There have been a few criticisms coming out of the recent live event, which saw a bunch of people leaving high sec to attack a target in NPC Nullsec. Most of them were people whining. Some were more valid, mostly focusing around in game organisation.
This post flows from one of the latter.
One of the biggest differences you’ll find between a Fleet from a large, well organised alliance, and a scratch fleet drawn together from randoms, is that the alliances fleet will contain ships which are far closer to each other in fit. You’ll have your DPS ships having similar ranges, everyone in the same kind of tank and so on.
That’s difficult to manage with a scratch fleet, as there’s no central source saying ‘Fit your ships this way.’
A side issue is: Newbies and noobs have this tendency to fit their ships badly. Newbies can break themselves from this, generally with the help of their corporations, and sometimes sites such as Battleclinic, or Eve Uni’s fittings.
However, it’s a bit difficult to send players off to look at third party sites, from the tutorials.
What would be good, in my very humble opinion, is if the Navies of New Eden (read CCP) were to publish some Doctrine fits. Tying it into ISIS would be great, though possibly a trifle excessive.
Then, when there’s a live event being run by one of the Empires, there can be a link to the doctrine fits, which may help shape the randoms into something a little more cohesive.
The moment that CCP release the SSO, I’m planning on sticking together a Doctrine storage system, for those groups without dedicated IT resources, which could be used. But something basic from CCP would be good. We don’t need a fit for every ship, but it would be nice to have the basics covered, both the T1 version, and the Navy version. Possibly some core T2 ships too.
Then you can add doctrine fits for some other things. Such as exploration fits from SOE, or fits from ORE, which fit a decent tank on the miners.
Teaching players to fit ships isn’t a simple thing. Examples go a long way.