Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Stargates present a host of problems in the Eve universe and I believe a better system could be developed to make the game more dynamic and interesting.

CURRENT STARGATE ISSUES

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1. Space feels contained to a system of waypoints instead of a vast emptiness. Eve is supposed to be about freedom and yet one of the core mechanics limits that freedom severely.

2. Gates are a severe bottleneck which affects all types of play.
a. Gate Camping - Currently this consists of pirates sitting around waiting for players to warp through. And travellers who can only hope no-one is on the other side when they warp through a gate into low-sec. This is not only frustrating for the travellers but boring for the pirates as they just sit and wait. Pirating should involve hunting the target and then pouncing on them, or cornering them using a coordinated flank with multiple ships, not sitting around outside a gate.

b. PvP - Players warp into the solar system they are trying to attack in giant blobs, removing any sense of interesting tactics and creating confusion. Defenders sit by the gates and open fire as the attackers stream in as fast as the gate can transport them. This is not only not interesting but also very hard on the servers.

c. Transporting – At the moment being a courier is exceptionally boring as players who are transporting materials just jump from waypoint to waypoint with little to no variation.



PROPOSED FIX - GRAVITY WELLS

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To make the game more freeform and to add strategy and tactics back into PvP and Pirating/Pirate Avoidance I propose we remove Stargates and replace them with a Gravity Well mechanic.

This works as follows:
Each ship has a jump drive built into it of varying strength. This replaces both the Stargates and the warp drives of a ship. Strengths and speeds could possibly be based on the already existing warp drive speeds. These jump drives use the Gravity Wells of stellar bodies such as Stars, Planets, Moons, and Stations to slingshot from place to place. Each stellar body has a Gravity well of size and strength based on its mass. This is similar to the way space probes use planets to travel faster in the real world (obviously simplified in-game to keep travel from being too complex).
The larger the Gravity Well of the slingshot, the further and faster a ship can travel. Ships can travel in empty space but it is far slower to do this (It does ensure that players are never stranded and could be used tactically to appear where an opponent doesn’t expect).
Every object in the game produces a Gravity well of a certain size and strength based on its mass. This allows for players in very larger ships to give slight boosts to small frigate sized ships. In addition to this players would be able to set up Mass Field Buoys. These would act as artificial gravity wells to allow explorers, traders, and corporations to set up their own custom but slower routes.

GRAVITY WELL ADVANTAGES

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1. Space becomes an open place again - Players can find their way through the universe in many more ways, and in the ways that they choose. In addition to this CCP can make the gas clouds and nebulas players currently see in the solar system background into actual places that can be visited, with their own interesting mechanics.
2. HUBs remain - Certain Solar Systems will still have advantages over others which means the trading hubs which have formed should remain for the most part. As an added bonus, players who are trying to go get to a destination which used to require a jump through a Hub can now go around it.
3. Increased PvP tactics - The tactics employed by attackers and defenders will become far more dynamic, based not only on the ships each corp brings to the battle, but their positioning and co-ordination.
4. Pirating becomes interested for hunters and hunted - Pirates will now have to scan space and track down their victims instead of sitting on a gate and waiting for them to show up. It also means that when a player is the victim of piracy, they feel like they have been bested through tactics, cunning and patience instead of just being unlucky.
5. Transporting becomes interesting - Players who specialize in hauling freight for other players will now have an interesting way of going about this. Not only will they get to plan their routes out a bit more, but players can invest in Mass Field Buoys to create their own routes over time.
6. Exploration becomes viable - Now players can fly out into the unknown spaces between solar systems in search of interesting places and hidden treasures. These discovered locations could even be sold on the market as stellar maps.
7. Existing system still work - Systems like the Auto-pilot still work. It would now be based on jumps between stellar bodies, but the physical size of each gravity well means you can’t camp a planet or star without a large amount of ships, or scanning and hunting. A form of Local Chat would still be viable, it would just be based on ships within a certain radius of the players location. Most people don’t use local chat anyway.

In conclusion I believe a reworking of the Stargate system to a much more dynamic Gravity Well system would remove many problems seen in the game today while adding new and fun tactics and strategies to the game.

I assume frigates and subcaps in general would have relatively small jump drives.

Have you seen some of the truly ridiculous distances stargates cross? Even a titan can't bridge some of those distances; you'd have to set them up side-by-side as some kind of Enhanced Bridging Array in order to have the bridging strength to get from one end of some gates to the other end. Especially those super-long gates way up in the north.

Your system would shut off access to whole constellations or even regions.

So what you want to do is remove 80% of pvp from lowsec and leave us with only station games and ganking stupid missioners/miners?

Without the bottleneck of the gates travel becomes 100% risk free and it becomes a lot harder to find people actually looking for a fight. This is a bad idea.

Yes. it should be literally impossible to secure your space.

Makes gate camping (sissy PvP) nearly impossible: +1

Decent amount of thought put in before posting: +1

Completely changes the game: -10

Net score: -8

No matter what game you play, if there is a spawn point it will be camped by players who want the easy kills in order to feel their uberness. I think Eve probably handles it the best of all of them.

Don't get me wrong, your idea makes sense in a scientific way and spawning in a new system in a completely random location would end the hated camps. However, Eve can be pretty slow at times. One of the more tedious portions is warping within a system and you are talking about making travel between stars into that same mechanic adding a lot of tedious time to the game.

I think I'd rather have to deal with campers than deal with a long wait while going between systems.

You listed a few advantages of a gravity well / sling shot system, but you didn't write up one disadvantage ... which it turns out, there are a few. Some are below...

1. (and most fatal) Gravity wells are great for getting you up to speed, but not so well in slowing you down. Since all of the celestial objects in space that could potentially provide enough force to sling shot your ship to any other celestial object is always moving, (planets revolve around stars, stars revolve around galactic centers, galaxies move in whatever path they've been given), your chances of hitting a gravity well perfectly on re-entry would be slim to none. This is the most fatal as inaccuracies in your trajectory would either slam you into a celestial body, or put you so off course that you never stop moving.

If you are dependent on a celestial body to get you up to speed for interstellar travel, your ship wouldn't have the capacity to slow you down at the end of your trip ... unless you start your retro-active burn light-years away from your target, for an smooth re-entry.

2. If you open space up to allow pilots to plot their own course from one system to another, space would indeed feel more like space. You'd have less hubs than there are now, population would be further flung out among the other systems, some people may even take up residence in those obscure gas clouds you mentioned, similar to how people now live in wormhole space. Why? because they can. There would no longer be a restriction of travel. hardware wise, this would become a logistical nightmare for CCP as the amount of bubble they would have to maintain would exponentially increase. If my character wanted to become a hermit among a gas cloud, your system would allow it ... and so would CCP.

3. System exits would no longer be "bottle-necked". This means that if you do happen upon a pirate fleet, you simply warp out at whatever trajectory you're facing and no more problems ... no more pvp ...

4. Think of a sling and stone ... now think of how many sniper sling-shotters are out there who can hit a moving target 10km away with a pebble. Yes, I know this point was made in point 1 above, I just wanted to re-iterate it.

The Gravity Well based travel may seem more realistic for real world purposes, but for a game, it would thin out the population and strain the server.

The issue with your concept is not the execution, but the implementation of the cluster. Your gravity well system sets the game up as a cloud where the current jump gate system is a bunch of nodes.

It's feasible, but it's not a simple change. As well, as we've already established jump gates, it changes a significant quantity of the story. That being said, introducing a jump drive module or new functionality on some/all ships that let them jump to massive bodies based on the presence of local mass would really shake things up.

To be technical, ships already jump to massive bodies, "The warp drive's gravity capacitor locks onto the mass signature" or something like that. That's why you can't just warp to any ship in the system you're looking for...

Apart from that, this would kill almost everything about EVE, right down to the hardware. Not to mention not fitting into established canon.

Let's talk lore, then.
The major problem with your suggestion of using the warp drive for long-range travel would be power requirements, which would be stellar, given that a warp of ~100AU already costs around 1000-1500GJ (or capacitor units), without warp drive operation trained. Now, extending that to interstellar distances, either ships would need capacitors that would render them, as a game mechanic, irrelevant due to their practically limitless capacity during sublight combat and travel, or warp drives so efficient and powerful that would render warping as a mode of intra-system travel and its methods of disruption (points, scrams, bubbles and interdictors) irrelevant.

Either way, you break currently important mechanics and aspects of play (even though I'm not one to advocate PvP and warp disruption, being a peaceful industrialist)

Haha this old thing. A lot of people have submitted this idea, me included. While, I think I pretty much spent my load on this topic I would like to maybe add some lore to a well contstructed, otherwise unoriginal, proposition.

Say a few years down the line this idea gets ironed out and works on the test server spotlessly. How would you introduce such game changing mechanic to the ever evolving story of Eve Online?

Simple, Jovians did it. Not only that, they opened their stations, mission agents, and entire sovreign empire to us. Game is enriched further. Everyone goes home happy.

The end.

Kosher?