But this post in particular stood out for me:
Scaling damage makes 0 sense. Can you honestly tell me a battleship in the real world will aim it's guns at a suicide bombing speed boat and magically hit it for less damage simply because it's small. NO. It's gonna hurt like hell, it's just going to have a rough time hitting it, especially if it's moving at all
(Posted by "I'm Down" - Pandemic Legion)
Yes!
And then this reply:
That's always been my take on it. A shell bigger than your ship should obliterate you if it hits. The problem should be hitting to begin with.
(Posted by "Kerensky White" - Goonswarm)
YES!
As a frigate pilot, you need to be aware all the time of your transversal against larger ships, because if it drops you're going to know about it. As in blap blap, boom, ship is exploded. I understand that, and honestly it makes the game much more fun. Sitting under someone's guns while cutting through their drones as they desperately try to swat you is hilarious fun, and exciting as hell, because you know that if you screw up for one second you're dead. Ask any Inty pilot, the skill required is much more than you would expect (It isn't as simple as "point, orbit, call in friends to the party"). I won't claim to possess that skill, but I like to think I'm starting to understand it.
But the one thing that's always annoyed me about tracking? The fact you can get shots that "lightly hit" you while you orbit a battleship. I'm sorry what? That battleship just winged me with a shell the size of a house, fired from a gun bigger than my ship, at near enough the speed of light, and you're telling me it only "lightly hit" for a few hundred armor damage?
Are you out of your mind?
Here's an example. Let's take a frigate that pretty much everyone has flown, like the Rifter. In real life, a Rifter is about the size of a Boeing 747 (which is weird when you think about it, because that makes battleships huge, not to mention capitals. Here's a picture I particularly like that conveys the pure scale of a Titan).
So imagine that 747 flying through the sky quite happily. Awwh look at the fluffy clouds and the morning sunlight. It's so beautiful...
Now imagine it gets hit by a house traveling over 200,000,000m/s. BANG.
Not a pretty picture for the Boeing is it? No doubt you can already see the comparison with EVE. In reality, anything that size hitting an interceptor that fast should result in instant obliteration for the Inty pilot. No "light hits", more like bang, hit, gone. Yeah it's not exactly as "fair" for the interceptor, but when a battleship fires at you, it should be all or nothing. Either he hits you and that's that, or he misses and you get to shake your ass at him a while longer. That makes far more logical sense than the shot just knocking off your wing mirror.
The fact that the current formula allows this sort of thing is incredible when you think about it. It needs working on, and this I think, will solve the whole root of the problem with the Titans. Fixing this (from what I understand) will mean it won't be a super-blap machine anymore. I can't say that I fully understand how the formulas work, because maths isn't my strong suit. But obviously CCP understands it, and so do many of the players, between the two, surely we can fix the current tracking system. It's totally unrealistic, and while you could say that for quite a few EVE mechanics, this one is causing alot of problems.
There is a huge pitfall to avoid here however. Tracking massively affects every fight in EVE, and a screw up here is going to have momentous repercussions on EVE's very foundations. This won't have a quick, overnight fix, and it deserves a good hard look at to pull the best possible solution from it.
Judging from the conversation between the players and the Devs though, it appears both sides realise this is a difficult problem, and not one to be dealt with lightly. Hopefully by Inferno, we'll have a much better system for shooting at each other, and that's something we can all be happy with!
(Also a quick note)
Part of this nerf doesn't sound like a good idea to me personally:
- Stop people from refitting their ships while they're being targeted
(CCP Greyscale)
If you've seen the most recent Rooks and Kings video, you'll know why. I won't go into it now, because Jester has already made a far better post on it than I ever could, and many people have already made good points against it in that forum post linked. :)
There are two problems with the direction these comments are going. A gameplay problem, and a "reality" problem.
ReplyDeleteThe game play problem is that it's no fun. If you accept that a battleship should have a hard time hitting the Rifter, but that it should obliterate the Rifter if it does hit, then you've created a lottery. The Rifter can do everything right, and then, without warning, his luck changes and he's sitting in his pod.
That's not fun for either pilot. It was luck, not skill.
The "reality" issue is that you (and others) are misled in thinking about a single huge shell. In fact, space based warfare is almost certainly going to use area of effect weapons over discrete shells - it's simply far easier to score a hit, and far more difficult for your attack to be neutralised (imagine how much missile users would cry if CCP introduced working defender missiles). Think "shotgun" rather than "rifle". We even see this today, where our troopers use automatic weapons (rather than more powerful muskets or WWI rifles) to saturate an area with low power shot.
When one of these weapons fires, a targeted area in space will be bombarded. With this kind of weapon, maximum damage will only be inflicted if the target is larger than the area targeted. If the target is smaller than the area targeted, some part of that weapon fire is "wasted". However, the advantage is that it has been easier to hit that small, fast moving target, because you have some room for error thanks to your large damage footprint.
While the specific numbers need work, I think EVE actually does a really good job of representing the mechanics at play.
A very good point, I always thought of these artillery shells as essentially massive sniper rifles, i.e pinpoint accuracy. A shotgun-like spread would make much more sense.
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