Kraken Merius
Big Diggers
Get Off My Lawn
0
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Posted - 2015.03.30 00:28:00 -
[1] - Quote
Just wanted to throw in my two cents on this subject. Overall, I agree that fighter assist and even drone assist, as it exists in recent memory, need to be either heavily modified or removed. That being said, heavily modified would be far more preferable to outright deletion. A full mechanic should not be cut out of the game simply because it doesn't function correctly and fixing it would require a fair amount of work. I also believe that fighter warp is one of the cool and unique things about owning and flying a carrier. It isn't broken or overpowered in a stand alone sense. The fact that your fighters can follow a craft through warp and reengage, while annoying to the guy/gal who is hightailing it, is a function in the game that is just fine the way it is in my opinion.
Solutions:
1. Really simple and needed. Remove the ability to assist fighters to a subcapital ship completely. If they could control fighters, they would have the bandwidth to use them in the first place. On grid or off grid, I don't think it matters, just get rid of it. I would argue to allow fighter assist between capitals, or at least carrier class capitals, but only to a certain degree.
2. As someone previously stated, and in line with my #1 solution, create a module that allows a certain amount of FIGHTER ONLY bandwidth, but only say a maximum of 2 or 3. That way, they would receive limited assistance and wont be able to use the module to pad their own drone bay and be buffed without the assistance of a carrier.
3. Even if not removed outright, disallow the use of fighter/drone assist anywhere near a POS. No one should be able to assist a fight from the inside of a POS. Nor by poking the nose or ass of their ship outside the shield.
4. Drone assist is a great mechanic, but being able to assign a hundred Bouncers to a Fleet Commander in a fight is not the way the game should be played, again in my opinion. The fleet should not be able to kick back and orbit while one guy keeps hitting a big red button on his control console. Therefore, I think that there should be a maximum amount of drone assists per ship, say 5, and then they can receive no more. Or as an alternative, create a new stat that will govern how much bandwidth a ship has available to receive assistance. So say the stat is named Drone Assist Bandwidth and the stat reads 50, then that ship can receive 5 medium drones as assistance and no more. I think this idea would transfer over fluidly to carriers by renaming the stat Fighter Assist Bandwidth and thus limiting the number of fighters a carrier can have assisted to it. This would add another level of depth in small and large fleet engagements as this stat would/should vary wildly with different ship types. Maybe even have a ship with bonuses to assisted drones, but that seems like a far fetched dream all in all.
All things considered, I think there should be a number or stat limit to just about everything you can do in the game, and for the most part that is the case. Just not Fighter/Drone assisting. There are numerous ways things could be reworked to keep drone/fighter assist while nerfing it (appropriately), keeping fighter warp, and removing the safety net of POS shields in these situations without just throwing hands up and saying "You know what? We're just deleting it." It will require some hard work, balancing, and testing. But this road, while harder, will ultimately be a more rewarding experience to gamers and a richer game in general.
Just my two cents. And since I only have two cents, can anyone spare any change?
*Edited for spelling |