Kristoff Atruin
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Test Alliance Please Ignore
2197
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Posted - 2014.05.09 23:31:00 -
[1] - Quote
From a long term Eve player perspective, I don't care if my suits are BPOs if the modules cost enough for death to sting. All they have to do is make sure that the modules are valuable enough.
"when your dropsuit is a BPO why should you ever use anything worse than your best dropsuit available?"
Because this is basically tiericide. Going up the tree isn't going to give you the huge jumps in power that going from standard to prototype does in the current Dust system. There's only the one level of each suit type. The point is to give each suit a particular role it excels at. like how Eve has cruisers that are good for brawling, kiting, sniping, repairing, drones, shields, armor, speed tanking etc. So you won't pick the "best" dropsuit, you'll pick the one that gives you the role you want to fill at that time. Suits higher up the tree will likely have more slots, making them more expensive to run for modest power increases and have higher meta levels which you have to take into account for matchmaking.
This also lets them do something else. Eliminate useless starter fits. You don't need cannon fodder suits that are no good for anything when every player starts with one role unlocked and unlimited suits for it.
I started playing Planetside 2 recently, and it seems like they're basically taking that game's approach to skills and increasing the complexity by about 10 times. Ie: rather than a handful of roles that you max out, each role leads to another one. The system described also has far more distinct suits built into it: 3 basic frames (light, medium, heavy), 4 basic roles, 4 racial variants of each role and then two specializations off of each of those. People talk about the proposed system as if it's going to be simple...well from what we've seen that's a kneejerk reaction without actually looking at what was shown. There's more complexity in it while being more accessible than what we have now. It's just that the complexity comes into picking the right suit for the job, rather than picking the right skills to make your suit super powerful.
So, benefits of the system shown to us:
1) More roles, no massive power advantage through simply having more SP (not as massive as now, anyway)
2) If you've invested in a suit you can always use it, even if you've been knocked down to using militia gear
3) Every player is fulfilling a legitimate role on the battlefield, no more useless noobs in frontline suits.
4) Clearly defined roles without power differentials built in means things are easier to balance, especially with weapons being locked to certain suits
5) Due to number 3 and the meta levels system, better matchmaking
Benefits of the current system:
1) Complex. Well, it's hard to understand why you should train one thing or another. Not really an advantage. I'd argue that having a larger number of suits balanced against each other makes the system more complex and interesting from a gameplay perspective. At least it LOOKS complex. It's also not very eve-like. If Eve had Dust's progression I wouldn't pick a ship to fill a certain role, I'd pick the ship that is the "best".
2) The super rich can use their wealth to stomp all over the poors, since they don't care if they lose a proto suit. The suit being inherently more powerful before modules are brought into play means the noob doesn't even have a chance. Not much of a benefit.
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Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
2198
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Posted - 2014.05.10 00:44:00 -
[2] - Quote
The suit will cost something, the modules, equipment and weapons. Tiericide is pretty relevant to the question I was responding to. "Why not always use your best suit?". Because there will be no "best suit". Once you've established that, then all you have to do is take the value of a dropsuit and push that into the value of modules. The only truly free suit will probably be the basic light / medium / heavy frames. The others will have modules etc to pay for.
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Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
2199
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Posted - 2014.05.10 00:59:00 -
[3] - Quote
Because the player in Eve can exist without a ship, and because ships are part of a deep resource cycle. They have a cost because players make them from their own time. Some guy mines veldspar for a few hours and sells the results of that work for what he considers fair, then buyer takes that and combines it with other minerals to make a ship. The floor cost of the ship is the purchase price of the minerals. You can also build your own ships if you can't find them on the market / have the isk for them. That's not the case with dropsuits.
And the biggest difference, dropsuits are lost dozens of times in a night. Nobody loses more than a few ships in a weekend unless they're really trying to. Most ships are owned for a very long period of time which is where the emotional connection to the ship comes in. You don't really get that with something you have to replace dozens of times in a night. This is something that was talked about at Eve Vegas.
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