Little bit about forums and little bit about whats to come

In the spirit of blog I'm gonna write about myself in this blog. Lately I've been reading the forums a lot. I see a trend coming where half the threads are addressed "Tux fix that". First I'd like to say is that I'm in fact not the only dev, I guess I'm just a bit more visible than some others. The second thing I wanted to say is that even if your thread doesn't have a yellow bar next to it, doesn't mean that I haven't noticed it. I don't reply to all the threads. Those threads I do reply to are usually because I have a very short answer to it, or I'm simply killing time but sometimes because I see something particularly interesting.

Sometimes I try not to reply to thread because the fact of the matter is that the mere presence of me in a thread contaminates it. Often after I make an appearance in a thread it gets spammed with messages expressing their love or hate for me and more often than not it gets derailed by people asking me to "fix" other stuff that they feel is broken. So you might ask your self is a strong forum presence by me really a good thing. I'd like to believe that a moderate forum spamming is the way to go.

Is this blog about forum posts, how lame
Fine I'll post something you care about. I guess I can tell you a bit about what I'm working on what I'm going to work on.

Lately we've been working on Tier 3 battleships. We've had some crazy bonuses on them and some little less crazy. I don't have any concrete numbers for you, or even bonuses for that matter since they are not final yet. Well you get to see them a bit sooner and express your opinion about them before their bonuses and attributes are set in stone but I haven't got that far with some of them.

On the horizon are the Tier 2 battlecruisers. Their design is a bit more straightforward. Caldari missile ship, Gallente drone ship but I guess you've already guessed as much. Both the tier 3 battleships and tier 2 battlecruisers are tech 1 ship and as such will simply be sold on the market, that is the blueprints. It is therefore pretty important that these ships get plenty of time in testing and stats are out soon so player can give their input on them.

I mentioned that we're planning to do assault missiles the other day. What are assault missiles some might ask? Well they are close range, high damage missiles. People quickly expressed their concerns that the very idea is overpowered and pointed out that Cerberus would pwn all heavy assault ships. The problem people see is that Cerberus gets two range bonuses and two damage bonuses. As it is now the second range bonus, missile flight time isn't all that useful, if I remember correctly it boosts the range from 120km to something like 180km. On a short range missile this bonus would be pretty sweet. Two range bonuses would in effect more than double the range of any short range missile and make it more of a mid range or even long range missile with the damage output of a short range missile.

We still want to prolong combat. There are number of ways to do that like boosting resistance, lowering damage of weapons or simply by adding hitpoints. Boosting resistance and lowering damage basically does the same thing. It not only increases the time people would live but it also increase what they can tank. The difference is that if we lower damage too much we might end up with a situation where 1 vs. 1 battleship fight is simply unwinnable for either side if they have a decent tank, which isn't really what what we want. Boosting hitpoints is a bit better method to achieve this. There are however complications. This would affect ships with small capacitor more than the ones with large capacitor so we might actually increase capacitor size and the recharge time. So they would still be able to achieve the same cap/sec but would have more cap to begin with. Also, Artillery damage output needs to be looked at if the alpha strike has less impact in a fight.

Another rather large project we are looking into is the lowering the optimal range of weapons to bring the fight closer. I read a rather interesting suggestion on the forums about "nerfing" range so that small weapons have the range they have today, medium weapons have 1.5x the range of small weapons and large weapons 2x the range of small weapons. This is something we're willing to look into and there are some good reason for doing this but its not an easy task.