Strategic Post

One of my favourite things to do for blogging these days is to notice some announcement of a change from CCP or someone saying something, and then dig up an old post of mine where I say the exact same thing.

The latest entry to this hobby is this dev blog on Strategic Cruiser changes:

The short version of the plan is that we want to address a few key issues with the current Strategic Cruiser design:
- Rigs in their current state lock T3 hulls into a specific set of bonuses and prevent T3 Cruisers from achieving the goal of a “strategic” ship that you can adjust from day to day to meet your needs by changing subsystems
- T3 Cruisers overlap too much with other ships (especially Heavy Assault Cruisers and Recon Ships) and their dominance can reduce ship variety
- Many of the subsystems and subsystem combinations are underpowered and rarely used
- The current state of T3 Cruisers is unsustainable from a technical graphics perspective
To solve some of these issues we are currently working in the following directions:
- Condense the available subsystems into a smaller number of more powerful and useful choices.
- - The current plan is to have four subsystem slots with three choices in each slot
- A general rebalance of the T3 Cruiser class which would include (among other things):
- - New faction-specific build components sourced from WH space
- - Dual tank bonuses for the Loki
- - Some power reductions to long range combat alongside the nullification subsystem
- - An increase in signature radius and mass
- Allowing rigs to be freely removed from Strategic Cruisers without destroying them

So way back in May of 2012 I wrote a post titled "Strategic Cruisers Are A Failure" in which I pointed out that the concept of Strategic Cruisers had failed:

The concept is simple: you can pick what role / bonuses / slot layout your ship has AND you can change it whenever you want. The first part is part of the reason the ships are so ubiquitous but the second part has pretty much failed miserably. Most of the time, you use a tool like EFT or Pyfa to determine what setup you want for your Strat Cruiser including the 5 subsystems you want, and then you buy that setup, put it together, and most likely never change it again.
If you want a Strategic Cruiser for a different role, e.g. a probing cloaky ship instead or your sanctum running missile spammer, you are more likely to simply buy an entire second ship rather than just the mods to switch your current ship. My hanger, for example, has three Strategic cruisers in it: one for PvE, one for cloaky probing, and one for pure gank PvP.
What is the reason for the failure of the ship class to live up to its potential? There are several:
1) Rigs. When you put three rigs on a ship, they are usually to compliment its main role or main method of tanking (or sometimes both). However, changing the subsystems of a strat cruiser can vastly change its role and/or optimal tanking method, most likely making the installed rigs sub-optimal or useless. Since you can't just remove rigs, only destroy them, it makes players committed to a single setup once the rigs are installed.
2) In Game, Setting Up Ships is Tedious. While some big improvements to fitting a ship in game have been made over the years, the fact of the matter is that it is downright tedious and intensive to explore ship setups and tweak it to how you want. There is no easy way to compare stats of two ship setups, removed mods are assembled so don't stack and litter up your hanger, your hanger modules are not in a nice tree to browse like they are in the market, and unless your hanger is well stocked or you are in a market hub sometimes you just don't have the modules or charges you need for a quick setup change.While out of game tools help a lot with some of these deficiencies, the fact of the matter is that its easier to setup a new ship with brand new purchased items than it is to swap out subsystems and modules of an existing setup unless you don't want to use that setup ever again.
3) Too Limited. Many of the scenarios where having the ability to change the capabilities of your current ship on the fly would be useful are the same scenarios where you do not have the ability of swapping subsystems and modules: deep in enemy space, wormholes, during a long roam, etc, any time you are far from your home base. Even if you have the subsystems and modules available, since you have to be docked at a station you still can't use a POS hanger or capital ship maintenance bay to to the switch anyways. So no jumping from Sleeper-farming PvE ship to hostile-fighting PvP ship in wormholes and no switching from forward-scouting recon ship to damage-dealing tackle ship during an offensive in null sec.
* * * * *
So what is the answer to make Strategic Cruisers live up to their full potential? Easy; address these three problems in some manner and you will go a long ways to getting there. Introduce a method for removing rigs (i.e. only in station and for a cost), introduce more ship-building-theory tools and module hanger organization tools into the game client, and allow swapping of subsystems outside of station environments.

 So what has changed in the 5 years since I posted that?

Well, in reverse order, citadels and mobile depots and even POS structures have been added/changed to allow Strategic Cruisers the ability to change sub systems so those inaccessible systems where swapping was impossible no longer exist. The ability to save fits and apply them with a click of a button have made changing ship setups trivial (and throw in multi-buy and multi-fit as important quality of life changes as well). And now as of this change posted in the dev blog, rigs can be removed without destroying them.

All three of my reasons of failure have been or are being addressed. We'll have to see if the ship class becomes more strategic with this rebalance.

Citadels, Entosis Links, and Low Sec

The recent dev blog titled "Citadels, Sieges and You V2" there was a very surprising change in direction from CCP:

Long story short, we have had long meetings about the structure attack system, and came to the conclusion that, while Entosis Links do indeed achieve our design goals for the Citadels, they are not actually delivering an experience we are satisfied to provide.
- It’s not fun being shot by massive structure weapons while being unable to retaliate in kind, it gives players the feeling to be helpless while they watch a timer go down
- There is gameplay involved in applying damage that Entosis Links do not preserve, like range, speed, falloff or positioning
- It devalues capital ships as a whole, especially Dreadnoughts, which were specifically introduced to assault and destroy static structures
- Last but not least, there is a visceral connection in shooting a structure down to destroy it. Having guns blazing while watching the target hit points go down is a very strong visual and adrenaline factor that Entosis Links remove out of the equation.

Well that was certainly an about-face!

This feels like an admittance that the gameplay in the current new sov mechanics, while "achieving our design goals", is not exactly lighting the community on fire with excitement. They don't want to back 100% out of Entosis Linking as the attack method for sov control as they have invested so much into that design mechanic, but they've decided they don't want to use it for new game play. Its like Strategic Cruisers all over again.

By deciding to go back to a modified damage system with mitigation beyond a threshold:

The way damage mitigation is going to work is pretty simple:
- We set a maximum limit on a structure, say, 4000 DPS
- Every time damage is applied to that structure, we check all cumulated damage done before that within a specific time frame – let’s say 30 seconds
- If cumulated damage on the structure would exceed 30*4,000 = 120,000 then any further incoming damage is reduced, or negated to preserve that amount over the last 30 seconds
- Mitigation is counted after shield, armor or hull resistances are applied to incoming damage

What this amounts to is a limit to how many ships can effectively pound on a structure. I won't bore you with the probably changing details but suffice to say the bigger the citadel, the more ships you need to reach the damage threshold. This allows CCP to pretty much guarantee the minimum amount of time required to attack any citadel, which in the dev blog seems to be a goal of about 30 minutes.

TLDR; The fastest you can attack a structure is 30 minutes assuming you meet or exceed the damage mitigation threshold.

This is a huge win for null sec and a minor loss for low sec.

In null sec, attacking something with an Entosis link that is unoccupied or untended deep in an alliance's space is relatively easy. But now Citadels are going require a fleet in order to attack in any reasonable time frame, something that is hard to accomplish on the down low deep in enemy space. For all intents and purposes, alliances are not going to have to pay much attention to their assets in the back field unless the enemy commits a significant investment to attack them, at which time its worth defending for the fights and kills.

In low sec there is no safe backfield. Almost every system is within range of several threatening entities. With the Entosis link as the attack method, it means the big boys on the block now have the the hammer for both defense and offense. This is already something we see with flipping systems in faction warfare when we try to attack the IHUB; it has to be quick and fast and full of fear of a drop. Entosis linking, which can be done with less investment, would have even the playing field a bit for smaller entities.

I think. I'm not sure. We'll have to see how it plays out in the coming months.

Team Building

The sixth and final Industry dev blog was released today at the start of Fanfest and covers a completely new feature of manufacturing and research: Teams.

The Elevator Pitch
Let’s start with a quick elevator pitch of what "teams" are. We’ll then dig into the details in later sections.
All jobs now require a workforce. All jobs automatically have regular workforce attached, so no special action will be required to start jobs We're not exactly sure how you capsuleers were able to build things without one before!
A "team" is an expert NPC labor force, that players can choose to hire instead of using the regular, provided workforce. A team consists of specialists that give bonuses to certain jobs.
These specialized teams are not available everywhere at any time. They are hired into a system through an auction. Once in a system, the team is available for anyone doing a job in that system for month, at which time the team retires and goes on a much needed space "vacation".
There is a vast variety of specialized teams. Each specialized team affects a particular job activity (like manufacturing or copying) and a limited sub-section of items. For example, a team could affect manufacturing of frigates, but have no effect on manufacturing of cruisers.

More details on what a team is:

- Each specialized team is linked to a specific activity (manufacturing, copying, material research, etc.).
- Each specialized team has a type, indicating what kind of stuff it can affect. There are six types: structure, components, consumables, ship, mobile and equipment. For example, a team that could affect the manufacturing of Rifters, would have the “manufacture” activity and the “ship” type.

So with four activities (for instance) and six types there are 24 combinations of activity/type a team can be.

- Each team has four members, and each member has a specialty. The specialty can be broad, but with less bonus (for example Ship – Small Class) or narrow and bigger bonus (like Ship – Frigate). Team members cannot have the same specialty.

I *think* this means that once the team activity/type is determined, each team member has a specialty within that category. So someone would only have a specialty of "Frigate" only in a team with a type of "Ship". Is there a list of all the specialties somewhere?

 - Each team member affects either material efficiency (ME) or time efficiency (TE). Members of a team can affect either and don’t all have to affect the same.

- Each team member also has an efficiency level, which dictates how big of a bonus he or she gives. There are five level of efficiency, with each level above 1 being a multiple of the level 1 bonus. The bonus given by level 1 is determined by whether the team member has a broad or narrow focus and whether it affects material efficiency or time efficiency.

 And the exact bonuses in a readable chart:

Broad is for team members that have a broad specialty (like Ship – Small Class), narrow is for team members that have a narrow specialty (like Ship – Frigate).
How much extra cost a specialized team demands depends on the overall efficiency of the team. The extra salary is a percentage that comes on top of the normal salary cost. The percentage can range from +2% to +18%.
In addition to its stats, each team also has a unique name that gives an indication of what it can do and where it originated.

Did you follow all that? To reiterate, a team will be good for an activity like manufacturing, research, etc. They will only be good for one type like Ships or modules or structures, etc. Within that team of four members, each member affect either Material Efficiency (i.e. less materials) or Time Efficiency (i.e less time in factory) and will either have a broad specialty (for example, Ships - Small Class) with a smaller bonus to the efficiency or a narrow specialty (for example, Ships - Frigates) with the larger bonus to the efficiency (see chart). And each team member is different.

Let’s look at the life cycle of a team now.
Teams are seeded into the game over time and become available for auction. The stats, name, home and activities are all randomized, meaning there is a wide variety between teams.
All auctions last seven days. Bids are placed on a team on behalf of a solar system. This means bids made by multiple players on the same system are pooled together.
When placing a bid, the default location is the same system you’re in, but you can edit this to bid on a system remotely. A bid can be entered for any system, including wormhole systems. Bidding on behalf of a system that is far away requires a minimum initial bid. Teams have a home location when they are created and the minimum is higher the further away the team’s home is. This represents a relocation cost and gives a small amount of geographical differentiation without it being too stifling.
Note that while a team is up for auction, it cannot be hired on any other jobs.

 Teams are randomly created, auctioned for a week, and work in the winning system for four weeks. I can't tell if a team is available for all relevant jobs in the system for the four weeks, or if players need to book them and share them.

When the auction ends, the solar system with the highest pooled bid wins. The team becomes immediately available for hire in the winning system. The team will be active in the system for 28 days (four weeks), at which time it retires (or is institutionalized; Inferno does not treat its users well). Any jobs the team was hired for are completed normally even if the team retires while the job is still ongoing. If no bids were made on the team, the team retires immediately at the conclusion of the auction.

Again, no word on how they are shared in the system. At this point, I'm assuming its available for all jobs or else it would put a damper on the cooperation aspect for bringing a team to a system during auction.

There's more in the dev blog so go give it a read.

Overall, I'm disappointed. When I saw teams were coming into things from the second dev blog I had more of an image from World of Tanks where you get inexperienced tank teams and train them up over time to become proficient experts in various abilities. Instead we get temporary random components to fight over in auctions.

And again, I feel this feature will aid the large scale rich heavy industrialists over the small scale and casual industrialists. Those with the wherewithal to hire the best teams to their hubs can amortize the hiring cost over their jobs and produce more cheaply even in busier systems than those who work with generic default teams or the poorer quality teams. I'm also willing to bet that capital ship production teams will be in highest demand even if poor quality because the large capital jobs makes savings more significant.

On the other hand, the devil is in the details. What's the spread of randomization of the teams? How many teams will be created? Will null sec powerhouses achieve any benefit from outbidding everyone to bring teams to null sec? How much will freeloading affect benefits (which ties back to my question of whether or not teams are tied up in jobs once they are working)?

Together with all the other changes coming this summer means I don't even know how this is going to shake out. Time will tell.

Agile Development Revisited - Rebuttal

Ripard Teg wrote a post yesterday that I'm going to have to disagree with. In COTW: Agile Development Revisited he is complaining about the speed at which the overhaul of ship balancing is occurring:

And yeah, I'm forced to agree. Best information says that frigates and destroyers will be done for winter, with the addition of one new destroyer for each race and the new logistics frigates being major features of the expansion. With the mining ship updates, that's roughly 40 ships rebalanced in 2012. Which means that at this pace, CCP will be getting around to balancing T2 battle-cruisers sometime late in 2015 and Black Ops, other T2 battleships, and maybe the T3s the following year. So as much as it sounds like an exaggeration at this level of resources, "a half decade" to get the re-balancing done is pretty much on-the-nose.

I started composing this post prior to the release of this dev blog which basically proves my point, but I'm going to write it anyways.

I work in an Agile software development shop, doing 2 week sprints and about 10-12 sprints per release. Hell, I even took scrummaster training and am a scrummaster of an eight person team and we've been doing Agile/Scrum for about 3 years. One thing that becomes apparent if you do it all right is that initial stories (i.e. pieces of work) take more time and effort than subsequent stories in the same development area. There is always ramp up effort to learn the existing architecture, determining the known unknowns, and making a task plan. Then there are refinements after the first couple stories as earlier designs and ideas get proven out or thrown out altogether.

Subsequent stories can build on the groundwork and lessons learned of previous stories. Backlog grooming for future stories can take these lessons into account as the picture becomes clearer. The end result is that no matter where you start, early stories take a lot more effort than later stories as the variables get nailed down.

The dev blog Ship Balancing Winter Update kind of proves this out, lucky for me. Instead of only the logi-frigates and new destroyers we are getting all 16 cruisers revamped, putting on the step of the all important battlecruiser and battleship classes.

So why was the initial ramp up of the first few frigate so long? Well, the plan of how to go from tiers to roles must of have been controversial and had a lot of false starts and revisions within the planning of CCP itself. How to make ships distinct without covering the same roles is a difficult proposition as I can attest to in my ponderings. But now that the framework is mostly set in the 24 frigates, it will be easier to take that model as a base and apply it to the other classes. Plus the devs have a better feel for what works in balancing and what does not work with the players and ships. Less trial and error, more forward development.

When I first started writing this post, I was going to say in reply to Ripard's post that "yes, the winter update is not a lot for ship updates but I expect the rest of the classes (crusiers, BCs, BSs, Tech II) will be a lot faster". However the dev blog shows that the acceleration is already begun.

I predict that the summer update will see all 24 battlecruiser and battleships done and discussions for what Tech II ships need love to have begun.