Cotton Tail
Domination.
League of Abnormal Gentlemen
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Posted - 2007.10.08 20:20:00 -
[1]
The ships sound fun, but as others have said, the problem isn't the ships, the problem is that EVE has reached a level in subscribers where a multi alliance fight can attract more players than a system can handle, while having no true reason to stop people from blobbing. If a new ship becomes very powerful, it will just become the new preferred weapon of war, people will realise that the best way to kill their enemy is to bring more of the good weapons than their opponents, and the whole cycle starts all over again. Having ships which take ages to kill won't encourage tactics as much as it would encourage blobbing, while making combat exceptionally drawn out.
There are two real ways to stop the situation as it now is, 1) CCP magically manage to fix the servers and game code to allow it to accomodate the current demands of the player base (Which everyone whines about them doing but it's obvious CCP don't know how to do it, and can you blame them?). 2) Come up with a game mechanic which penalises a side for bringing numbers in excess of what the server can realistically handle, either through simple mathematical penalties or forcing large groups to be more organised than 'FC says you 'xyz' dies'.
The perfect solution would be 1), but that just doesn't seem managable at the moment, I really have a hard time understanding how people think CCP is deliberately sabotaging their own game by not waving a wand and making the 800 man lag gremlins go away. Everyone involved in such situations knows the problem, yet they continue to do it anyway.
Thus all CCP can do is try and nudge people towards option 2, and that's some seriously delicate balancing, and most importantly CCP need to decide what size of fleet they consider to be excessive and plan around that.
The way I'd do that is to introduce a some kind of sensory confusion when large groups of players are on the same grid and get close to eachother. If too many ships are packed in close proximity, their ability to target their opponents becomes slower, as their sensors try to select their target amongst all the noise around them (or whatever random roleplay reason you want). The smaller your fleet, the less 'noise' your fleet produces, the shorter time your guys have to lock and engage, giving you the first strike advantage & the ability to cycle through targets faster.
In addition to this, make the radius of the noise bubble increase with the number of ships on the grid, so if one side wants to blob, they have to spread themselves out a lot more than if they had brought smaller numbers. This would still allow large groups of players on the same side to work together however, all you'd need to do was organise your fleet so that it was spread out enough to negate the 'noise', which would of course mean that you'd have to make sure everyone knows where to go and have jump in points pre selected.
The downside of that is the advantage a defender would have, having time to set up and spread out, giving them the maximum advantage over people assaulting. However the large size of the fleet would make moving from the spot very difficult to organise effectively, bringing in a much needed sense of logistics to mass blob warfare. And then you get the possibility that this could just cause people to wait even longer as they set up to fight, effectively making grand scale fleet fighting even longer. That I have no solution to, although the way lag is currently, I think a few minutes waiting time between firing is better than not being able to see/fire at the enemy at all. It's not a perfect idea, but this situation doesn't have a perfect remedy. Thats my best shot at it at least.
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