Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Nerfing supers is deleting the EVE economy

The Goon propaganda brigade is in the overdrive about nerfing supers because they are an "apex force", something that can't be countered by anything but itself. Everyone against it were too busy explaining why is it important to have special, endgame ships, while ignoring that the whole "apex force" thing is a big lie. Supers can't fight without subcap support because they can't tackle each other. If you drop a bunch of supers on other ships, they just warp off and laugh. Sure, you can grind down structures in unsupported supers, but if you just once go unprepared, just once don't have the numbers online, you get B-R.

The big lie about B-R was CFC going all in. CFC never goes all in. The whole Botlord is about avoiding going all in, even in a favorable situation. The whining and crying to avoid fighting Montolio was about avoiding all in. In B-R N3PL went all in and lost. CFC on the other hand took minimal risks. If hundreds of N3PL supers log in for the pings, CFC would just jump in their subcaps, clear tackle and jump out. Sure they'd still lose some to the first doomsdays and some unlucky would get bumped or disconnected, but losing trillions was never on the table for CFC. Supers might win timers but only subcap superiority can kill supers. Fun fact: the B-R battle report shows lot of CFC subcap loses considering they weren't even there according to the propaganda.

If we recognize how dependent supers are on dictors to kill other supers and on other subcaps to clear tackle, we can realize how big the Goon lie is. The question is why fighting so hard to nerf them? The answer is "it's the economy, stupid". Once upon a time PLEX was 200M ISK, now it's 800M. This means an hour of EVE-farming worth 4x more real money when newbies had to mine in Banthams and Ospreys and the Exhumers had 1/8 EHP and 1/8 cargohold. Marauders also couldn't tank whole complexes all by themselves and T1 ships were much weaker too.

Those were the times when losses hurt. Now a subcap can be replaced while waiting for the next fleet, chatting while your AFK miner/ratter gets you the ISK. Now losing subcaps doesn't hurt anywhere else than in your ego, just like in World of Tanks. A whole subcap fleet loss cost less than a single highsec gank, hence we reached the bizarro-world where the 250 men Marmite Collective kills half as much CFC as the 60K N3+PL+HERO+Provi+xxDeath do.

With constant PvE buffs, we reached the point where a somewhat competent player can ignore subcap losses. Especially if his alliance leadership feels generous with the SRP program. Supers are the only ships in the game which need savings to buy or hurt to lose. While I can clearly replace a lost supercarrier, it would still cost me two weeks of farming. If you kill my supercarriers faster than one in two weeks, I'm bankrupt and I guess most people have a bit lower income.

The problem of the CFC with supers is that they require an economy. Without supers, ISK wouldn't matter. The whole economy would turn into a luxury thing, like in WoW: if you have lot of gold, you can buy silly shinies, but nothing that would make you stronger in fields that matter. Why would CFC want to delete the whole economy, turning the game into World of Tanks in space?


PS: Why?

11 comments:

Von Keigai said...

losing subcaps doesn't hurt anywhere else than in your ego, just like in World of Tanks.

Which game do you think has more fighting, EVE or WoT? Don't we want fighting, because it's the fun stuff?

As for the cost of subcap loss, you may not feel it and perhaps a Goon flying a standard fit does not. But I do. That's why I am not flying T3s routinely.

Now, I could invest the 40 hours per month to run a mining-mission farm to make isk and buy/lose two extra Tengus. Yes. But I do not want to. That seems like work to me. So I can tell you from personal experience that economy does constrain me. And I am not particularly poor. By extension, I think it does constrain most people in the game. That's subcap only, BTW. Never mind caps.

Anonymous said...

If "clearing tackle" would be that easy when a single dictor chain of well-dropped dictor bubbles can keep a good portion of your super fleet tackled permanently (dictors are expendable), then the entire concept of "waterboarding" wouldn't exist.

Anonymous said...

Economy worked fine before supers. Also nobody is calling for their removal - just their long overdue balance.

Gevlon said...

Economy worked fine because there weren't so many PvE buffs and tiericide. When you had to mine in an Osprey to replace a T2 logi, subcap losses mattered. Now you can mine in a Venture to replace an almost-as-good T1 logi.

Reverting back the economy how it was AND removing nolife-multibox would be better. But now, removing supers would delete the economy.

Also "balancing" them would be equal to deleting. Why would someone pay 30B to fly something that is about as good as a 0.3B ship?

Anonymous said...

You clearly have no idea of what B-R was like. If the CFC jumped all their subcaps to "clear tackle", it would have taken then 30 minutes to log in, 30 minutes to get to the B-R gate or to the bridging titan, probably 30-50 minutes to load the grid, another 30 minutes for their order to warp to be registered, 30 minutes to land on grid, 30 minutes to lock something and 30 minutes to shoot it once.

There is a reason Titans were the only targets in B-R: everything was shooting once every half hour, and a DD does a bit more damage than a dread volley or a sentry carrier volley. The N3PL was shooting dreads at the start of the fight, killing a massive amount of them, but it was irrelevant because a single titan would have had more impact on the rest of the fight. That and other factors (some random, some not. Decide where "shooting Sort Dagon" falls in). Clearing tackle was an option in the first hour, and in the last ones.

Anonymous said...

Balancing isn't the same as deleting. Balancing means giving them a unique ability on the battlefield, ample hit points and damage dealing capabilty without having the objectively broken situation whereby they are invincible I Win buttons that they are now. The argument that 30b was spent thus they should be the unstoppable pwn wagons that they are smacks of entitlement.

Gevlon said...

If you turn them into specialty ships that a fleet needs 3-4, then there will be practically no economy. The average player will not have to care about his wallet as his ships will forever be free. Supers will be alliance assets, that few will be reimbursed from alliance wallets.

The ONLY way to make the economy matter and losses matter if players are "encouraged" to fly supers.

Anonymous said...

the second main problem is also TIDI.

If you could field as a coalition 2000subcaps to B-R, without TIDI, it would make a difference.

I remember all the fleets which where standing outside of B-R and just waiting.


If a system can only manage 1000 ships, you can only bring the strongest 1000.


these 2 problems go hand in hand.

Druur Monakh said...

>If we recognize how dependent supers are on dictors to kill other supers and on other subcaps to clear tackle

I have a feeling that this statement ignores the difference between tactical (sub-cap) and strategic (cap and super-cap) engagements.

In a tactical engagement, the k/d ratio (be it ISK or ships) matters, so in extension tackle matters. In a strategic engagement however, the k/d ratio would just serve to add insult to injury: no matter how many supers N3PL could/would have saved in the absence of subcaps, they still would have /lost B-R/.

In other words, in a cap/super-cap fight, doctors don't really count. When people talk about sub-caps, they mean damage-dealing fleets of significance - not the dictor pilot fish swarming super caps.

Language is imprecise like that.

Anonymous said...

Killing logistics and removing the e-war immunity would be sufficient to balance cap ships. There's no need to remove the big expensive toys. Making them vulnerable to weaker ships is the key to make the game more dynamic and strong subcap support relevant.

Anonymous said...

Nerfing supers WILL NOT DELETE Eve economy.
never heard a more stupid thing.
building supers requires lots of supply chain management and logistics management.

Still, we could entirely remove supers from the game and the volume of the eve economy wouldn't shrink significantly

still people would lose ships and have to replace them, be it a frig, a cruiser, or even a marauder.

pve fitted marauders or faction bs are much more expensive then simple carriers! these are capital ships...

one thing that would need to nerfed is the titan bridging ability. why ccp has never applied wh mechanics to jomp portals or jump bridges remains a mystery to me.

even without supers, people would need modules and ships. and such is the order of things.

eve is a game that is surrounded and veiled by myriady of myths...
like one player could matter, like more risk, more reward, like sandbox...
all this is propaganda crap.
bittervets are just tiring of the game, so they won't replace all of their supers losses, they might just get back to empire space and do the same boring things (isk farming via lv4 grind, not via ratting or anogrinding. why empire space is so much more attracting to people is, that they can enjoy the game casually without all the bitching about coalitions and blu standings.

in highsec, it simply doesn'T matter if someone has a blu standing or not.
in nul it matters. i can't tell how many former nulsec residents i know who have lost several hundred billions, only because some powerblock reset the standing while their fleet was jumping from one jump birdge to another. when their fleet landed they got attacked by the pos and a waiting fleet, that used to be blu to them.

Oh, and another reason, why Eve is not a sandbox. no single player can live in eve in a self reliant way. there will always be things that one has to buy somewhere to transport it to his residence...

Minecraft is a sandbox game, eve isn't