Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hi,

Firstly please let me apologise for writing this anonymously, I've read these forums for years... and seen the way our community reacts to things! I am a member of a mid sized alliance, around 1500 members, we have Sov, Renters, Super Capitals and are a part of the CFC/RUS/BL blah blah coalition of coaltions. What has become apparent in my couple of years in null sec is that the blob itself is out of control, and as seen last night in HED-GP the warfare and Sov Mechanics are creaking.


What I am about to suggest may have come up in the past, and will be hated at least the 10 or so people at the top of the very largest coaltions and alliances for certain. But in MY opinion (no-one elses) would solve some of the current issues and create new dynamics to reingnite the game.

Coaltions First....

Remove Alliance and Corporation standings from EvE, likewise remove Corp and Aliiance ticker from the overview. Only person to person standings should be allowed (and should be capped). No alliance or corporation standings, No more big blue donuts. By doing this you also remove rental from the game, unless you fill your actual pvp alliance with renters.
'Edit: no personal to Corporation/Alliance standings either'

Alliances Next...

Limit Alliance sizes to say 2500 members, every alliance in this game is full of millions of cyno alts and dead weight/afk gamers anyway. This size still allows for huge pvp battles, but realistically most 2500 man aliances probably only 250-500 actual players behind keyboards anyway, the majority of EvE players have several accounts or more.

I don't suggest for am moment limiting the number of Corps in an alliance or even the number of players in a Corp, providing the alliance/corp doesn't breach the 2500 member upper limit.

Sov...

Too many timers, too many complicated mechanics..... simplify it, iHub has 3 timers, the iHub dictates who owns the sov, who owns the station. No SBU's, TCU's, no Station timers. You can either defend your Sov within the 3 iHub timers or you cannot. The iHUB should be a permanent undestroyable structure. You do get to configure the timing (within limits) of the iHub reinforce timers.

Wardecs

If you want to attack another alliances Sovereignty structures you need to Wardec them, the wardec works in exactly the same way as it does now, it lasts a week, costs ISK and allows war anywhere in the game. Remembering that you have no blues, so no out of alliance hauling means all logistics, all sov, all activities for both the attacking and defending alliance is affected by the same wardec. The Wardec should still have the red star in the overview and local windows of course. I do think though that Wardecs should have a shorter start time and end time, instead of 24 hours make it say 6 or 12. Only 3 Wardecs at any one time.

No cyno chains,

If you own Sov, there is a beacon in your system automatically (i'd suggest attached to a station, where there is a station availble, or not at all if not)) that only your alliance can jump to. It should be able to be disabled, in my opinion killing station services should still be possible. The only reason for cyno's on ships should be for offensive battle or to cyno away from a bubbled station maybe. This free's up a ton of alt characters that do not do anything else, which also free's up space in the alliance member roll.


While lots of people will flame my ideas i'm sure. Please take a step back and imagine the implications.... less Sov grinding, less blues means more people to shoot at, no-one will ever own 3/4 of a map because their alliance will not be X amount bigger than all others and they don't have blue's stacking the favour. You would have to fight over logistics routes in other regions also. The server will be able to cope better with your fights, because although it's 'possible' to have 2x 2500 man alliances fighting together at once, its unlikely. it wouldn't even remove any of the propaganda in the game, it wouldnt remove the spying or other nefarious deeds. I have in no way restricted the structure of an alliances fleet, or the size of their empire, my suggestions are purely to restrict this insane blue-virus that is currently breaking my favourite game.


Please discuss :)

Uhm... so you want the attacker of, say CFC, space to waste billions of ISK just to be able to attack sov space which is, purposefully, decoupled from empire mechanics, such as war deci'ng? This is, while being a nice money sink, a major hindrance especially for smaller groups. This can be alleviated by only the wealthier alliances in your block actually attacking the sov, while the rest only attacks ships. The limitations to this, however, are not really what 00 should be about.

What would the removal of Corp and Alliance standings change on the blue donut? Big alliances already use web services to dictate and manage their standings. Members then would have to ... would be forced to set personal standings to all other corps/alliances. This is going to be a mess for all participants, but mess is what certain people like to have. You don't remove any blue standing with your suggestion, you just make it harder for individual member to keep up with changes and actually make it a whole lot harder for new alliance members to get things running because they will be setting standings for a day or two instead of flying ships.

Limited alliance size? Create another alliance. Get standings. Circumvented.

Cyno beacon on station? Now that's an interesting thing. For one, attackers cannot incap that unless, I guess, like pos structures. For two, you want to jump your caps to stations where they cannot dock, in case of SC, and cannot be defended by the POS? Cyno camping is made a lot easier this way than it is now. More over, you make the travel within your sov somewhat easier because you don't need to plan your cyno route with chars any more in space where you don't have set up a cyno gen and outside your sov you still have to have cyno routs. No change to current situation.

Summary:

Big fights won't be prevented with these changes.
The changes only make the live of the individual unnecessarily and disproportionately harder.
Coalition and fleet sizes won't be prevented.
Removal of spying is ludicrous, as it would make spying a lot easier due to the standing mess.

PS: Yes, I am on a roll today to dismantle and destroy short sighted sov change ideas, that result from being disgruntled over the recent fight in HED. Also, can the rest of the posters please look at the first page of this forum first, please, there are already several topics about the same idea.

Also, under what I propose above, their wouldn't be a CFC... their would be goons (albeit smaller) and there would be FA and various others... but there wouldn't be a CFC.

Been trying to edit in that players themselves would also not be able to set alliances or corporations blue, only members of them, and even then with a cap to your 'friends list'.

Then you truly have no blues at all, other than your mates, imo as it should be. When it comes to fleets themselves, your either in the alliance or your in the fleet as a friend, but when it comes to multiple fleet encounters... problems arise as there will be no standings to show friend or foe unless they are allliance members. Hence no large coaltion bloc fights like last night.

In its own way this limits a fight like last night, their wouldn't have been (or is unlikely to have been) 20+ different alliances on field. Also your more likely to see fights with neighbouring alliances rather than enitre blocs of space like we are fighting over at the moment. It doesnt preclude the possibilty of an alliance holding the north say, but it makes it damn unlikely.

EVE is already complex enough that there are web services which can analyse local for you, and spit out coalition affiliation info.

Crippling the standings/overview system would only make EVE less user-friendly, and would not actually stop people from doing the same thing they're already doing.

Screw the idea about removing the standings. I like being able to set an entire corp to red.

True there are out of game tools that could assist an FC, however how much work would that make FC'ing a live 1000v1000 fight if they have to double check out of game for perceived standings. That kind of thing wouldn't last.

The point I am trying to make is that at the moment, we have a situation where 50,000 or so blues want to fight 30,000 or so blues. And that these two entities essentially control the vast majority of null sec as it stands. when these two entities want to have a **** swinging contest (like last night) it involves 2000 capital ships. That is where we are now, and the server cannot do it.

And realistically do most of the member level players in these huge entities like all the politics and bull**** that comes from being in these coaltions... thats I can guarentee most of the members themselves didn't ask for.

Whilst i agree to an extent with Jean-Baptiste and SanDooD that CCP could do a lot to improve the scripting of EvE and possibly server loads and management. We all know that the very nature of current EvE (and Jean-Baptiste touches on it above) is that people bunch together for safety and strength... in the current EvE these coaltion will keep growing and bringing in more and more pilots because its easier.

If CCP improve the arctitecture we will simply increase the size of the coaltitions and fight sizes to accomodate, now this isn't aimed at any specific coalition, none of us are blamless here, we all have ten's of thousand of members. The coalitions are going to continue to draw in small alliances and corporations purely because it gets them access to the space, and it's damn site easier than trying to do without these enormous entities.

The problem is the arcitecture of the game to a point, the bigger problem is in the current format you would be trying to fix a moving target.

Why is it that every time there's a huge fight, the ideas in this forum not only get more repetitive than usual, but they actually manage to make the damn things WORSE?

Your basically trying to fix a problem by making it harder to access information, but that is never going to fix the problem, only make it more unpleasant for players.

No Corp/Alliance tickers? No way to tell whether that guy who just appeared on grid is from a known hotdropping alliance, or whether he is some random scrub for you to fight. Bad of the average player. Can I still find out your corp by looking at your character info? If so, you've just forced us to check that and memorize standings. Yeah, endless looking at character profiles, sounds like a great way to spend the evening. Total suck for the average players.

Yet it wont stop the blob, no way. Solution, big alliance use their IT infrastructure to generate blue lists, and make querying the list easy. Assistant FC queries non-purples against database, then passes on non-blue targets to main FC to call. Wont even stop renting, just have a renting alliance, and expect your guys to check before shooting people that they aren't in it...

Players will find a way to make coalitions, nothing you can do will stop it, only make things suck for everyone, coalition or not.