Jita Park Speakers Corner

Other names: neckicide or bottle-neckicide.

This is a proposal to change the philosophy of how resources in eve are made available from a principle of bottlenecks to a principle of diminishing returns with effort.

A bottleneck is a means CCP uses to help maintain a stable economy, by controlling supply. Either the amount of an item is limited, or how much of item A you get is limited by how much of item B you get. I propose instead that players be given more control over the situation, and the economy be kept in balance by making it progressively harder to get more of any one thing.

Example: The poster child of bottlenecks is moon materials. Once all the tech moons are being harvested, no amount of player effort will result in more Tech being harvested. To some extent the new extra reactions move us closer to the principle of diminishing returns. But its still bottle necked in that the total number of moons in the game is fixed. Ring mining as a replacement for moon mining may allow for a mechanic that has diminishing returns.

On the other side is pre-Odyssey ice mining where there is no bottle neck at all. And in a few days that changes to one of being bottle necked. Here I think CCP went overboard. Yes unlimited is bad, but so is a hard limit. The principle of diminishing returns with effort calls for soft limits.

Areas where the principle of diminishing returns is in place are ore mining and PI. In ore mining, easy mode is warp to your belt and mine. Its slightly harder when your belt is mined out and you got to go to another. Still harder if you entire system, or area is mined out and you got to go far afield, or blitz missions until you get a good mission belt.

With PI the more you harvest the more depleted the planet gets. But no matter what the harvesters will return more than zero. It never totally runs out.

A not too obvious bottleneck is salvage. At first you would think its not bottle necked as you can just do another mission and get more. But here the bottleneck is more subtle: Its in the type of salvage. There nothing you can do to get more of, say, armor plates at the expense of other types of salvage. The result is there are a few really high priced items and a big pile of junk. Now if pilots could do something like "Ill avoid targeting defensive systems so I get more armor plates even though that means I get far less of all other salvage types" the salvage bottleneck would be removed.

In the same vein is ore in Null. The ore spawns always have the same minerals. You got to mine them all out before you get another. The players cannot decide what resources they want to harvest, its spoon fed to them by the game.

Do you think what gets harvested should be determined by the players, or game mechanics? If you think the players should be making the decisions, support Bonkicide!

Rareness = conflict driver.

What you need to make sure of is that you don't end up with groups who it's nigh impossible to compete with, because of their control of that rare thing.

Oh hell yes.

I would love moon mining facilities to be open to raiding.

Maybe hackable, to get it to spew some of its contents (to then be stolen). Without having to get through a shield.

/Destroyable/ only with a timer, but raidable without, seems like a good mix.

Bottleneck materials should be available to all players.
With exploration being opened to everyone and made a lot easier, when will the newbie pilots have easy access to R64?

Shouldn't new pilots experience moon reactions and mining too?

Just remove moon mining from POS's and move it to MI (moon interaction) just like PI.
That will remove the majority of the bottleneck and allow new players to have a equal play.

Time ago, i suggested that bottleneck matherials should move across the map. Once harvested beyond a threshold in a part of the map, they would begin spawning elsewhere. That would keep space conquerors on the move and would add a lot more drama to null/low.

Just figure small entities A finding that worthy R64s are on their backyard and larger ones come after them. Or figure larger blocs whose R64s no longer are worth harvesting and must fight the neighbor to get some.

Maybe then they wouldn't bore to the point of messing with hisec, heh.

I was thinking about months, actually. Sure nullseccers could figure how long could take a war for a well defended valuable region, with a sov conquer system that made more sense than the current. Maybe 2 months to conquer + 4 to exploit it before it depletes? The point is, conflict drivers should keep moving goals away.

Only if the bottleneck materials are collected via the static structure model.

Let's imagine (for instance) a system where the Bottleneckium is found in semi-randomly spawned deadspace plexes. Certain areas of space have a relatively high frequency of them, others have a lower frequency. To get the bottleneckium, you have to find a bottleneckium plex and mine it, scoop it, kill bottleneckium carrying rats, or whatever. Some mechanic that requires having ships out in space doing stuff.

Small agile entities could theoretically go prospecting in the space belonging to a large sprawling entity, because even the biggest blocs like the CFC can't keep an eye on every system in their territory all the time.

Likewise small mono-TZ spaceholders would focus more tightly on their small area of space, but would be unable to prevent bottleneckium claim jumpers from filching the goodness from their space when they were doing so in an off-TZ, or if they turned up in superior force. But as long as the small spaceholders held that space, they'd get at least some of the bottleneckium that arose there. And if they were well organised, agile and skillful, they could take at least some of the bottleneckium from space belonging to larger entities.

With all due respect, I'm not sure that a Goonswarm Director is someone you want to tell that they're Doing It Wrong when it comes to holding space and securing moons.

Then lose that entire fleet value because the other guy brought something slightly bigger/better.

Another conversation not worth having because it will never happen. We'll never let it happen, that's why we took the CSM.

The whole problem with that logic chain, and I'm not disagreeing with the logic, is that pretty much no resources are going to be worth fighting for, until it, by itself, can replace the entire fleet


Which pretty much removes them as conflict drivers, leaving you only with two reasons to fight:
1: Boredom
2: Ideology.

Which points to a requirement for a big shake-up in how resources can change hands. Where small fleets can make a difference, without being hideously expensive to replace.