Dan Jintao
What Could Go Wrong
DARKNESS.
4
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Posted - 2017.06.09 12:10:35 -
[1] - Quote
So this is a bad change, and here's why:
1) You have made a change to a ship based on it's (admittedly overpowered) isk making ability that massively affects its pvp capability. Your statement that it is overpowered for pvp is not borne out, due to your recent nerf, as I will explain later.
2) You have greatly reduced the overall utility of a ship that many players have invested huge amounts of their time or IRL money to get into without even changing the base cost of the ship itself. This is naturally going to upset large parts of the player base, such as many of my salty alliance mates who have posted here because you have now wasted their hard earned isk.
3) You have nerfed the PVP capability of a ship right after a previous nerf, without there being sufficient data to determine whether the original nerf had had the intended effect. My reasoning here is that super fights don't come up that much. And by fights I don't mean Goon/PL/NC super blob lands on normal size cap fleet and obliterates everything in site. Frankly, when you have that much dominance by ship class, you SHOULD be dominating everything in site. My point is that fights where team A and team B have a similar number of capital class ships and a few supers in the mix, this doesn't actually come up that much. Making changes to the meta should be borne out by a reasonable portion of data. The nerf to the price of pirate battleships for example is entirely warranted because we have had an immense amount of data to show that pirate battleships are overly dominant in the meta and it has stabilised on a single hull, which makes the game boring AF. That's a good nerf.
However, there has not yet been suffiicent data to show the effect of the fighter nerf and whether or not it has been effective. My own limited impressions have been that that nerf has actually made supers extremely easy to defang, making them extremely expensive lumps of scrap metal. This was borne out in the PL dunk of CO2 supers, where gram squadrons were used with great effect to render CO2 supers helpless. Many alliances have not yet realised this and dropping supers often ends fights because they retain boogey man status in the meta. The eve community needs to time to learn and adapt tactics to create a new meta, following a nerf or a buff. With supers, that period is longer, because there are less of them and they are used less and by a much small number of alliances. However, instead of observing this rule, CCP have followed what was a very strong nerf, with another immense nerf. This is a poor call.
These three points lead me to the conclusion that this is a bad change. So, what would be a better change? The last of your changes is the correct way to go. If you want to nerf the isk sink, plug the hole, not the water. Massively increasing aggro against fighters (100% plus would be warranted) will make this mode of ratting far less desirable and make it cost more in practice for those who do it. This one change can single handedly solve the problem. You don't have to patch a problem that doesn't exist, or at least can't be proven through any meaningful data. |