With a PC version, I say that there is a very high possibility of that happening.

I agree about those complaints. I disagree about EVE being to complicated for FPS players though. I have known FPS players to get in EVE and take part in Null Sec combat within days of starting a trial account.

I think the best way to help with concerns about balance, and people upset for pub matches, would be to separate High, Low, and Null sec properly as it is in EVE.

We can not take Titans into High Sec in EVE, and maybe vehicle, or some other restriction should be in place for High Sec, ie. pubs.

That's not because it would be un balanced, not particularly difficult. Just mildly boring.

FPS's are supposed to fast paced, with limited "in-match" fidelity. Simpler version could be implemented sure, but it wouldn't be anywhere near the level of fidelity that EvE players get, it's to slow for FPS Combat.

Well I suddenly remember why I gave up talking to you.
It's not a case of it being a "simpler" game.

It's a case of it being a faster game. EvE takes care of navigation and aiming for you. Now granted the new game being on PC would be easier. But do you really want to be monitoring 10+ modules +Weapon Energy Levels +Movement +Aiming at the same time?

I don't why I'm asking, I know what you'll say. I would say vehicles would benefit most from the fractured space way of dealing with things.

You have your capacitor, using modules drains your energy level dependant on effect. Use too much and you can't activate new powers. But at the same time you don't need to sit there tweaking shield booster consumption by 5% to allow you to activate your hardener permanently.

It's meant to be faster paced and the fidelity should reflect that, otherwise you might as well not actually participate in an FPS game.

I'll be looking forward to seeing the new Pilot suits! Count me in for flying these attack craft. I think dropships as they currently exist, are ridiculous.

As someone who has played EVE for years, and been in null sec,and played DUST since the start, I can say they are different.

EVE is more complex for the FC, but DUST is more complex for the average grunt.

In EVE the FC has a vast amount of information to go through quickly to determine how to fight or flee in a given battle. The average pilot just follows FC order. I know that can be beyond many pilots, but I use to see 40 man fleets with 30 console playing noobs have no problem aligning and warping and applying dps where and when told. (How to Stay Aligned is playing in my head now...)

In DUST I would say the leader have an easier time. Only giving direction where and when needed. That said a DUST ground leader doesn't get to see everyone they are giving orders too. Now the average grunt merc though has to take general orders given by someone who can not see where they are fighting, and know how to adjust those orders to fit the situation. While the average EVE pilot is setting orbit and shooting at what the FC says to shoot at in the Overview, the DUST pilot has to be very situationally aware. That right there is a complex thing to describe and requires a lot of learned skill.

EVE is more complex in general to play, but combat is not easy to compare.

Who said EvE is easy?

But once again EvE is not fast paced, so all those variables have time to be considered.That level of fidelity will be too high for fast paced combat. Especially if you consider LAV and fighters.

It's also entirely incompatible for V/AV balance, since their will be effectively 2 levels of combat. 1 which can tweak power levels and energy consumption for better survivability against another which can only apply straight damage.

At that point you might as well segregate the 2 theaters of war entirely. To which you eventually end up with lobby shooter V2 and EvE world of tanks.

There needs to be a relative amount of parity in terms of fidelity. You effectively need to be able to just get in a tank and drive it, without having to assign power distribution first.

Like I said perhaps some more arbitrary power system that limits the number of successive module activations in return for faster cooldown.

At the end of the day it comes down to what you believe the tanks or most specifically the vehicles role in the game should be. My understanding of your view point is that there should be minimal actual interaction between vehicles and infantry.

Meanwhile I am of the opinion that vehicle/infantry interaction should be specifically ingrained into the meta, specifically for larger matches.

Like I said perhaps some more arbitrary power system that limits the number of successive module activations in return for faster cooldown.

At the end of the day it comes down to what you believe the tanks or most specifically the vehicles role in the game should be. My understanding of your view point is that there should be minimal actual interaction between vehicles and infantry.

Meanwhile I am of the opinion that vehicle/infantry interaction should be specifically ingrained into the meta, specifically for larger matches.

How would capacitors work with a passive module style of play? My favorite DS build was always armor stacked, no active modules (aside from 1 build that carried a scanner).

Would a vehicle focused on passive mods have an advantage, maybe be considered OP? Or would it be underpowered, or simply not possible (if nearly all mods were active)?

Obviously we don't know the answer, but what would be the ideal situation? I've been informed that active is the way to go currently in Dust, at least for dropships, but sometime around jan/feb of 2014 all passive mods on a dropship was very possible and very effective (affective? I always screw those up), and I still get much more enjoyment from flying a passive 4800-6k+ armor block than I ever did flying lighter craft and managing cooldowns.

I've played a bit of EVE so I have somewhat of a grasp on capacitors, and I'm not against having to go all active for an aircraft in the next Dust. But I do enjoy the simple elegance (in any game) of relying on passive skills and a clear understanding of the role you are geared for, and I'd like to see that option available in the next Dust.

I was referencing straight armor plates, as opposed to reppers. I traded self repair ability for max HP, and used a trip to the depot as my cooldown. I've always gravitated towards passive abilities (Diablo 2 Barb is the best example I can give atm), but if I need to go active that's fine, as long as AV/Vehicle balance is realized, that's all that matters.

And yea, outside of basic shooting and moving/flying I'd much rather have a KB lol so I'm looking forward to that

My biggest concern is simply how are they going to balance vehicles?

I was around for some pretty heavy AV/Vehicle thread wars here, and both sides had some pretty valid points. How can it be acceptable that a single suit can near single handedly take on a vehicle, and on the flip side how can it be acceptable that a vehicle can just become a very large suit and demolish infantry unchecked?

Overall I never really felt good with any of the builds I played, as they seemed to swing wildly between vehicles enjoying near dominance and infantry having near dominance. Add to that the proto factor, which (as has been previously feared) could create a "it's simply not feasible to run anything but proto" situation in the AV/V game.
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I personally think the ideal situation is maps that are sectioned in a way to cut down on forced infantry/vehicle interaction. My (super rough) example would be a map in which your team must cross a large swath of "no man's land", areas that are wide open and give vehicles the edge on maneuverability/line of sight, and thus an overall edge in general in said area. Once your force reached any fortifications/objectives/building clusters the edge would switch to infantry due to vehicles being ackward to maneuver in tight spaces and the amount of cover available to infantry.

I know we don't like to drag rl into theoretical discussions on how game play mechanics should work, but obviously in rl mechanized forces fair much better in open spaces, though we have to go back to WW2 to get an honest assessment of proper armor tactics/infantry interaction (that's my opinion at least, hasn't been a fair/real clash of armor since WW2). To this day taking an Abrams into a city is a risky proposition simply because a tanks job is to kill tanks, and if your armor has pushed into a city more than likely it has already pushed through enemy armor, or enemy armor is non existant. Once in the city some of a tanks greatest attributes are completely nullified: firing on the move/long range. Targets switch from lumbering hunks of metal to single soldiers that disappear just as fast as they appear, yet pack almost as much firepower as a tank.

In my mind (keeping the thought of an old thread involving Medium Attack Vehicles being armored troop transports in mind) the thing to do is have mechanics set where when you start a match, vehicles are called in, infantry is loaded up, and a single mechanized force advances to a point where the infantry can disembark their vehicle under cover fire from vehicles, and from there the vehicle/infantry fighting somewhat seperates, with vehicles duking it out in the open areas around a city/objective, and infantry doing the fighting and hacking inside the city/objective. A lone tank wandering into a city would be nearly a sitting duck, even with infantry support (column of tanks rolling through the middle of a city? Hit the first and last then rain the pain on the rest of the now trapped convoy), and a lone merc or 3 wandering into the open land outside a city/objective would be wiped out.
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Unfortunately there is still some heavy issues, because after everything I just said, what if the people of 1 team all pull out tanks? Or if they are loaded down with dropships and infantry? What if you have situations where one team consists of mainly lone wolf players? Do you limit vehicles? Force teamplay? I haven't even touched AV/V balance in all my babbling, how does that change the scheme of things? There are so many variables, so many people looking for that quirky little edge or trick that totally destroys balance. I do not envy CCP in regards to giving us what we want, but still balancing everything they give us.

Another example I like to use is the supposed fighters. In 1 thread a while back, fears of fighters targeting infantry and questions of small arms effectiveness vs fighters came to light. This, to me was an immediate wrong step. It's not even fumbling right out of the gate, it's fumbling on the way to getting into the gate. Fighters should have no business targeting ground anything, and if the maps are big enough this could be counteracted simply by the speed of a fighter, it should go too fast to target ground. And if you do that, the fighters need a reason to exist, which would be bombers.

My point is that so many things in Dust have been able to be geared towards fighting so many other things, it's made balance near impossible. I can almost guarantee with 100% certainty that had fighters been introduced to our Dust, dropship kills would not be the only victims of fighter attack. Pretty much anything other than tanks would have been fair game.

So I guess the issue becomes do you force a general balance onto everything in game across all professions/allow for casual and or lone wolf as well as hardcore and teamplay, or do you force people to remain in a role/play tightly as a team? I'm personally down for hardcore team play, as well as imbalance when it makes sense (1 dude vs 1 tank on open ground/1 tank vs 1 dude in a tight city street).

On top of all of that stuff, what's the general idea/vision of what CCP wants, overall and mechanics wise? And what kind of limitations do they have due to technology?
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My ideal for AV / V interplay was always based around the idea of slower tanks, that were significantly harder to kill. It would be balanced around far higher TTK where Tank v Tank has the lowest TTK. This would be matched however by making it more difficult for a tank to easily escape should things turn against it, where the tanks heavy defense and lack of mobility is the key points of it.

AV then could do comparably less damage, but then have additional toolkit options to create kill zones or trapped areas that would effectively trap a tank. The larger TTK though could mean that were the tank supported by infantry, the Infantry have a reasonable chance of saving the tank from the AV before it died.

To this end, I see AV being given all sorts of active equipment such as trip-wires (only via tanks), deployable statis zones, and capacitor-draining grenades that could effectively stop a tank dead in it's tracks. So when a tank moved into a certain area a large radius statis field could be generated slowing the tank speed by a massive amount, then various AV weapon types could have additional effects such as capacitor drain, movement penalty, and target painters that all make squad based AV far more effective in combination.

I wouldn't mind traps effecting all vehicles the same, under certain conditions. Say traps (mines/trip wires/stasis fields, whatever) were fairly easy to detect and fairly hard to negate, require a sapper role to disarm (possibly place) traps, give a passive scan ability to a vehicle such as (assuming we get one) an APC (MAV)((LAVs/HAVs would require a Scanning Mod to detect traps independent of MAVs)), and traps take on an Area Denial vibe creating a situation where traps can become effective even without doing direct damage. Also this would (hopefully) reinforce teamplay as cohesive thrusts of forces would fair much better than random waves of troops/vehicles. Therefore equal trap damage to all vehicles would be less of an issue as the most viable counter would be avoidance as opposed to survival/HP.

I also feel like damage to different parts of a vehicle is a must. Let, at the very least, damage to treads/axels/so on be independent of overall HP. For example a tank can take damage to its treads, and as damage increases movement performance decreases, up until zero health on the treads at which point the tank is immobilized. This opens possibilities for actual mechanic roles. Frenzied fight around an immobilized tank whIle the mechanics get movement ability back up and running? Yes please.

Obviously zero HP on the movement section would not destroy a vehicle, this would require zero HP on a body section.

This could be taken some steps further (seeing Front Mission 2 HP displays in my head) by letting, for example, a body section, high slot section, low slot section, turret section and movement section be allowed to take damage separately from each other.

I feel like this would blow the AV/V game wide open, as you are no longer relying simply on raw damage to effect (affect?) vehicles. AV could do serious damage without a vehicles overall HP taking a massive hit, giving infantry a good chance of almost entirely negating a vehicle threat, but still requiring friendly vehicles to handle enemy vehicles properly. The risk/reward on vehicles going after infantry would also become a bit less appealing, I feel, if risking your vehicle going after infantry did not necessarily eliminate your main damage dealing/kill shot threat, and instead put you at risk of being immobilized when your main concern (enemy vehicles) does show up.

Just brainstorming, haven't put too much thought into this stuff.

Vehicles need distinct roles. They never had a chance in DUST because they shared the EXACT SAME ROLE as any dropsuit, namely to kill individual infantry units. They were just big suits that could be "worn" by a single player so they had to be balanced one on one with a single AV suit. That was the only way to prevent one side from dropping 16 HAVs and destroying the other side. These big suits either cost too much or were too weak, they could never be what vehicles should be.

Nobody today uses a main battle tank to shoot infantry. It's not efficient. It shouldn't be efficient in EVE:Phoenix either. Make them good at destroying the smaller anti-infantry vehicles and fortifications. Let them blow holes in walls. Make them crap at killing individual infantry. By separating infantry from heavy tanks you can balance them much easier. If they don't compete one-on-one they don't have to be countered one-on-one.

Main battle tanks should require multiple crew members to operate efficiently. In the new game we can make it so individual players don't have to front the cost of these vehicles all by themselves. Have a range of vehicles from single pilot to multi-crew.

Give us a first person view! It kills immersion to have to run in third person and it alters the dynamic when you can see all around your vehicle.

Make piloting a player skill as important to flying and driving as it is to aiming your gun as infantry. Don't make flying to easy. Pilots are proud folks who want others to respect them for their skill. As such keep the current dropship flight mechanics and don't make the fixed wing aircraft arcadey like PS2 does.

Price is immaterial, you can't balance on ISK. The problem is that a vehicle can be piloted and fired by one player and it competes directly with that suit in the slayer role. That makes it logically equivalent to a suit. If it's equivalent, then it has to be balanced one-on-one, especially for low player count matches were any advantage is heavily felt.

You must change one of those two conditions before vehicles can require more than one AV suit to destroy them.

You can remove direct competition by reducing or eliminating its anti-infantry ability. A dropship with no guns could be tanked way up and not imbalance the game. A HAV with a rail turret could be great at destroying other big targets but be really bad at killing infantry. Smaller and more vulnerable vehicles could be better at anti-infantry, but be balanced closer to a suit. This approach requires more complex gameplay and probably destructible environments.

You can also require more than one player per vehicle for full use. Then you can balance on a 2:2 or 3:3 ratio. The vehicle still has a natural advantage because it forces coordination among its crew while the opposition has to have the discipline to provide it themselves. That gives them the edge in pub matches. The standard dropship and the LAV are examples which require a pilot and gunner to be effective. The LAV a little less so as you can easily park and switch positions in the blink of an eye.

And if CCP does it right they will require skills from each crew member.