Sissy Fuzz
Sissy Fuzz Communications
28
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Posted - 2015.03.23 23:05:47 -
[1] - Quote
"The Ishtar has been slightly rebalanced. "10% bonus to Drone hit points and damage" becomes "10% bonus to Light, Medium, and Heavy Drone hit points and damage, 5% bonus to Sentry Drone hit points and damage"."
This is a 16% nerf on sentry DPS and as such nothing like a "slight" nerf. And it is another blow to the exploration community. A little perspective:
Let's talk for a moment about how you practically destroyed exploration as a game style - was de facto the only "deep" niche left for solo players - when you effectively took exploration out of it and made it into grinding, which is what it is today.
Swarmed by so many players that it is now common to enter a system to see two or three sets of Sisters probes in space. This not only in hi- but also low-sec, much due to the press-button-to-explore mechanics now in place and one of the outstanding result of your rather immature analysis that by making things two-dimensional and LOLeasy to access, you are adding to the player experience. Not the case. What you are doing is installing cookie-cutter play style templates instead. You call it diversity and opportunity but it is, in fact, player experience spread thin and bland from lack of potential and depth. The average number of players on Tranq hasn't exactly exploded since the dumb-it-down-and-more-colors dogma caught on. But from what we learned at the 2015 Fanfest this is still the gospell. Everything layed out on a silver platter right there, for god's sake no barriers whatsoever. Well, I don't believe one second that you are "retaining" anyone this way, and what used to be the exploration community is not happy, that's for sure.
Back to the Ishar: The only way of getting a little bit of the exploration feel back is to go to lesser populated outskirts of EVE and play. Out there, of course, the "exploration" mechanics are still dumbed down and no challenge whatsoever, but there is still the challenge of staying alive. Which comes in two flavours: Avoiding or being able to kill  / capsuleers on the prowl (bless 'em), and being able to actually do the complexes you find there. And the Ishtar was one of a very small number of hulls (maybe the only one, right?) that offered the combination of DPS and mobility to pull this off. The ship has no tank when fit for reasonable DPS but by using distance, sentries, one could actually complete a complex in a fair amount of time (time * exposure = risk , so not trivial) and not die. Well, not so much anymore.
CCP, it has been said a lot of times before, and I appreciate that you are in denial about it and that you have found what seems to be a surefire way of designing the optimal game, statistics and the mathematical equilibrium. No devblog without an effin graph these days. But nobody cares about your pathological rebalancing programme (especially when you try to be charming about it "blood on the nerf bat") except for a handful of math nerds, who happen to be playing EVE from a spreadsheet instead of designing it from one. But I recognise that rebalancing for the sake of spreadsheet karma is in perfect line with the overall effort to remove all depth and potential in game by making everybody equal and omnipotent.
I'll find a way, though. I am criticising your design philosophy and compulsive "rebalancing" here, not whining. |