Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I've heard a lot of different ideas on how to stop capital and titan bridge force projection. So I thought I'd share my take on it.

Capitals need to spool up before they can jump, similar in effect to the Micro jump drive. The time this takes is up for debate and could be decreased with skills. If the cyno is destroyed before the spool up is complete then the jump is aborted. Titan bridges would work similarly and would require a spool up before normal operations. Any jump attempt would consume all the cap needed to make the jump and half of the fuel upon activation, and the rest once the jump is made.

Covert cyno's should have a very short or none existent spool up.


WHY:

The time delay makes direct force projection a risky subject, as your cyno could die before the fleet can jump, leaving their caps energy dry and some fuel short. Moving capital and subcap fleets via cyno jumps would take more planning and care.

This would also create a way to blockade enemy jump freighter logistics, something that almost cant be done right now from what I understand.

This change would also re-enforce the roam aspect of the game. Because for a lot of groups now, its a gang siting on a titan and one person is roaming/baiting.


Thank you for reading, please leave constructive comments.

If I can spool up my jump drives before the cyno is lit.... this will prevent hotdropping and give your poor hobo rifter broskies more time to gtfo how exactly?

Yes, this can be the case, but most hotdrops are just ways of getting grossly easy kills.

Just the other day my alliance mates and I were flying in a small gang (8 or so) and had just killed a HAC and were chasing another two pilots of the same alliance. When we engaged on the gate, we were dropped by about 30 oracles and 20 other support ships. The lag was enough that I didn't even have a chance of getting out.

Yes, you could argue that our 8 man fleet was over-powered to take on the 3 pilots, but they were in our own blue space and were eradicating them for the purpose of keeping industry characters safe.

I believe titan jump bridges were originally designed to bridge a support fleet into a battle before the titan followed.

A 5 or 10 second spool up (for a standard jump portal at least) would definitely not impact on the way that the mechanic is designed to work in the first place), but still give a chance for both the dropping pilots to get small-scale kills and small fleets the chance to get away (provided they are smart enough to be prepared).

(In before 20,000+ pilot alliance members calling me a carebear for hating inbalanced hot-drops. I'm sure they'd be whinging too if they weren't the ones getting the easiest kills in the game - drop, lock, shoot)

+1

Devs already said hotdropping was emergent, cyno lockdown was originally meant to counteract exactly this, but didn't work. It was exploitation of game mechanics design flaw that was allowed to go on for a long time, and now taken as granted. The result was deterioration of small gang pvp meanwhile.

Still, it's somewhat unfair to fix it after so long, after ppl had already built titans specifically for hotdropping and nothing else.

A additional side affect from a jump drive spool up have come to mind since I posted.

If enough prior planning or intel was provided it would be possible to stop a hot drop attack from its source as well as from the cyno it's self.

Example: you know your enemy undocks their cap fleet from a station 10 jumps away. You send a small team to harass them and keep pointing them, stopping them from jumping to finish bashing your tower.




In response to the "this will not save roaming comment".

No, but it would be a great start. My corp does lots of roaming, by choice mind you, and I can tell you that removing the insta hot drop would be better for everyone, even the hot droppers in many cases.



And no you would not be able to spool up prior to locking onto the cyno, don't be silly.