Would love if you expanded a bit.

those changes HURT solo. Solo ships that used rapid laucnhers now cannto kill anything of their size before reloading.

Its a bad idea to start this on weapons. Ohhh how about we do this to 220mm AC's! double dps...half ammo and 40 sec reload!
Or Artillery!
Or Blasters! Sure you'll do 1800 dps but you won't be able to sustain it enough to make a difference!

This is like taking viagra with the added side effect of it making you prematurely ejaculate. Sure its extra heavy and creamy but now you have to wait an entire day to do it again!

this thread is missing some tinfoil hattery...
where is dinsdale and his claims taht this will ruin high sec mission runners and is only a boost to the large donuts.

I'm not convinced at all by the first complaint. As I've said before, this delay creates new kimds of decision making, it creates spikes of tension in fights rather than a flat amount of damage moving around and beyond those things it can be completely mitigated if you want. As others have pointed out, simply splitting your launchers into two groups and alternating them means you are never stuck in reload. It also means you lose the advantage of having your damage front-loaded into a very high DPS number. Still, if you can completely bypass this 'downside' I don't see how you can argue that this mechanic alone ruins the system.

I commented earlier on the missile switching - I think it is a valid complaint and I'd like to find a work-around for it as an iteration but I don't think it's a show-stopper. Several of the ships using these systems are kinetic bonused which means you don't switch that often. You still have time to switch on the way to a fight based on what damage type might be best. You still have the option to switch as you run out of charges and would be reloading anyway. But again, this is a legit complaint and I want to look into it.

Most of the complaints about it being a straight up nerf make me feel like going ahead with the old plan and leaving RLML in their current state would have been a mistake. I think most of you feeling this way are just disappointed with the idea of losing a slightly over-powered weapon system, which is understandable. Please keep in mind that this change represents a 15-20% damage drop over long fights but offers a new advantage in trade. I suspect that ships like FW Caracals with RLML will remain very strong. Also, if they don't, it's very easy to tune the reload time down slightly or the rate of fire up slightly to bring them into balance and we would absolutely watch that and make necessary adjustments. I would be extremely unhappy if the numbers were bad and rapid launchers disappeared from Caracals and Fleet Scythes completely.

BTW, CCP Rise and Fozzy (and certainly some others too) have a lot of pvp experience, yet people deny them it only because of their tag, so really, nobody here actually care about pvp experience or actual global vision of the game and the killboard argument is only a way to dishonnor someone and don't have to bother arguing with him. Forum pvp 101, alias Troll initiation lvl1.

~*beautiful words*~

Blasting smaller ships is the point of destroyers already and they don't have any other role. What do they become if the Caracal is better than all of them in every single way ?

I've been discussing the response to this change almost constantly since the thread was posted, both with the CSM and with my fellow designers. I'll cut to the chase and say that the conclusion is to go ahead with the change, with the understanding that it needs to be carefully looked at following release.

I understand that the current RLML missiles are very strong and you guys like them and that many people would be very unhappy for them to get a significant change regardless of the method we chose. We definitely feel they need a change though. It's a weapon system designed to be best in a particular kind of situation rather than being the best choice for most situations and so one way or another it was going to get tweaked. However, if this change means the system isn't powerful in the situations it's meant for (dunking smaller ships), it will get adjusted until it is.

The second part of this topic is whether or not the other medium weapon systems are actually viable. The way players are behaving says they are, but following this release I'd like to have a conversation internally about missiles as a whole and figure out where we stand. Maybe there is some more changes needed and I'd like to look into that.

As far as the long reload mechanic, the feedback is mixed in this thread and mostly positive elsewhere (CSM, internal development, external forums) from what I can tell.

Again, I will say that the concerns about ammo swapping are completely valid and I've talked to my team and we can hopefully address that sometime after Rubicon.

Part of the reason I lean towards putting this change in is the common sentiment in most balance threads that homogenization is a big fear among our players. I think favoring new types of interactions rather than adjusting numbers slightly within the same mechanic makes the game more interesting, and everything I've heard from the community points that direction as well (except sometimes when doing something new means changing something old).

PS - saying I don't play the game or use Caracals is completely ridiculous, I think you guys can find more reasonable lines of attack.

I also assure you that I am not ignoring negative feedback. There are absolutely a lot of people giving that in this thread. In the past when I've gotten negative feedback which is backed with well articulated arguments I don't hesitate to make changes (see industrial rebalance, electronic attack frig rebalance, battleship rebalance), but in this thread the majority of complaint is very disorganized and unhelpful, that's why I'm instead going with the positive feedback coming from the CSM, from our testing and from some posters here.

Based on his purely dismissive responses in this thread I think it's rather obvious you are wasting your time with the whole "you are better than that" approach.