Regarding the discussion about ship caches to work around the force projection changes - currently there are still no plans for them, at least in the CFC, and it's gonna be a pain to stockpile much of anything after these changes.
I have, however, moved all my scattered stuff to a single station because I won't be able to easily move things around anymore. So there's that, I guess...maybe Phoebe is just a way for CCP to clear out everyone's asset entry in the database.
I don't like how CCP seems to be using fun as a balancing factor in nullsec. As far as I can tell, these changes don't make it impossible to move a large cap fleet from one side of EVE to another within a small number of days, just very unfun to do so.
I don't like how CCP seems to be using fun as a balancing factor in nullsec. As far as I can tell, these changes don't make it impossible to move a large cap fleet from one side of EVE to another within a small number of days, just very unfun to do so.
What would you prefer? A blanket ban? Asking the players nicely to stop doing it?
"Fun" is a slippery and relative term in any case; you seem to be using it as a synonym for "absence of effort", but achieving difficult things well is another thing that can be fun.
You might be confusing caches for capital reimbursement (we probably have these though I wouldn't be privy to the details) with caches of capitals for use by the members (if we have these I've never heard a hint of it) or members with capitals staged in multiple forward operating bases (we kind of have this for subcapitals, we do not currently have this for capitals, and there are currently no orders to do so for capitals).
I don't like how CCP seems to be using fun as a balancing factor in nullsec. As far as I can tell, these changes don't make it impossible to move a large cap fleet from one side of EVE to another within a small number of days, just very unfun to do so.
It is actually important to stop caps and supercaps from being able to instantly (within 5 minutes on the low end to 30 minutes on the high end) join any fight anywhere in the galaxy. So the carrier and supercapital changes are absolutely necessary and I don't think any reasonable people are arguing against them.
You might be confusing caches for capital reimbursement (we probably have these though I wouldn't be privy to the details) with caches of capitals for use by the members (if we have these I've never heard a hint of it) or members with capitals staged in multiple forward operating bases (we kind of have this for subcapitals, we do not currently have this for capitals, and there are currently no orders to do so for capitals).
It will be nice when our corner of 0.0 is more vertically integrated. Right now I have to import a lot of shit to build a ship and have a prayer of being competitive with Jita.
"I don't know why people ever, ever try to stop nerds from doing things. It's really the most incredible waste of time." - Tycho
I don't like how CCP seems to be using fun as a balancing factor in nullsec. As far as I can tell, these changes don't make it impossible to move a large cap fleet from one side of EVE to another within a small number of days, just very unfun to do so.
It is actually important to stop caps and supercaps from being able to instantly (within 5 minutes on the low end to 30 minutes on the high end) join any fight anywhere in the galaxy. So the carrier and supercapital changes are absolutely necessary and I don't think any reasonable people are arguing against them.
Which is all well and good, but:
The rhetoric around this seems to relate to making it harder for large alliances to defend huge amounts of space. I have a hard time imagining these changes actually doing that. At a strategic level, the difference between doing one move op which takes a few hours, and several move ops spread over a week is minimal -- from what I remember, the CFC was never fully deployed within a week anyway. And any stategic here are almost completely negated by allowing caps through gates. Deklein or Tenal -> Delve via gates is a huge pain, but it's a huge pain for a couple of hours at most.
Even for preventing hot-drops across the universe, I think this is the wrong approach. No one has ever said: "You know what EVE needs: more waiting around". As it is, there's already too much dead time (which is why I quit, incidentally).
I don't really want to throw out proposed solutions because I don't really have the time (or knowledge) to weed it down to only the good ideas. But even a hard cap (or maybe hardening cap, like increasing fuel usage) tied to distance from a "home base" sounds better than enforced downtime between jumps.
Edit: Also, you're taking one of the worst slogs in the game: GSOL's job, and making it even worse.
I don't like how CCP seems to be using fun as a balancing factor in nullsec. As far as I can tell, these changes don't make it impossible to move a large cap fleet from one side of EVE to another within a small number of days, just very unfun to do so.
It is actually important to stop caps and supercaps from being able to instantly (within 5 minutes on the low end to 30 minutes on the high end) join any fight anywhere in the galaxy. So the carrier and supercapital changes are absolutely necessary and I don't think any reasonable people are arguing against them.
Edit: Also, you're taking one of the worst slogs in the game: GSOL's job, and making it even worse.
This is why I specified carriers and supercapitals. My next post links a devblog where a lot of the logistics issues were fixed as well. The rest of your points have been addressed pretty thoroughly over the past couple pages.
This is why I specified carriers and supercapitals. My next post links a devblog where a lot of the logistics issues were fixed as well. The rest of your points have been addressed pretty thoroughly over the past couple pages.
My main point, adding downtime to balance power is a bad approach, is an opinion, so I'm not sure how that can be "addressed" elsewhere. Discussed to tedium, maybe. But whatever.
"Fun" is a slippery and relative term in any case; you seem to be using it as a synonym for "absence of effort", but achieving difficult things well is another thing that can be fun.
I basically agree with everything you're saying here, except that I'm using fun as a synonym for "absence of effort". I used to be in GS Recon -- doing region surveys is a lot of work, but fun. But traveling across the galaxy after these changes still won't be tricky, just tedious.
I guess I didn't realize that the premise "waiting for a timer to count down isn't fun" would be controversial.
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
Its not controversial, its just that, as you noted, its been discussed to death. And there will be trickery involved. Feints will be more difficult, and so much more effective if managed.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
I don't like how CCP seems to be using fun as a balancing factor in nullsec. As far as I can tell, these changes don't make it impossible to move a large cap fleet from one side of EVE to another within a small number of days, just very unfun to do so.
It is actually important to stop caps and supercaps from being able to instantly (within 5 minutes on the low end to 30 minutes on the high end) join any fight anywhere in the galaxy. So the carrier and supercapital changes are absolutely necessary and I don't think any reasonable people are arguing against them.
Which is all well and good, but:
The rhetoric around this seems to relate to making it harder for large alliances to defend huge amounts of space. I have a hard time imagining these changes actually doing that. At a strategic level, the difference between doing one move op which takes a few hours, and several move ops spread over a week is minimal
The idea is not to stop people moving their ships long distances. The mechanism has been specifically designed to allow you to do so if you're prepared to accept the consequences.
What it is intended to do is to stop people moving their ships long distances casually and without any serious consequence, because it has been amply demonstrated that being able to do so has had a terrible, stifling effect on 0.0 and lo-sec and the game has become very stagnant as a consequence.
So when you want to discourage an activity in game you can do it 3 ways
1) You can just make it impossible. Eg: Capital ships and pilots can make 1 jump per day, the end. No workarounds, just a flat prohibition and evading it is a de facto EULA violation. Or just remove capital jumping as a mechanic. Etc. This is by far the easiest way, much loved by the likes of Electronic Arts.
2) You can make it take a long time or be expensive in some other way than time. Eg: the mechanism used - but we could also imagine a system where if you jump your cap too often then, say, your capital navigation skills are eroded or the ship takes increasing and variable amounts of structure damage and if it takes too much then it blows up, or it just costs a fucking jillion ISK. However, in a game like EVE, these all boil down to "time penalties" in the end; SP/hr, ISK/hr, fatigue/hr - not all that much diference ultimately, except that you can't outsource your fatigue debt like you can an ISK debt. (Although now I think about, it I quite like the structure damage idea but it doesn't stop the "haha lets hot drop that battlecruiser gang with 50 supercarriers because we can" issue)
3) You can make it difficult. This is much much harder to get right, because your "mildly inconvenient" might well be my "god damb impossible", and it's even more super double extra hard when you have highly organised groups, because most difficulty obstacles only have to be solved by one person in the group. I'm not even sure what a viable solution would look like in EVE. If you can come up with a player based mechanism that scales well and is fairly evenly applied, then please by all means elucidate it and I will champion it vigorously.
NB: In a game that wasn't EVE, I could imagine some variant of the fatigue mechanism like: when you cyno jump a ship, you have to actively fly it through a temporarily generated wormhole. If you fuck it up and touch the edge or whatever, you pop out of the wormhole in some random system somewhere. And maybe take some structure damage too! The more fatigue you have when you jump, the more the wormhole gets twistier, changes faster or whatever else makes it harder to successfully fly through. But capital ships don't really lend themselves to that solution, nor does a 1hz server tick, which is kind of a shame. Also that mechanism means that if you live in Australia, you don't get to fly cap ships very often, but if you live in London, you get a non trivial capital projection advantage.
And again, lets remember that these changes are meant to promote a change in behaviour. The idea isn't to make you have a horrible time doing things the way you were doing them before. Saying that you dislike the changes because it will become horrible to carry on doing what you were doing before is merely saying that these changes will likely be effective in changing your behaviour.
Most of the complaints I'm seeing boil down to "I'm going to have a horrible time doing exactly what I was doing before". I can tell you for a fact that these complaints elicit zero sympathy from CCP.
There are other ways to disincentivise something. Technically some (or all) of them could be put into your categories above, but I think they're different enough to deserve separate discussion:
4) You can give it a drawback: E.g. your structure damage example, or maybe have ships occasionally end up in neighboring systems on jump in. You had lumped this in with (2), but I think it deserves its own section, because in my opinion this is more interesting than a straight time or ISK penalty, because it opens up new options: it can be worked around or accepted.
5) You can create a counter: Effectively increasing the risk of this activity. E.g. the often suggested jump interdictor which will "drag" jumping ships. Preferably there would be a range of counters -- some very effective counters, which are only applicable in a narrow range of circumstances, and more general, but less effective, counters.
6) You can incentivize the opposite behaviour: Give some kind of bonus for short jumps, or invading/fighting against neighbours. From a mathematical point of view this is no different from penalizing behaviour, but psychologically never seems quite the same.
7) You can remove supporting pieces: In some cases there are multiple elements that contribute. In some cases instead of addressing the problem head-on you can try to knock out another piece. But this runs a strong risk of being ineffective.
Number 6 on your list is going to happen fairly soon, I think, in that I very much suspect that CCP are going to allow 0.0 space to be much more intensively developed. This will mean that alliances will be able to build their space up to support many more players in a single system, but also that it will be expensive (in terms of effort as well as ISK) to do so. The logical conclusion of a PP nerf and a sov system like that is to contract your borders and intensively develop a small area of space.
I guess I didn't realize that the premise "waiting for a timer to count down isn't fun" would be controversial.
V1m basically has this covered, but you realize that caps can take gates now? Which is kinda crazy and awesome, and means you only have to wait if you refuse to accept the risk of moving through gates. If you take gates while your jump timer / fatigue counts down, you can still get across EVE in a couple hours.
So CCP nerfed travel speed to the bare minimum needed for the health of the game, and then gave you two choices - eat a jump cooldown, or take gates.
Edit: Most of the complaints I consider reasonable are about short range travel being made too painful as well - jump bridges, for example, were largely worthless in the initial batch of changes and it really would be nice to be able to use 5-10ly of bridges in either direction without having to deal with timers. Now you can at least use them for industrial stuff. As I pointed out in jabber today, the JB nerfs make sov nullsec even less lively - now people are just going to use instawarping interceptors to travel (0 chance of getting caught) versus maybe taking an actual ship through jump bridges (some chance of getting caught on gates between jump bridges), and since we still need to spread out to actually pve/mine/whatever it's gonna be harder to form defense fleets. Sov quality of life changes will (have to, by definition) negate all of this, of course.
OK look, this is such a big change that in all honesty we're guessing. Best guess, informed guess, reasoned guess, gut feeling guess: guess.
But as long as we're being honest, what is there about the current state of 0.0 that means we have a lot to lose here? You want to talk about "Time To Fun"? Well gee I'd like to discuss that with you but I have to go and sit in fleet next to a Titan for 2 hours then hear the FC apologise because the op is cancelled.
Yup. Having multiple fleets that are hostile to each other each sitting on their own titan waiting for something to drop is actually a thing that happens. That needs to go, bad. Smaller roaming fleets, by themselves, aren't a whole lot better with the current objectives we have (massive hp sinks) but getting rid of hotdrops, by either subcaps or caps, is a good change.
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DuriniaEvolved from Space PotatoesRegistered Userregular
I see CCP is once again trying to lure me back in with free game time. Also, flattery: "When you played EVE Online, others turned to you for knowledge, advice and leadership. With new content rolling out like it has the past six months, people like you are in high demand."
But the timing is pretty bad, with a new WoW expansion just around the corner. New Blizzard releases have traditionally made me unsub from EVE for a while. And I think my computer is too shitty to run one or more EVE clients + WoW at the same time.
On the other hand, I'm sure MRCHI is in desperate need of my "knowledge, advice and leadership".
NC. making a move before Phoebe complicates things.
Yeah basically. They have taken a station in Querious which is a bit unfortunate. We had a nearly full Ishtar fleet ready to go, but the main CFC fleet didn't arrive in time or else wasn't powerful enough or maybe both.
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BaidolI will hold him offEscape while you canRegistered Userregular
Our dastardly enemies attack while our fearless leadership is getting drunk in Vegas. Those knaves.
I don't know if anyone saw Seagull's Vegas keynote presentation but she nbd dropped in that sov changes are coming in the final release patch this year
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DuriniaEvolved from Space PotatoesRegistered Userregular
I don't know if anyone saw Seagull's Vegas keynote presentation but she nbd dropped in that sov changes are coming in the final release patch this year
Good. I was hoping they'd keep the time between the introduction of "Jump AIDS" and the "reward" for staying close to home as small as possible.
In other news, MERCHI member Muliphen was spotted dancing at EVE Vegas, and it was Commander Shepard-level cringeworthy.
For business reasons, I must preserve the outward sign of sanity.
--Mark Twain
Posts
Regarding the discussion about ship caches to work around the force projection changes - currently there are still no plans for them, at least in the CFC, and it's gonna be a pain to stockpile much of anything after these changes.
I have, however, moved all my scattered stuff to a single station because I won't be able to easily move things around anymore. So there's that, I guess...maybe Phoebe is just a way for CCP to clear out everyone's asset entry in the database.
What would you prefer? A blanket ban? Asking the players nicely to stop doing it?
"Fun" is a slippery and relative term in any case; you seem to be using it as a synonym for "absence of effort", but achieving difficult things well is another thing that can be fun.
You might be confusing caches for capital reimbursement (we probably have these though I wouldn't be privy to the details) with caches of capitals for use by the members (if we have these I've never heard a hint of it) or members with capitals staged in multiple forward operating bases (we kind of have this for subcapitals, we do not currently have this for capitals, and there are currently no orders to do so for capitals).
It is actually important to stop caps and supercaps from being able to instantly (within 5 minutes on the low end to 30 minutes on the high end) join any fight anywhere in the galaxy. So the carrier and supercapital changes are absolutely necessary and I don't think any reasonable people are arguing against them.
I might
And there again I might not
Huzzah! This pretty much completely addresses the industrial concerns and black ops don't become worthless either.
I can even keep using jump bridges as long as I use a hauler!
Yeah, I think this is a good middle ground, at least until some of the nullsec industry concerns are fixed.
PS. WTS Rorqual
--Mark Twain
"I don't know why people ever, ever try to stop nerds from doing things. It's really the most incredible waste of time." - Tycho
Which is all well and good, but:
The rhetoric around this seems to relate to making it harder for large alliances to defend huge amounts of space. I have a hard time imagining these changes actually doing that. At a strategic level, the difference between doing one move op which takes a few hours, and several move ops spread over a week is minimal -- from what I remember, the CFC was never fully deployed within a week anyway. And any stategic here are almost completely negated by allowing caps through gates. Deklein or Tenal -> Delve via gates is a huge pain, but it's a huge pain for a couple of hours at most.
Even for preventing hot-drops across the universe, I think this is the wrong approach. No one has ever said: "You know what EVE needs: more waiting around". As it is, there's already too much dead time (which is why I quit, incidentally).
I don't really want to throw out proposed solutions because I don't really have the time (or knowledge) to weed it down to only the good ideas. But even a hard cap (or maybe hardening cap, like increasing fuel usage) tied to distance from a "home base" sounds better than enforced downtime between jumps.
Edit: Also, you're taking one of the worst slogs in the game: GSOL's job, and making it even worse.
This is why I specified carriers and supercapitals. My next post links a devblog where a lot of the logistics issues were fixed as well. The rest of your points have been addressed pretty thoroughly over the past couple pages.
My main point, adding downtime to balance power is a bad approach, is an opinion, so I'm not sure how that can be "addressed" elsewhere. Discussed to tedium, maybe. But whatever.
I basically agree with everything you're saying here, except that I'm using fun as a synonym for "absence of effort". I used to be in GS Recon -- doing region surveys is a lot of work, but fun. But traveling across the galaxy after these changes still won't be tricky, just tedious.
I guess I didn't realize that the premise "waiting for a timer to count down isn't fun" would be controversial.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
The idea is not to stop people moving their ships long distances. The mechanism has been specifically designed to allow you to do so if you're prepared to accept the consequences.
What it is intended to do is to stop people moving their ships long distances casually and without any serious consequence, because it has been amply demonstrated that being able to do so has had a terrible, stifling effect on 0.0 and lo-sec and the game has become very stagnant as a consequence.
So when you want to discourage an activity in game you can do it 3 ways
1) You can just make it impossible. Eg: Capital ships and pilots can make 1 jump per day, the end. No workarounds, just a flat prohibition and evading it is a de facto EULA violation. Or just remove capital jumping as a mechanic. Etc. This is by far the easiest way, much loved by the likes of Electronic Arts.
2) You can make it take a long time or be expensive in some other way than time. Eg: the mechanism used - but we could also imagine a system where if you jump your cap too often then, say, your capital navigation skills are eroded or the ship takes increasing and variable amounts of structure damage and if it takes too much then it blows up, or it just costs a fucking jillion ISK. However, in a game like EVE, these all boil down to "time penalties" in the end; SP/hr, ISK/hr, fatigue/hr - not all that much diference ultimately, except that you can't outsource your fatigue debt like you can an ISK debt. (Although now I think about, it I quite like the structure damage idea but it doesn't stop the "haha lets hot drop that battlecruiser gang with 50 supercarriers because we can" issue)
3) You can make it difficult. This is much much harder to get right, because your "mildly inconvenient" might well be my "god damb impossible", and it's even more super double extra hard when you have highly organised groups, because most difficulty obstacles only have to be solved by one person in the group. I'm not even sure what a viable solution would look like in EVE. If you can come up with a player based mechanism that scales well and is fairly evenly applied, then please by all means elucidate it and I will champion it vigorously.
NB: In a game that wasn't EVE, I could imagine some variant of the fatigue mechanism like: when you cyno jump a ship, you have to actively fly it through a temporarily generated wormhole. If you fuck it up and touch the edge or whatever, you pop out of the wormhole in some random system somewhere. And maybe take some structure damage too! The more fatigue you have when you jump, the more the wormhole gets twistier, changes faster or whatever else makes it harder to successfully fly through. But capital ships don't really lend themselves to that solution, nor does a 1hz server tick, which is kind of a shame. Also that mechanism means that if you live in Australia, you don't get to fly cap ships very often, but if you live in London, you get a non trivial capital projection advantage.
Most of the complaints I'm seeing boil down to "I'm going to have a horrible time doing exactly what I was doing before". I can tell you for a fact that these complaints elicit zero sympathy from CCP.
4) You can give it a drawback: E.g. your structure damage example, or maybe have ships occasionally end up in neighboring systems on jump in. You had lumped this in with (2), but I think it deserves its own section, because in my opinion this is more interesting than a straight time or ISK penalty, because it opens up new options: it can be worked around or accepted.
5) You can create a counter: Effectively increasing the risk of this activity. E.g. the often suggested jump interdictor which will "drag" jumping ships. Preferably there would be a range of counters -- some very effective counters, which are only applicable in a narrow range of circumstances, and more general, but less effective, counters.
6) You can incentivize the opposite behaviour: Give some kind of bonus for short jumps, or invading/fighting against neighbours. From a mathematical point of view this is no different from penalizing behaviour, but psychologically never seems quite the same.
7) You can remove supporting pieces: In some cases there are multiple elements that contribute. In some cases instead of addressing the problem head-on you can try to knock out another piece. But this runs a strong risk of being ineffective.
V1m basically has this covered, but you realize that caps can take gates now? Which is kinda crazy and awesome, and means you only have to wait if you refuse to accept the risk of moving through gates. If you take gates while your jump timer / fatigue counts down, you can still get across EVE in a couple hours.
So CCP nerfed travel speed to the bare minimum needed for the health of the game, and then gave you two choices - eat a jump cooldown, or take gates.
Edit: Most of the complaints I consider reasonable are about short range travel being made too painful as well - jump bridges, for example, were largely worthless in the initial batch of changes and it really would be nice to be able to use 5-10ly of bridges in either direction without having to deal with timers. Now you can at least use them for industrial stuff. As I pointed out in jabber today, the JB nerfs make sov nullsec even less lively - now people are just going to use instawarping interceptors to travel (0 chance of getting caught) versus maybe taking an actual ship through jump bridges (some chance of getting caught on gates between jump bridges), and since we still need to spread out to actually pve/mine/whatever it's gonna be harder to form defense fleets. Sov quality of life changes will (have to, by definition) negate all of this, of course.
But as long as we're being honest, what is there about the current state of 0.0 that means we have a lot to lose here? You want to talk about "Time To Fun"? Well gee I'd like to discuss that with you but I have to go and sit in fleet next to a Titan for 2 hours then hear the FC apologise because the op is cancelled.
Again
For clarity.
Hotdrops are cool. Not starting a hotdrop in Venal because you'll probably get counter-dropped by dudes in Period Basis is not fun.
--Mark Twain
But the timing is pretty bad, with a new WoW expansion just around the corner. New Blizzard releases have traditionally made me unsub from EVE for a while. And I think my computer is too shitty to run one or more EVE clients + WoW at the same time.
On the other hand, I'm sure MRCHI is in desperate need of my "knowledge, advice and leadership".
In fact for those of us in Querious, it's already pretty goddamb real: The NCdot fleet~~ http://eve-dingo.com/formRecive.php?id=KKGXjSC
I stuck in an alpha clone in YA0. There are goons everywhere. Please send help.
I have no idea what this means.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Yeah basically. They have taken a station in Querious which is a bit unfortunate. We had a nearly full Ishtar fleet ready to go, but the main CFC fleet didn't arrive in time or else wasn't powerful enough or maybe both.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Good. I was hoping they'd keep the time between the introduction of "Jump AIDS" and the "reward" for staying close to home as small as possible.
In other news, MERCHI member Muliphen was spotted dancing at EVE Vegas, and it was Commander Shepard-level cringeworthy.
--Mark Twain