Thargor II
Amarr
Real Nice And Laidback Corporation
Interstellar Starbase Syndicate
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Posted - 2007.10.23 18:10:00 -
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Zulu and dev team let me address what I have seen here so far so that you can understand why the entire gaming community which you serve is so outraged.
1) Everyone currently feels that carriers/moms are perfectly fine in the field of battle currently in 0.0 under fleet conditions.
2) The only problem that relates to carriers/moms that the community sees is the massive lag that a fighter blob creates.
3) You are in fact not concerned with this and are not even mentioning what your true concerns are and what the motivation behind these changes is.
From the dev teams comments what I can extrapolate is a concern that:
1) Fleets in the not to distant future will contain a disproportionate amount of carriers and moms to support fleet.
2) Carriers and Moms will be the standard fleet ships and will push all new players in the game out of the fleet combat arena for at least 1.5 years of training.
3) The server side hardware requirements for having 300v300 carrier fights just doesn't bare mentioning cause there is no way this would work effectively.
Here is my response to what I believe is entire idea you have created then I'll say what I think should be done towards what I believe your goals are. Carriers/Moms are fine they don't need fixed. The only reason more and more of them are deployed on the battlefield is because of the stupid format of POS warfare and how you have to grind an opposing system to dust. What you are proposing fixing is a symptom not the base cause. This will always create animosity in your player base.
The problem you should solve is why are more people using carriers/moms and not flying a more diverse fleet. It is not an easy problem to solve but just making carriers completely unenjoyable to fly is not a good way to solve it. The answer I come up with is that war in 0.0 means an all out slug fest and the side with the most pilots, dps and least lag wins. So, the way to solve this is either to get rid of lag and then revisit the issue if it is still an issue or fix warfare in 0.0. The fact it can take a week from the initial invasion into a system until the POSs are destroyed means that any truly important system is going to be a lag fest for some time.
What you need to do is make it so a smaller fleet can deal with invading a territory in similar proportion to a larger one. Here is what I think would work, this is just an off the cuff idea, take and create a module for the black ops ships that allow you to hack a POS and pull it out of sovereignty counting until it is redeployed. Of course you would have to allow the POS owner to combat this by flying to his/her POS and using some counter measure that offlined the hacker's ability for a 24 hour period. Maybe making the hacking skill take 1 hour and be a really difficult skill to train. This would reduce the need to field only conventional fleets and pilots wouldn't all see carriers as the end game fleet ship.
Or you could just change what a fighter does. Maybe allow only 5 attack fighters out at one time but create, webbing, scramming, ecm, eccm fighters etc and allow the same amount of fighters there are currently but only allow moms/Carriers to have 5 damage dealing fighters under direct control at one time. While still being able to delegate their current maximum amount of fighters the only way they could get their full damage fire power on the field would be to assign fighters. If they didn't assign fighters they would have less dps but more combat utility.
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