How Rorquals are Saving EVE

Seraph IX Basarab has a bit of a vent about the Rorquals on EN24.

Such salt. He wants to not only nerf them but remove wealth from the owners, which is kinda just a wee bit petty do you not think? It's not the player's fault the game is allegedly 'out of balance' so much that everyone can helicopter dick about in a supercapital and titan, you feckless dingo todger. So with that, you know he's just crying tears of broflake sissy rage because "Hurr CCP changed my game".

Grow up you simpering doltv; the game isn't broken by Rorquals. It's improved by them.

Like a lot of guys playing this game, who are merely human beings with limited intellect and pungent body odour like me, Seraph also has a very skew-whiff view of the economic impact of the Rorqual. He complains that multibox Rorqual miners are pushing down mineral prices, causing deflation.

Well, fuck me sideways with a snow plow, isn't that a good thing? MUDflation is a problem in all other MMO's. A boneafide economist studied it in EVE (and several aspiring economics students have written papers on EVE), CCP made some tweaks and changes years ago, and by and large MUDflation is absent due to taxes and charges within the economy 'shaving the cheese' as it were.

What Rorquals are doing is providing a mineral boom. The abundance of minerals makes ships cheaper; Cyclone hulls are down to 30M. Aeons are 13B. Both used to be double that five years ago, I'm pretty sure. Given rat bounties are still the same, this means that Rorquals have made it faster and less painful to rat your way into a ship. This is good news, especially for newer players.

PLEX prices are, in the old coin, 1.6B. In 2009 they were 300M. So it's gone up like Australian real estate; hardly Zimbabweification. And yeah, this has an impact on newer players and credit card warriors trying to afford their ships, which are now cheaper in real world terms.

I mean, don't tell my wife, but Titans are now so cheap that if I had the opportunity to live out of, say, the Maila keepstar instead of a podunk fucking Athanor, I would top up a few PLEX and maybe one day fly a Ragnarok on my main. Full dislosure, I did tell her that this was the year I was going to buy one and she said "Aren't those worth $6,000 in real money?"

Not anymore, hunbuns; thank the fucking Rorqual. More like a grand, and that's fitted to 100B ISK worth. If you just want to driveby dickheads, you could get out of it for 55B as Ranger Regiment showed recently, and hey, that's a spendy birthday present, amirite?

Rorquals. Making Middle Aged Men's EVE Dreams Possible.  Finally. 

Seraph also complains of guys (him, probably) with mineral stockpiles getting dudded because the price is dropping.

Puhleeze fool. If you've stockpiled minerals thinking it's a hedge vs MUDflation, you took a risk on a commodity market by going long, and if real world history of mineral prices shows, a boom in prices leads to overproduction and a crash. It also shows that with a step-change in technology (eg; cyanidation of gold in the 1980's) the price tends to crash after. So in EVE terms, when the miners whine enough that it's not profitable enough to mine, and CCP buffs a ship somehow, or creates the Rorqual, then the price of the minerals change.

Should CCP nerf Rorquals because some flappity-brained nincumpoop has bet that trit will be 15 ISK per unit by 2020 and sunk 300B into the market? No. CCP should balance the game around the market stability, the overall MUDlfation risk, and the balance and playability of the game, in terms of if trit was 15 ISK then it would be onerous to afford any ships anywhere and people would stop PVPing. Like, seriously, CCP should not balance around the greed of players.

Balance Issues

I will agree the current Rorqual meta is a problem in terms of balance. That's a combination of factors, but mostly we have to look at Goons in Delve to see the balance problem and that's a problem created by the Goon supercap umbrella.

Perhaps Rorquals are too tanky with or without the PANIC module. This is true when they have decent support and you can't prevent that support getting on field via any form of cyno inhibition. This is the Goons issue in a nutshell; dropping 40 FAX to save a Rorqual is Goons organising themselves better than anyone else. The effect of this is in effect virtually unlimited Rorqual mining in effective impunity. Is it a problem with the Rorqual? No. Is it a problem with being able to multibox them due to drones? No. Is it a game balance issue or a meta issue? It's a bit of both.

Is it CCP's job to nerf the Rorquals tank, to make Goon Rorquals more vulnerable to smaller gangs of bombers? This won't help the smaller alliances or the lowsec miners or the wormholers who pop Athanors and mine in C1's. The tank isn't the issue.

Cyno Inhibitors Should Be a Thing

Certainly cyno inhibition is effectively a nonevent in EVE. Occasionally someone has an old school POS with a cyno inhibitor running, and it's getting rarer especially now that everything can take a gate unlike the old days when you had to take a gate, bash a POS in subcaps while getting dunked on by bombers, cripple the inhibitor and then you could cyno in the big shit.

Oh, you have the mobile cyno inhibitor...which is effectively pointless against anything these days because you rarely get 2 minutes before the hammer drops or the rescue fleet hops in. But maybe if your victim is AFK and you're quick you can inhibit the response fleet or force them to drop on your 100km away....which is about 10 seconds of MWDing for the swarm of fighter bombers. The mobile inhibitor is an obsolescent piece of shit. It needs a 10 second or 30 second anchoring and at least a thousand klicks of inhibition.

And why not a class of vessels that can do this as part of their role? Sure it's open to abuse, and it would be heavily abused as a new meta evolves but so is anything else.

But think of it. Even if it's a T2 battlecruiser hull worth 600M ISK, pushing this through a gate at some hotdropping lowsec pirate types and cutting off their inevitable dunk squad of Nyxes? Worth it. Bridging one in to dunk 20 Rorquals and cut off the instant backup? It would certainly change the meta, change the behaviour, and not penalise the smaller players more than the Goons.

Hell, no doubt the Goons would either have CAP supers in the belt itself (a step forward from having region-wide umbrellas of supers on near instant call-out), or the Rorquals would utilise a cyno inhibitor on the belt to shut down hotdrops, forcing the hotdroppers to maybe light on the moon nextdoor and warp over.

Like, would that not be;

• fucking logical that inhibitor technology would one day make its way onto star ships
• fucking cool
• worth a whole fucking summer update
• open up whole new metas

It's time to throw this kind of shit at the alleged problem, to spice the game up, versus keeping Seraph IX Boohooahoohoosarab from salting up his cheeks at the thought of how much ISK other guys are making. Fuck that guy.