Thursday, August 27, 2009

SUPPORT THE ROKH!



Welcome to the +25 Campaign headquarters. Here you can see what we are all about and why we want to change the Caldari Tier 3 battleship.

Take a look at this table of Battleship drone bay sizes:
Drone Bay Size
Ships
400
Sin
375
Dominix
175
Typhoon, Panther
125
Armageddon, Megathron, Vindicator, Redeemer, Kronos
100
Hyperion, Maelstrom
75
Abaddon, Apocalpyse, Raven, Scorpion, Bhaalgorn, Machariel,
Nightmare, Rattlesnake, Tempest, Widow, Paladin, Golem, Vargur
50
Rokh


This is not a bell curve with some having lots of drone space and some having a little with most in the middle. This is an exponential progression that looks like this:

While the lack of battleships with 100 m3 drone bay is an outlier, the biggest outlying point is the very first one: the poor Rokh suffering with 50m3 all by itself.

When the Tier three battleships were introduced back in late 2006, well trained pilots with medium drones could be fairly confident that their mechanical assistants could handle anything that got in close under the tracking of their guns. A 50 m3 drone bay on the Rokh was not too debilitating, merely annoying. But several patches and mechanic changes later and we have the situation where light drones are the only ones capable of catching up to and dealing damage to fast moving frigates, either other pilots or NPCs. Most battleships can carry a flight of medium drones and a flight of lights. Only the Rokh is prevented from protecting itself from both classes of smaller targets equally (i.e. frigates and cruisers).

We are not asking for more bandwidth. The current 50 Mb bandwidth is adequate and we do not want to field 2 heavy, 2 medium, and a light drone in a flight for maximum DPS. This is not about DPS, its about flexibility.

There are some arguements against boosting the Rokh, let me address the most common ones.

The Rokh is a sniper thus doesn't require light drones. Every faction has a battleship that is considered a sniper for them: Apocalypse for Amarr, Tempest for Minmatar, Megathron for Gallente. They all have larger drone bays. Plus all battleships have options for using long range or short range weaponry and the Rokh is acknowledged as a compentent blaster boat, definitely short ranged.

Yeah, but Caldari are not big drone users. Well, they are enough of drone users to give the Raven and Scorpion larger drone bays. Also, the Minmatar are not big drone users compared to Amarr and Gallente yet their battleships manage to have decent drone bays.

Ships with 125 m3 drone bay and 125 Mb bandwidth have to make the same sacrifice as the Rokh in terms of taking heavy drones or taking two flights of smaller drones. Well, not quite. From my perspective, Heavy Drones are battleship classed weapons to complement the battleship weapons on the ship itself. If such a ship like a Megathron chooses to take multiple flights of light and medium drones, he is sacrificing some DPS against large targets for protection from both kinds of smaller ships. The Rokh on the other hand has to make a choice: mediums to defend against cruisers? Or lights to defend against frigates?

The Rokh is balanced for a drone bay with 50 m3. First off, as I pointed out above the game has changed since the Rokh was first designed; medium drones can protect against frigates as well anymore. Secondly, what quality does a Rokh have that makes it superior to another ship, say an Abaddon, that requires it to have a smaller drone bay? or an Hyperion? Maelstrom? Face it, the 50m3 was an arbitrary decision based on the fact that it was good enough at that time.

The ship is perfectly fine the way it is, you just suck at flying them. I agree the Rokh is a good ship. I love this hull, I have several in my hangers. I just don't see why it has to be given a disadvantage compared to the rest of the battleships in the game.

What about the which needs ? I'm sure there are many ships that have inadequacies and if you feel strongly about it you should dedicate some time to mount your own campaign. This one is only about the Rokh.

Ok, you convinced me. What can I do to help the campaign?
There are several things you can do.

1) Promote the campaign. I commissioned Godlesswanderer to do up a campaign poster for me as sign at the top of this page. There are four sizes, the large above, and the medium, small, and tiny below:



Here are the URLs to them:
http://www.ninveah-enterprises.com/images/rokhcampaign/rokh25l.jpg
http://www.
ninveah-enterprises.com/images/rokhcampaign/rokh25m.jpg
http://www.
ninveah-enterprises.com/images/rokhcampaign/rokh25s.jpg
http://www.
ninveah-enterprises.com/images/rokhcampaign/rokh25t.png

If you want you can display them on your website, forums, blogs, etc to get the word out.

2) Sign the petition if you haven't already. Show CCP we are serious and ready for change!

3) Donate to the campaign fund. Send ISK to Korannon, CEO of Ninveah Enterprises corporation, with a note in the description that it is for the +25 Campaign. The funds will be used for advertising (like the images above) and other forms of promotion.

SUPPORT THE ROKH! BECAUSE YOUR DRONE BAY MIGHT BE NEXT!

10 comments:

  1. The Rokh gets the bigger dronebay the day the Retribution loses a high- for a mid-slot. IE, never. :(

    ReplyDelete
  2. I can get behind campaigns for both....

    Rokh +25!

    Retri -1H +1M!

    Now to think of a chant or something. . . .

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous7:06 pm

    FYI, your post is hard to read - text on the right is getting cut off. I needed to stretch my browse window way wide to see all the text. (Firefox 3.5.2 + IE 8.0)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wow, spectacular posters dude!

    I'll try to get this up on a blog sometime!

    ReplyDelete
  5. As a Gallentean pilot, who loves to fly this also ship by the way, I can only agree on this!

    ReplyDelete
  6. I support this message

    ReplyDelete
  7. The point of being an unpopular(somewhat useless) lv3 BS is, one of the hull bonus limited the weapon system.

    Seriously, hybrid turret bonus on a caldari battleship?

    In pve circumstance, raven/navy raven is no doubt the best t1 pve ship for caldari.

    In pvp circumstance, rokh can be a sniper ship, however the dmg is not impressing and after all does it really worth training large railgun skill just for a sniper? there is plenty of other choices.
    And btw, 25 drone space doesnt help pvp sniper at all.

    As long as the hull bonus stays, rokh stays as a "best mining BS". This is a bad joke =/

    ReplyDelete
  8. Dude:

    I tried. I asked. I lost

    Originally by: Knug LiDi
    Renaming Anchored Structures
    Technical Director tells me it should be technically possible. I will look into getting this on a team's backlog. This is definitely not the first time we've heard this suggestion.

    Originally by: Knug LiDi
    Rokh Dronebay
    50m3 is the intended capacityfor the Rokh Dronebay.

    Originally by: Knug LiDi
    Skill Queue on EVE Gate
    Yes, we intend to put skill queue functionality and many other in-game features onto EVE Gate.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous5:18 am

    How has this campaign been going?

    ReplyDelete
  10. CCP has explicitly stated that they do not intend to change the drone bay for the ship. So... poorly :)

    ReplyDelete