Rod Blaine
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Posted - 2005.12.27 13:48:00 -
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Earthan has a good point. Altho things imo haven't come that far yet, they most certainly can.
Eve is getting harder to keep balanced with every addition to the top end of the player spectrum. Yet, there's no way to keep the game interesting for the well organised player groups unless CCP adds stuff to reintroduce risk and excitement to their game.
As it is, talking pre-RmR, well organised and well led pvp oriented alliances had near to nothing left to fear in this game. There's next to nothing they cannot afford, they can do anything that can possibly be done by any player or group of players in Eve, and no amount of warfare with pre-rmr ships (aside from maybe hac's) poses any significant financial risk of attrition to them anymore.
The only challenges left to them were in the fields of efficiency, social power and tactics. The only sink left is time and effort spent organising things.
Now, with RmR CCP adds another layer of loss to the game, loss that hurts even the very well-off. And that is exactly what capital ships and the new tech2 are, things for rich people to aspire to use and lose. Carriers flown into combat on a regular basis are not toys for solo-playing causal agent runners in empire. They are ships that can reintroduce real struggles over resources again.
If anyone remembers the early days of alliance warfare, they should remember how hard it used to be to deal with the losses alliances inflicted to eachother in for example big conflicts like the old Stain v Curse wars. Small corps couldn't even affor to pvp in battleships back then because replacing the lost ones simply took too damn long.
Nowadays, I could play this game solo and still have no issues replacing a battleship every two days or so...
The wirth of isk has slipped, but the worth of tech1 ships and equipment slipped with it.
All that can and has reinstated that is capital ships and tech2 ships and modules. It's the only thing that could ever bankrupt old players now: losing a dread, or a load of tech2 ships. And given a prolonged war, it's what brings back the possibility to wion wars by attrition.
But the downside is that newer players, or those without access to 0.0 or the best earning potential in empire, cannot play that game.
What I think earthan means, is that there's a new gap opening again between the ones that can and those that cannot. Only this time it's not about battleships but about tech2 and capital ships.
The question is, is that really a problem ?
I think it's not...yet. But the risk is in the differences between today's powerships and between yesterday's ones: battleships
While a dreadnought poses about the same challenge to make, the same challenge to fly well, and the same risk relative to your wallet for a true vet or top-of-the-line corporation, the role of capitol ships differs.
Whatever you used to be able to do with a BS, you could do with a cruiser too, just not as well.
Now, how do you kill pos's without dreads ? How will you compete in the field of capital ship warfare unless you can afford them ?
The roles for carriers, motherships and titans have not become totally clear yet, but if anything as specific and impossible to substitute as that of dreads, we're in for what Earthan fears in the longer run. Purely because attrition then causes a lapse in ability, instead of a downgrade of ability.
Other then that, I don't think the relative difference in power between casual players and powergaming vets has changed that much yet. It may be more pronounced now, since the top end has kept evolving while the bottom end has done relatively less of that. But that's simply not something that can be changed.
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Power to the players !
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