Friday 12 June 2015

Squashed squad warps

They are at it again. This time, Fozzie has fingered CCP Larrikin to be the fall guy for proposing the idea that you will soon not be able to fleet or wing or squad warp to probe results, bookmarks, or (if you are a nerdbear) some mission objective. (le source du jour)

This is a fairly huge nerf to the way a lot of people play this game. Some people will not be able to survive this change. There are already people threatening to quit playing, it's that bad. (j/k, people threaten to ragequit over every change).

I'm not talking about the small gang guys - often you have a scout or hero tackle or some brave Garmur pilot being a kitefag cunthole on grid getting tackle ahead of your gang. In this scenario, people can just pile through the gate / wormhole whatever and warp themselves to the brave and likely suicidal soul. So you'll still be able to go YOLOceptor a carrier in nullsec and have your gang straggle onto grid, versus what happens now, which is everyone either gets cold warped off the gate / hole by the FC or aligns first.

However, there are some implications beyond the fact that multi-corp alliances in wormhole space will table flip or merge corps to avoid ridiculous BM propagation times (apparently related to the number of BM's you have in your library. so I wonder if my 2400 POS Bm's are holding us all back?) and the inability for people to push gang members around systems even at the squad level, which is how someone who has the bookmarks herds around people who don't. This just got stupidly harder. Thanks CCP.

Some more subtle implications:

Slippery Petes will find it really hard to exist in a battlefield where their FC can't yank them about the field like a flock of evil albatross. Likewise, bombers (the supposed and avowed target of the nerf).

Similarly, nano fleets will suffer badly, because a good nanofleet relies in part on being pushed around a collection of bookmarks off the gate or celestial, or being warped en-masse to a set range off a tackle ship.

I mean, i can see why CCP is doing this. Remember how i said that this is a uge nerf to the way a lot of people play this game? What i mean is the way people play this game is very passive. They POS spin and await a few intrepid scouts to find them content. They station spin and await a ping on jabber. They hump a BLOPs pig in a staging system and await one of several baits to get bitten, and then up goes the cyno, in comes the Jabber ping, a scout speaks up on comms, and they hop through, get in fleet, etc etc.

The passivity doesn't end there in a game dominated by big fleets with fleet warps; you get dragged gate to gate by someone else's mouse clicks. You get warped from A to B to C, you press F1, you broadcast. You get your shiny killmails or wake up in station, job done, game layed. Yawn. Boring. You learn nothing, you do fuck all, you experience very little and you exist in this really rather boring passive fluffy void of experience, letting it all happen to you.

So, yes, CCP should be working to improve the gaming experience. I can see how the wormhole community will be hit hard. Certain half-deaf, half-blind entirely passive people in my alliance will struggle as I tell them where to go. They'll have to read siggy, grok it's knowledge, parse the route, get to the correct system in the correct ship in their own time and not fuck up. They'll have to have fleet window open to catch the "WWW" from the scout as he decloaks his hero tackle.

They will land on grid piecemeal (no socialised warp speed in squad now). The defenders, n grid, might have the advantage.
They will have to sort their watchlists. They will have to learn to fly properly, not just land on grid and sit still, passively, expecting the situation to be locked down and the enemy half fucked.

Then again, less enemies will escape. Without squad warps, enemy FC's and squad commanders won't be able to attempt an emergency GTFO squad or fleet warp which will clear grid off instantly, saving the whole fleet in one mouse click. People will have to be paying attention to save their own dumb arses. Considering how dumb a lot of those arses can be, there's going to be ships assploded a lot.

But yes. BL and HK are going to have to find a new way of doing Slippery Petes. I'm sure they'll figure it out.

4 comments:

  1. It's a blanket response to a very specific problem.

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  2. To encourage people play more actively, you have to make things more interesting and remove all the dull shit. What this change does is adding exactly more dull shit for individual players (more clicking for everyone, how exciting), while slowing things down and cutting off some tactical options.

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    Replies
    1. If people can play Diablo III, I'm sure they can deal with clicking a mouse button.

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  3. It's not about the clicking, it's about forcing players to do some boring shit for no benefit to the gameplay. For example, moving fleet consist of players from two or more corps, say batphone, through wormhole chains gonna be a pain in the ass. Warp the guy with the BM, wait till he land, warp the fleet, jump the hole, repeat. And if you bring something bigger than generic T3/crusier size, you have to wait some more for your big guns to catch up. Boooring. Thanks, CCP, more boredom is what we desperately need in this game.

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