Monday, November 29, 2010

Be Careful What You Wish For

The Incursion release has been quite a startling turnaround, in a few hours we're going to get part 1 which is essentially a bunch of player requested mods that will make Eve a vastly better game for everyone. Never in the history have Eve have we seen an expansion with this much player input, and I must admit I'm feeling more than a little excited.... although that may be the feeling of anticipation I feel trying to fly out of outer ring with some blueprints (and maybe skillbooks) in my hold.

However, we should bear in mind that this is not the first time the CCP has bowed to player pressure and made changes, and, not everyone would agree that the results were ideal in the long term.

Remember the Dominion release, Motherships renamed to Supercarriers and given fighter bombers? CCP Abathur presented the original changes which were tested on SiSi by lots of dedicated players, many of whom had never had a chance to fly a Supercap before. Then along came CCP Nozh who decided that the new supercarrier design was overpowered and nerfed the number of bombers which could be flown, in exchange supercarriers were given the ability to dock. The rage flowed from the fan community, and the supercap changes missed the release, a couple of months later we had Dominion 1.1 which essentially gave the players what they wanted - the original Abathur approved supercarrier.

Now, almost a year later, the residents of 0.0 are now grumbling about Supercarriers being overpowered and starting to think that maybe a nerf is in order.... perhaps Nozh was right.. (then again being able to dock a supercap would make station games ridiculous)

Another long requested feature which CCP finally implemented was sized rigs, I mean it was pretty sweet to be able to put rigs on a rifter without feeling guilty. However since small and medium rigs have been added there has been an inexorable rise in the number of Drake blobs flying around 0.0. The cost of fielding a drake dropped by 30million isk the day that you could put medium sized shield rigs on it, that's a big chunk of the cost of the ship, even moreso when insurance is taken into account. So, again we see that giving players what they want can cause things they don't want - blobs of drakes and lag inducing missile storms.

Anyway - on with the new release - see you in Outer Ring!

1 comment:

  1. Reading back at the devblogs from that time I'm not actually seeing what nozh' supercarrier proposal was, other than to say that they weren't going to be in the 1.0 release. They are overpowered today, but their role is okay; just a modest damage and a significant EHP nerf are in order.

    The part of nozh' proposal that convinced me it was incompetent was that missile-using dreadnaughts would have to use target painters to do full damage. The idea of fitting a TP on a dread is retarded, and most of the targets they would be used on are ewar immune anyway.

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