Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Wrong ragequit over a right reason + the importance of the dot

Sugar pointed us toward the direction of an epic fail: guy lost a 2B collateral, 1.2B value cargo in a tanked Mammoth industrial to a suicide ganker. In the forum topic he announces his quitting from the game and also his opinion about the game being horribly unbalanced, if a 140M fitted Tornado can finish his 1.2B thing in highsec.

He is an idiot, no doubt. But his idiocy lies only in not recognizing the horrible unbalance before he suffered it. While having a big hole on the street is the fail of the road maintenance corporation, you are still stupid to jump into it.

The game is not unbalanced in the sense that the 140M Tornado could oneshot the 3M hull with 3M fittings. The design problem is that industrials naturally has a high pricetag due to their cargo. If you put 400M fittings on a 40M drake hull, you are an idiot and can avoid it by fitting T2 modules instead of faction and deadspace to Drake. Putting cargo into a ship is equal to putting on fittings loss and gank-loot wise. However the only alternative of putting 1.2B on a 3M Mammoth is not flying the Mammoth.

And here we arrive to the fundamental T1 hauler problem: their pricetag and defense is way too low for the cargo they are meant to haul by any veteran player. Of course there should be a cheap and weak hauler for newbies, but anyone over 1 month old will haul at least 100M, and for them all T1 haulers are useless. The ragequitter is right that the T1 haulers are broken, his fail was still flying one. I haven't flown one since my first month. When I started my ISK empire by hauling skillbooks, I realized that even a nano-fitted Condor is better for the job. Later when I had skillpoints I moved to a 300K EHP Orca and a 600K EHP cloaky Tengu.

A hauler that can be ganked economically with 1B cargo is by definition a noobship only for newbies. CCP Rise must design haulers for veteran players too. Alternatively it can be declared that blockade runners, freighters, Jump-freighters and Orcas are the options for veterans, but then the whole T1 hauler bunch should be replaced by a single Ore hauler, and the skillpoints put into racial industrial skills should be refund and its description should contain "IT IS TOO WEAK TO DEFEND any cargo over 100 million ISK, consider using transport ships, Orca or a freighter instead".



You might noticed that the dot is an important thing in EVE Online. Not only because it's a running joke to put it to your corp and alliance names, but because if you delete it while you set up a buy order, you end up like this:
Yes, he paid 16B for a 0.16B implant, thank you Ingeborg Tim very much. I told many times not to disable the warning box if the price is out of normal range. I tell it again, maybe it holds.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

"IT IS TOO WEAK TO DEFEND any cargo over 100 million ISK, consider using transport ships, Orca or a freighter instead"

EVE is a sandbox. Idiots need to be allowed to make mistakes.

Anonymous said...

No i see his point. Other than disposable goods and missions, there is no reason for them. I use my mammoth still, but anything more than hauling pi is a waste, and ill get big boys to carry

Von Keigai said...

Hilarious stuff.

You say it was tanked, and so does the ragequitter. (He claims he had 21000 tank; EFT shows less.) Yet EFT shows that if his hardeners were on, he should have 16889 EHP; and yet he was killed by the alpha of a Tornado fit with tech-1 guns, which should max out around 10000.

I think perhaps he had not turned on his hardeners, or at least not all of them. (He says he did.) If he had, there is no way a single Tornado could have popped him.

I don't think his explanation hold water in another way too: he claims he "I landed on the gate at zero", but got killed there. I had thought that once you start jumping you are invulnerable, and that this will happen automatically as soon as you exit warp assuming you did "d" to initiate the warp. Is this not so? Then this must mean he warped to zero to the gate and did not jump. He sat at zero for at least the second it took to Tornado to lock him and fire.

Von Keigai said...

As to whether or not industrials are balanced: sure they are. They are fine. They are not good for carrying large value loads where they can get ganked: true. Perhaps in some sense they were "meant" to carry high value loads. But here's the thing: EVE is a sandbox. Things happen in EVE that are not what the designers foresaw. As such, what some CCP employee "meant" is immaterial to the game. What matters is not the patterns in the brain of some dude in Iceland. What matters is how the game actually works.

And how the game works is, that industrials max out their tank at about 20000 EHP, whereas there are ships can that can do 10000+ alpha for 100m ISK. Therefore, no industrial can safely carry more than about 200m ISK, and to be safe you should no carry more than about 100m. That's how the game works. There is no "meaning" here, there is reality.

No ship is good for carrying far more value than it has tank. And it is not a design error if a ship can, possibly, carry more value than its tank.

If you put 50b in PLEX in a freighter, you deserve to get ganked.

If you put 1 PLEX in an Ibis, you deserve to get ganked.

In fact I carry "too high" value loads all the time in wspace. The reason I can do this is security via obscurity. If someone knew I was doing it and could get to the obscure places I was going, they could gank me. I make sure as I can that they don't know and can't get there.

EVE is cool because it transcends what the designers "meant" to do. Nobody meant for Asakai to happen.

Gevlon said...

@Von Keigai: the point is that industrials are useless in the role they are designed for.

Anonymous said...

why cant someone ever forget a point on one of my sell orders?

Von Keigai said...

Gevlon, "the" role? Somehow you know that industrials "are designed for" carrying 1b in highsec? Said who? How do you know this?

Do you also somehow know that freighters "are designed" to carry 50 PLEX?

And even assuming you do, that's what my first para argues: "design" is irrelevant in the sandbox. What matters is what they actually did create, not what the designers thought they created.

Gevlon said...

Let me rephrase it: they must be able to carry 1B or no veteran players (except idiots) will use them.

Imagine that one of the battlecruisers would only be flown by dumb people and battle badger fleets. That would warrant a rebalance, right?

Anonymous said...

Gnosis? It's inferior in pretty much every role except bait.

Anonymous said...

Look at the situation from an investment/risk/reward perspective.

Let's say that I want to haul stuff to resell it for a 10% profit (after taxes and fees) and that it takes me 30 minutes to do a full trip and set up orders. If I'm carrying 100M worth of goods, that translates into 20M/hour profit. If I'm carrying 2B, that's 400M/hour.

Now show me a ratting, mining or missioning ship that takes less than an hour to train into and can make 400M per hour.

Malcolm Shinhwa said...

There are things a T1 hauler is good for, even if you have an Orca.

I for one use a Mammoth to haul 4 catalysts + fittings and 2 incursus (for pods or when we don't need as much dps) + fittings to wherever I happen to be ganking that day. The Mammoth will get there faster than the Orca and also helps a bit with salvaging T2 wrecks. It can also haul the loot back. 6 ganks is about all I'd care to do in a day anyway. All that cargo is about 70mil, so not enough for most anyone to want to gank unless its for lols. Of course its all cargo expanded out the bootie, so if someone wanted to it would be easy to kill. But its 70mil isk, so who cares.

So there are some uses for T1 haulers. But if you find yourself putting more than 100m of loot in, then that is probably bad. But I'm not sure the limited uses we can come up with make enough sense to have them in the game as they are.