¶ As mentioned before, I like forums.  Can’t get enough of ‘em.  In the last few months, there have been a lot of crappy whine threads about various non-issues and perceived non-issues.  One such thread even made it to the point of having an Assembly Hall variant, where it was waved around in front of the CSM, as though just being posted in Assembly Hall lends legitimacy to a topic.  So many whines and trolls get posted there that it’s not even funny anymore, even to a troll like me.
¶ Still, this one thread is starting to look more and more valid to me as a player, as laughable as it may be to the ‘big boys’ in EVE.  Actually, several threads: the whines calling for a titan nerf.

¶ On the face of it, it sounds like just another noob whine about how “I’ll never be as powerful as somebody who played since Beta – look, he kan haz titan!!!11 :( :( :(“  But then you look at some of the people posting in support of downgrading the power of the titan and when you find members of GoonSwarm, Band of Brothers and other major 0.0 sovereign alliances who have several titans under their control, the argument seems much more legitimate.
¶ Without trying to sound as though I just want it nerfed because I can’t fly one, I’d like to say that I agree with folks like Guvante who believe that, when CCP designed and introduced the Titan ship class, they did not plan for one alliance (or coalition of alliances) owning more than one titan, let alone fielding multiple titans in a steady rotation.
¶ In one of my Chronicles posts, I mentioned Fitz VonHeise’s CAOD thread, listing the known titans in-game.  I’d like you to take a look at it, though the import of it may not be apparent to a reader who does not play EVE.  Even if you’ve looked at it before, look again.  Really take a few minutes, and look it over again.

¶ Thirteen titans for BoB alone – that’s frightening for any enemy to think about and the defensive potential of it is immense.  Coupled with cyno jammers, it’s no wonder that the weight of literally all of the other noteworthy 0.0 alliances wasn’t enough to topple their mighty stronghold in Delve.  But that isn’t what inspired me to write this post.  That’s just a little bit of background for the real reason I decided to run my mouth about the over-proliferation of titans.
¶ See, when they were implemented into the game, they were a massive time and ISK sink.  It requires the highest level of sovereignty to build one, literally more than a year of skill training, even with great implants, to be able to effectively fly one with all the bells and whistles.  Once you get into the thing, you can’t dock so you really can’t eject from it to go fly something else – just like with Motherships, your only choices are to remain trapped in a ship that will certainly not be deployed to every battle (it’s not like you’ll go roaming in one… right?) or leave it floating free at a POS where anything might happen to it, and neither of these are attractive prospects for many – not where a multi-billion ISK ship is concerned.  Naturally, most people who wish to fly the titan create an alt and train straight to their titan of choice (or simply purchase an alt from someone who has already trained it).  It also requires an intimidating amount of material resources just to build the thing once you do have the sovereignty level 4 manufacturing array and the pilot capable of getting into the ship.  There’s a reason why titans are valued at or around 80 billion ISK!
¶ No, when CCP put these ships in the game, it’s safe to assume they envisioned maybe one or two per power bloc, and that the titan would be the center point of some truly gripping, epic battles over territory.  Like the Deathstar of our favorite cinematic space opera, for example.  Perhaps they should have known that it would get out of control the way it has, but CCP’s track record for anticipating problems isn’t exactly stellar.  In his devblog regarding speed changes that are on the drawing board, after listing all of the speed enhancing items in the game and noting that a player can achieve up to 8 times the base speed of some ships, CCP Nozh states:

“If one then takes a look at the max velocity on missiles and drones, it is readily apparent that our combat system was never designed for such speeds. Even when we did some basic tests on our internal servers, with special high-speed missiles, we quickly noticed Destiny (our physics engine) behaving very strangely.”

¶ Now, as a player, I have to wonder, Why wasn’t this all tested before these items were implemented on the live server?  Why is it our fault now that we’re able to go fast after spending billions of ISK, when CCP put the stuff in the game to begin with?  If it was tested before being implemented and the game’s physics engine couldn’t handle it, why was it implemented at all?
¶ But, alas, dozens of noobs posted dozens of threads (literally, no more than a few dozen people whined about it, but they did it daily with sometimes as many as 20 different threads created per day) and CCP caved in, saying that they did some basic tests on their internal servers and their physics engine “behaved strangely.”  This, mind you, years after the items in question were put into the game.  To me, it seems that if you give CCP’s developers the benefit of the doubt and assume that they did test these items, they didn’t account for all possibilities.  Otherwise, they would not have made it possible for “nano” pilots to do what we do – that is: fly extremely fast, attempt to dictate range, rely on numbers and focused fire to make our individually weak DPS adequate, and fly in fear of certain ship classes and fits that can nullify our “nanoships” in short order.
¶ When taken in that context, it isn’t difficult to imagine a scenario where something that seemed like a good idea at the time was, perhaps, not as well thought out as it could have been.  It should have been a given that, on a long enough timeline, everybody and their mother would have a titan and the most powerful of the alliance would have more than one – indeed, over a dozen already in the case of Band of Brothers, with Against ALL Authorities close behind with nine!  After all, when you get right down to it the only thing required to own a titan is time.  The time invested into training an alt to fly it, the time invested to mine the minerals and build it, or in the case of recent alliances, the time invested to farm enough ISK to outright buy one.  Case in point: The Star Fraction.
¶ A few days ago, -SF- executor and CSM chairman Jade Constantine announced that his alliance had come into possession of an Erebus, the Gallente titan.  Now, I’ve got nothing against Jade Constantine or his alliance, either in-character or out-of-character.  In fact, I don’t know him at all, never had dealings with him.  But, -SF- is a roleplaying alliance and unlike some RP alliances (CVA, for instance), they are pretty much irrelevant in the grand scheme of player-driven content – they own no 0.0 space, they’ve never shown any indication of being a challenge for anyone’s space unless in NPC sovereignty where to be honest you can’t really evict anybody, just out-blob them (Foundati0n comes to mind).  I don’t know what Star Fraction plans to do with their new Erebus, hopefully they have a plan to go and use it as it was intended – fight a war and become a relevent 0.0 power.  If not, it doesn’t really matter to me.  I’m not likely to be directly involved in it.
¶ It just struck me that, when an empire-based RP alliance can get a titan, ANYbody can get one.  They’re not special anymore.  Then, I looked at Fitz’ thread and realized, “Wow, they really haven’t been special for a long time, now!“  Look at some of the other known titans:

• Circile of Two
• Omega Factor

¶ Who the hell are they?  Ever heard of them?
¶ Then you’ve got an assortment of alliances who have one or two titans, like Roadkill and Requiem, one titan isn’t anything out of control or crazy, nothing to see there.  But look farther down, toward the bottom.  Six titans not even in an alliance at all.
¶ I don’t pretend to know what, if anything, should be done to/about titans.  Obviously I think something should be done.  I don’t know what manner of nerf or rethink would most benefit this part of the game, but I do think it was a good idea that wasn’t very well thought out.  When all you need to get a titan is 80 billion ISK and a character capable of getting into it, this game feature is not working as intended.

¶ Just my opinion.  Meanwhile, I hope that Endeva and Drug Kito, the co-executors of <GODS>, are working on a plan to get us our own titan – preferably a nice, shiny Avatar!

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