Ignoring the whole reason the Hulk and Hurricanes were popular in the first place. I'm not going to argue with someone using non sequitur. The Hulk was popular because it was by far the best mining ship, hands down, no question, it was the best. The others were brought up to par because they felt the Hulk was where they wanted mining ships in terms of overall ability. Hurricane was fairly similar. These are things CCP has in fact openly stated. And in fact has openly stated that there are balance issues in other ship types and tiers that they intend to address. In no part of their statements do they say "this ship is too popular, so we gotta change it." I mean, dear god.. REALLY? That's really how you think balancing works? I've never seen a more out of touch statement. Also your example has nothing to do with my belief of fairness, so doesn't require answering. I already stated my viewpoint about differing roles and how they apply to fairness.

...Finally we were thankfully able to resolve some of the outstanding balance issues with the two most problematic Battlecruisers (Drake and Hurricane)...

Let's modify that scenario a little, ...

[quote=William Cane]found some botsquote]

Report them, have fun seeing the bot accounts for the rest of your eve life. .

Have you ever considered that this is, perhaps, for comedic value, and to point out the irony of an utterly broken and pointless mechanic?

Please, do go read the devblog by CCP Fozzie. He writes:

And he further shows a picture of their popularity.

Why do you think he does this? Is it pure coincidence when he says that there are "outstanding balance issues" and then shows a graph of their popularity where these two ships stand out?

ssh don't tell him that

Because generally its a sign ...

You mean it is the evidence of the problem and without it would you not have a problem.

Not how it works at all.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

He means that if you, as a game designer, think that something is overpowered, but none of the players are using it, there's probably some good reason that they're not using it that you haven't thought of, and that lack of use is actually evidence of it not being overpowered.

The aggregate of the players is usually smarter at finding the best uses for things than the game developers. (Canonical example, Jetcan mining.)

Not how it works at all.

...It wasn't one of the most popular classes. In fact, far from it. However it had an ability that was so powerful, so ridiculous, despite not seeming as such at a glance, that when people started discovering it, it was rapidly changed before there was any significant population shift...

You called it is a sign. I call it evidence. Is your sign suddenly gone or why are you giving me nonsense?

Its not absolute evidence though. For example. Say a corp of 1000 joined and all on a whim decided, "hey, we're going to be a Gallente only corporation" and they start off ONLY flying Gallente ships. That's a population shift that wouldn't be able to applied to such statistics. Its not an unrealistic one either. Well, maybe not so much now, but still. There are lots of potential causes to population shifts. You're trying to use it as the sole factor to look at. You don't only look at one thing like that if you're using any kind of logical thinking.

What... in the holy ****... ok... you're just trolling, blocked.

It used to be popular to believe the world was flat. They were wrong.

It used to be popular to believe the world was flat. They were wrong.

Regardless, popularity is one of the major metrics that CCP uses to detect imbalances, and rightly so, because nobody can perfectly weight every combination of incomparable stats, so the best you can do is find empirical evidence (i.e. usage statistics).

It is no coincidence that the Prophecy is the least used Battlecruiser in the current meta. The combination of anemic damage and slow speed left the ship relegated to the role of obvious bait with the occasional creative fit that relied on the element of surprise rather than competitive performance.

The Prophecy was in dire need of a completely new role, and it has now found that role as the next step in the Amarr EmpireGÇÖs expanding drone carrier program. The energy weapon capacitor bonus is being replaced with a 10% bonus to drone damage and hitpoints per level, and the drone bandwidth is being increased to 75mbit (equal to the current Myrm) with a giant 225m3 bay to hold a wide variety of drones in the tradition of Amarrian drone doctrine.

The Prophecy is also seeing two highslots removed to make room for an extra midslot and lowslot, and the addition of missile launcher hardpoints alongside the turrets to give plenty of fitting options for the creative pilot.

And yet Fozzie was able to pinpoint some of the reasons. Players are able to pinpoint why these things are better than others. The balance isn't off because the popularity. They become popular because the balance is off.

I'm not saying otherwise. Popularity is how you detect imbalances. Figuring out why they're popular is the first step in Fixing the problem.

Popularity is the primary evidence that you have a problem. And a theoretical problem that has no evidence suggesting a problem in practice is evidence that your theory is wrong (look at all the EFT warrior fits that crash and burn in actual testing).

Its not really foolproof evidence though is the thing.

No, not only do I disagree, but I will not ever agree to a logic where an aggressor considers himself punished for an instant win, but chooses to think it is a punishment. It is outright stupid.

Except the corp instantly dropping and reforming isn't a "win" for the aggressor. There are no goals I can think of that an aggressor may have in which that would be considered a "win". If they want gudfites? Not a win, as the other people skirted out of the war immediately. They want easy prey? Not a win. They want to disrupt a corporations activities for some reason (null logistics, general competition, grudges, etc)? Not a win, because you can't accomplish that if they can instantly drop and reform corp.

etc.

This is my entire bloody point, the ability to so quickly and easily drop and reform corps under a war means that goals of war deccing, the point of the system existing, can be completely undermined.

Couldn't really tell you if there's an EVE example, haven't seen enough, but the point still stands. Anyways, you may not have said its full proof evidence, but this whole conversation started because someone else did, which ultimately was the whole issue of why this is even a thing.

1- check the warp ins, once you find the warp in, stand on it and sort belts type and distance to see what he will mine next

2- exhaust one of the next roids to the point one cycle is left in it.

3- watch the bot mine it in one cycle,

Whitehound appears to be a member of a small group of people who think that the only pvp in high sec should be ganking.

Instead of people going to war with each other and having reasons to fight, he'd rather the only people who do pvp in high sec be gankers as apposed to people who have legitemate reason to go to war, like industrialists.