defective. It's a question of taste. Some people like Marmite.

The guy making a new ship wants his ship to be used. So he's likely to make it better than what's already out there. This is something all Live teams in all MMOs tend to do, they tend to see themselves as designers and creators of content rather than custodians and maintainers of current game look and feel.

These pressures could be countered by managerial oversight in accordance with a Grand Design. For instance, you could allow for a quota of inflation allowing speed, tanking, damage to increase by 10% per year each. It's almost never done that way, instead it's done on a case and case basis by feel.

In Eve I believe new content is also referred to their economist.

Now add to that the fact that a virtual world is a highly complex system prone to emergent gameplay. So some relatively innocuous seeming change like adding a class of frieghter that can cyno jump can have a huge impact on gameplay that may not have been fully foreseen. And that some unforeseen consequences are happening around other unforeseen consequences influencing each other in multiplicative ways.

So in short devs don't usually know how deep their changes will go, don't have controlling the system holistically as a priority and may not have an overall scheme/effective supervision at all. Thus over time a lot of new content, all pitched to be a bit more competitive than previous content will distort the system very powerfully.

No-one sane would mine Veld if they had access to Arkonor or Bistot. They absolutely wouldn't mine it in the quantities required for an alliance scale manufacturing program. For it to be worthwhile the local price of Trit would have to increase to the level of much higher tier minerals and if Trit cost as much as Mexallon or Zydrine then manufacturing would cease because no-one could afford to buy things made for that price.


You don't understand it though. You think that nullsec production could continue without easy importation and you are demonstrably wrong. That you continue to believe it after having it explained to you just demonstrates that you are in fact as dumb as you first appeared. There is simply no way that industry anywhere without logistics can possibly exist as there is no region in the game that can provide all the raw materials, datacores or sufficient quantities of ore to feed its residents. It is simply impossible. You think that the only impact would be higher prices for locally produced goods in nullsec but there would be no locally produced goods in nullsec. 0.0 alliances would stage in lowsec close to Empire market hubs as that would be the only way to ensure enough supply of ships and materiel for any kind of conflict.

That you handwave the actual issues away while you spout vapid talking points such as 'blobbing', 'harder logistics to save nullsec industry' and 'force projection' just shows your ignorance.



When you don't know anything you should shut up rather than be wrong at length. I can assure you that MMO live teams actually do 'holistically' design stuff with reference to everything else in the game - even CCP do spreadsheet analysis to compare macro-data such as ship balance. Sat next to me right now as I type this is a guy who did exactly this for EQ and SWG. I spoke to CCP at the summit in December and they explained their balance process to us at length. There isn't a major MMO out there who lets one guy design something like an entire ship class and put it into the game with the stats and effects that he wants it to have without reference to the balance team.

I would love to hear what this is, because they seem frankly terrible at balancing.

I was going to talk at length about how manufacturing in a POS sucks complete donkey cock, and how the bullshit about needing roles to actually be able to start (and thus, I believe, stop) jobs is a trust nightmare, let alone the act of things being stolen, is why POS manufacturing isn't as prevalent as you think it would be. I've done it, and it sucks so much cock it isn't even funny. And we're not even talking about how much fun it is to do all of this while the system is being under siege by an efficient blops gang, we're talking about just doing this in a normal day to day manner.

You being full of shit and having no clue doesn't make you mentally defective, it just makes you wrong.

 :headscratch:

Meh... so given infinite faith in the ability of CCP's balance team to spot a massive turd like this bobbing around in the sov' Jacuzzi causing people to scream and leap out, I imagine they now are either about to show us their ace-in-hole or are thinking "fuck, pass the net".

The only way your ever going to meet Veld demands from 0.0 alone, is mechanically (as in game rules) making the Veldminers immune to 0.0 space. Like the actual players who 'make a living' off of shitrocks, they are just not capable of and/or have no interest handling the rigors of 0.0.


Of course, I doubt there are many legitimate miners anymore these days, can't compete with the bots in high-sec for the most part.




While on the topic, did they ever nerf mission salvage as a mineral source?

The only way I would even consider mining would be in hisec (unless mining literally shit money on a stick), because at least then I could've been mining while I was watching a movie, programming, reading a book, cleaning the apartment etc, without having to watch local and intel like a hawk. And let's not even get into how much fun it is when there's one or more afk cloaker in system, especially when they're known for being blops-backed.

Make mining normal minerals like PI and you might start seeing something happening in null that isn't bot-infested.

This, btw, is the same discussion that ensued post CSM-5 on blogs and twitter. Literally the same. Same talking points. (Well other than that the NC is unassailable because of their jump bridges.)

There is no real need to make mining like PI when PI is already like PI, and enough people enjoy mining (for some reason) to generate minerals.

CCP have plenty of design room to make up new industrial resources suitable for 0.0 of course.

LOL!

Imagine me, if you will, giving you the evil eye for using "LOL". The evil eye. :oh_i_see:

I don't actually think if that is true. The majority of low ends come from the drone regions and the rest of the low ends probably come from macro miners.

I mean yea some people enjoy mining, but the quantity of trit that is consumed is so high that if it really was all generated by mining there would be have to be thousands of players simply mining all day in hulks.

The problem of "not having 0.0 production" is kinda dumb. We are dealing with commodities without branding, rules of comparative advantage state that there is essentially no way that you can create 0.0 production. Re comparative advantage: think of regions like nations. Comparative advantage states that if trade is possible specialization will create optimal production even if one region has an absolute advantage in producing all types. It is nearly impossible to create a situation where a relative advantage is not created. [Krugman's Nobel winning work is not applicable here].

Before carriers and jump freighters there was not 0.0 production. Everything was shipped in in freighter ops.

In short: It doesn't matter what you do to 0.0 either fully produced materials will be shipped in or raw materials will be shipped in because a relative advantage in the production of certain goods will always exist forming the basis of the majority of the income of the region.

edit: short explanation

Your point was that companies don't do this. My point, based on industry experience and first-hand knowledge is that they do. Whether they do it well is a different topic. You are still making up stuff that you don't know anything about though.

They did several years ago. They drastically cut the amount and quality of loot dropped from missions due to the constant beating about "waah you can make more money in empire mission running than in 0.0. nerf mission running to encourage people to go out into 0.0 and be ganked by 20 guys in Hacs". With the result that people now refine the loot and sell the minerals as its the only real way to make any money at all missioning in high sec.

And frankly people don't mine Veld even in high sec. There is literally no money in it. Its hugely bulky to transport everywhere in the quantities that you need. In IAC we tried to get people to mine veld the huge veld rocks once and people rage quit after half an hour and there was a lot of harsh words exchanged over coms.

I participated in one mining op in defi4nt while they were where TNT are now. 24 hours of god knows how many people, and they still didn't have enough of all minerals to build the dread they awere apparently gunning for.

Most high level mission runners don't even bother looting, they just blitz level 4s as fast as possible for the LPs and the bounties. The change in drop rates affected only a small percentage of mission runners who were fully looting their wrecks. Running level 4s in hisec is still very good isk/hr compared to almost every other activity in the game.

How many of those mission runners who had their game nerfed do you suppose moved out to 0.0 to play in the accepted fashion?

Ha ha sorry.

I don't mean to impugn the professionalism of Iain's colleague. I've been in the situation where as a middle manager I'm responsible for orchestrating something that is obviously going to be a clusterfuck while having no ability to affect the outcome. I even got a written warning after it fucked up despite having warned them for weeks it was going to.

My point is not that the industry doesn't contain people who do this work, in fact I'm about to provide an example. My point is that the industry doesn't listen to them, they're professional cassandras.

In Eve at the moment one of the things that is broken is incursions. Specifically the Vanguard OTA sites.http://incursionguide.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/blitzing-quick-reference-sheet/
In an OTA you complete the site by killing 3 Deltolle battleships. To make things easier on the logi pilots people usually kill 2 augas at the start, some cautious fleet commanders may kill more but increasingly people are just doing AADDD blitz (2 Augas, then 3 Deltolles). This takes about 5 minutes for a fleet of casual randoms who X up in Incursion Local. Everyone in the fleet gets 10.5 million isk plus some Concord loyalty points (which are better than regular LP).

By contrast the Level 4 mission I just ran pays 804k credits plus an on time bonus of 908k credits as well as 3840 LP. That's with the relevant Social skills maxxed it would be less for a newer pilot. It could take a new pilot a good half hour, maybe an hour. (Attack of the Drones) http://eve-survival.org/wikka.php?wakka=attackofthedrones4

The new content is miles better than the old.

Here's what CCP's resident cassandra had to say in Q4 2010:


http://cdn1.eveonline.com/community/QEN/QEN_Q4-2010.pdf

Faucet/isk balance spiralled out of control with Jita average plex prices rising from 318m on 14 Feb to 411m on 31st May (now ironically the economy has been rescued by the Monoclegate fiasco which caused largescale liquidation of plexes). The Incarna-related plex crash is discussed here: http://www.eveonline.com/iNgameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1538313

So you see Eve does indeed have people looking at the game holistically. But the game design is not being controlled holistically. Just after Dr Gudmundsson had expressed concern about the money supply it veered out of control.

The reason the incursion running faucet is out of control is a combination of things I talked about up-thread. Incursions were really tricky to start with and there was high risk. A lot of people lost expensive ships before the player base reduced it to the current formula (7-8 dps plus 3 logis for Vanguards, prefer Vanguards to the 3 other site types, delay the mom kill). The emergent gameplay has seen a high risk high reward short duration feature turned into a low risk high reward long duration feature as players have worked out how to manage the risk and extend the Incursion duration.

I don't have inside knowledge about why the decision was made to make this content so highly rewarding when it can be run in high sec. I do strongly suspect it's the trait I talked about before that Live team developers want to incentivise players to play the stuff they add in and consequently make it better than the old stuff. You know, the trait that Iain says couldn't happen.

Now Iain's case against this is partly that he's on the CSM. So he knows better.

We're veering into the territory of Cialdini's book on compliance psychology now. The essential points of compliance psychology is that it works on everyone and everyone thinks it doesn't work on them.

CCP fly a select handful of players to Iceland and ply them with beers not because they lack ideas on how to run a game, nor because they listen attentively to the CSM and change the game accordingly but because the process of discussion inevitably creates sympathy. It's the same process as billionaires inviting politicians to yachts and dinner parties.

The CSM reciprocate (Cialdini chapter 2 iirc) by speaking to the player base of agreements worked out with CCP which blunt the edge of player anger (Cialdini chapter 4 social proof and 6 authority). A few days after he posted on SA saying that the Goons might pull out of Eve in flames here's The Mittani placating the rioting playerbase:
http://www.tentonhammer.com/eve/news/ccp-reaches-an-accord-with-eve-csm

Iain, old bean, being on the CSM doesn't put you in a better position to comment on Eve, it puts you in a worse position because you've had compliance psychology applied to you. It's the stuff you see on http://youarenotsosmart.com/.

Consider though, The Mittani went there to make sure there would be no PayToWin coming soon. Right now, there isn't. Op success.

Now, CCP didn't say never ever to PayToWin, but the wrath of the playerbase was clear and CCP knows the CSM know it. Mitten's said he was surprised by an order of magnitude how many accounts had been cancelled, and the dozens of bad press articles were clear signs a disaster was in the making.

However, you're point is probably right in the CCP corrupted the CSM by inviting them to talk to them directly- Vile Rat didn't go, and his opinion is a lot different from the CSM members who did. I also think CCP is quite capable at learning *nothing* from the fiasco.

We should find out when the supercap nurf comes, if CCP Soundwave's promises are true. The rumour is we might see them in the next 90 days.

EVE has an automatically balancing price mechanism for the majority of goods. PLEX is the only thing that can change in price. And i think it may be safe to say that people built up the plex prices due to speculative demand rather than money supply issues.

If it was a money supply issue why were there increased stocks of PLEX in preparation to sell?

I haven't trusted the good doctor since he totally messed up the (very basic) economics on the "trit cap"

 :uhrr:  I'm sure you are trying to say some economics jargon thing.   I'd suggest using English in general conversation though.

I'm pretty sure that flying to Iceland and having CCP explain to me what they are trying to do with Eve and answering my questions on why they are doing that puts me in a better position to comment on what CCP are doing with Eve. If you think that all of a sudden I'm going to give them a pass on utter bullshit like the ~force projection~ nonsense because they fed me an imported steak and barbecued pelican then I don't know what to tell you.

You ate a pelican? A pelican!!?

Puffin. Sorry. And no, not a whole one.

Oh well. That's OK then. Puffins have it coming.

EVE has essentially price controls on various goods [everything made with minerals for instance] that enforce minimum and maximum prices.

Because these price controls are by explicit trade[I.E. you buy an item it destroys isk and creates an item made of minerals] money supply cannot effect the prices of those goods beyond the edge of that control. If the price gets too high or low they will just correct. And note that the economy will be "better off" for it.

So the only things that can have their price effected are things that are not tied to those price controls. Which (contrary to what i said earlier) is t2/t3 items and PLEX. Any problems with money supply should show up equally in the price of all those non-controlled goods [absent supply/demand changes]

Note that some amount of sustitutability implies that the price controls should have an effect on t2 prices and PLEX as price changes for plex do imply real cost changes for tech 1 goods.

I probably shouldn't ask this but what the fuck? Start at the beginning - the minumum price control is a reference to insurance, yes? But why is there a maximum price? Why is there a maximum price on minerals, and why is there a maxiumum price on those implants I get from missioning and then sell on? (I mean, there's a maximum price in the sense that other players are also spawning those items through gameplay and selling them but that's not a price control, that's just a market functioning, yes?)

Speak slowly as if to a child and if anyone complains, explain it's for my benefit. They will understand.

Insurance is now automatically adjusted based on mineral prices in trade hubs, it doesn't act as a price limit any more. He's talking about npc buy and sell orders, though in most cases ccp remove them if they become active as a mineral price limit. (see shuttles)

It is honestly best for everyone if you don't reply to Goumindong theory posts.

Less then Zero is my guess.  :why_so_serious:




Mission running is still way better for the High-sec player, nothing is as low on the food chain as the High-sec 'sustenance miner'.

Ok

To be honest I didn't realise there were NPC buy and sell orders any more for items which players could harvest or manufacture.

My mistake. [though it should act as a stabilizer if it is not immediately updated]

In case the price of PLEX are more likely to reflect demand rather than money issues.

I don't think there are. I'm looking at Salvager Is just now. The cheapest in this region is 33 000 the most expensive 999 500. I'm pretty sure I could put one on sale for 0.01 isk or for 10 trillion isk if I wanted to. I'm 99% sure that every order is a player order and that there's not some secret station somewhere that buys Salvagers.

What Goum might be saying is that these Salvagers could become minerals which could become ships which could be blown up for insurance. Therefore the floor for insurance fraud affects not just ships but ultimately all mineral based items.

I'm pretty sure there's no ceiling. If, hypotherically, you were the only person in the game making Salvagers you could set your own price and people would have to buy from you, do without or start making them.

Anyway I think the reason he brought it up is that he doesn't see plex as an adequate indicator of the Eve economy. I think it is based on the huge proportion of market share it has. I also don't think you can handwave a jump of almost 100m in 3 months as speculator stockpiling, especially since those stockpiles have now been liquidated without the price reverting to the original level.

It's not immediately updated. It will be updated manually by CCP if they see a need to do so, presumably if there's too much insurance fraud/suicide ganking.


You could be right. I don't think you are but you could be.

Is there something else that you do see as a valid indicator of money supply? We could look at that. It certainly feels from doing incursions that isk is pouring in. Previously the main fawcet was rat bounties. One nullsec battleship is approx 1m isk. One incursion site is 10 * 10.5m isk, these sites are crowded in high sec and there can be as many as three incursions up in high sec at once.

It will be very interesting to see whether it is discussed in QEN 2011 Q1. If it isn't I'd argue that the economy is fubar and they're trying to keep it quiet. That would be the only reason not to talk about it. (Well the other reason not to talk about it would be if it were economically insignificant and I'm 100% sure it's not the case).

If its money supply and there are no price controls [via trade] to constrain movement then we expect inflation unless velocity is changing significantly at the same time. When we say inflation we mean price movements in all goods(irresective of real cost changes). So if there was a money supply problem you would not see it simply in PLEX, everything would have gotten more expensive.

Going further into the regulation of money supply with regards to velocity implies a lot about just what the goals are. The goal is probably price stability[so long as productivity isn't falling]

OK, fair point I had a think about what might make a good indicator. Produced stuff and LP stuff may not be a good indicator as there are so many other factors affecting mineral prices and LP farming respectively but I think criminal tags should be a reasonable indicator. There a rich player's luxury, allowing you to get faction standing which reduces trading costs so there's a consistent demand and the supply may be reasonably steady. Their value is also tied in with the value of luxury ships like Fleet Stabbers so one would expect them to get more expensive if everyone is rich.

Angel Electrum was 1015.58 on 14th Jan, peaked at 5000 in May and is now averaging 1844.52
Guristas Silver was 1 590 000 on 14th Jan, peaked at 1 988 000 in Feb and is now averaging 1 057 000
Blood Diamond was 21 996 on 14th Jan, peaked at 6 472 000 in May, and is now averaging 10 000 (although 3 days ago 65 were traded at an average of 3.8m.

The figures are not conclusive but may indicate an increased money supply. The Blood Diamond tags in particular - if it's not a manipulation then people paying 3-6m for a 10k tag indicates people about with more money than sense.

Assume for a second that prices indicate relative value of goods constrained by input.

Why would we assume that an increase in money would increase the price of one good compared to another? A change in relative prices assumes either a change in the relative costs or a change in the relative value. With inflation we expect the relative price change to be zero between any two goods.

I think that it is much more likely you're looking at goods that have a lot of price volatility [either due to low volume or some other reason] than are experiencing any inflation.

If goods really aren't under any price controls you should see inflation in the cost of ships and modules.

We need to implement AAAAAAAA chain functionality in this subforum.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Cool. It works here as well.

Z

0

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Temporarily and I hope briefly drifting back on topic, CCP Soundwave Kristoffer Touborg had this to say earlier this week:

EVERY 0.0 region needs to have some type of incentive that makes living there awesome.  It could be rats, it could be minerals, it could be extra boosts in space improvements (which need to be boosted and not suck) or other oddball things that just happen in that region.  CCP has ignored all of that and made 0.0 less and less attractive.  The old jump bridges were a good thing.  Towers need to be less 'work' and your space needs to be more engaging period. 

Supercaps (and probably caps in general) need to be removed.  Just do it.  Since they will not the ships really need to be given a passive or secondary  role so fielding 200 of them becomes pointless or of little actual benefit.  A mobile station or supply hub, a big command bonus or something but NO WEAPONS OR FIGHTERS ETC. 

Also they really need to streamline most activities.  Too much of EVE is logging in and getting punched in the face by the tedium of maintenance or irrationally complicated tasks.   

Is he talking about making 0.0 less useful?

You can't do everything at once in Eve already, simply because there aren't enough hours in the day and because even veteran characters don't have every skill in the game.

I get the impression here he's talking about making one area great for mining and another great for other stuff (exploration? ratting?). So, what if your alliance is in the "wrong" region for the stuff that you want to do, are you meant to jump alliances?

Also, wasn't the idea of dominion that we would be able to upgrade our space, to turn a system into a miner's paradise or anomaly utopia depending on what the players do? How does slimming down the availability fit in with that?

They're all the time going on about getting people into nullsec, and then they start raining on the parade. Every. Damn. Time.

What "underutilized content" are they trying to make interesting again? Because I don't see it.

Faction Warfare, All of Lowsec, Ice Mining, L5 missions.

Of course L5 missions and lowsec are underutilized. You might as well cover your ship with salt and vinegar and serve it up with chips.

You have to understand, if you just make the rest of the game utterly miserable, people will hang out at the crossroads and provide targets.

I was talking to someone from the drone lands who suggested that Titans should need to use a special fuel to fire a DD, but that the fuel bay required for this fuel only be enough for 2 shots.  A new type of ice, maybe only found in 0.0

Personally I also think that they shouldn't be able to kill sub caps

To be fair that's why they're so desperate for another property.   The vets won't let them fix what's really wrong with the game.   Most empire casual people are never ever going to be interested in high risk gameplay.

Maybe just make the titan explode as part of the DD firing process, turning it into the last ditch "up yours" measure from the current weapon it is.

Would solve the problem with their numbers getting out of hand as well :why_so_serious:

How about the more supercaps in a given system the greater the likelihood they're attacked by some NPC superrace, let's call them Antarans, which are designed to crush them.  :grin:

I still think a nerf to supers is good, they should be a symbol of profligate resource use rather than a brutally efficient ship of the line. And making them more fleet command ships sounds good too. But it should also be connected to considering the current Sov structure. Sov is connected to both the super-problem and the blob problem because it ultimately boils down to a series of timers. The timers are needed to balance time-zone advantage but it also means strategy ends up coming down to having more power, in system, when the timer ticks down to zero. Whether that's a blob of super-caps or lagging out the system with sub-caps. It's a war of logistics and tedium.

If they had a system where sov could be a bit more dynamic then a huge blob could be skirmished or out-maneuvered. But a dynamic sov works against the mode of "building up your space". It's actually pretty tough and no game has really come up with a good system.

One approach would be to split sov into two types. Normal sov is relatively easy to capture, cheap to lose (no infrastructure) and can only be done on frontiers (including low-sec and NPC space). For example if you can clear the system and hold it for a small amount of time it's yours. Each alliance has one "capital" system where all the infrasture is. Upgrades radiate out into held space, resources from systems held can be gathered and brought into the capital, starships are manufactured and such. It is hard to take (timers) and even harder to take depending on how much space the alliance holds. So to take the space you need to basically beat their forces back and into submission before you can take the capital. A blob can be defeated by lots of small gangs retaking space to strengthen the defence of the capital. You'd want super-capital pilots for the grand assault but you also want noobies for system attack and defense. The star map provides natural chokepoints already and those become the point at which a new assault will be launched, add some subtle differences to various systems so they become local points of conflict for small gangs.

I suspect that the sov system will be tweake to make it possible to minimise someone's advantages from holding space without making it easier to take their space.  Something, for instance, that lets you shut down their JBs easier than now, steal their moon resources (or their replacement) and so on in smaller gangs while still needing the big battalions if you want to actually take their sov.

First, you guys are suggesting permanent, drastic nerfs, which is what we hate CCP for (over-nerfing things).  CCP doesn't need to over-nerf supercapitals, they just need to adjust the built/destroyed and cost/usefulness ratios.  Both of them are out of whack, but most of the things I see suggested would make the ships completely useless and/or cause the destruction of all of them at once.

Second, as far as sov, nullsec sucks to live in.  CCP wants it to be more populated and keeps telling us to go make it a residential area, but their game mechanics are all about industrial parks - you don't have amenities in 0.0, and the point of it is to build supercaps, extract goo, and fight over resources.  Empire is set up to live in, 0.0 is set up to work in.  And lowsec completely fouls up any commute routes.  They tried to make sovereignty be what makes 0.0 more livable, but it's still an industrial area, only now you can build some bare-bones employee barracks on the premises.

CCP doesn't want to go as far as giving Sov the power to make 0.0 as homely as Empire space, and on the other hand making it easy to live in Empire and commute to 0.0 for your daily dose of defending your holdings, wars, mayhem, and fun would change the game quite a bit (what do they do with lowsec, for example).  So, the game is pretty much unfixable, in my opinion.

I see nothing wrong with any such plans. The biggest subcap fight in a long time, between the two biggest NAP's in Eve, >1500 people in VFK happened yesterday, and apparently lag wasn't too bad (anyone who was actually there wish to comment?).

Supercaps are no longer needed. Or wanted, Titan Bridges are ok, and Titan's already provide huge fleet bonuses if anyone actually ran then as Fleet Command ships, but no one does for some reason I've never understood.

Yes they do. Restricting by cost and build time was CCP's original plan, and it doesn't work.

The other restriction was the sheer time you need to train to be in one. Of course with people selling eve characters on ebay, any prospective titan character can shave months or a year off the time easily. Hell my character could step into a Titan tomorrow of i had the isk for the hull and skillbooks. Any dread pilot has the majority of the training done.


one of the problem with supers now is that even if you nerf their power to the level of a Battleship they are in such numbers that you could sit them in a POS somewhere in the center of a region and pop them on top of any gang you want. Roaming gangs are single guys in falcons. Eve is at its best with supcap fights, and even dreads and carriers don't cause as many problems as they are fragile enough to actually die. That said the same capital bloat problem exists with capitals as well. Once you lose your capitals its almost impossible to achieve parity again. But at least you can fight with battleships.

Doing that will require massive nerfs. Quite possibly beyond what has been proposed here.

Furthermore, lets get some other things out of the way

1) You cannot just adjust the cost. If the last few years of EVE has not taught you that increasing the cost will just delay the time it takes to get a super-capital blob then i don't know what will(productive capacity is increasing, not decreasing/staying the same) Furthermore, if you need super-capitals in order to fight someone with a super-cap blob then increasing the cost INCREASES the gulf between the people who have blobs already and those that don't.

2) You cannot adjust the "built/destroyed ratio" without nerfing the shit out of them. You also cannot get usefulness to the right place without nerfing the shit out of them

This means that you have to nerf the everloving shit out of them or you have to radically re-design their role in the game.

I think what he's talking about is not varying resources across different areas of null sec. The one resource notable for being concentrated in a certain area (Technetium) has become a bit of a game design fiasco.

I think he's rather talking about the lack of resources that depend on nullsec for extraction. There are too many other sources of megacyte than nullsec Arkonor. High sec ice mining is a little too good for an activity so afk-friendly and low risk (outside of Hulkageddon).

(And that's why he says they got it right for T3. If you want T3 components you have to go to W-space).

So what we may see is something like Stront being removed from the high sec ice and restricted only to nullsec ice, but available everywhere in nullsec that has Ice fields. Drone compounds and mission loot that yield megacyte may have the amount reduced. I imagine the aim is to get more people doing a wider variety of tasks in nullsec than the current trend towards every nullsecer being a carebear-despising pvper.

Ah, that sounds a lot more promising. I hope you're right.

How about if you make supers more vulnerable to smaller ships?  So you need an escort of smaller ships to keep them safe?  That would reduce their numbers in a fleet.

You know how torpedos scale down damage when they hit a small ship?  How about having bombs from stealth bombers scale up damage when they hit larger ships?   They can make up some technobabble for why this happens.

But then you'd need escorts for caps and supercaps and a balanced fleet and 35 day newbees could fly Xwings and destroy the bridge deflector shields to ohgodthatwouldbesogood. Hell it would give *destroyers* something to do. Not to mention making Hurricanes.

Practically being a pain in our asses, trying to get us to play their stuff to try to keep the status quo that took no/less effort before? Ace!

This is what I was pointing out in the second post essentially.     Missiles that do crappy damage to normal ships but really hurt cap ships.   Frigs+Cruisers with massive turrets that have trouble hitting subcaps.    That way you actually need to bring a subcap fleet to take them out.   If you're supercap fleet is subpar you can still win with superior numbers.

It reminds me of how world war 1 fleet composition came about. It was all ships of the line till the torpedo was invented. Which meant battleships became vulnerable to torpedo boats. Which created the necessity for smaller and more maneuverable capital vessels called Torpedo Boat Destroyers (later shortened to just 'Destroyers') to escort the big ships and protect them from torpedo attack.

Of course if CCP tried such a redesign the old guard would scream that they "deserve" to win becasue of the skillpoint investment. Which is frankly a load of bollox. Their $15 is not any more green than the newbies.

How do you make them do big cap damage and not big tower/module damage?  Would this be a new ship type?  You do realize they made the stupid supercaps to prevent blobbing.  Making a ship to kill the cap blobs that are supposed to prevent blobbing seems...  Also high sec ganking would get cheaper, among other things.  I really see no way to balance caps and supercaps with the rest of the game in combat.  

Anti-supercap torpedo boat sounds like a good role for T3 Frigates. Horribly underpowered against subcap fleets, expensive, deadly to unsupported supercap fleets. Fills in a gap in the game, balances supercap blobs, doesn't directly replace any other ship.

And you could balance the nullsec economy at the same time by making them made mainly of morphite and megacyte.

Inventing a ship to kill off a ship that has big balance problems is doing it wrong.

Their $15 is probably less than a newbie's $15 since they're more likely to be able to buy plex with ISK, at that.

It's Bollox but they would win anyways, CCP is part of the 'old guard' remember.  :awesome_for_real:

Weren't cap ship fleets a problem before supercap fleets became the new problem?

Not that I've heard of. Carriers die fairly quickly to sustained fire in a way that super-caps don't. I believe there's a whole bunch of people interested in seeing how many maelstroms it takes to alpha-strike one.

I don't play this game, but aren't assault frigates somehow "missing" a ship bonus or something?


How about just giving assault frigates like +1000% damage to super capital ships?  I'm talking about the ships like the wolf or retribution.   I played with the Eve Fitting Tool a while ago, i seem to remember you could get those frigates up around 250-300 dps, and i kinda remember something like dreadnaughts do like 3000, so i dunno i'm just guessing?

I dunno if eve's combat engine can support doing that, or if there's any precedence to that sort of bonus for effects on specific ship classes?

If at all, they should scale their resistance in relation to distance to a supercap. So if they're buzzing around one close by shooting it, their resistances go up a lot, sig radius down, so they can't get picked off that easily, while retaining normal performance when in subcap fights.

To a certain extent. First people focused on cap only battles, in which case the bigger blob wins. Case closed. Also that was pre-Apocrypha, where lag ruled and affected everyone bar BOB. When Apocryoha hit and lag cleared to a level not seen before or since, BOB & Co lost 250 caps inside a week and abruptly stopped MAX and fled back south.

People are probably still smarting from the Prenerf supers that were unkillable, and the 4 Motherships MC had effectively destroyed Dusk and Dawn by themselves.


Also Dreads may be tougher, but once they drop into siege they have to rely on their own tank and its impossible to remote rep them, so spider tanks are out. That balances them out nicely.

Why? That's how it's done in real life.

Assault frigates were supposed to get some kind of bonus to afterburning, but that was delayed.

You could put a huge torps fitting bonus on any number of ships, destroyers would be my favourite (and this would open the way for another t2 destroyer at some point). At the same time you could increase torp damage and explosion radius to effectively increase damage to caps without changing the dps they do when ratting.

But you'd still need to nerf supercap HP, dps, and their ability to receive remote assistance (siege mode for FBs and doomsdays maybe).

Give the dreads a natural role damage bonus to replace the siege damage bonus.

Make the carrier interface for SMA access not horrible, and you could start to see them used to carry anti capital destroyers or something idk.

No one new will ever join Eve if they have to grind being a spearman for 6 months.

Not what I meant. I meant that, in real warfare, if you've got some sort of overwhelming advantage -- either people invent a counter, or you win. :)

Since "them winning a crushing victory forever and ever" is out, and it appears that -- tactically -- there is no real solution, the EVE devs are forced into one of two solutions.

Either nerf the overwhelming advantage bit or develop a counter.

Something like cheap destroyers fitted with capital ship-killers is actually not only a kinda workable idea, but is the sort of tactic/response real world would come up with. (As noted above with carriers, submarines, etc).

The worst thing you could do would be to develop an even bigger ship, capable of killing capital ships. Then everyone would just move on to flying that. Retasking something like t2 or t3 destroyers and forcing the enemy to start dedicating resources to handling them is at least a leg up on that. Every pilot flying an escort ship isn't one flying a capital ship, and as long as the new anti-capital ship ships aren't capable of face-raping battleships, well....

Plus it fits into their already developed "big and slow can't hit fast and small" concept. You won't want to risk your blob of supercapitals until you clean out all their nasty little "I might die, but I'm taking two months of supercap with me" gankers.

Everyone in EVE "grinds" flying a small tackler/ewar/bomber/whatever for at least 6 months. Then generally have more fun than the capital guys do, because a Rifter pilot never ever has to shoot or rep a POS.

Takes almost 6 months before you can fly a mediocre battleship properly. These are arguably the most enjoyable 6 months you'll ever have in EVE Online : The Spaceship Themed Bad Game.

Whether your first six months are fun or not has a very direct relation to whether or not you are in CONDI. Your options if you're not are slim to none and slim's out of town.

Another thing CCP won't do but would help enormously is take a look at buff/debuff mechanics.

If it were possible to stack debuffs on specific targets, subcaps would be able to multiply up their power in a way that would be massively more powerful against single large targets than against balanced fleets.

It might also reduce POS shooting and lead to slightly more interesting support ships than the current logistics mediocrity.

I hold no hope for CCP ever doing this when they regularly claim there are literally no ideas for roles for new ships (I can only assume they have never played another computer game in their lives because jesus christ it is not difficult to come up with a dozen concepts without having to think for more than 10 seconds)


Not just your first six months. We tried other alliances and holy shit I'm not doing that again.

I'm sorry, I though we were playing a video game that was striving for some level of viability for all players.  Balance in this case is not MAD. 

It used to be. I forgot what specific use got that eventually nerfed.

anything that hits hard enough to bring a supercapp to the red is hard enough to one shot gg a lesser ship.

Like shooting torpedos at an interceptor and firing your dreadnaughts guns at the frigate that has you tackled.  So unfair to just one shot smaller ships.  :ye_gods:

Yes.  This a 1000 times.   You may feel goofy flying a rifter in the presence of the various battleships/cruisers, etc.  Don't.  Unlike that group of poor bitter vets whom are locked into the hell of set optimal and push butan, you get to zip around with your afterburners blazing brightly locking down shit to your hearts content.

Dampeners. But only because all current ewar has a terrible design which leaves the target ship either utterly useless or entirely unaffected.

I think if they just made it so that nothing supercap could hit anything subcap, ever, even if it's not moving and target painted, a lot of the problem would go away.  A balance of caps raping subcaps, supercaps raping caps, and subcaps raping supercaps would force people to field substantial mixed force fleets rather than simply plopping as many supers as possible on the field with zero support.  Titan weapons shouldn't be turned on anything smaller than a POS or a capital, any more than the death star's main gun should be used to shoot down X-wings.

Dampeners and tracking disruptors still stack, they just don't have enough effect to matter with capitals (supes are immune, dreds are immune when sieged).

Previously ECM stacked (They provided a set number and once the sum of the number exceeded your sensor strength you were jammed forever) but it was changed for obvious reasons.

Soft counters in the form of ewar aren't ever going to be strong enough to counter super-capitals without them also being strong enough to ruin smaller gangs. Its not worth trying. Also because as Eladec mentions, ewar has an inherent factor of "entirely useful or entirely useless"

It's possible to make it so stacking only works only on capitals or supercaptials.  There's no reason to do so for subcaps.

Yeah but ECM only works on carriers (aside from non sieged dreads) so why bother? You will just be nerfing carriers.

Of course you could take away Supercaps ECM immunity but that would leave them vulnerable to being pointed by rifters, and we cant have that.

That would still be horrible and would actually overpower subcaps because the design of ewar is so mind numbingly terrible.

They need a debuff system redesigned from the ground up. It won't happen because it would take significant effort away from RMT in stations, but would have benefits across much of eve.

It's not just "having fun in a corp" it's getting into one at all. Until you can fly a fully T2 fit battleship, you have very limited options and you have essentially none until you can at least fly a BS of some sort. When BAT moved south I wanted to get into the Max 2 war last summer (on the right side) and it was really hard to find a spot even with a pet. Having said that. I could join LAWN again in a minute. Though I'm not sure how bright their future is. Even the old pirate corp, the Bastards, that I flew with as a Hellcat wants 4m SP and that's just to gank newbies in lowsec.

Only if you design it stupid. I'm talking weapons that are only effective against supercaps -- specifically designed anti-supercap missiles or whatnot, that can't even hit or track anything smaller. (IE: Giant bonuses against supercaps, huge penalties against anything else).

That's just an extension of the sub/carrier concept mentioned above -- carriers were forced to surround themselves with escorts if they wanted to survive, because they were pretty darn defenseless against subs.

I'm not talking "make a bigger hammer" -- that what lies mudflation. I'm talking make a specific, anti-supercap tool. Which means your supercap fleets will have to much smaller and fly surrounded by escorts if they want to live to get to the target. Supercap blobs will just be eaten alive by roaming hit-and-run gangs of smaller, cheaper ships fitted with anti-supercap weaponry. (Said gangs would be vulnerable to anyone fitted out to deal with BS or smaller ships, since their anti-supercap weapons are freaking useless against battleships and the like)

Without disagreeing with what Morat said, there is however the factor of the Jump drive, which means that the Supercaps dont have to nove through hostile space getting eaten alive. They can just appear when needed, wherever needed, and when its safe. Which means the opposition would still have to be pretty cagy with having a fleet of super-killers ready.

However that would increase the level of strategy in the game, you have to admit.

Fuck, I'd just add a super-cap killer to stealth bombers. :) Watch a blob of those fuckers uncloak and blow up a dozen supercaps before being podded would be amusing.

These already exist. They are called 'Torpedoes' or 'Citadel Torpedoes'. Also Bombs to a different extent.

Hmph. I've never played the game at that level. If they exist, they need to be buffed a bit. The idea is to make a weapon that forces either supercaps to unblob (either by making large groups of them dangerously risky, or by requiring supercaps to need non-supercap escorts) -- without just creating a new ship everyone uses and becomes the new problem.

Anti-Supercap Bombs. You can't carry many, they don't work vs subcaps (meaning you either load one or the other pretty much unless you have mitch cow blockade runner with you) and now a blob of supercaps is a blob of dead supercaps.

Goons are pretty much 70-90% of what makes Eve tolerable. And they have a culture that celebrates the Hero Rifter.

If you want to join a Leet-PvP corp like PL then yeah, but your catass trackies on and get ready for 1-2 years of training, corp hopping and building a rep.

Some of us really enjoy Eve without being in Goons or an elite pvp corp. There's a lot more to the game than just those two options.

You could mine Veldspar for example.  :why_so_serious:

Funnily enough I was just mining Veldspar. In nullsec. In my Crow.

Just as well I didn't get killed, some of the meaner people might have mocked my fit.

You'd make more isk/hour doing that in a Vexor or Arbitrator.  Just saying.

I just needed 999 Veld for a storyline mission. It made sense to me at the time.

I use my old Vexor for mining. I think I once refit a Myrmidion as a salvager and was following a corp-mate as he ratted in 0.0. (This was before I could fly a BS, and my skills made 0.0 ratting in a BC a bit iffy).

I was having a solid bit of fun running L4's in high sec (like 0.6) and selling the occasionally good piece of loot, collecting the salvage, and melting down the rest. I rather enjoyed manufacturing rigs with it and selling them as well.

There was something deeply pleasant to log on and have made millions while offline. (There's also the fun "Oh wait, I have research agents. I haven't collected from them in months" fire sales).

You'd make more isk/hour buying it. Just saying.

The 999 quest makes you go out and harvest it.  Doesn't complete until you do.  I know because I got it five times in a row and I have a stack of Veldspar sitting in my cargo bay.

In summary, fuck CCP right in the sandbox.

But that could chafe my willy.

(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Qu15clDr-iM/Ss_PTNgoogI/AAAAAAAADZI/uFaNTvy-fc8/s320/sheriff.gif)

There was none on the market.

There was none on the market.



I think you may be mistaken. Try moving the ore out of your cargo bay and into your items hangar then completing the mission. Also double check you have enough.

It's certainly possible to complete the higher level ore storylines with purchased Kernite and Omber.

Back on topic

Does the Goon victory at VFK indicate Supercaps are not as broken as we all thought or was it just a case of exceptional circumstances?

Exceptional Circumstances. We were fighting under a jammer, in our capital system, with all our allies, and enemies made a strategic mistake of attacking Stalingrad-On-the-Volga level.

And the supers that were in system were Ex Bob who expertly pulled what is technically called the BOB Maneuver (run away while their allies get murdered)

And the victory mostly depended on the enemy deciding there was someone else who needed a kicking more or was easier to drop super-caps on. With the resources available to them their losses were readily replaceable and dropping super-caps on non-core systems would have been successful at nibbling away at goon space.

Re the original thread topic: 

Call me a cynical, jaded, untrusting bastard, or just another wacky conspiracy theorist, but I find it VERY hard to believe that any "fix" for the supercapital problem that CCP has in mind will bear any resemblance to any of the reasonable ideas or expectations aired in this thread.  Nevermind the colossal incompetence they have demonstrated with almost every design decision or implementation they have made in the past.  The real problem is that too many folks at CCP play the game and enjoy their perks as members of the good ole boys club.  That club is still butthurt from their humiliation at the hands of the goons who not only spanked them with superior tactics, organization, intelligence and enthusiasm, but had the gall to do it with cheap ships and newbie pilots who most definitely were not and never will be welcome as equals to the "elite" long-timers.  The insult to the egos of the self-identified privileged elites is not something very many humans have the moral fortitude to overcome.  Even if their official policy and logical business model dictates that they not pander to the privileged, their personal identification with the ranks and perks of the privileged seems too ingrained to completely suppress, even if they were to honestly attempt to do so.

I suspect a significant proportion of CPP that actively plays the game thinks it is wrong for a bunch of goons noobs to be able to trounce old-timers flying advanced ships most of the "noobs" can't even dream of flying.  They like the fact that an established power full of long-time players can achieve near-invulnerability to a pack of newcomers, no matter how many people the newcomers can bring or how good their tactics are.  The fact that the goons were able to not only fend off BoB but looked likely to outright win against them even before their alliance was crippled from within was a morally reprehensible state of affairs that literally hurt it seemed so unfair.  They may not admit (or even believe) that this elitism is at the root of their design decisions, they may whitewash those decisions with claims of impartiality or platitudes like "rewarding their most loyal customers", but strip away all the bs and at the core it is going to be incredibly difficult for them to separate their selfish interests and belief in their entitlement to privildge sufficiently to make a truly rational decision on this.  They are just too personally invested in the outcome to be impartial about it.

I will be astounded if whatever "fix" does finally come actually fixes anything, at least the first time around, and totally flabbergasted if it in any way makes established powers once again vulnerable to newcomers like they were before supercaps were added.  The only chance of the latter happening is if enough of the top decision makers actually believe the threat of thousands of goons and other relative newcomers permanently leaving the game is a real and imminent threat if they don't, and even then the odds of them getting it right are slim given their record.

I don't think you are in a minority position here. The only hope is that CCP will realise that an inflow of noobs is what keeps null-sec going. Making it the playground of super-capital heavy super-powers is death to their game long-term. But they are still distracted, under-resourced (in terms of Eve) and have no easy way to make a 20 or 80 billion Isk ship worth that money without being over-powered when massed.

It is a fascinating design challenge though which I think is why there is the discussion. Rather than any belief CCP will do something sane.

Actually, I don't think they're going to magically gain expertise and coding talent, but I do believe that they are being forced out of the good ole boys club by their financial situation and the fact that some sort of suit will take control of CCP to fix the company, so it will no longer be a dev play sandbox.

Whatever effects they hope to achieve will be grossly distorted through the lens of their incompetence.   At least there is a chance they'll nerf them in a useful way on accident.

So, what might be some of the more interesting consequences if CCP bungles this "fix"?  It seems to me like The Mittani has made himself remarkably vulnerable on this with his two-step of "fix it or the goons quit" then "it's cool, CCP has our backs".  If CCP screws the pooch as expected his reputation takes a body blow.  He's proven quite adept at the metagame (players vs players), but I don't understand what he could possibly hope to have gained by playing the meta-metagame (players vs devs) this way.

Vulnerable to whom?  Pubbies already hate Mittens anyhow because he's in a null-sec corp, so who cares?

Super-capitals are pretty much a null-sec concern only so by and large the pubbies have no reason to care. However in terms of the null-sec game there are basically three power-blocs and one of them has a clear super-cap superiority and the resources to extend that lead. So CCP's balancing will determine how null-sec evolves. Both for the existing powers and any new groups trying to establish themselves.

That said I don't think they'll nerf super-caps nearly hard enough to change the current balance of power.

I really think you're misunderstanding the source of political power of faux intellectual forum posters in goonswarm.

The [roblem with a "fix" is that the consequences of the original bungle are still there. The NC is gone for example. All those Supercaps won't just vanish. This isn't as simple as a WOW expansion where "green pokadot gear" makes the previous "pink stripe gear" obsolete and everyone is on the same level again.

I believe the T3 ships were an attempt to make a new level and to make t2 ships and stuff obsolete and put everyone on a closer level, but they were tied to the Wormholes which meant that supply was a serious problem, and they wound up being yet another rich players toy. Not to say that Wormholes were not a good addition by themselves, they were, but tying the level playing field to wormholes was stupid.

And this leads to another problem. People say "Oh a supercap casts 30 billion" but thats just half the story. the fact is the amount of labour that's involved in getting the material to make one is vast. Frankly I doubt they would even be in the game without macromining and the levels of material that you can get in the drone regions. That's another thing the killing of the jump bridge networks is going to affect btw, the ease of getting material out to your manufacturing sites in 0.0, so its going to be harder to build them from now on. Which means less will be built in the future, so the people with the advantage in supercap numbers will keep that advantage.

Frankly My solutions would be CCP breaking out the Jovians blowing up every one of them, but the second they started that all the supercap pilots would log off till CCP got bored.


Not entirely. Supers can operate in low sec where there are no Bubbles. Hell people used to camp gagtes in invulnerable motherships till heavy Interdictors came out, and then Supers vanished. I think its only boredom thats keeping people from operating in low sec. I dont knjow of Titans can DD in low sec, but Bombers should work and fighters definatly do.

Amend Supercap high slots to only fit strip miners primed with Veldspar crystals.

That solves the problem of not enough people in nullsec mining Veld at the same time as redressing the military balance problems.

Pass me a stone, for I am death unto birds.

Low sec is the same thing as Null Sec as far as everyone who lives in high sec knows or cares.

Might as well be yeah.

As far as I can see (and I still count as a noob) low-sec is pretty much a wilderness. So while you can hot-drop a swarm of super-carriers (titan DD's do not work) into low-sec it doesn't really change much from dropping a couple of hundred battleships or T3's. There's either nothing there to deserve it or the target flies or dies.

Low-sec and faction warfare not being an approachable feeder into null-sec is another example of CCP's poor grasp of game design and lack of effort.

Why?  If they don't fix it then he should tell Goons to quit.  It's not his fault if CCP fucks up as usual.   That personally seems like the best possible outcome to me.   People not quitting enough is the biggest problem.

But they never learn.  I mean, look at Everquest.  WoW kicked it's ass and it pretty much died, but you still have people like Brad McQuaid thinking he still needs to make a game grindy to be successful.

WOW isn't grindy?  :uhrr:

Wouldn't know, never played it for more than 20 minutes.

EVENEWS24 (http://evenews24.com/) reports...well not much new really (http://www.evenews24.com/2011/07/31/ccp-soundwave-why-balancing-is-bad-and-monkeys-are-good/).

CCP Soundwave did say Gallente would be looked at neat year, and we can expect the supercap nurf in the next 3 months (no change there).

Also, he wants to nurf/destroy Datacores. I should get around to collecting and selling mine, they've dropped in worth a lot recently.

Compared to any prior diku?
No.
No, it isn't.

Did they mention what they would use for Invention if they get rid of datacores?

One to max level in WoW is literally about the same as two hell levels in original EQ.

Yeah and grinding all that stupid faction in WoW took forever.  While much of that is optional I think it is unfair to suggest WoW has substantially less grind.  They simply shuffled it around.  This may have changed somewhat since I quit years ago but having seen a friend playing recently it is most certainly still there. 

Pretty much all MMO's are going to have an element of grind. Virtually inevitable with a game expected to support so many hours of play. The grind was shorter and better concealed in original wow. Not that I'm sure what that has to do with EVe though.

Guild Wars

Had some soul crushing faction and title grinds.

Not to mention the entire storyline of Prophecies!

I don't remember being an r5glad giving me +1000 health.

I'm a bit nervous about this. Datacores are the cornerstone of my play for free strategy. Then again that may be why they're nerfing them.

I doubt they will leave people completely high and dry. As in the skills being useless. They may do what they did with PI. The change there for people who missed it was that the resource spawns move around a lot more often. Every now and then you have to move your extractors. The sweeteners were that they reduced clicking and raised overall output.

I imagine with datacores they might tie it in to the missions. Something like you get 2.5 times the research points as long as you do the mission each day. Since the missions are Hand The Guy Some Trit or level 1 Courier runs that wouldn't be too onerous but of course a shock to people who hope for completely passive income.