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“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” ― Albert Einstein
Drackarn pointed this killmail out recently and proposed the following for a blog banter:
Obviously that is a not just a bad fit, its horrific. But the guy might not know any better. We get these all the time circulating social media and corp/alliance chat. How do we educate players on fitting? This guy has been playing four months and can fly a BC, but has no idea how to fit one. What could be done to help bro's like this?
Furthermore, what (if any) responsibility do veterans players have in finding these players and instructing them on the finer arts of ship fitting? If it exists, does it extend beyond them into teaching PvP skills, ISK making skills, market skills, social skills, life skills...
And another question you can think about is this: do purposely wrong fits, aka comedy fits or experimental fits or off-meta fits, offend you or your corp? Would you, like Rixx Javix when he was in Tuskers, face expulsion for fitting your ships differently than the accepted standard?
"Its the difference between streaking and getting caught with your pants down." - Kirith Kodach
Deep breath. Hold it. Slowly let it out again. Nice. Feel better? Good. Let's get started. I'm going to warn you ahead of time that you may not like some of the things I am going to say in this post. In fact, I may not like some of the things I am going to say in this post. But... honesty. It hurts sometimes.
The single greatest crime of Eve Online is simply that it has no acceptable, helpful, comparative, or otherwise enlightening fitting tool included in-game. We have to rely on third-party software for these services. When you consider, that at its heart, Eve is a PvP oriented game - this is a crime of staggering proportions. And sadly, this situation used to be much, much worse than it is today.
Because of this oversight, and the mere fact that Eve makes fitting ships so easy, young players often have a very strongly misplaced sense of how to properly fit ships. This often results in hilariously horrible consequences and bad, bad deaths. Having dealt with more young players over the last year, I can confidently tell you that this situation is not improving. Despite the increase in guides, advice, kill-boards, and general in-game improvements - many pilots simply continue apace. Being horrible.
At its root, this situation is directly related to the social aspects of Eve and the increasingly important need to direct new players into organizations, corporations, and alliances. It is, very simply, peer pressure that eventually wins out. Bad habits start from day one and the problem is NOT just limited to young players. I've witnessed many older "should-know-better" players making these mistakes as well.
Ok, now let's back up a second.
What exactly is a bad fit? Is putting a cloak on a Drake a bad idea? Is putting guns and a shield extender on a Badger considered a bad idea? (What if you have 150 of them?) When I started putting rail guns on a Comet it caused a lot of drama in certain organizations, but now it is an acceptable way to fit a Comet. Was that really a bad fit? Was my special Sacrilege fit truly bad? Can a bad fit be responsible for 350 kills? Because that one is. What is the difference?
And who are you to tell me, or anyone else, how to fit our ships?
HAM Drakes? It'll never work. Light Missile Caracals? You gotta be crazy! Dual-tanked Frigates!?! You should be ashamed of yourself! You never, ever dual tank anything! Sheesh. What the Hell is wrong with you?
Name an acceptable fit and at one point or another it was crazy talk. The work of madness. Examples are rife in Eve's history. Try something crazy and eventually PL will steal it, turn it into an effective tactic, and then everyone will think they are geniuses. Then suddenly everyone else is doing it.
The truth is somewhere in the middle of all that. Yes, there are actually bad fits. The only way to know which is which, is to know how to properly fit a ship. Only then can you properly counter-fit a ship. THIS is not a counter fit Dominix, this is simply a horribly fit Dominix.
The other exception is of course Fleet actions. Proper comps demand a unified fitting convention, the fleet only truly works when everyone is on-board with that convention. Large fleets demand coordinated fits, dependable, reliable, and trusted. One bad apple can spoil a big bunch. Trust me.
But beyond that? Innovation comes from trial and error. Trying new things is how things change. Demanding that everyone fly exactly the same way is borderline stupid. Especially in low sec. Counter-intuitive fits often work brilliantly, and just as often die in a ball of fire. But it is trying that makes the difference. I could count hundreds of examples.
The important thing is teaching pilots the standards, the reasons behind the standards and then allow them the freedom to try new things. The essential problems are universal. Knowledge, understanding, and experience. The best place for this is within a Corporation that cares, that is open and willing to help. There is no substitute for this in Eve. Not yet.
I once had an Alliance Leader who will remain nameless tell me that when the Manticore I was flying ended up on the Alliance killboard - that I would be kicked from the Alliance. I flew it anyway. I had a very specific idea about what it was capable of doing. It did eventually die, like all good spaceships do. But not before nearly soloing a Geddon (I ran out of torps and had to ask for help to finish it off sadly) and about 15 Russian Transports out in the Great Wildlands. The loot from that run bought me a Shadow POS Tower and enough mods to deathstar the shit out of it.
And since I was used as an example (without my knowledge!) in this blog banter, I will say this. A ship that kills another ship, no matter the circumstances, is not a badly fit ship. The winner is always right. The only badly fit ships are the ones that explode. When that happens to me, I always say the same thing, "Back to the old drawing board."
As for me? I try to teach, instruct and generally provide an environment in Stay Frosty that is open to new ideas. We share fits constantly and try to help everyone become a better pilot thru continual practice, which is undocking and fighting practice. It is, after all, the only way to learn. Either your ship dies or it lives. Ultimately that is the only way to truly judge a fit. You could have mixed guns, dual-tank, and T1 drones - but if the other guys dies and you live? Well then, that is glorious.
But we need an integrated, fully-functioning fitting tool included within Eve and we've needed one for eleven years. I went three years of my Eve career not being able to use a fitting tool because one was not available on the Mac platform. I can only imagine what insanity I could have avoided.
Or what brilliance I may have missed out on.
Comments
Can't agree more but I wonder if the "Can fit modules you don't have skills for" change that is coming is going in that direction? I wonder if we'll have a Ship Fitting Tool proper in the not too distant future. Sure would be great if so and EVEHQ and EVEMon can focus on other things without all the changes "balance passes" bring.
Just my thoughts.
I like my smuggling tengu (good thing it's uncatchable, because it looks awful, not least because of the stabs, and the rockets...), my salvage proteus, my lowsec orca, the dual-boxing BearHypes... and yet I know that out there, there are people who wiill declare them bad because they're not obviously right for some PvP or PvE purpose I didn't build them for.
Granted it was a terrible fit by normal standards i had a specific target in mind and if that target didn't come through i just bugged out and re-shipped. Now if i would have lost it i am sure i would have heard the told you so, but i never did.
1) Simply trying to fit it to be ready for every eventuality. They have 2 blasters for close range, and 2 arti's for the long range alpha etc - not realising that EvE is more about specialising to a particular task and picking your fights.
2) Completely unaware of what modules are available for each slot. Even on the fitting tools - unless you know there's a rig to give powergrid, or a lowslot for more cpu, or different options for cap recharge in both mid or low - how do you go about building a solid fit? You build a fit based around the modules you've heard about, seen, and know! And empty slots seem wasted so why not throw that armour rep on rather than leaving it gathering dust in the hangar.
Short of going through the market reading the description/attributes of every single module, there's no way a newbro can know all the options.
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I think what turned me off as a younger player was the black and white and elitist nature of it, whereas in reality there are many shades of grey.
A fit is either considered optimal (i,e, matches there own opinion) or you get 'that fit is terrible', 'that fit is bad', 'omg you can't fit for shit' whilst they look down their noses.
Where is the middle ground?
And very often these 'terrible fits' (when you actually manage to pin the complainer down to explain why!) are 'corrected' with just one or two module changes! So 85% of the fit was perfectly fine, but it's still called terrible? What is this? Don't I get any credit for the 85%?
Really - all we need to do is collectively get off our high horses and give credit where credit is due, followed by offering suggestions/alternatives/questions.
Sure - there are exceptions where 'every' module in a fit might be questionable. All the more reason to ban the description of 'terrible', or 'fail fit' or 'bad' - and instead focus on maybe asking them why they chose those, and going on to offer advice/suggestions from there.
Thats like saying if a quadriplegic falls on someone and happens to kill him with the fall, then the quad isnt a bad fighter.