EVE General Discussion

[UPDATE] Some good discourse going on, I've added a few more prompt questions some others have come up with, lets keep the discussion going. [ENDUPDATE]

Sure, you can sometimes get small gang fights in wormholes, or in lowsec or faction war, but small gang PvP still suffers overall of being too risky for the reward in most cases.

So, some questions to think about...

Should small gangs be able to harass larger gangs in such a way that it's difficult to catch and kill the small gang?

Should small gangs have VIABLE objectives in sov warfare?

Should small gangs be able to "raid" resources from other, larger entities? (Pretty sure a dev mentioned this idea somewhere)

Should CCP consider buffing speed across the board for cruiser and smaller hulls? (It's been a long time since the nano nerf, and there are PLENTY of counters players can bring in the form of ships for countering speed, it just requires some forethought on behalf of those forming their fleets).

[UPDATE]

Should local be changed, or possibly removed, from 0.0 and/or lowsec? (Russell Casey), (Lin Fatale)

Should there be another jump bridging method besides Titans and Black Ops (and static Jump Bridge POS arrays), with limited capabilities? Could the Black Ops bridge concept possibly be expanded upon? (Russell Casey)

Should hot drops, especially Titan bridge hot drops, be nerfed somehow? (Rhinanna), (Tres Farmer)

[ENDUPDATE]


If there are any more good prompt questions people come up with, I'll edit the OP and give credit where due. If I use your idea, I probably won't use a direct quote, I will paraphrase your idea to keep the questions relatively simple to engender discussion.

Personally, I'd love to see a resurgence of small gang activity. Sadly, I think some gameplay changes really need to take place before it's particularly viable, so let's try to have a constructive discussion about what needs to be done.

What needs to happen? People need to grow balls, thats it.

ITS A GAME FFS. I've never known any other game create such aversion to risk. So what if you die horribly and get everyone else killed? Noone will remember by tomorrow and they'l all have new, identical ships.

The idea that internet spaceships and e-reputation are serious business is what killed this game. So much weight placed on death that people will avoid it at all costs.

AT ALL COSTS.

It's pathetic.

Yes, absolutely - there has to be one single advantage of bringing the smaller gang. A small gang of comparable ships and pilots should always be killed by the larger gang, but right now, there's no point at all to bring fewer members, which leads to the terrible amount of blobbing and blueballing in eve.




Imho no - Taking over sov should always involve heavier machinery and huge fleet fights.




Absolutely - small gangs need a purpose - raidable moonmining arrays would require alliances to actuqally populate their space to keep it profitable - otherwise they'll get robbed until there's nothing left.

Small gangs never really had a purpose to begin with - fielding them was always an end in itself. Other than e-peen-stroking (killmails), there never was any profit to be made and no strategic goal to be achieved.



No - BS are already too gimped for my taste.




Same here - blobs are for brainless sheep who enjoy ctrl+clicking their fleet broadcast window and hitting F1 repeatedly - that's killmail-mining, not pvp.

Remove killmails.

No killmails = less incentive to just join a blob and pad your killboard = less people doing that = more small gang PVP.

Oh nearly forgot: Which will jsut exponentially increase lag because of even more stuff the Physicsengine needs to calculate? It sounds nice in theory, but in practice we got ALOT of factors deciding about winning and losing in PvP. Adding more will add more variety but more loag as well.

1) Local needs to change. Doesn't have to be delayed, but it needs to be harder to identify a small gang than just scrolling down and seeing what color everybody is. Small gangs will know who's in their fleet, but large gangs or even busy trade hubs with a high population count won't know there's enemies among them until it's too late. And that's really what a small force is meant to do in warfare, separate from a larger force and pick off stragglers, disrupt logistics, eliminate the enemy's ability to supply themselves and generally sow confusion so the big force has an easier time. They can also gank the enemy's unprotected carebears to hurt their isk income.

2) A bridging option without a POS or a titan. Again, they have to be able to infiltrate and outmanuever larger forces and hit an enemy empire's soft underbelly (which in EVE would be the carebears who can't even deal with AFK cloakers) in order to hurt an enemy alliance's income (again, if you gank their carebears, you gank their war machine).

3) Ways to flip a system without a huge POS-bash and long-ass timers and the ability to take down moon mining arrays not adequately guarded. There has to be something that makes a small gang a legitimate threat so the larger force will even bother to chase them. Otherwise they'll be ignored. And also, make it easier to gank unprotected carebears and hurt their enemey's income.

4) Easier ways to gank an enemy's carebears/bots if they're unprotected and thus hurt their income.

Yes, I'm picking on carebears because anyone who's played an RTS will tell you that when you get raiders into an enemy's base the FIRST thing you kill are his workers, farmers, builders, transports, etc because it hurts his abiltiy to build combat units and forces him use the ones he does have to protect his economy. That's what null really is: a giant game of Starcraft. Kind of sucks being an SCV or a zergling, don't it? Which is why I don't live there.

And if you say EVE is completely different from Starcraft, didn't the DRF just win 0.0 by spamming (upgraded) Carriers?

Small gangs can take on big fleets, they just need the nuts to try.

no because that breaks away from eve online being a single shard server

Small gang pvp is no-where near dead, its just rarer in sov 0.0.

The biggest problem with small gang pvp is the hot-drop. You engage any enemy who owns a titan, anywhere near their space and there is a good chance there is a gang twice the size of your waiting at the other end of a titan bridge.

Simply put, the titan bridge should be a out of combat method of transfer for ships to keep up with their cap fleet, not to jump in on top of the enemy, same with any cyno TBH (apart from covert cyno)

Either make using a titan bridge use 100% of your cap, or put a delay on using it from when the cyno is popped. This would at least reduce the casulties from the gang getting dropped on, or allow them a chance to kill the cyno ship before they can gate too much in.

Some ideas off the top of my head


Targets small gangs can harass that have the reward either in killmails, disruption of services and/or griefing or isk value in dropped items or isk bounties.

Must be mobile in nature so as to allow hit and run tactics instead of attacking stationary defenses like POSs or outposts are currently. Grinding away at shooting structures sucks. Make it akin to incursions with some sort of payout as well as the ability to disrupt services for a set time. Let the time disturbance be based on how much dps is put on target. Let the dps on target per ship be a factor. Like incursions where theres a sweet spot for rewards and payouts let it drop quickly for if more ships are added. Let this be a payout and dps modifier.

Allow for black ops or small raid style tactics. Allow for fleet survivability by making the disruptions small, effective, possibly lucrative, and have meaning both in the individual sense as well as the greater tactic sense.

Randomize the spawn locations every so often so as to not allow a set defense, but more a active system defense.

Has to both reward the pilots for their efforts economically and socially targeting player groups in the 4-8 ship category


Shields would either regen naturally, or a beacon to the sov owners would illuminate after a set amount of time that there is no dps being put on target and be reppable to restore services to systems or pay a few based on the hps needed to restore service immediately. This isk could go into a kitty for a random drop towards a fleet attacking the service. Sort of a slot machine random drop aspect. This way we can avoid the boring grind of repping shields on yet another structure, given an incentive to the players to attack these things and allow isk to be used to "defend" resources.

Targets to include things like Customs offices, Jump bridges, cyno jammers, moon mining arrays, infrastructure upgrades.