Eve Online, Games

Will nobody think of the newbies?

5 Comments

A very quick post just to address a concern that a few people raised abour yesterday’s rather controversial example of an sov system that would promote smaller groups in Eve.

What some people suggested is the idea that a mass limits system would screw over newbies, by meaning they wouldn’t be taken into the sov plex battles in the final phase of a sov war. This has been raised a lot but, as Malcanis trained me to be, I was sceptical of the “will nobody think of the newbies?” line.

Really, Newbies Will Be Fine

Look at these figures:

A megathron has a mass of 98,400,000kg.

A celestis has a mass of 12,070,000kg

A harpy has a mass of 1,155,000kg.

A griffin has a mass of 1,056,000kg.

A Teensy Thought Experiment

So if you are an alliance defending your space, and you have some bittervets and some newbies and are wondering what to take, which of these ever-so-slightly simplified-to-make-it-obvious fleet comps do you take to counter the enemy and his 50 megathrons?:

1 – 50 megathrons. Alpha hell yeah. Superior target calling will carry me through.

2 – 49 megathrons and 8 celestises. Say goodbye to a third of your dps, enemy mine.

3 – 49 megathrons and 85 newer players in a mix of griffins and other T1 and T2 frigate hulls.

So yeah, newbies are going to get their fights, just probably not in bloody drakes.  I’d rather have 85 griffins than a megathron, most days.

Some alliances will go for alliance-tournament style, perfectly-balanced compositions, and will recruit high-SP players, just as they do, today. But for everyone but three or four “elite” groups and maybe some mercs, if you think that you can do without newbies then you’ve not been watching Eve for the last umpteen years. And if you don’t give them fights then they will rapidly leave for someone who will.

The next article will be on the sov plex battle and a vital remote rep nerf.

  • pugnaxbonecrusher

    I am fully behind this idea, but the bit that you are being criticized for in the HMO MMO thread is that a Kitsune is the same mass (more or less) as a Griffin, and the same goes for Celestis/Arazu (or Thorax/Proteus, etc). Why let newbies fly T1 stuff when they could be supplanted by vets with max skills?

  • Kael Attrell

    First, I wouldn’t expect most groups to expend the effort, or have the right number of properly skilled pilots, to minmax effectively enough to actually exclude newbies from all of these final sov fights. Second, T2 frigate skills aren’t really that hard to train up in comparison to the current ships you need to fight a sov war (t2 large guns, strat cruisers, carriers/supercarriers, etc), so in that way it’s probably more accessible than it is currently. Third, is there really that much of an effective difference between this theoretical 85 perfect skilled Kitsunes and a realistic mix of T1 and T2 frigates? Fourth, even if newbies are locked out of this part of the sov war, isn’t that still way better than the current system where they’re entirely useless against a supercap fleet / insane amounts of structure hit points? They’ll still be useful in all of the fights leading up to the final instanced one. Just a couple reasons why it might not actually be such a problem.

  • Two step

    If you are using wormhole mechanics, you should look to w-space to see what sorts of things might happen. When faced with mass restrictions, we always bring as many ships as we can, and those ships are as heavy as we can get and still fit everyone through the hole. Given the shitty way that mass in eve scales, I would expect that most people would bring as many Jamgus/Kitsunes/whatever as they could, and just enough DPS to punch through their opponent. My worry is that 1000 Megathrons would be replaced with 900 Blackbirds and 100 Brutixes.

  • Zaand

    I’m actually going to jump in and defend Endie here.

    Under his new system -as I understand it at least- only the sov timer fights will have restrictions; all of the other fights required to flip a system will still be a numbers game. So you send your ringer fleet to go “capture the flag” or whatever, and at the same time you can have your other fleets running defense, shooting POSs, camping gates / stations, maybe trapping a bridging titan etc. As long as you still have the ability and more or less the necessity to fight the large multi-fleet battles, their will always be a place to dog pile as many new players into a fight.

  • Ed

    Let me know when you find 85 newer players on top of the 49 Megathrons. Also, a fleet of 134 people, all online at the same time, is anything BUT “small”.