Capital ships in EVE, what's up doc?

Hi, I‘m Zulupark and recently transferred from the Quality Assurance department to the Game Design team. I’ve been with CCP for just under two years now and don’t plan on going anywhere. Say hello to your newest balancer (I still haven't received a nerfbat though).

I‘m posting here now because the last few days we‘ve been looking at the way capital and supercapital ships are functioning on Tranquility, and to be honest we‘re a little concerned with the direction it‘s taking.

What we want is pretty basic: We want to make fighter wielding capital ships more reliant on their support fleet and less of a direct über deathbringer.

How are we going to do it?

Well, we have an idea, and before you go ballistic remember that this is an idea and we‘re still working on it:

We plan on changing the way fighters work, and have it so that you can still launch all the fighters you want (within limits of your ship/skills) but you can only directly control 5 of them at a time. That means that a carrier/mothership can launch 5 fighters, assign them to a gang mate, launch 5 more, assign them to another gang mate etc. etc.

This means you will NOT be able to launch 20 fighters from a mothership and send them all to incinerate a battleship in .2 seconds. It does however mean that you can assign 5 fighters to each of your lil‘ friends in the fleet and send them forth to be the messengers of your burning fury.

Remember, we‘re not messing with the final total amount of fighters you can launch and delegate, just the amount you can control and delegate at a time. You can of course also launch 5 fighters and make them attack a target of your own choice, if it pleases you.

But wait! There‘s more!

Not only do we want to limit the amount of fighters you can launch, but also the amount of drones! Yes, we want to limit carriers and motherships just like other ships, i.e. they should only be able to field 5 regular drones at any given time.

That‘s it! No beer for you at Fanfest!

Awww man you can't let me run dry. But seriously, the reason we want to implement something like this is that we feel that capital ships are being used way too much as better-than-battleships-at-killing-stuff ships, when we in fact think that they should be used more as the-ships-that-keep-other-ships-alive-and-provide-them-with-additional-firepower ships. Did that make sense? Probably not, but anyway, we hope you get the gist the direction we want to move them in and the way we see that happening.

Remember that this is still just an idea and we want your feedback on this, so please, post constructively and you just might make a difference in the (EVE) universe.