On August 15, CCP announced a new change that will be coming to standard Cynosural Field Generators and Jump Freighters in their “Era of Chaos”. The change had two parts, which were “Cynosural Field Generator I can only be fit by Force Recon Ships and Black Ops Battleships” and “Jump Freighters can jump to Covert Cynosural Fields”. While both are huge changes to the game, the main change is to regular cynos, and it will be the one I am talking about today.
First off, this change is amazing. The three major aspects why are:
- It adds risk to lighting a cyno
- Capital ships can’t light cynos
- It takes much more work and risk to add caps to fight
The Reasoning
The first reason is the most obvious one. Most cyno lighting ships are either cheap industrials that are in the 10-20mil isk range, or its a rookie ship with the only cost being the actual module and fuel. No one cared if their cyno ships died, because it was likely that they were going to die so the fits were made cheap. Having to sit for a few minutes in space completely vulnerable to attack with a giant “come kill me” beacon on the overview of everyone in system would obviously drive players to find cheap cyno ships, and I frankly think that has been abused for a while. Now, you either put a Force Recon or Black Ops on that kill me beacon, which are both very expensive ships for their class with relatively low tank. This will force players to either defend their cynos or be very careful about when are where they activate this module.
The second reason is that Capital ships will no longer be able to light cynos. When small gangs or even large sized fleets come across ratting or mining capitals and want to attack there is a huge risk of being dropped on by enemy caps, and if you fly a ratting or mining capital then you most likely have a cyno fitted just for this reason. Not only is it pretty overpowered to have your target ship, which most likely has millions of EHP, also be the ship you have to kill to prevent a fleet of 100 dreads coming through and killing your group, but it made it so groups of caps would have groups of cynos, making it extremely hard to kill. There are still ways currently for attacking groups to get around this such as cyno inhibs, but if the capital pilots are paying attention they can make the inhib pointless.
Third reason is now it takes risk to add caps to fights. In the past, it was either another capital having a cyno, or a cheap ship as mentioned before. Now, you have to add an expensive ship with low HP (remember, some of these ships have fits that cost as much as capitals) to go to fight, and these ships are fairly uncommon so it will most likely take longer for them to show up. Cap escalation won’t be easy and cheap anymore. All of these reasons help reduce how OP capital ships are in low and nullsec, and overall are much better for the game.
Other Thoughts
Some other things to point out is these ships require high SP amounts to fly, which means less cynos. I think this could have the partial effect of having more non-ratting or mining capital deaths due to more caps using stargates to get around instead of cynos, if the region they are in or the alliance they are with has a low population/infrastructure. Also, these ships were very rarely used in the game until this change, and overall it’s positive for them to see more use.
On the topic of other things, a few people have been requesting a special edition cyno (or something like it) that has no navigational use/purpose, but can still be used as a memorial token for our fallen capsuleers. CCP Falcon responded to on the EVE-O discussion thread, saying that he wholeheartedly agrees with the idea, and feels that making memorials for fallen pilots is a very important to him, and he will bring this idea to the attention of the game design team. CCP Rise then followed up to say that this was a thing that the design team missed when putting the changes together, but they will work to create an alternative pilots can use to create the traditional in-game memorial events.
In conclusion, this new change is a great feature to the game. It will make null less safe overall, which I think is CCP’s main goal for the whole “Era of Chaos”. While the overall reaction to this change is mixed, with half of the players saying they hate it and the other half saying it’s the best change to happen in a while, we have to recognize that while this might not be good for certain groups, this is generally extremely positive and the right step forward in balancing the game.
