Max Teranous
Body Count Inc.
Mercenary Coalition
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Posted - 2007.10.24 10:18:00 -
[1]
OK, well with this dev blog we know why you are looking at changing carriers. The first one gave no reasoning, and suggested pretty much the worst way of changing them, then just left everyone flailing in the dark. Add in a few really ****ty dev comments & the change on sisi and you got yourself a lynch mob. 
I do think that some of your assumptions are wrong. That people use Triage for a start.  That forcing the delegation of fighters is a good thing is another. As soon as you take the combat ability of carriers out of the pilots hands, they will not be put on the front line. That is totally contrary to CCP's thinking over the past year, and how most people want to use carriers themselves. However you do have a point that you can set up a standard fit carrier and do a bunch of things with them.
So fix this swiss army knife issue that seems to be the root of the issue, you can either do the module thing as described or create a few new capital ship classes. Keep the current carriers as "damage" carriers, have a new class for proper fleet support & logistics with a revamped triage module, and T2 freighters can be the hauling ones. I'd personally like to see new ships, because new shiny toys are good, and it's harder to switch between modes on the fly if you have to redock or jump out/in again. But either way will work to reduce the swiss army knife effect. And more importantly it won't completely alienate your player base.
Another issue that is kind of mentioned, but not explicitly is the numbers of carriers and blobbing with them. The only reason blobbing with carriers is worse than blobbing with any other ship type is the effectiveness of spider tanking. A potential fix is to put a mild stacking penalty on the amount of remote assistance you can recieve, for example say 10 or more remote reps on a ship (not a POS or station service!) starts to get heavily penalized. However i would much rather see a global fix to blobbing in general, is the 800 in local fights are just horrid experiences. But that is a discussion for another thread, not this one.
The only other issue i can see with capitals is low sec motherships. Despite seeing one go down, it is still too easy for them to **** about and then escape. Rather than a sweeping change that removes options such as banning from low sec or not allowing weapons to be used in low sec, give the players a method to tackle a mothership in low sec. It creates conflict (good!) and we ourselves can solve the problem by killing them.  Again, the exact mechanic is unimportant, be it a capital scram, or the scram immunity is reduced to X in built WCS in low sec, etc etc. Just some method to hold them down other than neuting to hell and bumping !
And for the record, i'm still ****ed that we were lied to about this "just being an idea for discussion".
Max 
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