EVE General Discussion

How do you think the changes you suggest would make EVE better?

0.0 would be depopulated, with the possible exception of systems within a few jumps of empire gateways, and maybe NPC 0.0 with good empire access like Syndicate and Curse.

Traffic through low-sec would also therefore fall to zero.

Most of 0.0 players have no interest in being forced to live in empire, and large numbers of them would simply leave the game. Including their empire production, R&D, mission and mining alts.


All this seems like a rather high price to pay for some weird purity-test nostalgia for aspects of EVE in 2004 that are gone and will never ever come back no matter what you do.

Nullsec is shockingly deficient in low-end minerals. Obviously you're unaware of this, but even after the high-end ore buff planned in odyssey, there isn't going to be nearly enough trit and pyer and especially not enough mexallon in 0.0 anoms.

Really I think you need to educate yourself on what the actual problems of 0.0 manufacturing are before you make any more suggestions about it.

I think definitely something needs to be done about cynos and jump drives, they are far too powerful. Completely scrapping them I feel is definitely not the way to go as would throw a massive spanner in the works of how the game currently works in more areas than simply supply and logistics.

The description of being able to attack transport and freighters need to be bought back though. Transporting stuff into null sec should be be risky and open to attack. At the same time Malcanis is correct, industrial activities in null sec should be given a big buff which is what they are doing, along with making the industrialist open to attack, which is again what they seem to be doing. That way alliances will have to decide how to supply their alliance, either through local production, or importing by freighters, or a mix of both. Right now importing is virtually risk free whilst local industrialism is as hard as hell.

Then please explain all those dead Jump Freighters. You do realise that even if the JF pilot is in a NPC corp, that he's actually a 0.0 alt, right?

I'm not saying there is zero risk, but just virtually zero risk. I think it would be difficult to be killed if you do everything correctly, so those pilots achieved quite a feat by managing to die. I would be interested in the circumstances of their deaths.

OK so a jump freighter can't cyno directly into hi-sec. It has to jump into a lo-sec system and then use gates to get to Jita (or whichever other trade hub). After loading up at the trade hub, it might have to take a few hi-sec gates to get within cyno range of the lo-sec midpoint. From there it can jump into 0. Or depending on the route, it may be able to cyno directly from Jita.

If the JF pilot is in a player corp, then they can obviously be wardecced, and you'd be appalled at how many JFs empire wardec corps harvest.

Even if the pilot isn't in a player corp, JFs can still be suicide ganked relatively easily, and this is also surprisingly common.

And remember: this is a 6.5 billion ISK hull, not to mention the value of the cargo, with no slots and no defences other than its hitpoints. It's slow and clumsy. If they were routinely killable in the way that, say, a 3 million ISK Iteron V is, then they'd be useless.

If you have for example a 10% chance of losing your JF (let's say it's holding 3.5B worth of cargo, bringing the total loss to 10 billion ISK), then that makes the average cost of a trip to empire a billion ISK each way, plus whatever the fuel is. Obviously you're going to make pretty damb sure that your risk is a lot less than 10%. People don't fly JFs like they're T1 cruisers, nor is it a problem that they don't.

In short: what makes you think they're "too safe". How safe would be "just right"?

He's not being condescending (yet lol), he's utterly destroying your argument. You're leaving so many variables out (on purpose it seems) that Malcanis could drive a Dread through the gaps. I mean seriopusly, you're demonstrating that you don't really know what you are talkign about (example "the minerals will cost the same"...minerals you can't get in null sec?).

Malcanis is illustrating a point I've made several times in this thread: the shear incredible amount of changes needed to the game to make any of this nostalgic "attack the convoy! Ho!" crap would would probably involve so much dev time and game reworking that that it would probably be cheaper and faster for CCP to make a whole new game called "Space Convoy Attack" than do in any of the things people are suggesting.

Things do need to change, but the need to change in a reasonable way and CCP need knowledgeable advice from players for that to happen. "Force null sec players to use crappy industry" is not reasonable advice.



And, just to add, Malcanis sucks (there, now no one can accuse me of Malcanese Jock Riding ) .

To me that Is still far to safe. We both know the only real way to kill them is to suicide gank in high sec, which is rarely worth it if the freighter pilot is smart and doesn't load up on PLEX's or some other such item which has no business being transported in a freighter. They are completely immune when travelling through null sec and low if the freighter pilots uses friendly pos bubbles.

Assuming cynos and bridges were nerfed, the benefit would be that you wouldn't have to make freighter runs between null and hisec. You make the stuff there, you use the stuff there.

I'd be in favour of null being able to improve facilities to compete with hisec, but the costs should be absolutely massive, both in terms of time, ISK and effort. Hisec has the backing of long established empires, they can afford to build facilities almost as they please. But null alliances aren't really empires in the same way, they're kind've newcomers on the scene. I'd love it if they could work their way up to that level, but it can't be something that an alliance just sinks an insignificant amount of ISK into and then bingo, they can compete with say, the Amarr Empire. The effort it takes should reflect that infrastructure projects on that kind of scale can only really be done when people are invested in a common cause and are bonded by years of a common culture and vision for the future. It can't be a case of "oh, cool, I sold those 5 Typhoons, I'm going to use that ISK to pay for 300 more manufacturing slots and a new 99.9% efficient refinery".

What's your "desired goal" exactly?

Look, there are two major obstacles to 0.0 industry

(1) Lack of capacity. We've covered this and I think that everyone's pretty much on the same page here. Null needs a shedload more slots because outposts are pathetic.

(2) Higher TCP (Total cost of production). Hi-sec industry gets so many effective subsidies that even with the improvement in capacity, 0.0 industry is still heavily disadvantaged in efficiency.

Now there are some things that we can do to help improve 0.0 efficiency, like for instance make Amarr outposts produce more quickly (effectively give them a PE bonus), so that a given player in 0.0 can produce more than he would be able to in hi-sec. But the unpleasant fact is that the sheer weight of subsidies that hi-sec manufacturing gets may have to be balanced with eg: an increase in station fees or some other cost balancing effect. This is made even more unpleasant, because hi-sec people are often unaware of the extra costs that 0.0 players pay - for instance sov bills are a lot of ISK. Goonswarm Federation pays a couple of hundred billion ISK per month on those bills, for instance.

It's basically impossible to compete with people who get free invulnerable stations that are also virtually free to use when you don't get those things.

I ran some numbers from Akita T's spreadsheet on how much it would cost to buy enough Amarr outposts to replicate the production capacity of hisec: assuming 30 billion ISK for an outpost, a cyno jammer POS, TCU and Hub, and 1 billion ISK per month for the sov fees and POS fuel: 40 trillion ISK, plus 1.4 trillion per month. And that's just for the production slots.

That magnitude of subsidy is, as others in this thread have noted, effectively impossible to compete with.