EVE General Discussion

This!

As a CEO of a smaller PVP corp you guys really need to work something into the game that we can also fight over and gain income from.

I can't say I know much about moons, but I know enough to say the income from them is greatly imbalanced. As ceo of a smaller PVP corp that has no real interest in being a spoke in the wheel of some giant collation or part of some random alliance, we too need something worth while to fight over.

While I don't expect to hold something like a tech moon, there should be other resources we could fight over in the 500 to 1 bil isk/month range that bigger groups wouldn't be interested in.

You guys really need a way that local smaller groups can also move up the ranks being able to fight over smaller ISK sources.. There is the Customs Offices of course but those are very hit and miss on being worth it or not and with no defense it just becomes a full time job defending them if you have enemies in the area.

Simply a billion ISK a month would go a very long way for a smaller PVP corp like ours.

I think it would be the ulimate irony if the goons were successfully able to rid the game of miners, and then CCP changes tech to come from ring mining rather than moons.

Yes as pointed out by Nicolo, these moon goo miners (and others) would be in your alliance generating income for your alliance. I fully understand that anything and anyone will be shot on sight if they are not part of the flock.

I appreciate the CCP responses to this thread, as well as its mostly constructive discussion so far. I have one question for the CCP game design team:

What do you think about what I'd call the "traditional model" of a 0.0 alliance? Now, I can't speak for how things work in the south or east, but pretty much every alliance in the north works in a similar fashion. The alliance holds strategic assets (moons being by far the most important, then also POCOs and stations), which produce income to the alliance wallet. This wallet then funds ship replacement / ship sponsorship / capital / supercapital programs.

This means that the regular member in a reasonably well-run alliance will get their ship losses in PvP replaced by this alliance income. This means that I, as a member of an alliance, don't have to spend my time grinding NPCs or rocks for money, I can instead spend it fighting for my alliance - which is what I came to 0.0 to do.

If alliance-level income is nerfed to the point that it can't afford the ships needed to keep the alliance alive, the burden of making ISK falls down to the common grunts. I, as a busy person out of game, definitely don't have the time to spend shooting NPCs or shooting rocks or doing industry or whatnot to afford my ships. Neither I want to, I consider the vast majority of PvE content in EVE dull and repetitive. I prefer shooting other people in the face and taking their stuff.

Forcing alliances to tax their members and then use the taxes to buy ships doesn't solve the problem. It only means that the alliance will be redistributing the burden of the grind. If the "PvPer" in an alliance is to survive, someone else (or likely several people) will have to pay for their losses. I don't see a fair way of managing this that wouldn't result in a group of alliance members being exploited for their ISK.

And before anyone accuses me of wanting effort-free income, this is very far from the truth. Alliance (moongoo) income is by no means effort-free. Even now, in what I would consider peacetime, there is not a week without us having to fight to defend our moons. In an active war, moons are being attacked daily and frequently change owners. I would say that on average I spend as much time fighting for moons (and for sovereignty, and for CSAAs, and to just deter enemy fleets) as I would need to grind for money to afford my ships. The only difference is that I don't spend this time shooting NPCs, but shooting other people.

This aspect of EVE is what kept me attracted to it for the past three years. The fact that you can have a fully functional game without any of the background and content being provided by NPCs. As it stands now, the vast majority of my interaction with the game is player-driven. Our income as an alliance - which funds my ships - comes from bashing other players' towers, not from grinding NPCs. After a blanket moongoo removal with no comparable replacement for an alliance-level income, I don't see a way in which this type of gameplay could survive.

So here stands my question, is CCP aware of this "traditional model" of a 0.0 alliance? Do you want to support it, abolish it, or is it not a deciding factor in the process?

Thanks for any replies.

With the current model of moon mining it is absolutely impossible to avoid bottlenecking and "top-heavy" income. It simply cannot be done without throwing out the whole model.

Alchemize everything may do some work in this regard, by introducing more dynamic mineral supplies, I'd have to puzzle over that some.

Bottlenecking isn't necessarily bad, if it wasn't around a mineral that only appeared in 4-5 closely packed regions.

Bottlenecking basically means that you've got one or two mega-valuable moons and the rest are worthless. The goal of the Dominion rebalance was to try and shift some of the P/D value to other moons: so you'd have some valuable moons, some middling, and some covering fuel, and some worthless. Except whoever did it didn't understand how bottlenecking works so he just shifted it to tech by mistake.

It's not necessarally bad and I think p/d was good for the game, but if you want moon value to have something between 'worthless' and 'tech'. The only ones that are not completely worthless are neo/dysp, because neo is very close to tech in usage, and dyspro has no stockpiles that built up while it was the king mineral (unlike like most minerals) and is mostly used.

First off, I've never played out in sov null; only npc null. The OP's main objective it seems is to increase sov warfare. So here is an idea. So only one PCS per system? If that is the case, then why not introduce a mechanic where you can build more stations in a system provided you hold all the surrounding systems connected to that system? Kind of like how countries expanded throughout history. You conquer a land and then expand, as you conquer new land you fortify the land you initially took. This to me would increase sov warfare, but then again I've not dabbled much into that. Would this work?

Putting something like a comet full of moon goo into the current grav site mechanic shouldn't be too difficult to implement. Maybe even take it so far that the current industry upgrade system would allow you to have a better chance of getting a comet site, but not so far that getting a comet site is a sure thing.