So the changes to remove the ability to assign fighters I agree with, it can ruin PvP though it does give advantages to a defender which is sometimes needed. This will make it more difficult to rat in contested i.e. camped areas, but thats acceptable, hiding next to a POS shield is kinda meh and I never did it.
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I don't understand what you are trying to say, but there are too many people looking for fights with a carrier ready to assign fighters, that being said it was a mechanic that allowed the smaller group to take on bigger groups without risking too much, which is what I like about it.

This is quite literally what every gang who comes roaming near us wants. you pop out a few defence ships and they run even if they out number you 3:1. and that's without fighters.

Some of your knowledge of this is 6 months behind the curve (atleast taking your post at face value) - people doing this are increasingly moving away from sitting at the edge of the FF towards other ways of using POS mechanics to be safe where they don't need to move back inside the FF to become perfectly safe.

Even a ship with interceptor speed and sig will struggle to kite off fighters unless with a head start let alone a cruiser from what I've seen - many of the original complaints were purely due to people scouting in inties, etc. getting initial tackle for a small gang then getting alpha'd trying to escape when fighters arrived.

The revenant that got killed while it had been involved with doing skynet stuff got caught on login 20-30km outside the POS FF possibly at the spot where he cyno'd in. (which IMO is a good example of why fighter assignment should follow cyno restrictions around a POS).

A Major point is the fact which most PVP actions are based on the idea "Yes, we can win this... lets get them" as the other side is thinking exactly the same like "As we are breaking the Logistic we are gone kill them all"

Which explains again people cry if they see themselves outnumbered by a fleet multiplier.

So what about AFK cloakers? Intelligence Gathering cloakers? Off-Grid Boosters? Cloak boosters?

At the moment the fighters are a little bugged, they werent bugged half a year ago. We randomly loose fighter in space. They arent recoverable in any way. The CCP solution is to make them just normal drones.

No you can't because they don't exist anymore.

...in a world where people are against off grid boosting, they think off grid DPS is somehow "ok"....

I don't think there is anyone here who supports the mechanics that allow for the skynet thing or a very small number if there is, most people don't want to see another huge feature nerf/removal that affects a wider spread of uses including non-pvp use due to the actions of a few.

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.

I don't think you understand.
Rise only has the ability to change about a dozen values in between releases.

This reply is spot-on sir. Couldn't have said it any better.

really the fact that skynet fighters can do things that other ships with comparable firepower simply can't ongrid or offgrid

Hiding on the edge of DED pockets while shouldn't be possible is far less reliable to do than many other techniques and does atleast mean someone is moving a capital about space which gives chances to catch them at some point - atleast the capital is there with a chance of being caught (and with minimal impact on roaming gangs if my other advice is sound - which I believe it is though can't easily test for myself) unlike this change which means the capital won't be there in the first place even if the problem is gone.

That's not oppression, that's CCP listening to the feedback of the majority of their players over a whiny minority when it comes to feedback.

With the skynet fits they can apply levels of alpha even to tiny stuff that is normally the upper end of battleship territory and through to capitals - which should never happen and is to my knowledge (atleast where I first started to see complaints about it) where most complaints about skynet stemmed from - from a properly fit super/rev you only need like 2 of the fighters to get good hits (which they will sooner rather than later in most cases) to kill many smaller frigs - which they can also easily chase down.

If they were tweaked so as to be ineffective against sub BC type stuff I believe most of the skynet issues would go away with minimal knock on effect - sure people who use skynet for ratting would have to assign to something a little more expensive on the field to kill frigs and some cruiser NPCs off as quickly as they used to but I have little sympathy in that regard.

Killing fighters when assigned to someone isn't that easy if they are on the ball, they can immediately recall them or assign them to another player who is further away.

Not directed at you but on that topic even removing assignment and forcing carriers on grid there is always going to be some cases where they can take advantage of mechanics to reduce the risk to themselves either via grid-fu or just sitting on the edge of the fight and cynoing out if anything threatens them and so on - sure they are a lot less safe than now - what next remove grids :D and cynos :S.

Pointing fighters won't stop them warping - this was done on purpose originally due to gameplay reasons don't really have my head in it enough to know if they are still relevant reasons today.

Guess its time to un-sub my fleet of capital toons, wont be needing them for a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG while now.

If CCP wants to kill caps so bad just remove them from game, would be faster and easier.