Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Im not sure how many people are in favor of the 2 coalition maximum that 0.0 has turned into, so I thought i'd ask.

What do you think 0.0 should be? should it be lots of little small groups? Big coalitions? Nomads? Lots of passive income sources? Lots of PvE? Manufacturing Heaven?

Then, with that goal in mind, what would you change to make that happen?

Ill go first:

I believe that null sec should be a few large groups with a bunch of smaller groups fighting over the space they can get. Groups should not be able to or not want to hold large swaths of space that they're not using, and ISK generation should be based on doing work, not just passive moon goo income.

Thoughts?

The money is in renting these days, not moongoo, isn't it?


Hint: That's much less work than moongoo, for much more reward, and the space gets used.

Apparently it is, otherwise CFC wouldn't rent out large chunks of their space. But renting doesn't necessarily result in activity, as you can clearly see in Delve, Geminate, Branch or lots of the Drone Regions. So, renting empires are also harder to maintain because you cannot proforma claim space, since you are going to lose it after some time if nothing is happening there. Sov would be to be claimed on a case-by-case basis.

I disagree with this, in a sense. Because:

I don't think they are, as it is.

As I see it, losing sovereignty, on occasion happens because a force larger than yourself has decided that it wants your space, and all your available defensive resources are not enough to defeat all of their offensive resources, and all your available offensive resources aren't enough to defeat all the defensive resources that they invest into your ex-sov, their new sov.

But more often than not, it seems like sov changes hands mostly based on feuds or greed or some other ideological factor that has no correlation to the size and activity of either the attacker or defender.

That is to say, this hypothetical:

Alliance A has enough people to defend and farm (utilize all the space, asteroids, rats, etc. of) 25 solar systems, and alliance B has enough people to defend and farm 25 systems. If alliance A gathers all their people up and invades alliance B to take one of their systems, they now have 26 systems, but only enough people to keep an effective security schedule rotating for 25 systems.

In theory this means that at all time there should be exactly one system within alliance A's space that is completely undefended, and anywhere else you would try to attack would result in an adequate response, for instance having your subcap fleet shut down when trying to bash cyno jammers, or whatever is the first step in invading a system these days.

But in practice, alliance A is not going to take over the 26th system and just leave one of their old systems in order to move miners, ratters, probers, roamers, and such to the new system. In practice they're just going to spread out. Meaning all of their systems are mostly protected, and a fleet forming to thwart invaders will be mostly adequate, and so on.


This, I think, is what leads to the ultimate problem: One group overextends and becomes vulnerable, another group sees this and tries to take advantage of it by using ALL their available resources to attack. This in turn encourages the defending group to use ALL their available resources to defend, and that leads to hitting the physical boundaries of the limitations of software and hardware - a number of packets needing to be processed by the server that exceeds (by more than one order of magnitude (accounting for 10% tie-dye)) the maximum processing frequency of the server.


Now, that's not to say that this technical problem isn't a problem - it's a problem that something which is possible within the rules of the game (the "game mechanics") is impossible within the rules of physics (that specific rack of server blades running the node is incapable of calculating the things which are supposed to happen on that node). I'm not saying it's not a problem. All I'm saying is, while group A and group B are busy piling 97% of their players into one node, who's helping themselves to all the A and B sov hosted on all the other nodes? Who's taking advantage of all the juicy ratting and mining upgrades that nobody is around to utilize?


Certainly, there are many factors in this, and I'm not familiar with all of them, but I think that a big part of the problem is tunnel vision - players obsess over the meta-game, and put more and more effort into executing the traditional "blob" strategy without exploring other options. Perhaps I am wrong, and a competent leader is able to explain to me why alternative strategies are not viable. Why you could not create a fork or a feint over multiple systems, why it's not possible to drive out a sov holder with guerrilla tactics, why it's imperative for an alliance or coalition to hold so much space that they inevitably fail to defend it.

So to answer your question; what do I think 0.0 should be? I think 0.0 is what it should be already, and you just need to go there and stir up dust and be the "smaller groups fighting over the space they can get" like you describe. That's what I think. But I could be wrong.

If I had suggested to limit the activity to only ratting, I would agree with you. However, I think that activity is, as said, more than ratting and more than PVP'ing. It involves - or should involve - a lot of different things. You could even introduce a system (that is something I haven't said yet, granted), which allows an alliance to set up personalized activity quotas for the mentioned subjects, like 10% ratting, 10% PI, 10% PVP-kills, 10% Manufacturing, 10% mined roids, etc. You can freely set the quota that suits your needs or likings best. For instance, in a entrance constellation/system to 00, a higher PVP quota would make more sense than ratting for obvious reasons. In a constellation with good sec status, Ratting makes more sense. In a constellation with suitable stations, belts and planets and feasible low/high sec connection, and with an alliance that wants to do that, a more industry inclined quota makes sense. Etc.

Basically, it should be what it is right now: a place where players can do what they want to. But it should change in so far that players cannot be able to hold vast swaths of space just because and just to have them lay idle; they need to do things to keep that space. How they achieve this in the range of the suggested parameters is up to the players. What it would make more difficult in comparison to now is the fact that you cannot have kind of inactive staging systems of other holdings (think of the CFC system in Immensea). These would slowly decay away and become sov-less after a while, depending on the activity.

Regarding the angry dread pilots. That is surely a danger you have to take on if you want sov somewhere, there's no change to the current state of things. But if the sov gets revoked from a large entity anyways all the time, because nothing happens there and instead a smaller entity grabs that space and keeps it active, diplomacy can result in fruitful relationships ... or just a small alliances kicked out of sov because they where not up to the task and/or chose the wrong corner of the universe for their endeavor. Diplomacy, naturally, doesn't help if the "invading" party is -10; angry dreads are the only logical answer then.

oh, this is where we get to post our deluded vision of 0.0? Islands and more of them. I posted nasty stuff a while back about a place I call scrubnull. Its a magic place not reachable by cyno, and technically 0.0, but without the ability to take sov.

In my nasty post, it was a joke, like a space magical WH with only friendly NPCs and NPC corps you could join and chat it up with chatbots and generally behave like you're playing a single player game.

Part of it could work, and not the chatbot part. First we take a pirate group, now jellous of the attention whoring of the sanchas. But unlike the sanchas, the other pirates, take your pick, have a string of uncharted systems, back to an uncharted home system. they're not attacking at random, they're trying to take space and hold it.

First you destroy their beachhead in highsec and lowsec, then they are driven back along this string, you probe out stabilized WH's, and progressing down a sec chain, progressively getting lower truesec. there is no one path to get there, its a pirate Region, where you can destroy their sov, but not take sov. Big empty unclaimable space, with access to empire. Thunderdomes without the WH randomness. the lower truesec, the more dangerous and escalated the fights, up to a point where you really can't push farther, the foe is overwhelming.

The pirates, however, will still keep returning to try to retake sov in the systems the lost. instead of the random invasions there would be planned invasion, and residents of the emptied systems ( no outposts, since theres no sov and part of taking the system is "destroying" an in system outpost) would need to be ready for it, or get steamrolled by npc's

Null as it exists currently is fine, WH's ditto. If theres going to be new space, and small group want a chance at 0.0 without the conflict driver of sov, moon goo and renters, this will be a taste of the larger world beyond empire. just a taste, and that might be enough to get them to think of joining Sov-null. if not, well they're still targets in a lawless space.

I'll still call it scrubnull though.

Ok, just as a point of clarification, Im not suggesting that CCP force 0.0 to be any particular way; that would go against the very nature of Eve.

That being said, 0.0 is very much shaped by the game mechanics which can make one way of playing easier or harder.

For Example (I am not suggesting this as a good idea just using it as an example)

If CCP were to remove all titan bridges and POS bridges, move all moon miners outside of the shield bubble, divide all structure HP by 10, triple the number of money moons, remove jump clones and lock all med clones to high sec.

If CCP were to do all that, 0.0 would become a much better place for small groups who use their space and it would be terrible for large alliances who want to manage vast empires because moving people around would suck and you would always be on defense somewhere.

Now of course most of those ideas are moronic but Im just showing how mechanics can influence the 0.0 composition one way or another.

Its whatever u make of it.

but i think id prefer an iteration of it where actively patrolling and defending borders was important for keeping your systems secure. Sure some owned systems may be empty backwater posts, but not the vast majority of it. Of course, the increased work and risk that would come with behaving like this could be balanced with greater rewards.

There is also nothing wrong with areas of no-mans land in null.

edit once i realised i hadnt actually said anything-
removing local would probably bring us closer to the above. maybe someother things, but im tired

The only thing I think would make null more interesting for me and make me think about maybe going back would be to kill off the force projection that's been slowly added to the game. Titan bridges and jump bridge networks means that you don't need as many people to hold vast amounts of space getting rid of both would remove all the problems I think null sec has. Such a change would not affect logistics in any way shape or form. There are no downsides except that if you have 1000 people all sat right in the middle of your space waiting for a fight to happen at the other end of eve they won't be able to get there in a few moments and would force people to spread out around their empire to remove trouble makers.