As announced last night on the o7 show, we have a list of high-impact balance changes planned for Scylla.

This thread is for discussing the proposed removal of fighter assist for carriers and super carriers.

This change being largely driven by 'skynetting' which is a tactic where carriers and super carriers can sit in near perfect safety at the edge of starbase shields and assign thousands of DPS worth of fighter drones to their fleet mates who can fly whatever ship they want, while wielding an enormous amount of damage. We feel this is not meeting our standards for risk vs reward and therefor would like to remove the ability to assist fighters. More details are covered in this dev blog.

A particular point of feedback that we are interested in surrounds the ability of fighters to warp. We know that in some circumstances it can be frustrating to have your fighters warp off grid to chase a target when you would rather have them move to another target on grid with you instead. We also know that fighter warping is unique and provides some interesting gameplay in some scenarios. Would you prefer that we removed the ability for fighters to warp or that we left warping in, despite the absence of assist?

Look forward to your feedback.

Well it seems like you realised the problem is risk vs reward while asigning fighters from the edge of a POS FF. But instead of making it more interesting by finding some way to make it more dangerous to asign fighters you sadly take the easy way out and just remove it. It would be way more interesting for the game if you found a way to make carriers that asigned fighters more vulnerable.
The best way to adress this Problem would be to not allow asigning fighters within a certain distance to a POS. This will create a lot of interesting encounters / fights over carier/super carriers that are caught while they asigned fighters.

Concerning fighter warp there is no problem with that. People that don't want it can hit the don't follow button and all is fine.

Simply remove all flavours of drone-assist.

don't give in to those wanting to keep the warp ability on fighters, they are just big drones not actual ships

You shouldn't remove the whole assignment mechanic just because you overbuffed assigned fighters via mods & skills bonus application change.
Assignment was in the game for what, 10 years? And it never was a problem until you started applying each and every drone bonus there is to fighters.
Solution: undo this bonus application change for assigned fighters and keep the mechanic itself. If that's not enough - allow assignment to cruisers, even BCs, only.
But don't remove the unique mechanic that was perfectly fine for years.

As for warping, fighters and FBs 100% must be able to follow you when you leave the field. A choice between losing your super or several hundred mil in FBs is not a good one. Same for carriers and fighters.
Fighters following targets is often an annoyance, so a toggle for that would be perfect.

I've yet to see an actual argument to keeping fighters going to warp besides "please don't nerf they cost me money".

So a unique and interesting feature thatGÇÖs been around for numerous years is being removed because of an undesirable side effect that has reared its head more often of late due to changes that came in Phoebe. So instead of correcting the side affect you are just going to axe the whole feature.

ThatGÇÖs like having a blemish on your hand and chopping off the whole hand to get rid of it.

*Golf clap* I guess we should be happy you guys are in game design and are not doctors, why not put forth some effort and prevent the undesirable behavior directly instead of taking easy sloppy way out?

If you have no idea how skynet works then you probably shouldn't post here. The Carrier is 40m outside a friendly POS, with a heated MWD and agility rigs and can get back into a friendly POS in under 1 second. The Einherjis are assisted to the interceptors from this position. For all intents and purposes it is completely invulnerable. A t2 Fit Thanatos costs around 2b including fighters, but it is an almost invulernable asset. The tangible assets you will lose are the Stilettos in this example on the grid, and probably rarely the fighters if the Stilettos aren't paying attention, and the Vindicator. The assisting Carrier in a proper configuration is at almost no risk what so ever.

suddenly i feel like seeing the neighbours Boy sitting in the sandbox calling mommy and blaming the 5 year older kid for destroying his plan to world dominance.

just like, if i can't kill it quick enough, iam gonna run to mommccp and make them disappear through another way.

grow balls. seriously.

They do get bonuses dumpass.

Please leave the ability for fighters to warp back to the carrier in the event of the carrier warping out. It would really suck losing 200m ISK fighters every time you get a socket error. Additionally, it gives fighters something unique as opposed to other drones.

This also encourages people to rat in carriers. It has been years since I have actually ratted with a carrier, but less than a week since I have helped kill ratting carriers. If rats kill your fighters every time you get a socket error or you lose fighters every time you try to save your carrier, people will either use heavy drones or not rat with the carrier.

Additionally, make fighters give killmails and make it so they cannot warp out of bubbles or when pointed.

CCP Rise and CCP Fozzie are part of the game design team and are not programmers. The Fighter Assist code has likely not been touched in over 10 years when it was put out in the Red Moon Rising expansion in 2006. There are several bugs in the fighter assist code and since CCP has a problem with applying/deapplying skills/bonuses from other grids in the past (See OGB) and the Brain-In-A-Box project, it would probably take incredible amount of time from the development team to get these bugs fixed. At which point, fighter assist will go back to being a marginalized and rarely used mechanic, of which CCP would have now spent hundreds of development hours on.

Assigned fighters do inherit bonuses from the carrier pilot/their ship and the mods fitted.

Ignoring the bugs, I am suggesting to you that making it so that fighters lose their bonuses off grid is probably going to take a huge amount of development time from CCP for lackluster returns. The usage of assisted fighters before the changes was close to non-existent. Are there actually any tangible uses for assisted fighters if they do not retain the current stats?

What if they want to keep the modules affecting bomber/fighter? Did you think that might be the reasons why they didn't just revert back? What if they changed their mind and think projecting damage off a ship own grid is broken just like they want to get rid of OGB but can't for technical reasons?

The only real problem with this change right now is we get no answer on why approach X, Y and Z were not used to fix the issue.

This change will result in more PvP as Carriers will have to come onto grid to achieve the same effect as before (Resulting in more content, escalations and carrier kills).

a simple fix to fighters is that they should return to base upon 50% shield damage for repairs.
once they have returned to base they need to rest and change their pants which takes them 5 mins of combat fatigue.

I'm sure someone in the thread has said it, but:

Isn't the obvious answer to "skynet" just to remove the bonuses from the carrier (in the case of the thanatos) and modules when the fighters are assigned to someone? Few pilots used fighter assignment till the skills/module changes were introduced since fighters really are not ideal against small targets without them. You just made fighters viable after years of near uselessness, now you want to nerf them?

I think most everyone agrees fighters warping is fine and should be left alone. It really is a cool feature.

You could reduce fighter weapon ranges to reduce this but then you'd run into the old problem that made fighters mostly useless back in the day in that their high orbit speed and short optimal range meant they'd often defeat their own tracking.

you are an awful forum moderator.

either you know full well what you are doing, or you don't understand the seriousness and criticalcality of what you are deleting.

people need to see majority of posts you are deleting please stop and let someone else do your job.


Besides. you're just a "Vice" admiral. im a "Fleet" admiral.. i out Rank you.

WHY IS CCP REALLY DOING THIS

Personally I think this is about people plexing, and not spending real $ to sub their accounts. Everything is getting more expensive, including the cost of making and running EVE.

Hello

Appreciate all the feedback very much.

Based on what you've said here we are planning to leave Fighter warping in, but stick with removing assist.

We hear the concerns about the state of capitals and loss of return on investment from training towards them and we absolutely want to make sure that caps of all kinds are not only viable but exciting and powerful. We still feel this change is necessary, but we are looking into ways to improve on the state of capitals and capital balance. No news on that front for now but it's something we are committed to improving.

Thanks again.