Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This proposal obviously is an answer to the Dev Blog: Long-Distance Travel Changes Inbound.

I developed the ideas to this proposal while reading and thinking over the comments thread to this dev blog and in fact I already posted an earlier version of them there.
Unfortunately this thread is so full of tears and people repeating the same things over an over and flaming each other (on more than 280 pages as of now) that serious proposals get lost completely.

As I believe that I do have to offer some ideas worth considering I decided to create this proposal and I hope that is not against any forum rules.
Please discuss my proposal in this thread and not the Long-Distance Travel Changes Inbound Dev Blog itself.


The core of my proposal is quite simple: remove jump drives from EVE completely.

That of course requires some explanations :)

Coming from the perspective of a logistics pilot I initially was quite upset about the upcoming nervs to jump freighters.
Then someone on the dev blogs comments forum linked the following blog post: CCP Greyscale's Vision.
I do not know if that bloggers interpretation of CCP Greyscale's vision is correct and the blogger clearly thinks that it is a horrible vision.
Despite these facts the described vision was somehow inspiring to me.
Suddenly I found myself thinking "wow such an eve universe would be fun".
With this in mind I re-thought my feelings towards the long-distance travel changes and that resulted in my proposal here.

I do still think that the announced changes are bad though I do share the underlying vision.
With these changes we will have the fact that doing logistics with jump freighters will be a pain in the ass.
Compared to that doing logistics with normal freighters through gates is much smoother and ... well maybe even fun :)
But still having the temptation of a (would-be) save transportation method via jump freighters will most probably induce me to do the boring stuff ruining my own gameplay fun.
Thus having jump drives removed entirely feels somewhat like a relief compared to the currently by ccp proposed solution.
Better make a clear cut (even if it hurts) than letting people suffer :)

Maybe instead of giving jump drives to the tech II freighters give them bonuses that give them a fair chance to escape at least smaller gate camps (stronger warp cores?, bubble immunity?, maybe cloaking?).

Similar thoughts also apply to capital jump drives in my opinion.
The announced changes make traveling with jump drives annoying.
Why not again make a clear cut and be maybe even a bit more consequent?

• remove all jump drives from eve
• allow capitals to jump through gates - except titans!
• make titans maybe even more powerful than they are but make them pure mobile defense platforms that are built in a system to defend it and are not able to leave the system at all.
• allow titans to still open jump portals for other ships (but not themselves)
• retain the covert jump portal generators for black ops ships as they are
• remove cynos from the game - both jump portal generators will be able to open a portal to any system within range
• introduce a 24 hour cooldown timer for any pilot who jumped through a jump portal (no complicated math)
• implement the changes to clones as announced in the dev blog

I do know these are radical ideas but take your time to think them over and keep in mind: changes to long distance travels will be coming - wouldn't my proposals be clearer and less annoying after all?

Please support if you like my ideas.

agreeing everything else than titans and jump portals. Taht is bad idea.. imagine 100 titans in system camping a gate? sounds balanced right? and if black ops could jump any system in their range without cyno would be too op. think about 100 cloaky T3s in your ass with no warning?

Its so broken it wouldnt be funny at all.

aakkonen

This actually would be not much of a difference to today as cov ops use covert cynos that you can not detect.
The only warning you get now is the cyno opener appearing in local chat and as we all know local chat is an issue on its own ;)

Plus: because of the 24 h cooldown on using jump portals a fleet will not be able to chain-jump so they will first have to travel to a system within jump-portal-range to their target system (the system you are in) using gates.
That applies even more to the titan jump portals as your enemy's would first have to build a titan in a system close enough to yours to use its portal generator to jump a fleet to you.

And finally of course jump portal generator max range is subject to discussion :)


Thought of that problem too but again: can also happen today and allowing titans to use gates would not eliminate that problem.
On the contrary I do believe that building 100 titans in a system is a bigger barrier than flying 100 of them to a system.

Imagine an alliance with sov over 100 systems ... if they wanted to protect every one of them with 100 titans in my scenario they would have to build 10,000 of them. With titans being able to move from one system to another they only need 100 of them and can move them wherever they need them.

However I do admit that such a scenario would be thinkable and the problem would be that you as an attacker would not be able to bring in counter-titans and you would have to eliminate the titans with large fleets of smaller capitals capable of using gates or jump portal generators.
Question is would that really become a problem?
If you think that is the case suggestions for solutions are of course welcome :)

Well to make that clear: the titan part of my proposal is not the important part to me.

It is just because titans are so big that the imagination of a titan jumping through a portal (as announced in the dev blog) seems completely hilarious to me from a "keep things realistic" point of view ...

Also I do think my idea would create some quite interesting conflict potential just as you wrote, FR8 Actor.
- strongly defended core regions of an alliance with lots of titans in systems
- weaker buffer zones around the outer regions of their territory
- enemies having to fight their way system by system to the heart of a hostile empire instead of jumping right into it
- people trying to build titans secretly in systems within jump portal range of systems they want to attack
- people tying to prevent other people from building a titan in a system
and so on.

But after all the "get rid of jump drives" stuff is the important part of my proposal and I could accept titans jumping through portals if people insist :)

no. I support CCP's proposed changes. They are a fair middle ground between what we have now and your extreme polar opposite idea.

You take it way too far.

Did you even read your link Mord Fiddle? Here is the money quote,



In other words, CCP has a balancing act: make the game interesting and with content but not go so far that nothing can effectively get done and people just go play another game. Even Greyscale gets that...barely.

So, no. Yes in the great old days people would do freighter convoys in and out of null sec. Thing is that was back in the old days, we have a different game now and unless you make other changes to the game, possibly very drastic changes we probably can't go back to those days.

Nobody really wants to run convoy ops. Not really. How do I know tihs? We can run them right now. But nobody wants to because nobody does.

And trust me, if the changes go through as they currently are things will look very different on the map.

Edit:

And let me clarify: In those great and awesome old days, people did convoys because they had to, not because they wanted too. As soon as somebody figured out how to use carriers crammed with industrials which in turn were kitted out to be crammed with loads of stuff the convoys stopped.

Technological advancement is awesome. It is awesome because is gives you more free time...for time to do...gasp fun stuff like roaming.

Now one can legitimately argue that roaming is not frequent enough and also not very fun (50 jumps and seeing nothing) and that it is likely due to hot dropping--i.e. jump drives. But here is the thing....nobody hot drops in a JF. Ever. And they never ever will unless JFs get some serious re-working. So jump drives on JFs is not really the issue, IMO, with null stagnation. Thus, I think even the current nerf to JFs is too harsh.

More from Fiddler's Edge:



Note the highlighted part. If that indeed is Greyscale's vision of null that is something I have a huge problem with. The problem is making life in null a living hell means it is not fun to play in. What do we all love about null? Ships blowing up. But with an economic collapse we will be far, far more reluctant to let our ships blow up. Fights may very well become even less common. FCing has gotten to the point now where each side can, with some considerable degree of confidence, know what the outcome is likely to be. Given that even a T1 hull with T1 mods may become expensive in null FCs may op to stand down.



This is quite true. One of the problems with null and has never been fixed is that corporations and alliances have very limited means of dealing with various incentive problems in the terms of the game mechanics. So player organizations have come up with ways to solve those probelms on their own. And now, due to its own design failure, CCP is trying to change things...but they are myopically stuck staring at the mechanics they currently have vs. looking at ways to change things.

Let me also add that if you increase risk without increasing rewards you get less of the activity in question. I know some armchair economists will come in and try to argue this so I'll go pedantic mode here for you.

By increasing risks you are in essence increasing costs. Granted production costs themselves might not go up--i.e. building T2 gun X may not cost more than it previously did. And the price might indeed go up, maybe even alot. But what has changed is the probability of an sudden and catastrophic loss (e.g. a freighter of moon goo on its way to empire). On an expected cost basis, costs have just gone up...way up. So even thought you might look at that higher price and go, "Woot, I'll be rich." If you do it long enough you will suffer that catastrophic loss and there go all those profits.

So...do we want more activity in null....or less. If the answer is more, then you have to make that activity look more attractive not less.

This is one of the fundamental results of economics and it is pretty much indisputable: want more of something--then make is less expensive and/or more rewarding. Want less of it, then simply reverse that arrangement.

So, in my opinion, Greyscale's vision is very, very bad. I play this game to have fun, not engage in a living Hell.