Gategun-Gate aka CSM minutes

CSM - Council of Serious Minutes

Last week the CSM released 165 pages of meetings minutes for their already hilariously outdated meeting with CCP.(Okay okay, it was only a few months in coming) Some things discussed in the meetings were already in game, and naturally there was quite the ruckus when certain parts of the document were read, repeatedly, every what-way possible. There is an excellent summation of the minutes by a fellow blogger, Drackarn, here, he covers a bit of the same thing as I am going to focus on here, but also the rest of the 165 page monstrosity.

I am referring to the gate guns discussed on page 95. Prerequisite would be to watch the fanfest presentation on Crimewatch, specifically from 15:40 to about 25:00. This will explain what they mean for Suspect vs criminal flags. 

Now the intent of the gate guns seems to be to deter warfare on gates in lowsec and added punch against criminals in high sec. The meat of their proposed change was the following two tidbits :

"Sentry guns will now shoot anyone with a criminal flag, suspect or otherwise."

"Sentry guns will also start with smaller amounts of damage, and ramp up with time. Ideal tuning will be to where triage carriers will die at around 4 1/2 minutes."

So if you had watched the Crimewatch presentation you will know that suspect means anyone doing a "misdemeanor" and a criminal is a person comitting a "felony." Without re-covering the entire presentation, let's just suffice it to say that this places flashy red pilots at risk, as well as current yellow pilots who engage in piracy in sight of the gate guns.

Now napkin math aside, let's just think about the level of firepower that the gate guns will have to scale to in order to force or kill a triaged carrier. Then think about the orders of magnitude less that would be required to kill a BS, or volley a BC off the field entirely. It's been pointed out a few times why this is such a bad idea, but let's sum the arguments against this.

At first glance, these new enhanced gate guns will make lowsec pirating on gates, camping gates or otherwise trying to fight on a gate, a pretty useless idea, instead of just limiting frigates from the fight you will start to see bigger classes of ships vollied off the field just by making your tank last a good few minutes.

I won't go too far into the explanation of how bad this is, but that's because several people already took care of that for me. Honestly I think that this response from the community was warranted, but seemed to miss a later summation by the team working on the gate guns. Who said:

"CCP Masterplan explains that this is where everything is at in the design process, that they're looking forward to working more on this as the Inferno stuff dies down"

 With this in mind, I still have hope, but am honestly a little disappointed by the CSM who didn't seem to have much to say at the time about it. Hans Jagerblitzen (Follow him on twitter where he is actually "active" here) was once again on the front lines of this, both as the accused and respondent to this fit of rage against this idea.

To his credit he was able to calm anyone who would listen, as well as some that didn't, and force a better summation into the notes via the forums. The indication there is CCP was/is/will be looking at this and it was indeed just a design idea and not yet a reality. I expect that some change to the gate gun system, made largely useless by the preponderance of swarms of t3 and tank battle cruisers with Logi support in lowsec, will be in place for the December release.

Related Posts : "A look at CCP's suggested gate gun changes" - Low Sec Lifestyle, by Sugar Kyle