Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

Greyscale again

When I wrote my post the other day listing the features in Retribution 1.1 that surprised me, a number of people gave me grief for not mentioning the following two lines:

• Active armor hardeners and shield hardeners no longer give a passive resistance bonus when not active.
• Armor and shield compensation skills no longer give any bonus to active armor or shield hardeners.

Had I just not noticed those lines, they demanded to know?  Had I not seen the forum post from Greyscale defending these changes?

Sigh.

For the record, yes I did see this change coming, and yes I did see CCP Greyscale's post on the matter.  Here it is almost in its entirety:

This bonus came to the top of our work due to a defect, which prompted us to discuss whether we even wanted this feature in the first place. After fairly extensive discussion, we decided we would prefer to just remove it outright, for the following reasons:

• We're not, in general and with exceptions, fans of multi-function modules. EVE fitting is about trade-offs, not about having your cake and eating it. In this particular case, it was making the decision to take an active hardener over a passive one easier than it otherwise would be, which isn't a particularly good thing.
• The UX of this feature as implemented is pretty bad - there's two sets of resist attributes on the hardeners with very little explanation, the skill descriptions need to be unusually complicated to explain exactly what's going on, and it's not at all obvious from the modules that this feature even exists (see Liang's comment above).

He then posted essentially the same thing in the same thread the next day.

Sigh again.  Guys, I really don't want to be in the business of bashing Greyscale.  So yeah, I did notice it.  But I think I blocked it out.  ;-)  Obviously, this change has now been implemented, and there's only one further dev post in the thread, Greyscale doubling down.  That's it.  There's no other replies from Greyscale and no other replies from any other devs.  And of course, these changes are in the game now, and they're not coming out.

One of the reasons listed by Greyscale for making this change is that CCP are not "fans of multifunction modules."  This is such a silly justification that it's hard to believe it was written down.  EVE is full of multifunction modules, of course.  In the very same thread, EVE player Sinzor Aumer does a lovely job of listing most of them.  My particular favorite are Cap Batteries.  Until very recently, these were single-function modules.  Today, they're dual function: increased cap, and resistance to neuting and NOS'ing.  And that was a change that CCP implemented very recently!

As I said, there's no reply to Sinzor.

The second reason strikes me as much more telling.  Essentially, it's saying: "We were told about a possible bug in how these hardeners work and when we looked at the code we couldn't figure it out.  That prompted a philosophical discussion about whether active hardeners should have a passive mode."  And that strikes me as being much more likely to be closer to the true reason.  Call it "CCP lazy mode" if you must, but I feel like someone said "Fixing this is going to be hard... do I have to?"  But I've written enough about that sort of thing.  Let's ignore what prompted the philosophical discussion and jump instead to the philosophical discussion.

Should active hardeners have a passive mode?

The module I kept coming back to when I thought about this myself are the various forms of the Damage Control mod.  This mod is the ultimate multifunction module, having three functions (or even 12, if you prefer).  It's so useful in PvP that it's the very rare PvP ship that doesn't have one fitted.  And that's kind of where this philosophical discussion starts, isn't it?  Adaptive Invuls are so useful that it's incredibly rare to find a shield-tanking ship without one.  Whether they have a passive mode or not, you're going to keep using them.  Active shield hardening modules are so useful that I can only think of two ship fittings where I use a passive shield hardener instead and I only have one character with the passive shield hardening skills higher than Level III.

And I think if we were honest with ourselves, we'd probably come to the conclusion that this is a problem.

In addition, the situations in which players rely on the passive modes of active hardeners are so rare that honestly, it's just hard for me to get very excited about this change.  Now, it's totally fair to ask CCP if they're going to put a multifunction passive shield resistance amplifier into the game.  After all, there are both active and passive multifunction armor resistance amplifiers in the game today.  But I would want to ask a fair question back to you: if there were such a passive shield resistance module... would you use it?  After all, it wouldn't be as effective as the tried-and-true "Invul" and would take the same kind of slot.

I dunno... I've thought about it, and other than a few specialized Drake fits, I can't think of too many ships where I'd sacrifice higher resistances for more solid tanking under neut pressure.  If I'm that worried about neut pressure, I fit a Cap Booster of some type to my ship and call it good.

So all in all, if you ask me how I feel about this change... I'd say I'm extremely ambivalent about how it came to pass, not that concerned about the change on its own merits, and thoughtful about what the change means within the philosophy of the game.  So I guess this post wasn't about "Greyscale again" after all.  I'm sure he'll be relieved to hear it.
Source: Greyscale again