Shadoo wrote:I don't think anyone who has flown a titan in combat can argue that the ship is not currently overpowered in combat when used in great numbers, just like no one could seriously argue about AOD DDs when they started to be used in 3+3 scale every 10 minutes
Of course, same goes for every ship in eve -- when used in great numbers, but Supercapitals certainly show this curve more often on the field
So I'm extremely happy that you state that the ship needs a role change - last time we were campaigning for AOD DD change -- this was exactly what a lot of us were asking for
But that was 3 years ago
I am therefore rather dissapointed that what we, the community at large, have been asking for a very long time is rather haphazardly brushed off as something that "will be looked at long term" with a surgical change that SCREAMS of a kneejerk reaction without really providing us with much to go on here to see your vision or have comfort you are going to do something in the long term for the "end game" ship in EVE
And forgive me for saying this -- but you have not always had a great track record of revisiting changes you've made in the past as surgical adjustments. Thus I feel like pressing a bit harder on the high level thoughts that have lead you to make this current fix
What is your intended role for Titan with this change on TQ today?
How will you evaluate if your changes implemented will match up with that role on the TQ combat field in this release? For example -- as far as I can see -- a large group of titans will still obliterate a large group of battleships/drakes -- all you've delayed is the first hit and require more micromanagement in making sure the lock queue is evenly spaced out
Given how large fights today unfold on TQ -- how do you see this ship fulfilling your intended role on heavily TiDi systems with the sig change
What is your future vision, even at high level, for the Titan ship class? Will it remain a combat asset or are you looking and overhauling it for something else (personally btw I've argued for the last 4 years that titans should NOT be a combat ship at all, but rather a massive alliance level asset for logistics/cloning/staging/etc)
What assurances can you offer us this change will not remain a permanent fixture for the long term?
With the combat ability of this ship being "surgically adjusted", would you be even willing to look at for example increasing the jump range of the ship to balance the change
And lastly -- are you going to allow those pilots who wish to wait for your stated longer term role adjustments to GM-dock their ship until such a time that this change is no longer a surgical measure in order to still utilize the account/character for combat in EVE?
The intended role for titans is a) jump bridging, b) doomsdaying things, c) fleet boosting and d) doing a decent job of killing capitals with their main guns.
We'll be assessing the success of this change based in the first instance on whether or not players are still telling us they're having problems with this sort of thing, and then if they are, looking at the situation objectively and seeing if it merits further work.
On systems under Time Dilation, we're expecting this to work
mechanically identically but subjectively slower. Time Dilation is a technical fix to prevent performance issues on heavily loaded systems; it's not a game mechanic and we're not currently considering it for balancing purposes.
We don't currently have a clear future vision for titans, as mentioned in the first post. We've repeatedly tried and failed to find a role for them that we're happy with in the past, and we don't want to spend significant balance resources on revisiting this right now because we have other priorities.
We can't offer any assurances about our future plans. Every release (~6 months) we sit down and look at what our priorities are for the various different resources we have available (balancers, general designers, UI designers, various breeds of programmer, artists etc) and then allocate accordingly. These priorities change based on the current state of the game, the resources available and so on. Spending significant resources on a major titan rework is not currently on our short-term plan, and beyond that we don't have any reliable way of offering guarantees on what we will and won't be working on. This approach means that we're always delivering maximum possible value, but at the cost of not having rock-solid long-term plans. I would also note here that we're doing this "quick fix" precisely
because we don't know when we're going to have a comprehensive solution - we regard the current situation as broken, and we don't want to leave it broken indefinitely while we wait for a "proper fix" with no clear timetable. This is the best way to deal with this general sort of problem in our opinion.
We're considering additional changes to balance out this adjustment; we'll do it if we feel it's necessary, but we'd prefer to make as few changes as possible at this time.
We're also considering ways of letting people "park up", but we can't make any commitments about that this morning.