Kaffis Mark V wrote:
The idea is that those ships are super-guild or alliance centerpieces, not something that most people are meant to have. Most people are meant to be dogfighting in fighters -- that's how it's attempting to avoid EVE 2.0. By making big-ass capital ships so hard to keep that they're super rare and don't dominate gameplay.
That's also what makes the Corvettes appealing as small guild flagships. They're "capital" ships (in the 90's space sim sense of being multi-crew ships that demand torpedo bombers to constitute a serious attempt at taking them down) that can be put away when you're not using them.
EVE tried that. Titans, and to a lesser extent supercarriers, were supposed to be alliance-level assets that were super-rare. Alliances weren't meant originally to have more than 1-3 titans, and maybe 9-10 supercarriers, with smaller capitals (carriers and dreadnoughts) and battleships making up their core combat power.
Much like epics in EQ though, they players were having none of it and titans and supercarriers have become more and more plentiful, and despite continuous nerfs (especially to their ability to affect small ships) there's become a continuous meta of the only way to counter titans being to have more titans, to bait and destroy isolated individual supercaps, or just lag-crashing the node if in danger of losing. Despite CCPs attempts to keep up (time dialation in reference to the last) that meta has remained.
Star citizen, if it's going to allow a lot of theft of large warships and make them alliance-level (or whatever we call alliances) assets is likely to run into the same thing. They might prevent it with the Bengals by limiting it to a half-dozen in existence at once, but there's then a new quandry - do you ever risk actually using one in combat for fear of someone capturing it?
If battlecruisers (or destroyers, or whatever) have to be manned and defended at all times and can't be logged off or docked up, that's going to greatly contribute to promoting uber-alliances controlling large swathes of the game either de jure (player owned space stations) or de facto (they set up somewhere and no one else can dislodge them because they control all the bengals and have enough people to keep their battlecruiser fleet defended and manned all the time.
It's also going to promote a lot of EVE-like politics to get in control of and then dismantle from within corps/alliances that control these assets.
That isn't entirely bad; I'm all in favor of metagame, politics, and MMO drama as opposed to the practice of just running off to "ride the rides" at the themepark (i.e. log in, que up, do instance, never talk to the douchebags in your group) and I agree with Khross that some of the work needs to come back to MMOs. that said, remember those goon guys we were worried about a few pages back? They're masters of this kind of shennanigans, and whatever limits Roberts puts on whats allow they WILL exploit to the fullest, and the same crew will be the dominant power bloc in both major space MMOs.
If I can't practically own/operate a BC I can live with it, but if that IS the case, I'm very concerned about the implications. We'd best practice our torpedo delivery techniques.