Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You clearly havnt done much with Dominion sov.

The new system is actually pretty damn good. The fun parts are more fun and the unfun parts now go faster for everyone except people with 50 super carriers to grind with.

"Trollcepters" were hilariously ineffective in the playtests on Duality. Once borders contract to used space and the whiney scrubs have their directors/FCs tell them what ships to use a lot of their issues go away.

The speed limit I'm fine with.

The number of nodes and capture time being reduced so drastically I'm not sure about. Seems like fights will get a lot more swingy in favor of whoever can get started first. Which could be good, could be bad I guess.

Shy of adding sentry guns to stations, iHubs, and TCU there will always be some number of pilots able to "troll" attack your space thanks to the switch away from HP structure grinds. And if you dont go out and defend against them no amount of passive recharge is going to help you.

In the prior system, attackers could warp at will. Now at least you have a chance to catch and kill them. You will never again have the chance to sit back and ignore them, knowing full well that your safety is built on so many hit points that a non 0.0 apex force attacker would have to burn themselves out of EVE and take a day off work to actually affect you.

H. T. F. U. (or hire mercenaries to be hard for you ;) )

EDIT: The main thing this system needs, just as Dominion needed, is a sov transfer function so peaceful transfers of sov can be conducted quickly and easily. But I'm sure CCP's keenly aware of this and said tweak will occur.

Any C-team FC is going to use a scout, and smartbombs are easy to avoid with perches. I also specifically mentioned smartbombs as the only realistic counter, and they're hardly consistent enough to be considered a counter.

How does this speed cap of 4000m/s stop interceptors from just offlining the module and gong full speed again? They've always been offline the module to gain their mobility and speed back so I don't see how this is any different

I'm not positive but the reduction could be if you have it fitted, whether its online or not makes no difference.

The funny thing is Troll Ceptors aren't the most broken thing, it's 500mn Strategic Cruisers

not really if you want to go in a fleet of t3d you should be able to...

but if you want to go in with one ship that is where you should have a good chance of being caught.

That is why i have proposed making capture structures, outposts, ihubs and tcu have a chance to use a 75km scram and web.

This will make it so if a trollceptor tries to attack my outpost i simply undock in a insta thrasher and pop him.

Also with this mechanic and without looking at whats going to happen to capitals i would like to see the return of the option for the structure grind once you pass the first reinfoce timer.

basically you have to e-link the outpost or tcu or ihub and it goes into reinfoce mode. when it comes out you have to capture the capture stuctures in the constalation and that will then cause the second timer which will deactivate the shields...

since there are no shields left you can now shoot the structure... but at the same time there will still be caputre events... so you have to choose try and grind the structure or capture the annoms... or try both...

that way you can have a b-r like fight again.

A comment and a clarification:

1. I really appreciate the commitment to keep working on this; even if I'm skeptical of this approach, that statement alone was worth the full price of admission of the post. Thanks.
2. How do webs interact with the speed limit? Say, for example, an "attacker" starts with a ship that normally would have gone 8 km/s; they fit an entosis link on it, and it's speed is capped to 4 km/s. It's entosising a TCU, and a Huginn with a fed navy web lands and applies a 50km 60% web to it. Does its speed drop to 3200 m/s (8km/s * 40%) or 1600 m/s (4km/s * 40%)?

I'm saying this as nicely as possible. Fozziesov is a broken and fundamentally flawed system. No amount of tweaking will ever make it work as well as either of the two previous sov systems.

Fozziesov is not engaging for the average fleet member, who has to wait around while the magical sov hackers do all the work. Under Dominion sov, your average fleet member got to contribute via DPS, and at least got killmails at the end.

Fozziesov is not fun for a sov defender, who has to race to defend buffer zones from entities who have no intention of actually taking your space, or holding it, or even using it.

It's not fun to chase interceptors around. This has also been a problem as far back as since interceptors recieved bubble immunty which was also one of the worst design decisions in the history of Eve.

Fozziesov lacks permanence. Under Dominion sov, losing a system was potentially, for all intents and purposes, permanent. It could potentially fall into a timezone from which you would never be able to take it back. Under Fozziesov, you can lose systems and take them back later. Losing your space therefore has far less value. There is less on the line.

Since losing space has less value, fewer people give a **** about their space. This is readily apparent in the mass exodus from nullsec.

Fozziesov discourages fighting because it does not force an entity to control a grid in order to win an objective. Ironically, this was one of the stated goals of the system. It discourages fighting because there is no need to commit anything more to win an objective than a single sovhacker.

Any fleet that splits itself to cover multiple nodes, and protect multiple sovhackers, will fall prey to a fleet that maintains coherency, and rolls as one large group winning multiple small fights. It's therefore in the best interest of a defender to not engage, to retain a "fleet-in-being" to discourage an attacker from splitting up. By preventing an attacker from splitting up, he can therefore maximize the tedium on part of the attackers.

Dominion sov, at least, forced both the attacker and defender to commit to a grid to fight over an objective, no matter how adamant the defending FC was at attempting to blueball the attackers. There was always a final timer, and the defender must show up for it in force, or lose.

Fozziesov's focus on the "small entities" detracts from the immense amount of organization that has gone into the maintenance of large space empires. The idea that small, disorganized entities should have an easier time defending their space, or advantages when attacking someone else's, is contrary to the concept of "effort vs reward".

This blind focus on the "small entities" has also directly lead to far fewer large fights in Nullsec, and indeed, the need for them. Large fights, large wars, large empires, and large fleets, have always been far greater content producers than small gangs, or "small entities".

Large fleets make stragglers, targets for small gangs to catch, and reasons for industrialists to build things.

Large wars involve thousands of players, given them reasons to log in, reasons to fight, and reasons for large battles involving mass destruction of ships to occur.

Large empires drive a metagame that is not found in any other game in the world, and provide organizations and structures which unite large numbers of players and provide a support network for new ones, and causes and reasons for older ones to log in.

Eve's metagame has been the number one driver of content for the game. The metagame produces headlines, the metagame produces new players.

Fozziesov, and the focus on "small entities", aims to systematically destroy all of these, and, by extension, destroys a large part of why we play Eve at all.

Despite the focus on "small entities", Fozziesov heavily favors large entities with large numbers of people who are capable of providing extra ships to fit sovlasers to, and to rat and keep up ADMs.

The ADMs of Fozziesov aim to restrict the size of a space empire on the concept of "occupancy sov". In hindsight, "occupancy sov" was a misguided and flawed concept. The size of a space empire should not be limited to the amount of space it can utilize, but by the military pressure exerted by the other players and their space empires.

Entosis Links, the cornerstone of Fozziesov, are a major contributor to the flaws of Fozziesov, and are also a fundamentally flawed concept that should never have been implemented.

The idea of a "magical space laser" that determines whose flag is planted in space is, even on it's face, a laughable concept. We dumped millions of skillpoints into combat skills for a reason.

Citadels, which so-far look like a good re-work of POS/Stations, are greatly hamstrung in their potential because of their reliance on Entosis Link mechanics.

The issue of "trollceptors" is a direct result of Entosis Links. The EHP grind of Dominion sov, and of POS, was an inherent inhibitor of "troll" tactics. Higher DPS ships inherently cost more money. EHP grinds were, by design, inherently conducive to risk-reward concepts. To effect a change in sov, you needed to commit.

This commitment was a major driver of conflict. When a sov war occured, it was a big deal.

EHP grinds may not has been that much fun, but that wasn't the point. Eve was never a "fun" game. Eve inherently is incapable of being a "fun" game. Designing Eve to compete vs other video games is a futile effort, as other games that are designed to be "fun" games will easily outcompete Eve on fun.

Eve has always been the "serious business" game. For all the tedium of Dominion sov, thousands upon thousands of us were willing to harden the **** up and deal with it, because it had permanence, because it had a high bar.

The only solution to the problems of Fozziesov is to scrap the whole thing, return to Dominion sov, and iterate upon a proven system.

Holy wall of text batman!

(he's right though)

I love it. CCP is putting out the fire with petrol.