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[Proposal] System security rating in Empire space should be dynamic
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Gizu Ichosira
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#1 - 2012-03-30 04:38:05 UTC
Think about the way a police force works in real life: there is a limited number of law enforcement officers who need to be allocated effectively to protect a large area, with the goal of reducing the total amount of crime as much as possible. They use crime statistics to identify 'hot spots' and then move more resources to those areas.

I propose that CONCORD should work like this. Within the fiction of the Eve universe the resources of CONCORD are limited, so they are forced to prioritise certain systems and neglect others. Wouldn't it be better if the system security ratings were adjusted regularly (ie. monthly) in response to the number of criminal acts being committed in each system?

For example: a 0.4 system that experiences frequent acts of piracy would be raised to 0.6, allowing CONCORD to respond to the threat. A 0.9 system that hasn't had a crime recently would be lowered to 0.7 to compensate.

I believe this would force the miners, carebears, traders and pirates to move around frequently if they want to stay in their comfort zone. The concept of avoiding low-sec will become a lot more difficult when system security status can change. Pirates and gate-campers will have to find new hunting grounds when CONCORD invades their favourite trade route choke-point. Mission runners will have to choose between finding a new agent in a safer system, or accepting the risk (and higher rewards) when their high-sec agent becomes a low-sec agent. Miners will be forced to explore new systems rather than sitting in the same safe belts day after day.

Comments?
Nekopyat
Nee-Co
#2 - 2012-03-30 18:22:16 UTC
I think in order for this to work they would need to first find a way to remove the stark line between high sec and low sec game behavior. If they could find some way to convert the safety into a more even continuum then having security status shifting would be a fun mechanic. Though that would mean they would also have to look at all the anchoring/cyno/cap rules too.

Still, I love the idea of space being a bit more dynamic.
Anshio Tamark
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#3 - 2012-03-30 20:13:23 UTC
I like the basic idea you're proposing, BUT...

Should it be updated frequently (every 15minutes? Every hour?) or would it just be calculated at downtime, which might accidentally make it last a bit longer? Personally, I think having it change at down-time would work out best, so you don't set a course for somewhere, and then suddenly one of the systems on your route becomes low-sec. That would just annoy haulers, while changing it at downtime might even be easily justified through lore. CCP would just need to say that CONCORD evaluates every empire-system once a day and updates security levels based on how many crimes they've responded to (the more crimes, the more people they station there. The more people they station there, the higher the security-level).
lachrymus
KarmaFleet
Goonswarm Federation
#4 - 2012-03-30 21:25:06 UTC
I like the idea in principle, but you need also to bear in mind that sec status also has an impact on resource levels in particular as well as the level of Concord policing, so you'd need to find a way of doing that in a fair and sensible way.
Herping yourDerp
Tribal Liberation Force
Minmatar Republic
#5 - 2012-03-30 23:51:04 UTC
in the current eve it wouldn't be worth trying to implement
Darvaleth Sigma
Imperial Security Hegemony
#6 - 2012-03-31 07:37:21 UTC
Anshio Tamark wrote:
I like the basic idea you're proposing, BUT...

Should it be updated frequently (every 15minutes? Every hour?) or would it just be calculated at downtime, which might accidentally make it last a bit longer?


If you updated it every day, not only is it a lot more work, but individual battles can change the sec status of an entire system because of the short time-frame. Essentially, with less data to go on, anomalies have a greater effect.

I think that the original proposed change-over time (ie: one month) would be much better here. It also makes the whole thing less crazy and anarchical, as players actually have a chance to move somewhere else (safer or riskier, depending on the player) before it all just jumps back again. If you changed it every day, we'd essentially have a situation where every hisec becomes lowsec, and every lowsec becomes hisec (as in hi people don't fight and in low they do) so then the next day the systems which had been high two days ago would become high again, as in the day before they were low and hence more fighting occurred there. Think of it a little like the VC and the Americans in Vietnam; whenever they took an area from the VC, they'd leave and the VC would just move back in.

No, I definitely think a daily update would be frankly ridiculous. A month is just right.

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