Need for Speed? | EVE Online

Need for Speed?

2007-02-15 - By CCP Tuxford

Last week I talked to you about our need for speed initiative but you might have guessed I was not talking about Nanophoons. There have been a lot of talk on the forums lately about speed in general. What you may not know is that we here at CCP have also been having a lot of talk about it, we've even dragged our CMO into the discussions (I have a cunning plan where I can blame everything on marketing).

The problem isn't just with Typhoons but rather we have sort of lost track of speed in general. The problem is really there are too many things that affect speed and so few of them stacking nerfed. Some of them we can't really stacking nerf, like skills and implants and some of them are simply just affecting different things. For example MWD, inertia stabilizers and propellant injection vent all affect speed but in different ways. Nanofibers and overdrives also don't stacking nerf with mwd/ab because they affect it in different way, add velocity instead of multiply.

Why don't we like people going really really fast

One of the biggest reasons is the "feel" of the game. Combat in EVE was always supposed to be more about tactics and strategy rather than twitch movement. I know a lot of the community enjoy that style of gameplay but it just isn't EVE.

Another reason has to do with game mechanic and can be summed up to pretty much the same arguement as when warp core stabilizers where balanced. When going into a fight we want people to commit to a fight. That means when you go into a fight you are risking your ship or ships, not just warping in on anything and if you can't handle it you just warp off.

So whats the plan?

A good idea would be to have modules stacking nerf more. For example have low slot hull modules give percentage velocity instead of fixed number, that way it gets stacking nerfed with microwarpdrives and afterburners. Another improvement is to have agility stacking nerfed. That doesn't help with the max velocity but it does affect how fast you can achieve said velocity. It also makes it harder to you to orbit at extreme velocities, forcing you to lower your speed.

Another thing we're discussing is changing those hull mods so they don't affect as many things. For example overdrives increase velocity, nanofbers agility and inertia stabilizers mass. Well we might then switch the istabs and nanos around as it really makes more sense that nanofibers reduce mass. The only problem is that I'm afraid that the agility mod will be sort of useless.

The biggest factor in the velocity is the microwarpdrive. Looking at microwarpdrive stats it shouldn't come as a big surprise that these modules aren't supposed to be sustainable, they have high cap need and give penalties to capacitor. However they can be, so when in doubt nerf the microwarpdrive! Well not really but we have discussed number of modification of it.

  • Make it require charges
  • Make its cap consumption dependant on velocity
  • Not allow people to use cap booster when mwd is active

Making it require charges has the benefit of you not being able to run it indefinitly and you'd have to reload it once in a while. It however has the massive annoyance factor of having to carry yet another consumable in your ever diminishing cargohold. Disable the cap injector when the mwd is active isn't really a perfect solution as you'd probably be able to sustain it with few cap modules and nosferatus. It however would make such a setup a lot more vulnerable to being nossed itself. I like making cap consumption of microwarpdrive dependant on velocity because it can be done so that it only affects ships going really, really fast.

This isn't all nailed down yet, we're still discussing options and exchanging opinions about this but you can be sure its being worked on.

What about the Amarr?!?!

Well I guess I did promise. For me there are number of problems that plague Amarr. The biggest one in my opinion is the popularity of so called omni tank. That is tanks that just boost the tank equally over all the resistances. On smaller ships that can be explained by the ease at which people are fitting oversized plates. On bigger ships it has to do with viability of plates but also people are often choosing EANM over active hardeners.

Comparing EANM with active hardener isn't really straight forward process. You might be tempted just compare the average resistance, or that is the average damage that leaks through. That's fine if it's what you want to do but given that only two types of turrets do EM damage and projectile do little of it, then I'd take a high kinetic and thermal resistance instead of high EM resistance any day. The reason I don't always fit an active hardener is simply because they use up too much cpu. Tech 2 activatable armor hardeners uses 14tf more than energized one and that amounts to a lot of cpu need. In a pinch we might consider fiddling with base resistances, that is increase EM resistance a bit on shield and lower it on armor but that's something we really shouldn't do unless we have to.

Amarr needs oomph. TomB and I have been talking about giving them oomph. What is oomph? I don't know but I sure like typing it. The Amarr were supposed to be the capacitor race, today that can be best characterized by the fact that they need most of it. It seems blatantly obvious that they should get bonus to capacitor warfare. Of course that is totally dependant on how we're "overhauling" nosferatus.

People say that beams are too hard to fit and in general, I agree. Then why haven't we done anything? Well it can be really time consuming and frankly there is always something "bigger" we need to think about. We haven't forgotten about this however.

Khanid MK2. I don't think I need to explain what it is, in general we liked the idea and I don't think it's at all unlikely that we will actually go through with it.

General ship loving. There are some ships that need help and we're gonna give it to them. Which ships you might ask? Well, Armageddon might need some fitting help, the cruisers aren't really that great and Apocalypse might get a bit of a role twist.

When is this going to happen

Don't expect this all in a single patch, there isn't gonna be a general "AMARR BOOST" patch and of course we're going to be careful not to overdo it. This is all something we have planned, if you want some order on this then we'll probably work on omni tanks/EM damage problem first and then look into some of the others.