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In defense of primetime: It ties SOV to fights very clearly. It says "We're on at this time and we either undock or get our **** reinforced." It also has absolutely nothing to do with blobbing. Large alliances are large alliances and have large numbers of people (duh) and therefore will have more people than smaller alliances at any given moment. No game mechanic other than one that breaks EVE will change this.

In agreement with your criticism: Invulnerable sov 20 hours a day is not ideal in my opinion. Currently I see 2 different ideas on how to alter this mechanic:

1. Sliding window based on alliance size. Larger alliances have larger windows where their structures are vulnerable and smaller ones have smaller windows to defend.

2. Sliding difficulty. The further away from primetime it gets, the harder it is to reinforce a structure. This difficulty could take the form of longer reinforce times (Sov Lazer has to cycle for longer) or any number of other ideas and mechanics.

The bottom line is that people, like you and I, want there to be smaller entities holding space. If we want that then we have to want some form of the primetime mechanic. Expecting a small group to be able to cover all timezones is simply not going to happen and they will lose their space.

If only CCP would invest the time it took to write this blog, never mind come up with all the sov changes, into updating missions they would get a lot more toons playing....... This is the newest gift to nullbears, among a long list of gifts over the years, to only get a, BWWWAAAAAA that is not what we wanted thread.

Personally, I do not see this as being a viable long term solution.

Yes the current Sov system has creaked and groaned for 6 years, but if all I need to do is plex 10 more than you ... how does this help a small 3-4oo man alliance vs the current superblobs?

Unused space is unused for a reason, it is bolloxs. The Anom nerf made most -0.5 space pointless to occupy [I will add a rider here, yes you can still mine]. If anything I am certain the superblobs would LOVE fresh meat to take these systems ... more Brave newbies to farm.

Ultimately this is a griefers system, small groups of disaffected or bitter-vet(tm) can mess around with sov in unused systems but when it comes down to it they will not have the stamina or numbers to plex their way to victory.

It doesnt work like this. Let me explain.
Party "A" is holding sov, party "B" wants to take it. "B" moves to a staging system near region "R". "A" creates a dummy alliance, puts all sov in region "R" into this dummy and sets its prime to the weakest time zone of "B".
Weaponized boredom, as thay called it.

Dummy alliance gets promptly rolled because they need to have active members within the alliance to actually use the entosis links in defence. Big daddy alliance's links count as hostile for the purposes of capturing/RFing.

Edit: and or mercs from the right TZ can be hired to assist in flipping it to Freeport status at which point the TZ war is inconsequential.

The prime time mechanic disproportionately favors small groups on defense, not large ones. TZ coverage is just another form of force projection, like jump distance. Fatigue nerfed force projection in space, prime time nerfs force projection in time. The ONLY people suffering from this change are large groups with complete TZ coverage now. They will no longer have the same scale of force projection that they are used to.

The prime time TZ mechanic only effectively comes into play when first trying to reinforce a structure with E-links. It simply prevents a larger group from reinforcing things belonging to small groups "at their leisure"; instead they can ONLY do it if they have local dominance in the prime time TZ of the smaller defending group, where they should be at their strongest. The TZ aspects of the contest after structures come out of reinforcement is basically unchanged from the current stront system (though the mechanics of control nodes ALSO tend to disproportionately favor small groups on defense for reasons not related to TZ).

TZ coverage is still an important part of control node contests, since they go on indefinitely until resolved. A close control node tug of war can be won simply by staying online longer than your opponent, so TZ coverage does not becomes totally irrelevant.

Any idea that small groups currently can use TZ's to their advantage against large groups is basically a strawman borne out by exactly 0 real world examples of this happening in practice.

In short, the TZ coverage thing is being blown way out of proportion. It doesn't actually change that much at all. The biggest impact, frankly, is in the ability for mutli-TZ alliances to coexist internally, and I think proposals in this thread about allowing alliances to set prime time by constellation or something along those lines would probably be reasonable ways to address that.

where can i buy those interceptors with 250km lock range btw?

That's exactly what I'm talking about. With strontium, attacker at least has some influence on exit timer. You can either reinforce it unusually early and get a timer in 01am instead of 03am. Or you can kite the timer to get it in the evening instead of at downtime. Both of this tricks work in POS warfare, and work more or less tolerable.

The problem with the Entosis trolling isn't that it cannot be countered. It can. The famous "trollceptor" can all be countered by a Rifter with a T1 Entosis link orbiting the structure at 5 km, freezing the timer.

The problem is that countering Entosis trolling is so boring gameplay that you'll wish you'd still be grinding stations in Drakes. Either a mobile group needs to run up and down in the region whacking moles, or every system needs to have guards who just do nothing (or mine/rat at the keyboard) for 4 hours and respond to the ping. If they fail, everyone yell at them because 2 days later 10 nodes needs to be captured. If they win every time, they spent 4 hours of their lives at the keyboard with a handful of trivial killmails.

Again: 4 hours of focused gameplay and practically no result. At least you could watch TV between reloads with the Drake.

The attacker should commit something worth killing, so the defenders - if did their job well - go home with a nice killboard.

I like both of these ideas. The primetime thing is the only aspect of concern because there is a very large EU presence in my alliance so with only 4 hours I see it impossible to make everyone in the alliance happy for a prime time. Particularly because I am on Mountain time (-7) so by the time I'm getting home from work all the EU TZ guys are mostly getting ready for bed.