Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Sovereignty has always been a pain in the ass for everyine in nullsec and CCP... It doesn't have to be though.

The one massive problem has been that it's always been based around a structure grind. First posses and now SBU's, all things that don't really need any presence.


I say, remove all structure based sovereignty and base it entirely around activity.

If an alliance manages to form at least 60-80% (to be determined) of all activity in a system for a week, they gain sovereignty of it.

Activity can be defined as follows, from the least impact to the most:

• Influence.
See below.

• Basic presense.
Be present in the system. The more pilots spending more time in a system, the more activity you produce. Cloaked ships do not count as any activity!

• Construction.
Manufacturing items in POS or stations. Putting down POS (doing nothing else with it) also goes here.

• Moon mining.
• Belt activity.
(ice) Mining, belt rats, the lot.

• Anomalies.
• Capital ship construction in POS.
• Construction of outposts.
• PvP kills!
PvP kills over the past x days are tallied up: More kills (final blows from players) generate more activity.

Activity accrues over time, retaining the level 1 through 4 for a given system. Massive PvP action can swing activity in favor of another party, making war a viable option to switch it. However, to retain sovereignty, one must remain active!

System level and the amount of time where sovereignty is held also produce influence around the system, ala the EVE Sovereignty map. This makes it so that fringe systems do not need to be actively pursued around the clock, but still gives smaller alliances room to manouver into a part of space.

This system also allows smaller alliances to claim a part of space without being overrun by larger alliances almost immediately - Sovereignty is no longer a matter of plonking down an SBU, you no longer need a pure capital ship force to take over systems, making invasions by smaller alliances much more feasible aswell as them simply taking unused portions of space.

This system also means that travelling to another part of the universe for a prolonged time means you may have to give up sovereignty back home, since you will be much less active there. This makes cross galactic wars much less common and much harder to maintain. This combined with the possibility for smaller alliances to take unused space means that conflict may become much more common and local.

Renting out space is still possible, a new standing might be created where the renter doesn't generate any activity for themselves. In return, they get (full or partial) access to the system and generate activity for the landlord.



I bet there's more consequences to this system than i can currently think of, but it seems to me like this might be the best system to replace the current one with. It feels like it may make everything a lot more dynamic.

I think that Sovereignty should be removed from POS structures.

Tie sovereignity to activity. Anybody can put up a structure in space, and lets say that if you have sov, your structure gets some bonuses. Upkeep and bills should be removed in 0.0, except fuel costs.

It's great that structures in 0.0 enable you to manufacture stuff that is otherwise not available, it defines role for them. But don't tie sov mechanics to it, it just promotes static content, POS spamming, and all that is boring in 0.0

Something that just occured to me:

Since capital ships are no longer the sole factor determining sovereignty, guerilla warfare suddenly becomes an effective way to wage war! Defenders are no longer relegated to fleeing to empire or playing station games with little to no effect, they can actually affect the war if they play it right! This also goes for offense: Large empires cannot ignore smaller invaders anymore. If unchecked, they can severely hamper their activity ratings in systems. This further incentivizes only taking systems you will actually use, rather than spamming SBU's/posses everywhere you can.

To CCP: I strongly believe that this will not take away points of conflict. Since the activity system encourages actual activity, conflicts will arise at the points of interest in a system: Mission areas, anomalies, asteroid belts and moons, aswell as stations. Since PvP activity is still the most valuable people will still be engaging one another, only there's little to no incentive to blob each other out depending on the size of the organizations waging war on each other, making warfare far more dynamic.

Current structures only incentivize vast blobs, the entire organization gathered in one place to simply force their advantage in numbers with little to no thought behind tactics or strategy, nor any worry about having to defend their own territory while attacking. Spreading out points of conflict together with incentivizing smaller empires because of the activity system will generate enough points of conflict, as furthermore smaller empires will move into nullsec thus increasing the likelyhood of conflict elsewhere.

About using SBU's and POS's, there's a brilliant quote from the philospher James May:
"It's an ingenious solution to a problem that should never have existed in the first place!"

They are artificial means of creating conflict where none should be necessary and in the process they eliminate any chance of (significant) conflict anywhere else.

The diplo staff already has an insane workload for those alliances due to kill and standings lists anyway. I do admit that i overlooked this type of alliance in my proposal though.

That said, a freespace alliance and holding sov - Aren't those conflicting concepts? Why would it matter to a freespace alliance whether they held sov or not? Due to their usually smaller nature, holding sov of any kind would already be difficult and the new system would, in the case of freespace alliances, lessen the impact of sov in the first place.

Another take on this problem would be to make alliances able to declare their space as 'open space'. This would lessen the activity impact of all other characters, corporations and alliances at neutral and higher standing to 50%, 33% or even less. Entities at mutual negative standings or war still have full impact, though their activities would be lessened anyway due to the defender's advantage. One could try to abuse this by not setting enemies to negative standings, but this would make a hell of a mess of a war since friendlies will not be able to spot enemies directly, making it a properly much worse option than straight out war.

Maybe you could declare open space, but all activities in these systems would be taxed by CONCORD in return to some degree (0.1-5.0%)?

This could use some refinement i admit, though i still believe that the activity system overall is a much better option than keeping it the way it is now, since freespace alliances will also have a lot of trouble defending their space in the current system since being outblobbed is still a valid and insanely effective tactic due to the current structure mechanics. In this way i believe the current system to actually be worse than the activity system for freespace alliances.

Soemthing did occur to me:

You could put a system tax on your systems that neutral or higher guests will pay to you, which will generate activity for you. This combined with the influence activity from your surrounding systems could do the trick.



Also, to combat possible abuse by killing frigs in your own systems from a pet alliance all day long: A dominance system. Depending on the K/d ratio, which would be hidden, further kills would yield less and less activity for you if you're truly dominating your opponent. This would prevent an abuse scenario like described above, aswell as further reducing blob incentive (focusing all day long on one system with a large blob doesnt yield further rewards as for activity).

That one still needs some work though.