This is pretty much what I'm talking about in that quote, but it's not something we have the time to seriously look into right now.

. In particular, predicating "can survive as a small alliance in nullsec" on "can afford a large supercap fleet" would be extremely silly, because it excludes exactly the type of players who we're most keen on being able to maintain small holdings in nullsec, ie newer, poorer players.

Congrats CCP, you just handed the CFC an all-access VIP ticket for the entire north of nullsec
Titans will now be used for bridging and nothing else. I guess the most expensive, most skill intensive ship in EVE shouldn't actually be used for anything else, right?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Titans were supposed to be very expensive but also very effective strategic force multipliers and as such were working as intended. Smaller entities in nullsec could defend their space by relying on a larger supercaptial fleet. .

This has never been a stated balance goal in any discussion I've been party to. In particular, predicating "can survive as a small alliance in nullsec" on "can afford a large supercap fleet" would be extremely silly, because it excludes exactly the type of players who we're most keen on being able to maintain small holdings in nullsec, ie newer, poorer players.

You completely missed the point, smaller does not mean "small as in tiny and new". I am talking about well establsihed alliances with 1,000-2,000 members facing a blobs of alliances with 8,000+ members or whole coalitions with more than 16,000 members.

You can't seriously be that ignorant about your own game...

We're absolutely listening.

Titans are an anti-cap/supercap ship and we need to limit their ability to kill subcaps. That's a change that's happening and is unlikely to change. The practical details on how that happens we'd love as much feedback on as possible. We've been talking about the lock timers this morning based on feedback from the playerbase, looking at what adjustments we can possibly make. The changes in the OP are still subject to change if we get feedback on how to achieve our goal better.

If it really is for one thing only, I was never told this. DD to kill all sub caps was first incarnation.. even thou you are very happy to say this all the time. Make us able to dock the things so we can wait out this horrible nurf in stations. Would you have us stuck in ships that can be used 1 time every month if we are very lucky ? Pretty sure someone said this with Supercarriers also...

Because CCPs marketing for EvE is all about 1000 dudes who played since 2004 controlling large parts of the universe, and you as new player have the CHANCE(!) to become their serf.

If you are a small well established alliance you can hold a small portion of space (say one constellation) or not very valuable space.

EvE is not just about the battlefield on the grid but its about diplomacy, making allies, building a community.

Hi everyone,

We're not happy with the effectiveness of large groups of titans against subcapital ships, so we're making some adjustments to titans and to XL turrets.

This is a quick, surgical adjustment to solve a specific issue we have identified. It's not a general titan balance pass, and we don't consider titans "done" after this change. Titans will require significant further changes, and probably an overall adjustment in role, before they're in a place where we're really happy with them. This will require a reasonably significant amount of work, which we unfortunately don't have the spare resources for right now. In a similar vein, we're not making more extensive balance changes (or addressing this issue in a more technically complex way) because we're allocating the minimum resources needed to resolve the specific issue (titans performing excessively well against subcaps in certain circumstances) satisfactorily. If you have any further questions about this paragraph, please ask away

For the immediate future and until such time as we have the resources available to do a comprehensive overhaul, we want to ensure that titans perform decently against other capitals, but do not represent a serious threat to subcaps. We want titans to have clear vulnerabilities, and as much as possible to have them acting in support of the main capital/subcap fleet rather than the other way round. We've already prevented doomsdays from being fired at subcaps, and this adjustment should continue that trend.

We have talked to the CSM about this, and we're comfortable going forward with these changes in light of that discussion. I'm not going to put words in their mouths, though.


Specific changes being made:

XL turret tracking halved, siege module tracking penalty removed

This should generally make titan performance against small targets significantly worse, without seriously impacting their effectiveness against larger targets, or negatively impacting dreadnaughts in their common use-case (ie, in siege mode).

Titans reduced to 3 maximum locked targets, and base scan resolution reduced to 5

This should make trying to engage smaller targets very inefficient, due to long lock-times and an inability to queue many targets at once. This reinforces the titan's MO as a slow-acting but hard-hitting platform (in line with the doomsday's huge damage and 10 minute RoF). The scan res number is balanced around multiple Cormack's sensor boosters, on the assumption that money is not a limiting factor for titan pilots, and therefore that people will shell out for officer SBs if that lets them continue do this kind of thing. Our understanding is that this isn't standard practice right now, but we have to balance for expected behavior after the change, and for worst-case scenarios.

Expected release schedule for these changes

These changes should hit TQ some time in April. If there is a sizable release in April then expect them to turn up then; if not then we'll announce deployment dates for these changes closer to the time.




Changes considered and discarded:

(I'm expecting at least three people to not read the word "discarded" and make angry posts about something in this section. C'est la vie.)

Titans can't lock subcaps at all

Guaranteed effective solution, but we considered it too hacky and restrictive.

Adding a "minimum sig radius" attribute to turrets, below which damage would fall off regardless of tracking

Too big a change and more technical work than we actually needed to solve the problem.

Changing the lock time formula

As it is, the lock time formula doesn't really scale in a nice way between battleships and capitals (the kink in the curve always happens around cruisers regardless of the scan res and sig radius), but again we decided we could solve the issue without resorting to this sort of technical work.

Changing XL missiles to match

While in a strictly regimented world we ought in principle to nerf XL missiles and remove the penalties from the siege module for them too, in practice they're not actually a problem due to the way missile damage scales against small targets. Leaving them unchanged also serves to differentiate missiles further from turrets, which might make them more useful on capitals under certain circumstances.

[quote=dooplex]

Because CCPs marketing for EvE is all about 1000 dudes who played since 2004 controlling large parts of the universe, and you as new player have the CHANCE(!) to become their serf.

If you are a small well established alliance you can hold a small portion of space (say one constellation) or not very valuable space.

EvE is not just about the battlefield on the grid but its about diplomacy, making allies, building a community.

Very funny how is a 1000 people going to hold a constellation, new or not that goons have their eye on ?, so what you are saying is that 10x1000 people can ban together and hold it against you, and that should be the only way

Why shouldn't Titans be able to hit MWD'ng drakes with sig's the size of moons?

If fleets in large numbers had to actually manoeuvre in order to bring DPS onto a target then the blob would be less advantageous than it would be now.

This has never been a stated balance goal in any discussion I've been party to. In particular, predicating "can survive as a small alliance in nullsec" on "can afford a large supercap fleet" would be extremely silly, because it excludes exactly the type of players who we're most keen on being able to maintain small holdings in nullsec, ie newer, poorer players.

For the immediate future and until such time as we have the resources available to do a comprehensive overhaul, we want to ensure that titans perform decently against other capitals, but do not represent a serious threat to sub caps.

A+ troll.

This just proves that CCP and Goons have a suspicious relationship.

Dear pubbies,

Did you know that former Goonfleet CEO Darius Johnson is now the head of security (CCP Sreegs) and in charge of banning botters? According to their forums, not a single goon was banned during the last banwave. Did you know that CCP Sreegs named his son Alexander after The Mittani and that The MIttani is his child's god father? Can you expect fairness in this situation?? CCP needs to answer about how many goons receive a CCP pay check.

Recently the Eve-O site was redesigned. In completely unrelated news (I SWEAR) Solo Drakban is the goonfleet webmaster and does freelance design work and was recently very busy with a contract.

There is a huge scandal coming that is going to blow T20 out of the water. Look for emails, chatlogs, etc. that prove that CCP devs have been directly helping goons to get anything they want.

When is the last time you asked CCP to change something and got a quick response? Andski of Goonfleet demanded that CCP change their rules about *SCAMMING* using the recruitment channel. One of the only safe places in which people could find a corp. A CCP dev and community moderator responded within 2 hours with a change to the rules. People have been asking for ways to stop non-mutual PVP for years with no response.

All of this is out there and obvious. If you take off your blinders and take a step back you will see the gigantic writing on the wall.

Top tip: learn how tracking works before making this argumentGǪ

GǪespecially if you add this button to your post.

Franklin Roosevelt you can't post, you're dead!

This just proves that CCP and Goons have a suspicious relationship.

Dear pubbies,

Did you know that former Goonfleet CEO Darius Johnson is now the head of security (CCP Sreegs) and in charge of banning botters? According to their forums, not a single goon was banned during the last banwave. Did you know that CCP Sreegs named his son Alexander after The Mittani and that The MIttani is his child's god father? Can you expect fairness in this situation?? CCP needs to answer about how many goons receive a CCP pay check.

Recently the Eve-O site was redesigned. In completely unrelated news (I SWEAR) Solo Drakban is the goonfleet webmaster and does freelance design work and was recently very busy with a contract.

There is a huge scandal coming that is going to blow T20 out of the water. Look for emails, chatlogs, etc. that prove that CCP devs have been directly helping goons to get anything they want.

When is the last time you asked CCP to change something and got a quick response? Andski of Goonfleet demanded that CCP change their rules about *SCAMMING* using the recruitment channel. One of the only safe places in which people could find a corp. A CCP dev and community moderator responded within 2 hours with a change to the rules. People have been asking for ways to stop non-mutual PVP for years with no response.

All of this is out there and obvious. If you take off your blinders and take a step back you will see the gigantic writing on the wall.

You can't threaten me. I am reporting you for making threats and even though you are in CSM I will see you banned.

You can't threaten me. I am reporting you for making threats and even though you are in CSM I will see you banned.

Interesting concept, threatening a former president who's been dead since the 1940's. Take that dead guy!

Now I'm not trying to be a total jerk, but you have never succeeded in this. In addition, if you are actually reading the comments in this thread, you should realize that you are not going to succeed in your newly stated role change for Titans



Nothing you are doing makes this happen consistently. Signature radius on an MWD Drake or an MWD Maelstrom (the current FOTM fleet ships for the big nullsec alliances fighting Titans right now) is virtually identical to Signature Radius on a Carrier, and the lock time on that ship with your new system is 30+ seconds (not including TiDi). So how is the Titan an anti-Captial ship when a capital can dock/warp/enter shields before a Titan can lock it? Seriously, look at what you are doing and realize that this change does not perform your intended action.

I'm not a game designer. I don't know what the answer is. But your actions do not support what you say you want Titans to be doing.

Vile rat. It is you. It is you who is the worst GoonFleet poster.

All that first quote is saying is that it's never been our intention that you need supers to survive as a small alliance in nullsec. There's a lot of people reading into it a lot of things that aren't actually there.

WRT the second point, I would suggest webs (where applicable), dictors/hictors, and not using titans to play docking games.

Way more people paying for the game think Titans are overpowered.

Because CCPs marketing for EvE is all about 1000 dudes who played since 2004 controlling large parts of the universe, and you as new player have the CHANCE(!) to become their serf.

If you are a small well established alliance you can hold a small portion of space (say one constellation) or not very valuable space.

EvE is not just about the battlefield on the grid but its about diplomacy, making allies, building a community.