Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Problem with Sov is it makes no sense whatsoever, lets go out and claim the vast regions of lawless space and keep them lawless and that's the problem.

Your colonizing what has been termed lawless space and in doing so your bringing law to the lawless region but the game mechanics don't reflect that and that's whats causing the problem. Sov should have a side effect that increase's the systems Sec status over time to reflect colinization.

As it is at the moment 0.0 is not about anything but killmails and epeen. There is no empire building, all you can do is claim systems and upgrade them to make them more profitable in some way.

Having Sov increase sec status of the system overtime would solve most 0.0 issues, Alliances would be forced to curtail the amount of space they claim or see it turn into a more civilised society.

Ofc this aspect would be a pipe dream as the Null sec people want everything to work there own way and would balk at the idea of the systems they claim increasing in sec status and that stuff that high sec brings like lower ore's lower complexs and lower level rats, but in reality that's how colinization works.

True, the whole concept of sov is pointless since you're colonizing a space that stays a lawless space just like if you weren't here.

But on a more realistic note, the biggest defense sov holders have currently is the MASSIVE amount of time and ressources that would be required to take the huge amount of systems they have.
And the whole point of having sov being preserved by sov mechanics is bad.

So yeah, less structure hitpoints, less timers. Its your space, you should be able to defend it within 24 hours, and even 24 I find it super long.

And more interestingly, this would result in less-popular systems decreasing their sec status over time, eventually becoming low- and nullsec, and thus empire would be the next silly artificial construct to become a natural part of the sandbox, just the way the entire market was eventually, begrudgingly released from its artificial lower mineral price floor held up by NPC-seeded shuttles.

Consequently, that would in turn make factional warfare less of an artificial construct, in the sense that militia pilots would not be fighting some futile back-and-forth war against each other, but actually shaping the boundaries of empire space by claiming sov for their faction.

I think an idea ought to be well thought-through before it needs to graduate to the largest public venue that is the forum. I think an idea deserves at least that you are capable of describing in full detail the mechanism that you are proposing, or in concrete terms the factors that you want to change. But that is my opinion, of course. I think it would be nice, for instance, to see some diagrams of what neighboring-system SBUs would look like, how this would interact with different "types" of systems - would dead-end systems with only one neighboring stargate become stronger or weaker? Would it be much harder to defend "nexus" systems that have may stargates? How would this affect intelligence gathering? Perhaps there would be a greater need for it, or perhaps it would be possible to plan and execute a blockade of a neighboring rival alliance entirely without them knowing it, if you simply drop an SBU in a system you control which bordered a system you don't control that only has two gates?

Are we really at that point, though? That's another thing I would like you to do when posting idea threads - cite lots of relevant references so that it is easy to understand the issue your idea is designed to solve.

I'm not intricately familiar with the politics and actual goings-on inside of alliances and coalitions, so admittedly I'm probably missing some crucial insight that sheds light on this, but to use the HED-GP battle as an example, this is what happened from my point of view:

The attackers used the strategy of moving their fleet to the ihub in advance, and were thoroughly fortified, dug in with several layers of bubbles and so on, before the timer expired.

The defenders used the strategy of hot-dropping the attacking fleet at the time the ihub timer would expire.

Already this seems like a mistake on the part of the defenders - in EVE, just as in the real world, there are many advantages associated with having the enemy come to you and fight you on your terms.

Also, I am told by friends that yes, waiting for the timer and dropping the fleet in all at once was a strategical decision made in advance by the commanders, not an emergency reaction.

Sounds a lot like an unfortunate mistake.

The problem then occurred in the form of many capital pilots getting stuck in the jump animation, while their ships had already entered the fight. Which sounds like a technical issue, not a problem with the rules of the game world.

The cause of this battle, as far as I understand, was the defenders' inability to keep the system cyno jammed. The factors in this was the number of jammers and the time it took the defenders to scramble a fleet to defend them. Perhaps it was simply poor management that resulted in too few pilots too late to do anything? Perhaps the root cause of it goes deeper than that - perhaps an alliance / coalition of their size is not large enough to defend a territory of their size, and this would not happen with better security coverage? Perhaps there is a legitimate problem with the mechanical side - as you say, something needs to change?

In conclusion, I think that if you could explain a little more clearly how this particular change (SBUs outside) would alleviate the problem, and reflect on some possible problems it could cause, such as putting even more jump animations that could glitch out into a battle, that would be great. Personally I was visiting HED-GP during the battle, and I had no trouble activating modules, warping around (albeit it slowly), and so on. The only problem I experienced was using the stargates, which might be something you would want to do if the SBUs were on the other side of them.

Remove titan and jump bridging altogether. This would have a number of positive effects:

1. fleets must now travel to the battle site which means they will now have travel time.

2. This means they will be detected en route,

3. and defences can be deployed before the blob is of server-busting size.

4. hot-dropping is no longer an automatic winning strategy, which means that smaller mobile fleets are more viable.

The whole point of holding SOV is force projection. Holding/defending regions of the current size (we're pretty close to serenity anyways ) would simply be undoable without the help of a jumpbridge network or a bunch of bridging titans. We are already in the age of bridges everywhere, only a few roamers are left using gates, everyone else sends a cynoporteus anyways and just bridges the fleet to 0, or in more remote areas, they'll bridge three falcons and a few bombers via BLOPS.

If you're arguing that force projection in it's current state is ridiculous, then I fullheartedly agree. Wanna fight? Then go there and fight. But no risk-free travel anymore please.

Also please bear in mind that proposals like that would harm the CFC massively, do you really want that?

So conquering VFK (for example) would require seventeen separate structure bashes, as opposed to five? (Seven planets. Each POS has an RF timer, so fourteen structure shots there, plus three on the station)

Is shooting structures really that much fun?

destructible stations would be nice .. so if you don't want to take that systems SOV you can just destroy it and leave instead..
much shorter timers would be needed for this though so maybe 2-3 hours .. maybe make hacking work on reducing timers.. too allow for fast attacks

The timers are there to try to make sure everyone has a chance to defend, and since one time may be inconvenient for many people, they make you do it a few times.

Frank Herbert, writer of dune, wrote in another series of a bureau of sabotage(BuSab), because a hyper efficient government can change too many laws to fast without enough oversight and forethought, so the BuSAB was there to throw sanctioned monkey wrenches into the political machine.

Much the same here, The timers and stages of the Sov system prevent blitzkrieg sov grinding, like back in the bad old POS-Sov days, and give a chance to the defenders. More; The multiple timers promote multiple battles over the same resources, and increased losses mean more market activity, more resources used etc.

SBU's are sort of like garbage bags. You buy them to throw away, but they serve their purpose; Delay and keep the trash mostly in one place..

i think the sov sec status should change.

you are colonizing lawless space where pirates live/hunt you kill the said pirates when you rat and as such rewarded by bounty payments, i think as players regardless of standings blue red watever kill the pirates (missions/ratting/scan sites) you are infact making the system a little safer so the sec status would go up slightly.

every x pirate ships in x time it goes up by say 0.05

this however would have the effect of making all of null/low sec slowly but surely high sec so a counter marker would have to be included

i would make it if there has not been x kills in the x time you can say the pirates are rallying in the system making them a little more dangerous and decreasing the sec status by 0.05

the overall effect this would have is alliances/corps would have to manage there space to keep good ratting systems

i dont think systems should ever get to high sec status however.

i agree that SBU's should be placed on the gates entering the system rather than in the target system would still be the same amount of sbu's.

#14 Destructable stations will likely never happen, the crying of people who lost ALL their stuff (or even portion of it) would lead to new Jita riots.

#15 IMO you suggestion only increases dogpiling into one system and onto one grid. That is exactly opposite of what I would like to see happen.

#16 I know what you are saying, but in my opinion timer amounts and lengths need to be shortened. Currently there is 3 day preparation time for station systems, which allows to gather massive blobs of 2000 of their closest friends to defend/attack. 24h should be enough for anyone to organize defense of system, not everyone goes away same time, and if they can´t they don´t deserve to have that station. Sure someone can come and haze down all your region during a weekend, but it would require immense amount of effort, not to mention that if he doesn't stay back to defend said region, its equally easy to take back from him.

#18 again too big of changes for CCP to actually consider on short to medium term.

#19 If you SBU all gates, how would anyone get into the system anymore? Especially if the system is cynojammed and defensively SBU´d you could just lock down portions of space where no one could go. Station should have some effect to the defense of the system, but I tend to agree there should be no reason to grind down two massive structures in same system. The station could give other kind of benefits, like give extra timer on IHUB, provide some kind of defensive bonuses within the system for defenders (bit like wormhole bonuses, but smaller) or something completely else.