Phocas
Amarr
Viziam
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Posted - 2006.12.12 06:01:00 -
[1]
The development team, and a large portion of the playerbase, want to remake the combat system so that fights last longer. They say that this allows for more tactical decisions (i.e., subsystem targeting) during a fight, and more fun since you don't die instantly in fleet battles. There have been a lot of interesting suggestions for how to do this, and CCP has recently implemented a "across the board" hp increase as part of improving combat.
What is strange though, is that there is a tried-and-tested, accepted way that this is usually accomplished in all other MMOs, but for some reason the design played out very differently in Eve. In any MMO, there may be many different types of characters, but there are 3 essential combat roles:
-Players that can absorb damage (tank)
-Players that can deal a lot of damage (gank)
-Players that can heal (healers)
The existance of healers is what allows the fight to last longer, and allows for all kinds of interesting tactical decisions. But this class is very under-represented in Eve. There aren't many of these ship types, and people think they suck. This could be for several reasons:
1. They don't suck, but many think they do because no one wants to use them. Psychologically, it's much more satisfying for most people to be the guy in there dealing the damage than helping your team. So much so that healers are often an unpopular class, in almost every game. This is not a problem at all; it seperates the people who "do it right" from the people who always lose. Gank squads in most other games pay the price for being so unbalanced and usually die, but here they flourish!
2. They actually do suck.
There's no reason to believe that Eve has a larger percentage of players in catagory (1) than any other MMO, which do have healer roles filled in greater numbers, so I will assume (2) is the case. If this isn't true, and it's just that most players refuse to do something that would give them a tremendous advantage over others, than this post is irrelevant. But I have a hard time believing everyone would gimp themselves, especially at the alliance level.
First, consider the cruisers with logistical roles (not the logistical ships). Unlike a logistics ship, each one is only better at one "healing" action than any other ship (Amarr has cap. transfer bonus only, Caldari has shield transfer bonus only, etc.) This doesn't allow for very much versatility. Also, they're tech 1 cruisers in a game where the battleship (or high DPS HACs) are the staple of almost every fleet. No survivability.
Then, there are the logistical ships. These are really the only ships designed to explicitly fill this role very well. They have several problems:
-Skill requirements make it a difficult ship to fly when you first start, possibly relagating it to "second class citizen" status in people's minds early on.
-I've never flown one, but they look good on paper. Yet very few people fly them. I am assuming this must mean that it is always more beneficial to have something else in your gang than one of these, except perhaps in extremely situational circumstances.
-They're Tech II! Who thought that was a good idea? Take one of the 3 basic roles and make it as scarce as possible? Sure they're affordable because demand is low, but demand being low is part of the problem. If they were to fix that, their being Tech II would instantly give everyone another reason to never fly them (they'd become highly overpriced).
Oh, and there's one other logistics ship out there. The carrier! If you want Tech I support ships, it will cost you...2 billion 
This problem is easy to solve but requires changes which will affect how is played dramatically. Game companies often don't like to make those changes, but CCP has shown their willingness to do this several times before.
Anyone have any thoughts? I'd really like to see a developer's perspective too.
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