Bitter Vet Cure: New Ships

  So Manasi (http://manasi.eveplayer.net/2011/02/the-mules-point-of-view/#axzz1EnHDAjwl), Letrange (http://letrangeeve.blogspot.com/2011/02/manasis-trees.html), and then Manasi again (http://manasi.eveplayer.net/2011/02/ideas-for-letrange/#axzz1EnHDAjwl) have been talking a bit about bitter vet syndrome, all the new shinies meant to bring in WOW players, and some of the things CCP hasn't been giving much love lately.  It's certainly been a deeper conversation than these three posts and I really couldn't even begin to start linking the quality forum and blog posts which have made good points from all angles of this.

  This did however get me thinking a bit about two things: 1) bitter vet syndrome and my EvE life and 2) new ships!

  I admit I have struggled with B.V.S. at times but not as much as many others.  I've found myself a bit disheartened at EvE every so often and spinning my ship because I didn't have the will to go out into space.  I usually combat this with a frigate roam in which I lose at least 3 stealth bombers and make everyone laugh.  I'll ask Devin to comment more on this for your entertainment later.  I've also been lucky enough to find something new just in time to keep me logging in.  I will admit that this has slowed down quite a bit since last year and I've been forced to seek much of my new "buzz" from faction ship experimentation and out of game fun such as Somer.Blink and TeamSpeak rages.

  That brings me to my next thought: we need new ships.  It's clear that a ton of work went into T3 cruisers and I appreciate that.  Even though I struggle to "want" one myself I can see the draw of that reconfigurability.  I do wish they were a bit more flexible in adapting to their race but that's another issue (for example, the Proteus is very tough to make a good drone boat out of).

   One of the things that brought me back to EvE was the new ships being introduced at the time.  While the dreads, jump freighters, and altered super carriers have been fun over the years I've always gotten more excited about filling out the general fleets.  The T3 was wonderful and gave me a lot of hope for T3 frigate or (gaming gods willing) T3 battleship additions.  Now though, it seems that there isn't much hope for new ships on the horizon.  I do hope that as Incarna gets further developed CCP will be able to put some more energy back into new ships.

With that said here are some personal ideas (they may suck, sue me):

• Escort Carrier (a personal favorite detailed here)
• Hunter/Killers - T2 Destroyers designed to do what Destroyers do best: Hunt down submarines...er... Stealth Bombers (maybe depth charges or specialized _on grid only_ scanners that give a general vector but not exact locations)
• Jump Bridge Support Ships (detailed just a bit here)
• Flag Ships - A battleship sized command ship, it's appearance on the field means serious business.  More defensive than offensive it would have higher than T2 defenses but be more in line with the T1 offensively. 
• Artillery - T2 Battleships - A natural evolution of the tactical use of "Sniping" in fleet engagements.  The Navies would naturally want to take this to the next step.  Increased range, increased targeting, greatly increased volley damage.  BUT you also have decreased firing rate, greatly decreased defenses, etc.  Perhaps these ships would even need to link to each other or "siege" into artillery mode.