Yesterday Dominion sov died for good. There were a number of reasons why most of us welcome the death of that sov system, that has been replaced by a new guy, the so-called Fozziesov that revolves around a new module: the Magic Wand called Entosis Link and a whole new system around capturing beacons and so on, trying to focus in spread battles rather than single chokepoint fights.
This last asseveration has been already questioned, as hellcamping and sieging a defender has been proven a good strategy as a defender that can’t undock is not able to contest. I think that a good amount of criticism has been already happening at meta-level and we can find plenty of content, for example this reddit thread where people argue about this new system.
But on this post I would like to focus less about Fozziesov being good or bad, and more into balance and how I feel that the approach to balancing EVE gameplay has not been a success so far. First of all, what do we understand when we talk about balance?
Well, balance in terms of gameplay means that given a similar set of characteristics on certain equipment/ship/weapon/character/whatever, the experience, performance and outcome will be similar. Balance as it is, is not contradictory or opposed to specialization. It doesn’t mean that you can’t find something that does the job better than other options, it means that you have choices, that won’t be a single obvious decision. That you will be able to decide what do you prefer based on the characteristics and not because that’s the only logical decision.
In terms of EVE gameplay, we can use the mining ships as a good example of this. Before the balance pass done in summer’2012, there was the Hulk and then there was everything else. It didn’t really make sense to mine in anything else because even a battleship could out-mine the rest of the ships and there was no reason to use anything else. But now, after several tweaks, you have different choices. You can decide if you prefer tank over yield, if you prefer capacity over yield or if you prefer yield over capacity and tank. You have multiple choices, some of them will outperform the others in different situations, but you are not forced to decide because the rest of the options are bad.
Now we get to the funny part. The part where the metagame gets involved: fleet doctrine conformity. Any collective of players that does PVP will have any sort of fleet doctrines. This are compositions of ships and fittings that have a certain goal. This goal can be countering another kind of doctrine or giving a situational advantage for some kind of battles. Doctrines will always try to minmax the potential of EVE ships, will try to find good synergies between all the ships that make part of it and will need fc’ing skills to be used properly.
The meta will always revolve around the current state of the art, and will always try to find the best solution. This means that if there is a king of the kill, there will be many doctrines using that ship. 2012 was Drakes everywhere. Cheap, insane tank, plenty of fitting options, pretty good range and damage types, low skill requirements, etc. There were better options maybe, but Drake was simply good at too many things to overlook it. So everyone had a Drake doctrine. This doesn’t mean that Drakes were for everything, but they were too versatile to not use them. The heavy missiles were killed by a huge nerf to make people not use the Drake. Killing the messenger (of dps) was probably not a good design idea.
It is a nerf that tries to address a problem but with the wrong focus. The focus is preventing the metagame flavor of the year. But you can’t never outplay the metagame by changing the game rules, because by definition, metagaming is built around the game and will adapt and will evolve to make sure that we take as much advantage as it is possible from the game. If the game is balanced, we will have plenty of good choices to make and nerfing things so everyone stops using them won’t happen.
Like it happened with the Drake, the Ishtar became the cool kid last year. As a Heavy Assault Cruiser, the Ishtar was too good in many things to overlook. You could choose an Eagle to have better range, but then you would have less DPS. You could have a Deimos having better damage output, but the tank would be worse and not to mention the range. A Vagabond could be much faster, but the damage output would be worse as well. Ishtar was too good in many different ways that it didn’t make sense to fly anything else on its class and everything became Ishtars and Ishtar-counter doctrines.
The nerfs tried to kill the Ishtar by tweaking the bonuses and the sentry drones, supposedly to bring balance. But unlike the case of the mining ships, this balance didn’t really happen. Because instead of making the rest of the options viable in comparison with the Ishtar, the nerfs tried to bring the Ishtar back into the ground. And in my opinion, this is how to not bring balance to gameplay.
And we have more examples of how to screw up balancing. We have the recent polemic about fleet warps, the reduction of null-to-null wormholes, the fatigue mechanic, etc. What does things have in common? They are based in the erroneous concept that making things more annoying brings balance.
First, because no matter how annoying a mechanic is you will find always players autistic engaged enough to exploit it to the limit. Second, because it will give an inmediate advantage to bigger communities, as it will be easier to find those kind of players the bigger you are. And third, because playing a game is supposedly to be fun.
Per gaming desing, I should never face a situation where I find myself thinking “doing this sucks so hard but that’s the only way to do it”. Phoebe did something good: EVE became bigger. It allowed smaller entities to field caps more comfortably. But did it stop the so-called Apex Force? Nope. The reason that explains that post-Phoebe we haven’t seen a massive slaughter between nullsec entities is because there are not enough reasons to justify the amount of effort and nonsense that you have to deal with to move your ass accross the galaxy to knock the door of someone else. Does it stop any supercapital-heavy entity from fulfilling their goals? Nope. Now many smaller fishes might be safe because killing them entails too much effort to move there. I’d call this a spurious consequence and not good gaming design.
Phoebe forced nullsec entities to use wormholes more often to find content if they weren’t lucky enough to have content coming at them. Thera was excellent on this regard because it helped a lot to do this. But now we see null-to-null connections being nerfed. How am I supposed then to find content if no one comes to me, in an universe where recent changes have made moving around a huge pain in the ass in terms of man-hours and cost efficiency? In this case, the change doesn’t even mean that you have one option that is better than the rest, it means that you simply kill the option we had and now we have to choose between unfun and tedious choices.
And going back to the new sov mechanic; Fozziesov will not bring new life to New Eden at least until we get a picture about the next phase where we know what owning space means and why owning space is cool or why it is worth it to fight for it rather than living out NPC or lowsec and milking the resources of nearby conquerable space. We changed the old boss with a new one, but this doesn’t change the fact that having a boss sucks. We will probably hate on it until we have a reason to love it or a reason to deal with it.
