(Cripes, it generated 45 comments on this blog alone, far more than any other post I've made.)
I suppose what surpised me the most, especially on EVENews24 [EN24], was the level of high discourse. Very few of the comments on my article could be considered sophomoric or crass. That's certainly not the norm for EN24. That's not to say there is not good debate happening in the comment section of any article on EN24, simply that you will find a lot of sperg in with the superb.
A lot of people got the point of the article. A lot of people did not.
The impetus for the article was a complaint from a carebear that an inexpensive ship should not be able to blow up an expensive ship. I was annoyed by that notion, especially given that the expensive ship's strength is in an industrial role, not a combat role.
To back up the premise of my post, that it doesn't take much skill or money to destroy expensive things, I tossed out a few real world analogues for terrorism. Thus began the point flying high over the heads of some readers.
Some people chose to focus on the EVE is Real argument. First of all, EVE Online is a game. It is no more real than Starcraft (all of Korea will likely debate me on that.) That's not to say that some basic truths of our real world cannot be translated into EVE Online. And one of those truths is that anything can be ka-blooied at a fraction of the cost of what it took to build/buy the thing to be destroyed. And that to do the destroying requires very little skill compared to the skill to pilot/build/manage the thing that is to be ka-blamoed.
But a lot of people remained incensed that something that took them two to six months to train into, cost them a third of a billion ISK, could be destroyed by someone in a twelve million ISK ship and with barely more than a week and half of skill training. "It's a game, and CCP should make it tougher to destroy expensive ships," the people cried. "Only expensive on expensive, and cheap on cheap."
That would suck a lot of the diversity out of the game, while making every ship a viable combat ship. Mining barges become battle barges? Um, no. I like that EVE Online delineates between combat and non-combat roles. You want maximum mining output, then you sacrifice combat capabilities (defensive and/or offensive.)
A number of readers then seemed to fixate on the two real-world examples that used suicide bombers as their modus operandi. As though all bombings require the sacrifice of the bomber. (The third example was not a suicide bombing, but was left unmentioned in their arguments.) "Gankers should have permanent death," the people cried. Um, no. I'm not even sure I need to argue why this is such a terrible idea.
Finally, as one commenter pointed out, my choice of analagous terrorist acts was deliberate. But not for the reason they pointed out. I specifically chose acts of terrorism against America, mainly because most Americans seem to think these are the only noteworthy acts of terrorism. Further, most Americans get up in arms when they are used, as though mentioning them, in relationship to anything other than the tragedies that they were, are heinous acts themselves. "How dare you use these tragic events to drive home a point! Americans died!" the people cried.
I could have mentioned the Bishopsgate bombing by the IRA, or the Lockerbie disaster, one of the many Mumbai bombings, the Madrid train bombing, or the battle for independence of Algeria from France. None of these involved suicide bombers. Nor did they target Americans. Likely, no one would have commented about them at all, certainly not with any indignation. So, yeah, I was trying to elicit the response I expected in that regard. And I got it in spades. Americans aren't any more precious than non-American victims of terrorism.
***
Now I'm thinking about battle barges. I have some ideas on this. Demand, after all, should be supplied. Some of the carebear comments have it right, in a sense, but their desire to have their cake and eat it too is all wrong. I think I'll write about this next. Maybe some new surprises for Hulkageddon VI.
"That would suck a lot of the diversity out of the game, while making every ship a viable combat ship. Mining barges become battle barges?"
ReplyDeleteRight, because the fact that CCP made it so that it takes multiple tornadoes or hundreds of thrashers to suicide gank a freighter in 1.0 space, so that it could be a viable transport for mediocre valued items in quantity, means that now freighters rule the killboards, destroying all in their path. yea...not so much. This point goes nowhere fast. Do you think freighters/orcas/jump freighters should get their EHP nerfed down to hulk levels? That would indeed be amusing, although it would make EVE a worse game.
"And one of those truths is that anything can be ka-blooied at a fraction of the cost of what it took to build/buy the thing to be destroyed. And that to do the destroying requires very little skill compared to the skill to pilot/build/manage the thing that is to be ka-blamoed."
Generally it takes less skill to blow something up than to build it. Depending on the target, it may still take significant skill, which is why terrorists aim for trains and buildings, not dams, runways, satellites. Are you going to turn on the TV and see that terrorists have blown up the Grand Canyon? Or are they going to aim for something simple to blow up again.
People aren't asking for hulks to be super-tanked juggernauts, that the miner can rat in between mining ops. They're asking for them to have a normal and reasonable EHP, in keeping with their cost and size. They cost x% of a freighter, move at the same speed, they're both industrial ships. Yet it seems that the hulk is much easier to blow up, proportionally, than a freighter (Fully tanked, a hulk is still 1/6 the EHP of a freighter for 1/3 the cost, IIRC. And that's comparing a mining nerfed hulk to a freighter still hauling at 100% ability). Comparing hulks to Orcas hulks look even worse, as Orcas can be tanked up to near 300k EHP for half the cost of a freighter. All of the arguments you lay out for keeping hulks the way they are, work equally well as arguments to nerf freighter/orca/JF EHP down to a hardly usable level. If you want to be consistent you basically have to advocate that at this point...do you?
Hey Poetic,
ReplyDeleteI am from India and I watched the whole Mumbai attacks unfurling. I had family there and my cousins only just missed the train. When I heard their voice on the phone that they were safe I literally broke down. It was a horrible,horrible thing to recall/experience. To bring something like that to argue against some lost space pixels is not something I would support. American or not, the price was blood and the tragedy was real.
That said,I do follow your blog and you do great work. Hopefully we get over keeping Eve too real. Cheers,man. Keep writing!
What made your original comments silly was how you implied that a Hulk owner could do something (other than putting away the Hulk) in order to combat suicide ganking. Your exact words were, "If you want to protect your non-war thing, then bring along some goddamned war things." How is that supposed to do anything? The Hulk and the suicide gankers are dead before the "war things" you bring along will even have a chance to intervene.
ReplyDeleteI'm not going to say that suicide ganking should be written out of the game mechanics, but let's not sit here and pretend that Hulk owners can really do anything about it beyond closing their operations. I still find it odd how you criticize people for wanting there to be "fairness" through game balance, while you advance, at the same time, your own variation on the just-world hypothesis, in which suicide gankers can "get theirs" as long as miners do X (an X which, by the way, doesn't even exist).
The desire to have cake, eat it too, then cry when forced to share some cake (ESP at blaster-point) is pretty much a requisite for being a True Carebear. ;-)
ReplyDeleteAnyways, I think all Indy ships are far too squishy, especially in the modern tier-3 world ... Easiest best fix I can think of is adding a load of structure hp. After all damn things handle like they've got 5 internal bulkheads in em, why not give some struct hp to reflect that? People can then throw a DCU in the lows for a decent tank boost ... And those who just CANNOT get past that min/max mindset and just HAVE to have that exp cargohold or mining upgrade, get to roll the dice -- after all struct hp has 0% resist without a DCU. ;-)
I've always been in fair of this approach. It gives people a decent buffer option, makes rp sense, and forces a choice between buffer, cargo, and mining upgrades.
Deletebattle barge.. i like the idea.. Hopefully they will add thoes in when they add in Q-ships.
ReplyDelete@Rammstein: This is a false analagie, Should a Hulk have 1/3rd the cargo capacity? NO! each has its own role, the Hulk sacrifices Cargo and EHP for the abillity to mount strip miners, as well as being (infinitly) more flexible
I think "should" is not the right way of looking at it. It is a business decision. The easier it is for the, to use the Bartle archetypes, Killers to prey on the Explores and Achievers, they fewer of the latter you have, which results in less revenue for CCP. The happier you make the motivated-enough-to-post-on-forums, the less income you make. Until you hit a Monoclegate tipping point.
ReplyDeleteMy guess of where we are is the optimal strategy for CCP shareholders is to keep making things better for the care bears until the actual resistance - not forum rants - starts to get higher. Say add an additional 100k care bears and lose 10k killers?
Clearly an all 0.0 EVE is the most logical; but that would cost CCP so many subscribers. It's not what "should" happen or what makes the game "better" (which is code for "more fun for the poster.") Rather it's the rational discussion of the costs of design decisions. Most suggests I read seem to be ways to lower CCP's revenue; if I were a shareholder, I am not sure I would call that "better."
P.S. A digression - I have always thought that EVE should support true suicide bombing. If GrieferCorp war decs NewbieFriendsMiningTogether, instead of telling them to get into Rifters and be easy kills, let them put some ordinance in the hero of Alliance tournaments, a Battle Badger, and suicide it. A lot of blobfest might be avoided if the most potent weapon in the game was a fireship - a suicide freighter with 900k m^3 of explosives on board.
"Make gankers permadeath" OK, but then gank victims shall permadie too! Gankers have 2 weeks training. That's how it works in the real world too, the terrorist leaders recruit illiterate, poor youth and use them to blow up highly trained and valuable Western citizens.
ReplyDelete"5M ships shall not defeat 300M ships" OK, but then 100B titans should mine 3000x more than Hulks.
Despite being an avoider of PvP and a high-sec dweller, these "plz no gank me" people can't stop amusing me with their stupidity.
Don't count Teh Battle-Hulk of Win(TM) out just yet:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndWUlntJ58U
'Course, the fit would have to change, that video was before the Nosferatu nerf (when Nos' replenished your cap whilst draining as much as neuts do now) and when WCS' had no drawbacks, but drop those for neuts, a DCU, and a medium shield extender...
...(/Me giggles) URP-SPLOSION!
@serge
ReplyDelete"@Rammstein: This is a false analagie, Should a Hulk have 1/3rd the cargo capacity? NO! each has its own role, the Hulk sacrifices Cargo and EHP for the abillity to mount strip miners, as well as being (infinitly) more flexible"
Analogies are not true or false, they are strong or weak. In this case, we each obviously believe our analogy is strong and the other's weak. I'm claiming that mining ships should be in line with other indy ships, since they have all have similar cost, speed, appearance, and function chiefly as noncombat vessels. You're claiming that obviously mining ships should be much weaker in EHP than other indy ships, but fail to provide any reasoning as to why that analogy should be favored(unless you think that the statement "strip miners clearly magically reduce EHP" is a reasonable supporting argument) . Without any attempt to support your argument, I'm not sure why you think simply stating an alternative analogy would be convincing. Unless you can put your argument on a firmer foundation than mere rhetoric, there's no point in continuing this debate.
@hong:
Some indy ships aren't squishy, and some are, by a factor of 10. I agree with you 100% otherwise, the super squishy indy ships should be given more structure to bring them into line with the orca and freighter.
Well by Indies I mean the T1 variants. Sure, an Occator can mount a bitchin tank (which really only prolongs the inevitable in low or null -- I'd just as soon "get it over with"), but we're talking about Iteron and Retty/Covetor-type stuff, not T2s. :-)
DeleteI can fly up to Iteron IVs from back in my carebear days ... now I are "l337 nullsec d00d" (lol) and as such have great tanking/fitting skills.
With a quick play at EFT this is what I came up with:
[Iteron Mark IV, lol I still POP easy]
Local Hull Conversion Expanded Cargo I
Damage Control II
Power Diagnostic System II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Experimental 10MN Afterburner I
Medium Shield Extender II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
200mm AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet Phased Plasma S
Medium Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I
Medium Polycarbon Engine Housing I
Medium Cargohold Optimization I
all Vs stats:
EHP 10,353 <--- well, as long as your attackers don't bring neuts, that's not so bad, right? Read on...
Sig: 238m (yes, that's about the same as a Minnie BC)
Align: 10s (think it's gonna take ANYTHING 10s to lock/scram/BLAP you if you have BC-sized signature?)
Speed: 148m/s no AB, 363 AB on, 470 AB-OH (plus figure you're gonna be webbed so burnin back to gate @ 250m/s ...? yeah not gonna happen lol)
Cargo: 8083m3 (I know, that's shit)
Such a fit might discourage the solo or "casual" group -- but if yer flyin some :goodshit:, rest assured that 3 Nados will comfortably alpha you off the field no problemo.
Really I'd say make the Indies and transports more like "freighters" -- nerf their midslot layout, add a shit-ton of structure HP so it's _your choice_ if you want that extra expanded cargohold, or trade it out to a DC2 for tons more EHP...
And for the record: I like the idea of 'sploding ships doing splash damage, especially if loaded with tons of ordnance or other volatiles. ;-) Then again I also think that if a frigate's flying _between_ two BSes or BCs both shooting at the frig, there should be a good chance that any misses should "hit" the ship behind the frigate. ;-) Would definitely require some different maneuvers in big fleet fights. >:-D
Yes and no, PS. The bombing of Pan Am 800 over Lockerbie killed mostly Americans and the Madrid train and London bombings both used suicide attacks. 9/11 killed more people than the next eight largest terrorist attacks combined and affected people from more than a 120 countries. It happened in America, killed mostly Americans but it was a strike against the whole free world. Americans don't feel like special snowflakes when it comes to terrorism but no other country has had an attack by terrorists on that scale. Bishopsgate, while no doubt horrible and detestable, is an apples to logs comparison to most other terror attacks in the last 30 years.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the analogy of technology required to destroy things vs technology required to build. Take a trip from Kandahar to Kabul on the Ring Road in a million dollar MRAP and have it destroyed by ten dollars worth of fertilizer and plastic jugs to really appreciate it.
I thought this article was thought provoking and interesting but you lost me on your lack of understanding of terrorism history which I would have refreshed myself on prior to writing this..
In practical terms the designers of hulks really ought to have slapped as much HP on these things as possible.
ReplyDeleteOnce in a system they pretty don't do much travelling. They just sit there chomping at rocks. Agility and speed is never a scarifice a Hulk pilot would worry about. So what if they'd been designed with the align time of Jupiter?
Design flaw from the start. Would I change their HP within the context of the game? Basically no.
The only part that seems unrealistic to me is that a pod pilot can gank some people, rat their standings back up, and all is forgiven. That's not how the real world works.
ReplyDeleteWhat I would like to see is an option to put an additional flag next to anyone who has ever committed a suicide gank in high-sec. There's no reason I should not have to look up the killboard stats of each pilot in local just to tell whether they're likely gankers. It should be very made more obvious.
Well my opinion stays strong, I'm all the way with this guy that made the site, first of all: only miners should debate in this topic, if you dont mine you have no idea what its like to be a miner!
ReplyDelete1. Miners mine ore to make all those shiny Battleships (including stations) pvpers are flying in. where else they gonna find ores to built the dam ships when someone blows the crapper out of it. refining rats..?
2. you start killing off all the miners - there aint gonna be any miners left, it aint gonna acually be worth mining anymore. yeah... all we need is another alliance to make another Hulkaggon. then see how many miners are gonna mine and how many ships your gonna have in Jita for sale. incase you dont know this server aint full. should be a lot more gankers around when it is.
3. WHAT is the highest lvl ship in this game..? Now someone tell me what lvl the hulk is..? wait did someone say its the BEST ship EVER for mining... thats a joke played upon all of us miners made by CCP. Seems to me a LVL-3 HULK is the best mining ship, but that dont exist. it should progress as with any other T3 ships.
4. I been a miner for a while now... I was told its ok to be a miner EVEN on the official site... they PROMOTED it !!! I am 100% all for calling this, an act of TERRORISM, this includes CCP for allowing this to happen. a blatent lie. weather its to combat botting or make more coin for themselves - its an act of terrorism on behalf of CCP and the whole game... CCP should warn new people joining, that you may be a victum of terrorism if you become a miner. I would of chosen a different path if i was informed properly.
You know what I would like to see, and laugh my chokoes off... you all killing the miners off for the profits left front and center, and they all say "stuff this! I am changing careers to a battleship or better" - "I'm going pvp"... 90% of miners on the server go PVP, cause they sick of getting blown up or dont have the finances to buy another hulk or retriever. wonder what that would do to the so called econemy. I'd say only Goons and other large alliances would be the only ones mining.