Sink the Titan(ic)!

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.