Sarah Sarai
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Posted - 2009.11.25 19:33:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: CCP Hammer
First, IĘd like to say that a single developer cannot come in and unilaterally change everything with no oversight. People are spewing a lot of hate at CCP Nozh but instead itĘs a case of shooting the messenger. He is just doing his job trying to improve the game and explain the reasoning for why changes were made. We work as a team and agree on the direction things are taking. We want the game to be balanced and fun for everyone to play. We also think about the future of the game and how it will be in years to come after our changes weighing the medium- and long-term repercussions.
While this might be true, Nozh doesn't help his case. The target painting comment is a perfect example of what really ****es off 0.0 players. You should probably use a different messenger and have someone else edit/proofread their devblogs to prevent player eruptions like that. All players see is a developer they already don't like saying "hey we're removing all those nice ms changes, also here's some new capital weapons balanced around target painters working on targets they don't *actually* work on, have fun!" In case you've forgotten, most of the players I'm referring to don't like this particular dev because the last time a controversial change was made (speed/nano), he came up with some pretty outlandish examples to support his claims. Players aren't going to react favorably to such things. So while your statement about how changes are made/not made by single developers is probably true, perhaps you should evaluate it from the point of view of a player that doesn't understand how your internal controls and flows work. All we see is this guy we already don't like from a prior bad run-in feeding us some more garbage changes. Not flaming, just trying to give you some constructive feedback on how you might better handle something like this in the future.
Quote:
We werenĘt entirely happy with the direction and balancing of MOMs before development of Dominion began. Even during the SISI tests they still werenĘt falling into place for us. They were potentially too powerful and that would have resulted in a small minority having a lot of fun at the cost of thousands who would be instapopped in 0.0. So we tried to tune them again to a point we felt was balanced, but then the role of the ships wasnĘt clear once we started to lower the damage. Instead, they started to blur with dreads and carriers.
How would thousands be insta-popped by the supercarrier changes? I'm confused as to how fighterbombers were some unstoppable weapon no one could deal with compared to current fighters. If you increase the signature radius on their torps/weapons/whatever high enough so they only affect capitals, I really do not see how they were all that overpowered. Having said that I understand if you didn't like the role. Seeing as this is mostly a 0.0 issue and you aren't sure what to do with it, perhaps you should ask the 0.0 players in the CSM to gather information for you. I bet if you talked to the various mothership pilots in the 0.0 alliances you could cobble together a rather good idea of what works/does not work with motherships as-is and help form an idea of what you want them to be. Hell you have a good case subject working for you now (Seleene) to jumpstart that. Currently I would say they're just fleet support, they can carry a pile of extra dictors/tacklers/cynoships to fights and hand out fighters. In the devblogs, it's made clear titans should be the main logistics vehicle in the fleet, so that doesn't leave you many roles for the mothership to fill. If you don't like them as anti-capital combat ships, consider making them anti-support combat ships instead to make up for the void left by the Doomsday removal. A decent example of this would be increasing the regular drone damage, range, and speed on motherships, or making fighters much more effective against battleships.
Leaving them as-is really leaves some of your more advanced players in a bind, because if you completely revert the changes they are really ineffective (especially the HP changes, since Titans will really rip them apart). These ships are not easy to use, they're not easy to move, and they don't really justify the price. You don't have to do MASSIVE changes to make them all that useful. A "yea we screwed up here's some freebie changes" example would be increasing the jumprange to match dreadnaughts. That won't be massively gamebreaking, but it will really help out because currently that is a major hurdle in using them. I don't think that's going to get ANY complaints from anyone, and it'll show people you're not the heartless bastards people think you are currently.
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