This and that

Hi I'm the friendly content developer Tuxford. I've been busy these last months and haven't really been focusing my efforts on communicating with the playerbase. The time I do go to the forums and post my answers may seem a bit short and lack a bit of solid information. I have however been keeping an eye on the forums and hope to address some of your concerns now.

It's always better to address concerns in blogs, forums have so much volume that answers disappear the day after and we simply can't keep up with all the threads. Also, to keep the little sanity we have left, we prefer to read forums in controlled doses. Reading someone feels we should be used for minced meat isn't exactly an encouraging and inspiring atmosphere but hey, we like burgers just as much as the next guy.

Lets talk about hitpoints for a second.

Actually let me write about them, and you comment in the feedback thread. Boosting the hitpoints was an effort on our behalf to make combat longer. Why do we want to make combat longer? We want to give people room to breath in combat. We've talked about stuff like adding sub-system targeting and Heat into combat but their impact is lessened if you don't have time to actually manage it. We feel it's quite essential to add more tactics and variety to EVE combat, add more flexibility within the ship setups, sacrifice tanking for some extra damage output because the situation allows it - or vice versa. Increse the strength of your ECCMs, well, you get the idea.

Worthy of note is Rigs are also a step in that direction, slowly decreaseing the predictability of ships and their inherent "optimized setups".

Now I personally like the hitpoint increase, I believe in them and think it's the right thing to do. It might be a too much in one go though but we'll do more in later patches until we hit the magic number and are totally satisfied. We do like the relative hitpoint boosts with battlecruisers and destroyers getting more than other ships and t2 ships getting less of a boost than tech 1. What would the scheme look like then?

• Tech 1 battleships, cruisers and frigates get 25% increase
• Tech 2 battleships, cruisers and frigates get 12.5% increase
• Tech 1 Destroyers get a 66.67% increase
• Tech 2 Destroyers get a 33.33% increase
• Tech 1 Battlecruisers get 56.25% increase
• Tech 2 Battlecruisers get 28.125% increase

The shield recharge rate, capacitor capacitance and recharge time are all increased by 50%, plates and extenders increased by 25%, and cap booster volume by 20%. Capital ships would still get a 400% hitpoint increase. Cap booster volume decreased by 20% (not 30%).

Will this "fix" combat?

No, not on its own, we'd even say that this doesn't do awfully lot for fleet combat, but it does give more breathing space (we're doing something else for Fleets, stay tuned). There are other things we need to do in order to not only make combat longer but also more interesting, and these are coming in the next release. But we have to take one step at a time, that's how EVE has evolved through the years. One could argue that Revelations is doing too much, but we have more people to examine everything and we're achieving more in a smaller timeframe so we have to keep up on all areas.

Why not mess with modules instead?

Tweaking numbers on hardeners and armor repairers/shield boosters is not the right way. We don't want to make setups that can too easily sustain the damage. The hitpoint increase is the most effective way of increasing the length of combat without creating unbreakable tanks.

There were also a number of changes that came with the hitpoint changes, such as shield recharge time increase, shield extender and plate boost and finally the increase in capacitor capacitance and capacitor recharge time. Theres been a bit of debate whether it was right to increase the capacitance and recharge time or do something else. Now I'll tell you what I am basing the changes on.

Let's start this by making an assumption and say t is the time you can run your modules given you have a capacitor of max capacitance C, T is recharge time and cap drain is dc. Now lets say that we can denote the relationship between these factors as t = f(C,T,dc). The assumption is that:

a * t = f(aC,aT,dc)

In plain english this means if we increase the capacitance and recharge time by a factor a the time we can run our modules is increased by a factor a. This might seem logical but it isn't necessarily true and has to do with whether the cap recharge formula is linear or not.

Now let's look at ship that is taking damage D and has a regeneration R. The damage it is taking is then d = D-R (unless the R is bigger than D in which case its not taking any damage at all). After the patch it can run its modules for 50% longer. It therefore has taken 50% more damage before it's out of cap. It also has 50% more hitpoints so if it would be in 50% armor before the patch it will be in 50% armor after the patch. The only difference it took 50% longer. This goes for the damage your doing as well, you can run your offensive 50% longer. Still not convinced? Well I can't explain it any better than that.

I don't think there is really any reason to go into the volume of cap boosters, it's quite obvious, with 50% longer fights you need to carry 50% more charges which means the volume needs to be 1/1.5 = 0.66666667 smaller. We decreased it by multiplying it with 0.7, that's close enough.

So you can see we're not trying to shift the balance with this change in any way but rather just to increase the length of fights. I'm not going to say this will only make fights longer, hopefully the impact on other areas will be minor. For example, a Prophecy and a Cyclone meet in head to head battle. Just before the Prophecy pilot runs out of cap he manages to kill the Cyclone. After Revelations, both these ships get a 87.5% hitpoint increase but only 50% capacitance and cap recharge time increase. Simple matter, we just increase the capacitance and cap recharge time of those ships by 50% right? Not completely, we could do that but that might upset the balance between cruisers vs. battlecruisers and much more. So we decided if the time of combat is increased by 50%, all capacitance and cap recharge time of ships should be increased by a similar amount.

What about the ships?

This is a hot topic. Everyone (even the Devs) has an opinion and not everyone agrees with everyone else. Sure, we're not right all the time, but here we are, more than 3 years into the game and doing more than ever to evolve it, so kindly bear with us. Sometimes we simply don't agree with the reasoning, no matter how long a forum discussion thread might be. Below is our reasoning for the ship changes, aggregated below for your reading pleasure. We know not everyone will agree, but hey, there's 150.000 people in the EVE community and we're doing what we think is best for the majority. We've got a couple ideas about solving world hunger next. wink

We've made a few changes. The Hurricane lost a bit of grid and a turret hardpoint, while the Drake lost a launcher hardpoint and its bonus changed from launcher rate of fire to missile kinetic damage. The Myrmidon received a drone bay increase to 125m3 and we've changed the rate of fire bonus on the Abaddon to laser damage bonus.

I've been seeing a lot of concerns about these changes. Some people have been saying the Drake is useless now, especially with the change of bonus from rate of fire to kinetic damage. Does this make the ship predictable? Yeah it does a little bit. Theoretically, you could just stack on kinetic hardeners to tank the Drake, but in reality you shouldn't, or at least I sure as hell would never take that chance. If I'd just tank kinetic it's pretty certain that my shield/armor is wide open to the other damage types. Don't get me wrong, having every version of every damage type isn't really an option because of cargo space but to undock with just kinetic missiles in your hold isn't doing your insurance any favors. As a bunch of us are in a bit of a christmassy kind of mood, we are contemplating giving the Drake its launcher rate of fire bonus back and by contemplating I mean discussing and by discussing I mean throwing various oddly shaped objects at each other.

The Hurricane is a great ship, one of my favorites actually. If you're having problem making it work, ask someone who is using it effectively how they have it set up. The Myrmidon is also a really good ship, but players have been asking for a bigger drone bay. It has 125m3 right now meaning it can fit 5 heavy drones. With those drones its damage output is really good but doing that is a dangerous thing. All drone users should know this but if you lose your drones on a dedicated drone ship a large portion or even all of your damage output is gone. As a result, putting the biggest drones you can find in your drone bay is not necessarily the best thing to do.

The Abaddon's rate of fire bonus change eases the pre-patch cap problems. True, it does less damage, but with the no laser cap need bonus and boosted rate of fire (up to 25% faster), the cap need became too much of a handicap. Make no mistakes, the original design insisted this ship should have cap problems. This ship is a monster to be honest, definitly not a ship you want to meet if its pilot knows how to use it. Equally, you don't want to fly it unless you know how to use it.

Well that's about it from me. Gotta get back to crunching for the Revelations release next week.