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Important Articles: The Anatomy of PvP |
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2008.04.20
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2008.05.05
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2008.05.17
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When trawling through the eve-online forums, I spied yet another thread calling for nerfs to nanofibre setups. After a dozen posts of opinions on what should be changed in the game to counter nano ships, I realised that not one person had identified the core problem and attempted to come up with a solution to counter it. In fact, based on devblogs and developer promises on the issue, it's possible that the developers aren't even aware of the core problem behind the nano-fit mechanic. I'd like to give an overview of the core problem as I see it and how this can be addressed. Fair combat: The basis of fair combat in Eve is an assumption that every tactic has a counter-tactic. The fact that there is no tactic or setup that cannot be countered is what keeps the playing field generally fair regardless of balance. This maintains fair play because no matter what the enemy throws at you, you have the possibility of throwing something else back at them that will beat it. This makes it your own fault for not anticipating the enemy's strategy and preparing a counter-strategy. If the enemy fields a squad of sensor dampening ships, they have the upper hand.. unless you have a squad of ECM jamming ships to jam their dampening ships and counter it. If the enemy is using nosferatu and energy neutralisers to kill your capacitor, they have the upper hand.. unless you happen to be using cap-injectors or logistics ships. In no scenario should there be a strategy that cannot be countered. Using nano-fit ships is the current win-button for a lot of players because it's a tactic that, if executed correctly, cannot be countered. Using the right ship, fitting and strategy, a nano-fit pilot can evade 99% of situations without penalty and can also fight when he wants to. It's obvious to anyone going up against a team of really skilled nano pilots that it's just not possible to defeat them through normal means. Your turrets can't track them, your missiles will hit them for pathetic damage and your warp disruptors wont hold them as they can simply MWD straight out of your range. You can't stop them with energy neutralisers because a good pilot will have built up enough speed on a strafing run to coast outside warp disruptor range and escape even if the capacitor he's using to run his MWD disappears. You can't stop them with interceptors because a good nano-fit vagabond can actually go faster than the average interceptor and has the firepower to kill an interceptor in persuit (whose transverse velocity will be tiny compared to the nano ship). The problem: The immediate issue is that the intended counter-tactic to the nano-fit ship is not fulfilling its goal. Stasis webifiers are meant to be a counter to high-speed enemies but if you web a nano-ship, they will have built up enough speed to coast out of your web's range. The solution is meant to be the use of specialised anti-speed ships like the Huginn and the Rapier, which have a large bonus to the range of webs. Unfortunately, due to how stasis webs work even long-range webs won't slow down an enemy before he's outside their range. Why is that? When an enemy ship is webbed, their maximum speed decreases and their ship immediately begins decellerating toward their new maximum speed. As with accelleration, the decelleration rate of a ship is based on its agility so a ship with high agility that accelerates quickly will also decellerate quickly. The problem with this is that somewhere along the line, CCP decided to change stasis webs to significantly lower the enemy's agility in order to prevent them from quickly aligning to warp out. This change means that when a nano-ship is webbed, its agility decreases markedly and so while it's maximum speed has decreased by as much as 99% with dual T2 webs affecting it, the ship decelerates very slowly and so it continues along its strafing trajectory at speed until it exits web range. This means that the more webs are affecting the target, the HARDER he is to slow down. This counterintuitive result is the core of the nano problem. A solution?: Now that the problem has been identified, potential solutions can be devised and tested. One person did touch on this problem and proposed a solution late last year and the forum-goers dismissed it out-of-hand in favour of nerfing speed directly. Although the poster didn't back up his suggestions very much, this solution makes perfect sense in light of the actual problem. A script that makes the web increase the enemy's agility would be perfect as it would cause them to decellerate extremely quickly when caught and restricting it to specialised ships like the Huginn and the Rapier puts it right in its place as an anti-speed ship without affecting anyone's current setups or tactics. -- Nyphur |
