Vash Bloodstone wrote:Something about this rubs me the wrong way.
I haven't played a lot recently, but why is this proliferation of pirate battleships considered a problem? Maybe someone can clarify for me? Are there too many gangs of pirate battleships roaming around? Did someone find this to be an problem and consider it to be unbalanced?
Well, for me, I've always kind of thought of Eve combat as a complex game of trade-offs, like rock-paper-scissors. Let give me a simple analogy using this game. Lets says we had a game where for some reason rock was winning more often than paper or scissors. Let's say we had two ways we could try to balance this game. We would either 1) Reduce the number of times people get to use rock by basically forcing people to use it less or 2) we could make whatever is causing rock to win more often to stop, possibly by changing paper and/or scissors. To Me, going with option 1, makes no sense, because it doesn't actually remove the imbalance, it just decreases the amount of times it happens. If you want a truly balanced game, you need to make all sides balance each other by their traits, not by how often they are used. Otherwise, you limit player choice.
Eve Online is very dynamic game and players should given free choice. If for some reason, CCP thinks pirate battleships are imbalanced, than that's a failure of game design, not of player choice. Players are always going to go for the best. What I would suggest is that if you think Pirate battleships are imbalanced, than change the traits of other ships and/or features to make it more difficult for them.
What I think will happen is that this pirate battleship scheme won't achieve its intended objective. If pirate battleships are unbalanced in whatever way CCP thinks they are, they will be continued to be used regardless of what they do. Especially since I think those who most use pirate battleships probably already have plenty of them or plenty of ISK. What this will really do is hurt the poor or inexperienced players from using pirate battleships by artificially increasing the cost of entry, which will reduce player choice, and hurt the game. Less Choices=bad. More choices=good