islador
Gallente Frontier Explorer's League
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Posted - 2011.07.08 21:28:00 -
[1]
I've been playing for 5 years now, I can fly just about everything under the sun, including capitals. Capitals as they are, need work, but adding bigger badder versions of what already exists doesn't help anyone, they just become the new standard, case and points, SCs and Titans.
Any new capital needs to be something unique. Any new capital needs to be expensive. Any new capital needs to have a limiting factor tied DIRECTLY to player count, or directly to a drop rate.
To expand on that last bit, Estamel's Invuln is arguably the best item in the game, there are VERY VERY few of them because the drop rate is absurdly small, so CCP could concievably limit the number of new capitals in the game by tying either construction, or use to a drop rate, be it a sleeper drop, pirate drop, etc, it doesn't matter as long as it's rare.
As far as unique ships go, they need to be gang or alliance support in some way. A new dread that blows **** up makes the old dread useless. But a new cap that sieges and projects a 200km bubble from hell is VERY unique, and fills a very specific, very vital role in large scale engagements. It doesn't compete with hictors or dictors because it cannot move, and it's range is so extreme its bordering on suicide for the fleet deploying it.
Another option is the long sought after mobile station, something that takes a capsuleer crew, a gunnery sergeant thats trained to use the 8 capital guns, a station engineer that has to be present for the market, refinery, labs, clone bays and offices to be turned on or off, a pilot to jump/warp/fly the station, a repair chief to handle the remote repair arrays and turn on/off the repair bays in the docks, a shield or armor engineer to run the tank and ensure she doesn't get blown up, and a captain, to use the gang link towers projecting off the top. By requiring these 6 different pilots to fully utilize the vessel, you limit how many can be fielded at anyone point. To be combat effective you only need 5, and with a single pilot jumping from "Seat" to "Seat" it's just a really ****ing expensive dread, carrier, etc. Make this station anchorable and with a POS style reinforce timer, so you can leave it somewhere, make it large enough to be warpable like an outpost, and make it require another maintenance array to be refitted, so that you can't refit randomly. Require it use absurd amounts of fuel to jump, no fuel to operate but stront to reinforce, and limit it to 0.0 only.
The point I'm trying to make is that new capitals need to be new, not just bigger and badder. The training time needs to be proportional to what they bring to the table, and they need to be limited in some way. ISK is not a limitation, ISK does not require trust, or companionship to flow, making a ship that is jointly piloted, or requires some rare item to be built/flown, is a hard limit. Each hard limit has different pros and cons, and should be used for different types of ships, but above all else, these new ships need to be gang/organization focused, not individually focused.
Give us bitter vets something to look forward to CCP. Give us something new and exciting, that really pushes the group play and puts our seniority to use. Give us the tools to play and build in the sandbox to our heart's content, but don't give us something where strategy and coordination are useless. |