I'm going to throw this here since I have a feeling a lot of questions coming up will be along this line:
Why nerf things when you could buff things instead?This is a question that comes up often in any thread where we are discussing decreasing the power of an item or ship. I can completely understand where it's coming from. Buffing things makes people happy in much larger numbers, it simply feels good to see the effectiveness of your equipment increase. Many other games rely on constantly improving gear to drive engagement in their content and that method of development can work very well for those games.
I'm going to start by quoting my answer to this question from the Heavy Missile thread before Retribution, because what I said there still applies.
CCP Fozzie wrote:When we are balancing in a game like Eve we always need to be conscious of the danger presented by power creep. In some games where the progression is tied to ever advancing gear stats power creep isn't a big issue as it is built into the whole premise of the game. In a sandbox like Eve player advancement is tied to individual freeform goals and we need to make sure that the tools available are both interesting and balanced. Any time we buff something in Eve, we are nerfing every other item in the game slightly by extension. In a case like this we believe that the best course of action is to adjust the Heavy Missiles downwards to achieve balance.
I would be lying if I said that we never allow power creep in EVE. It's quite simply much much easier to balance upwards and considering how powerful of a tool it is for creating short term customer satisfaction, some power creep is very hard to avoid. However we do need to be very mindful of how much we let ourselves indulge. There are cases where for the long term health of the game ecosystem we simply have to reduce the power of certain items and ships. We believe this is one of those times. I can promise you that we're committed to eating our vegetables and making adjustments either up or down based on our best estimation of what the game needs. We won't decrease the power of items and ships unless we deem it necessary but we also won't forget that our job is to manage the health of the game over the long term.