And now, I make a fool of myself.
Perfunctory preface: I am a noob at EVE Online. I have been playing since January 2012. My account is barely three months old, and my total play time (according to Steam) is about 110 hours. I have not played the game very long.
I have never flown a Titan (obviously). I have never seen a Titan in game. I have never talked to someone who has flown a Titan, nor someone who has seen a Titan. I can’t tell you the exact stats of every Titan, or really any stats at all relating to the Titan, but that each one is something like 15-18 km long, which is preposterously awesome. I couldn’t tell you how many targets they lock, nor what the resolution or tracking is on their guns or their ammo. I am not qualified in any way to comment on the nitty-gritty mathematics behind why Titans are OP and need to be nerfed.
But, and this is important, this ignorance as to the mechanics and data behind the Titan ship class does not mean I cannot identify and comment on a fundamental design problem inherent in the class. So that’s what I intend to do. You’ll find no math here. Only large scale design-based thinking, informed by an amateur understanding of game design.
So let’s get into it, shall we?
One of the big hot-button topics in EVE right now (aside from Mittani-gate and all that jazz), is the Titan ship class and whether or not it needs to be nerfed. According to other bloggers, the most reliable of EVE sources, the Titan class is simply too good at blowing stuff up. The statistics seems to bear this out: according to CCP Diagoras most of the top ten ratting player characters last week were ratting in Titans, and Ripard Teg has published several well-supported posts detailing how the Titan just shoots too damn well. I mirror his opinion that a city-sized monstrosity probably shouldn’t be able to insta-pop a frigate at 100 km, but as I said above, I’m not going to address the mathematics.
From where I’m standing, as someone who is an EVE noob but has some understanding of game design, and as someone who has no dog in the Titan hunt as it were, there is a single fundamental flaw in the Titan’s design and implementation.
The Titan has no core design philosophy.
Ask yourself the following three questions, and try to answer quickly with your gut reaction.
1. What is the purpose of the Stiletto?
2. What is the purpose of the Guardian?
3. What is the purpose of the Erebus?
Now, I’m not Miss Cleo, but I’m pretty sure I can guess the gist of your answers. The Stiletto’s purpose is tackling and running down enemy ships. The Guardian’s purpose is to remote repair friendly ships. The Erebus’s purpose is to........ shoot things? Bridge fleets? Support? Attack? Odds are there are as many answers to question 3 as there are readers of this post.
See, no design philosophy.
One of the most important elements of game design, and in fact design in general, is that every component needs a philosophy behind it, so that the philosophy can guide the design process and make sure the component, whatever it is, stays on track and fulfills its purpose. This is also important because a strong design philosophy will allow designers and developers to easily pin down the component’s strengths and weaknesses.
Looking at other games, one of the best examples of this is the color wheel in the card game Magic: The Gathering. In that game, there are five colors, corresponding to the five resources needed to cast spells, and over the years the colors have developed very strong and identifiable design philosophies. Blue is the color of invention and research, White is the color of balance and community, and so on and so forth. (To those of you who play Magic and know a lot about the color wheel, forgive me for the gross simplification. I’m trying to keep things basic here.) These philosophies directly inform the relative strengths and weaknesses of the colors, and individual cards in new sets are always based around the card’s color and that color’s philosophy.
Turning to a real world example that has a closer parallel to EVE, military vehicles have their own design philosophies. Fighter jets engage enemy fighters and establish air superiority. Bombers deliver massive damage payloads to important ground targets. Destroyers escort larger ships and defend them from smaller ships. Aircraft Carriers transport hangars of airplanes and act as mobile platforms for launching air assaults.
Now, as you may have noticed, all of these real life examples come with trade-offs, weaknesses that arise due to the very nature of the craft’s design philosophy. Fighters can’t drop 500 bombs onto a ground target. Bombers can’t engage in dogfights with fighters. Destroyers can’t go toe-to-toe with battleships. Aircraft Carriers sacrifice all built-in weapons or defense systems in order to better fit their role as transports and logistics platforms. Real life military crafts are not designed as “catch-all” machines that can do everything. Broad design leads to weak design. Jacks-of-all-trades are never as useful as focused single-trade specialists.
This is the fundamental problem with the Titan class in EVE. It has no design philosophy; and lacking a philosophy, CCP just slapped everything they could think of onto the ship and called it “awesome.” Clone bays? Those are cool, throw them in there. Hangars and maintenance arrays? Gotta have those. Oversized guns? Hells yes. Immunity to ECM? Oh yeah, that’s awesome. Doomsday weapons? Jump portals and bridging? Fleet-wide bonuses? A horn that plays Eye of the Tiger? A bitchin’ paint-job with flames along the side of the hull? Fuzzy pink dice on the rear view mirror?
I ask you, what is a Titan’s purpose? If it’s logistics and fleet support, why does it have a doomsday weapon and ridiculously good guns? If it’s a front-line damage dealing platform, why does it have hangars and maintenance arrays and bridging capabilities? It simply does too many things well. It has no major flaws or weaknesses, save perhaps that it’s really slow and will always get people’s attention when it lands on grid.
So how do we fix this? Can we salvage the poor Titan? Well, for starters, CCP can go ahead and apply whatever hot-fixes it thinks are necessary right now. None of them will eventually matter, so they might as well just do what they think is necessary to band-aid the problem in the short term.
Looking to the long term, CCP needs to call a spaceship staff meeting, get everyone together in a big room with a big table, order some pizza or whatever Icelanders like to eat in lieu of pizza, and hash out just what the hell the Titan’s role is supposed to be. But for this session to work, the team needs to be ready and willing to slaughter sacred cows. Nothing should be off limits just because it’s “what Titans do.” We’ve established that “what Titans do” is “everything,” and “how well they do it” is “too well.” CCP really needs to just throw out everything, pretend Titans don’t currently exist in game, and start from scratch, beginning of course with the all-important question of “What role are Titans going to fill?” Are they going to be mobile stations to provide large scale logistics for invasion fleets? Are they going to be high DPS damage platforms? Battleship killers? Frigate killers? Whatever the answer, this question must be addressed first, because all of the design flows from this. If Titans are logistics stations, they obviously don’t need high tracking mega-guns. If they’re DPS platforms, they obviously don’t need clone vats and hangar bays and maintenance arrays and all this other stuff.
Figure out what role Titans fill, then design them to fill that role. Don’t hang extra bells and whistles on them just because they’re the “endgame” ship of EVE Online. In fact, CCP and the EVE community need to strike from the record the idea of Titans as “endgame” ships, and indeed we are all better off if we eliminate the idea of an “endgame” in EVE altogether. EVE is not a linear experience, and EVE fleet combat is not a series of raid tiers a la World of Warcraft. Titans are not “epic purples.” Titans should not be the “phat loot” that every EVE player should aspire to acquire. Titans should be specialized super-capital ships designed to fill a particular role in large scale fleet warfare. They shouldn’t be uber-ships that people use to kill 3,000 rats per day.
So that’s an utter noob’s view on the Titan problem, and how CCP can fix it. I’m not going to bother with number crunching and specific stats that should be tweaked, because none of that matters if the ship class still has no fundamental design philosophy to guide the tweaking.
Fix the house’s foundation before worrying about replacing a few roof tiles.
CCP, I implore you to get on this, just so that you can get it all behind you and get to work on the real problem with Titans: namely, how every one of them looks like a giant lego space hot dog. Seriously. These ships are supposed to be the epitome of their empire’s technology and culture, and all four look like ten mile long bratwursts.
Monday, April 9, 2012
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Fail-ganking Like a Baws
Salutations, dear readers. It’s been a while. Apologies, but this is not the continuation of the prior post. One of my major faults as a writer is that I am too verbose, and I end up splitting things into multiple parts. But then, of course, time marches on, I do other things, and finishing the follow-up parts to a post about something that occurred a month ago seems ridiculous. So this is not the follow-up to the last post, and I’ll try not to make multi-part posts in the future unless all of the parts are finished in advance.
Anyway, it’s been a while, in part because I haven’t actually played much EVE in the last three weeks or so. I’ve been playing other games while my skills train up. One of the blessings and curses of EVE is the skill training system. On the one hand, I’m glad that my skills continue to train while I’m not logged in. But on the other hand, I sometimes find myself asking why I should bother logging in on a particular day, if I need a certain skill and that skill still has three days before it finishes training.
But the skills I needed have finally finished up, so now I’m back in the cockpit and ready to actually start ganking mission bears. To that end, I invested my ISK into a brand new shiny Hurricane, decked it out in the latest tech2 autocannons and sundry tackle apparatus, and launched my new baby into the aether, a blank area on her hull primed for a tally of hapless victims. My eyes flashed with ambition and excitement, my fingers primed to lock point and rain hot space lead upon the unwary and unfortunate. Today, I became a true ninja.
And then nothing happened for five days.
One of the things that other ninja blogs don’t mention is that stalking and ganking the mission runner is much like fishing or hunting in real life. There are long stretches of absolutely nothing occurring, punctuated by sporadic moments of action and violence. For every bagged deer (to reference the type of prey I hunt in real life), there are innumerable hours of just standing around staring at the woods and freezing to death. Such is the way with mission runner ganking. For every killmail and fail-fit, there are dozens of scanned down missions where the bear never shoots, or even really acknowledges that you’re there. Occasionally you get a mission runner who pops his wrecks as a desperate attempt to get you to go away, and now and then you’ll happen upon someone who will call you out in Local, as if that would do anything, but most of the time the prey responds in one of two ways: (1) ignore you completely, or (2) warp off as soon as you land on grid. Now, the truly gifted ninja can often goad or harass the MR into shooting or taking some other action, but such tactics are beyond my rudimentary and largely theoretical knowledge.
And so my beloved Hurricane, dressed to the nines with ammo racked and chambered, sat collecting dust in the hangar for almost a week. Now and then I would fly her around the system and back, just to make sure her moving parts didn’t rust from disuse, but we were both itching for action that I just couldn’t find.
Until, at last, a buck walked into the clearing and approached the salt lick.
A smile came to my lips as the scanner ticked off “Raven: 100%.” Finally, a battleship I could take. The last couple of days had given me nothing but faction battleships and marauders, and while I am more than willing to relieve someone of a grossly overpriced shiny ship, I don’t quite have the confidence to just warp in and start tangling with a Navy Issue, and Marauders never shoot. With equal parts anticipation and pessimistic reservation, I undocked my Vigil and warped to 0.
Unlike most mission sites, this one did not have a gate or multiple rooms, so I landed right in the thick of things. The Raven sat at low burn about 100 km away. Rats, both alive and dead, littered the area. From the location of the wrecks, it seems the Raven had landed in the middle of the room and then started puttering along while it went to work. Of course, since a Raven can barely top 100 m/s on a good day, it hadn’t gotten very far, but it had been in the site long enough to drift a ways away from the warp-in point.
I set right to work, pulling into a tight orbit around the nearest large wreck and locking salvagers. The wreck contained some worthless missiles and a cheap module, but I snatched it up for the aggro. And lo and behold, the angels descended, and the Metatron said, “Thy faith shall be rewarded,” and the Raven locked me up and sent a volley of cruise missiles my way.
Giddy with excitement, I rushed back to station and leapt into the Cane. With all my telepsychic power I demanded that the undock procedure to hurry up, and for the ship to align and enter warp to happen immediately. Moments later I landed in the mission area.
100 km away from the Raven.
The magnitude of my idiocy crashed upon me, and amid a string of curses I pointed the Cane’s nose at the Raven and said, “Go!” And the Cane went, at the blazing speed of 350 m/s.
You have to understand, up until this moment, the two ships I flew most often were a Vigil and a Rifter. Both of those can break 1000 m/s with an afterburner running. The oppressive lethargy of larger ships like Battlecruisers had yet to sink in. The idea of tooling around in the vastness of space in a ship that can barely make 100 m/s was beyond my imagination.
As the distance to target slowly ticked down, I made several calculations amidst nervous anger. My warp disrupter, overloaded, had a max range of something like 30 km. My speed was 350 m/s, and my distance to target was 85 km and falling. My lock range was 49 km. I figured if I managed to get into lock range, I could send my drones at the Raven and hope they would distract him long enough for me to get into point range.
But the angels giveth, and they taketh away, and at 60 km away the Raven, realizing his missile volleys were barely denting my shields and that he was currently tanking about twenty rats, warps away, leaving his drones to their fate in his haste.
Oh how I cursed my incompetence. But I was tenacious, and I intended to get that damn Raven when he warped back in to try to finish the mission. I knew my mistake was not making a new bookmark closer to the Raven while I was still in the Vigil, so I decided to plant a new bookmark right where his drones lay, so that when I warped back in I would be right on top of him. But the rats frustrated my purpose. There were too many of them, and they all turned on me once the Raven ran off, so I didn’t get very far. I managed to drop a bookmark 50 km away from the drone before having to warp off and repair. I had a hunch my prey would return quickly, so I docked up, repaired the Cane, and jumped right back to the site.
Just in time to see the Raven warp away, drones in tow.
By this time I was not surprised. Nothing in this gank was going as planned. I still thought my initial plan was sound, so I decided to stay on site and try to plant a bookmark close to where the Raven was warping in and out. I didn’t get very far, of course, under the concentrated fire of the mission rats, so I had to settle for dropping a bookmark 40 km away from the Raven’s warp-in point and make haste back to the station.
Or rather, that was the plan, right up until I hit warp and nothing happened. I checked the Overview. The lone remaining rat frigate was warp disrupting me.
Well, shit.
I locked it up, applied web, and laid into it with the 220s. Nothing. Misses across the board. I started to sweat. Was I really about to lose a Hurricane, a virgin Hurricane no less, to my prey’s mission rats?
In a panic I dumped my drones and engaged them on the frigate. Slowly, slowly, my babies began to eat into the rat’s shields. Meanwhile, the rest of the mission rats had chewed deep into my armor. Lacking any type of active repair module, I was now in a race. Could my drone kill the frigate before the rats killed me? What a ridiculous black mark this would be on my record: a brand new Gank-cane blasted to bits by mission rats, after the actual mission runner was long gone.
The frigate was at half armor as I went into structure. I continued to fire the 220s at the ship, I guess for moral support for the drones, while I checked and re-checked alignment to make sure I could warp the moment I was free.
The frigate went into structure. Smoke and fire bellowed from my hull.
An explosion in space.
I mashed the “Recall Drones” button. I would not leave my saviors behind.
“Warp Drive Active.”
Salvation.
Thus did I avoid the most embarrassing turn of events ever. Thus was my career saved by four Warrior I’s and a Valkyrie I. They have secured a place in my hangar forever after as the Drones What Saved My Ass, and they shall enjoy a happy retirement.
So what did I learn from this almost-debacle?
There is also an interesting question that arises out of this whole incident, one that both confounds and irritates me.
If it had a point on the Raven, the Raven wouldn’t have been able to run away as I slowly lumbered toward it, and the operation might have worked out a lot better. So what gives, mission rats?
I expect you to back me up next time. We both want the same thing. You point my mark, I help you kill him. You win, I win, we all win. Deal?
Anyway, it’s been a while, in part because I haven’t actually played much EVE in the last three weeks or so. I’ve been playing other games while my skills train up. One of the blessings and curses of EVE is the skill training system. On the one hand, I’m glad that my skills continue to train while I’m not logged in. But on the other hand, I sometimes find myself asking why I should bother logging in on a particular day, if I need a certain skill and that skill still has three days before it finishes training.
But the skills I needed have finally finished up, so now I’m back in the cockpit and ready to actually start ganking mission bears. To that end, I invested my ISK into a brand new shiny Hurricane, decked it out in the latest tech2 autocannons and sundry tackle apparatus, and launched my new baby into the aether, a blank area on her hull primed for a tally of hapless victims. My eyes flashed with ambition and excitement, my fingers primed to lock point and rain hot space lead upon the unwary and unfortunate. Today, I became a true ninja.
And then nothing happened for five days.
One of the things that other ninja blogs don’t mention is that stalking and ganking the mission runner is much like fishing or hunting in real life. There are long stretches of absolutely nothing occurring, punctuated by sporadic moments of action and violence. For every bagged deer (to reference the type of prey I hunt in real life), there are innumerable hours of just standing around staring at the woods and freezing to death. Such is the way with mission runner ganking. For every killmail and fail-fit, there are dozens of scanned down missions where the bear never shoots, or even really acknowledges that you’re there. Occasionally you get a mission runner who pops his wrecks as a desperate attempt to get you to go away, and now and then you’ll happen upon someone who will call you out in Local, as if that would do anything, but most of the time the prey responds in one of two ways: (1) ignore you completely, or (2) warp off as soon as you land on grid. Now, the truly gifted ninja can often goad or harass the MR into shooting or taking some other action, but such tactics are beyond my rudimentary and largely theoretical knowledge.
And so my beloved Hurricane, dressed to the nines with ammo racked and chambered, sat collecting dust in the hangar for almost a week. Now and then I would fly her around the system and back, just to make sure her moving parts didn’t rust from disuse, but we were both itching for action that I just couldn’t find.
Until, at last, a buck walked into the clearing and approached the salt lick.
A smile came to my lips as the scanner ticked off “Raven: 100%.” Finally, a battleship I could take. The last couple of days had given me nothing but faction battleships and marauders, and while I am more than willing to relieve someone of a grossly overpriced shiny ship, I don’t quite have the confidence to just warp in and start tangling with a Navy Issue, and Marauders never shoot. With equal parts anticipation and pessimistic reservation, I undocked my Vigil and warped to 0.
Unlike most mission sites, this one did not have a gate or multiple rooms, so I landed right in the thick of things. The Raven sat at low burn about 100 km away. Rats, both alive and dead, littered the area. From the location of the wrecks, it seems the Raven had landed in the middle of the room and then started puttering along while it went to work. Of course, since a Raven can barely top 100 m/s on a good day, it hadn’t gotten very far, but it had been in the site long enough to drift a ways away from the warp-in point.
I set right to work, pulling into a tight orbit around the nearest large wreck and locking salvagers. The wreck contained some worthless missiles and a cheap module, but I snatched it up for the aggro. And lo and behold, the angels descended, and the Metatron said, “Thy faith shall be rewarded,” and the Raven locked me up and sent a volley of cruise missiles my way.
Giddy with excitement, I rushed back to station and leapt into the Cane. With all my telepsychic power I demanded that the undock procedure to hurry up, and for the ship to align and enter warp to happen immediately. Moments later I landed in the mission area.
100 km away from the Raven.
The magnitude of my idiocy crashed upon me, and amid a string of curses I pointed the Cane’s nose at the Raven and said, “Go!” And the Cane went, at the blazing speed of 350 m/s.
You have to understand, up until this moment, the two ships I flew most often were a Vigil and a Rifter. Both of those can break 1000 m/s with an afterburner running. The oppressive lethargy of larger ships like Battlecruisers had yet to sink in. The idea of tooling around in the vastness of space in a ship that can barely make 100 m/s was beyond my imagination.
As the distance to target slowly ticked down, I made several calculations amidst nervous anger. My warp disrupter, overloaded, had a max range of something like 30 km. My speed was 350 m/s, and my distance to target was 85 km and falling. My lock range was 49 km. I figured if I managed to get into lock range, I could send my drones at the Raven and hope they would distract him long enough for me to get into point range.
But the angels giveth, and they taketh away, and at 60 km away the Raven, realizing his missile volleys were barely denting my shields and that he was currently tanking about twenty rats, warps away, leaving his drones to their fate in his haste.
Oh how I cursed my incompetence. But I was tenacious, and I intended to get that damn Raven when he warped back in to try to finish the mission. I knew my mistake was not making a new bookmark closer to the Raven while I was still in the Vigil, so I decided to plant a new bookmark right where his drones lay, so that when I warped back in I would be right on top of him. But the rats frustrated my purpose. There were too many of them, and they all turned on me once the Raven ran off, so I didn’t get very far. I managed to drop a bookmark 50 km away from the drone before having to warp off and repair. I had a hunch my prey would return quickly, so I docked up, repaired the Cane, and jumped right back to the site.
Just in time to see the Raven warp away, drones in tow.
By this time I was not surprised. Nothing in this gank was going as planned. I still thought my initial plan was sound, so I decided to stay on site and try to plant a bookmark close to where the Raven was warping in and out. I didn’t get very far, of course, under the concentrated fire of the mission rats, so I had to settle for dropping a bookmark 40 km away from the Raven’s warp-in point and make haste back to the station.
Or rather, that was the plan, right up until I hit warp and nothing happened. I checked the Overview. The lone remaining rat frigate was warp disrupting me.
Well, shit.
I locked it up, applied web, and laid into it with the 220s. Nothing. Misses across the board. I started to sweat. Was I really about to lose a Hurricane, a virgin Hurricane no less, to my prey’s mission rats?
In a panic I dumped my drones and engaged them on the frigate. Slowly, slowly, my babies began to eat into the rat’s shields. Meanwhile, the rest of the mission rats had chewed deep into my armor. Lacking any type of active repair module, I was now in a race. Could my drone kill the frigate before the rats killed me? What a ridiculous black mark this would be on my record: a brand new Gank-cane blasted to bits by mission rats, after the actual mission runner was long gone.
The frigate was at half armor as I went into structure. I continued to fire the 220s at the ship, I guess for moral support for the drones, while I checked and re-checked alignment to make sure I could warp the moment I was free.
The frigate went into structure. Smoke and fire bellowed from my hull.
An explosion in space.
I mashed the “Recall Drones” button. I would not leave my saviors behind.
“Warp Drive Active.”
Salvation.
Thus did I avoid the most embarrassing turn of events ever. Thus was my career saved by four Warrior I’s and a Valkyrie I. They have secured a place in my hangar forever after as the Drones What Saved My Ass, and they shall enjoy a happy retirement.
So what did I learn from this almost-debacle?
(1) If the mission site is just one location, and there are no acceleration gates, make sure you plant a new bookmark on top of the mission bear.
(2) Hurricanes are slow lumbering brutes. Don’t expect to run anyone down.
(3) If the mission runner warps off, get the hell out of the mission. Don’t try to tank the rats, and be aware that frigate rats can potentially point you.
(4) Take care of your drones. They will save you.
(5) The mission rats are more dangerous than the mission runner. That’s why you want them attacking the mission runner.
There is also an interesting question that arises out of this whole incident, one that both confounds and irritates me.
(*) If there was still a point frigate rat alive, why the hell wasn’t it pointing the Raven?
If it had a point on the Raven, the Raven wouldn’t have been able to run away as I slowly lumbered toward it, and the operation might have worked out a lot better. So what gives, mission rats?
I expect you to back me up next time. We both want the same thing. You point my mark, I help you kill him. You win, I win, we all win. Deal?
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