CCP Ytterbium
C C P
C C P Alliance
394
   |
Posted - 2012.03.29 12:31:00 -
[1] - Quote
Haven't read the whole topic, so mainly going to answer the original post here.
Giving players a ship that is better, even remotely marginally better, than tech 1 hulls for the same price tag is defeating the very purpose of tech and power level systems we have in-game: you are allowing pilots to gain access to more efficient vessels without paying the price tag for it.
It doesn't really matter how high you set the skill training requirements, we (as the game balancing team) already have serious issues balancing tech 1 hulls to be all viable between each other and to their tech 2 / faction / tech 3 counterpart. Not only would this cause a serious reverse shift of what we are trying to achieve with the ship lines and tech revamp (please refer to the Fanfest presentation), but it would also widen and magnify the hull inconsistency gap as more and more players meet the training requirements for the ships you are suggesting in time.
Besides, this would create inconsistencies in the skill requirements. At the moment, training a skill to 5 is something required for tech 2 ships, 4 is mainly for faction ships, while 1-3 is for tech 1 tiered hulls. As you can see requiring a skill to 5 for a tech 1 hull makes little sense and remains quite confusing.
As for creating new ships, what would be their purpose? Again, ship balance is currently a horrible mess, there is little need to add a new, specific meta-level between tech 1 and 2 when we already have faction in the middle, that can be split in two, with navy ships (slightly better than tech 1, as you suggested) and pirate ships (slightly better/specialized than tech 2).
However, there would be two ways to satisfy you by tampering with your idea a little 
- Introduce more pirate ships: as they are a cross-bred of two factions altogether, they could fill some of your high-end goals: for instance Blood Raiders require both Amarr and Minmatar trained. But that is two cross-racial skill requirements, not four and we don't see any faction requiring all of these for now, except maybe Concord. However, allowing players to fly Concord vessels wouldn't end well, to put it mildly. In all cases, pirate ships have a significantly higher price tag for tech 1 ships for a reason, and that would stay that way.
- Have bonuses not tied with spaceship command, but that benefits existing ships somehow: here we would reward players for training something on top of spaceship command skills. Basically hulls could be sorted by role, and you could then add new generic and specialization skills that give small bonuses to strengthen such roles no matter to which race it applies. Example: you could have a generic "combat ship" skill that give you X% more HP to all EVE ships sorted in this category. We are thinking on introducing that for the ship lines, but that's a very tricky move, as having new skills on such a fashion would still widen the gap between new and veteran players, while possibly unbalancing hulls further or killing fitting fitting creativity if we done incorrectly.
Hope that helps a bit. |