Quote Originally Posted by bugme143 View Post
Except Bikkus sunk massive amounts of ISK and time into his setup, so why are we punishing him for that? Shall we also punish titan pilots who can take a carrier off the field with the push of a button? A single group of talos or catalysts will render a site's work wasted for him. For any VG boxer, a catalyst or talos fleet will stop the ISK income for a day, and if they catch a ship, they'll render two days wasted. For the multibombers, they're on the record stating that defensive bubbles will stop them from a bombing run. For the multiminers, again, catalysts are the source of income disruption. We shouldn't be punished because someone doesn't want to hop into a Talos or Catalyst.
The amount of isk invested has absolutely nothing to do with whether something should be nerfed or not - the point is you shouldn't nerf things too far when you're doing the nerfing.

Counterpoint? Supercaps.

Titans. Back in the day, they had DDs that could target everything, they could be tracking fit and blap almost anything off the field, especially if it was moving in a straight line with no transversal. This was before t2 siege, so they were also the highest dps ships in the game bar none.

Supercarriers - Before fighterbombers were nerfed, they shot actual missiles. With a few target painters on your target, you could use your fighterbombers to apply nearly 8k dps and 120k alpha almost 100% onto nearly any target in the game.

Both of these were incredibly broken things. If you don't believe me, watch the first seven minutes of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw4lWgEaEIc especially the wyvern footage.
CCP ended up nerfing Titans into being completely useless EXCEPT for their one broken ability - DD, which are now only used in no risk gank situations, or for the once a year massive lagfest because no other weapons BESIDES DD work in such hi lag situations. This effectively turned the game into the boring blue blobfest we have today, since the only remaining tactic was the one goons already used - bring the biggest blob of subcaps to the field or fuck off.

Supercarriers were nerfed into uselessness as well, until very recently when they were rebuffed a bit so you could do some things with fighters.

When CCP nerfed Titans, there were several hundred in the game. Between PL and Raiden, we had almost half of the active titans in the game iirc. Collectively, that massive collection of military hardware worth >30 trillion isk(very low estimate, not counting inactives, and this is just those two alliances TITANs - forget the supercarriers) was nerfed into complete uselessness overnight.

No matter how much time or isk Bikkus sunk into his setup, it wasn't even close to the amount of time and isk sunk into the pre-nerf supercap fleets.

The point is - instead of outright banning multiboxing, or isboxer, and making his entire setup 100% useless, much like CCP did in the case of supers, they only gave it a soft nerf - to input broadcasting. There is nothing wrong with this, much like there'd be nothing wrong with CCP objectively looking at titans, preserving them as an antiblob weapon, but removing the more broken/stupid things like jump bridge or DD from them.

CCP's removal of input broadcasting was very measured, showed quite some restraint, and as we've proven since - it hasn't killed multiboxing, nor has it crippled/effected anyone beyond the lazy, incompetent, or those pushing things a little too far.

Most of us adapted, and are continuing much as before without issue.