EVE General Discussion

I'd still like to see ccp get rid of drones entirely. Argue all you want but there's no denying that the thousands of drones on the field likely caused that node crash. Not that I'm complaining, was nice for us to get a moonwalk for a change.

The amount of system resources needed to process all those interactions from those drones...what they are doing, what is being done to them....in that battle had to be staggering. Probably close to what it would be like to have 7000 non-drone capable ships in system. So yeah, get rid of drones. That is the best guaranteed bang for the buck.

Given the entirely speculative nature of the rest of your post, it's interesting that you throw in a "guarantee" at the end. You don't actually know what the "bang" would be, and the "buck" would actually be considerably expensive, when you consider that they would pretty much have to take all of their recent balancing efforts and do them all over again (among other things).

You assume I meant a dollar when I could have in fact, meant a deer.

Step 4a: the first coalition to get 6 fleets into the system wins.

You cannot stop players from making a coalition of any size as its not a game mechanic, but emergent behavior.

As you are an esteemed member of the neutral 3rd party, You have been in systems with over 2k players and the node lived. On the night this Reinforced node died, there were only 1300 - 1500 people in the system. Plus about 3k drones and fighter bombers.

*** SORRY FOR THE WALL-O-TEXT ***

What if, and hear me out here, what if sov warfare was reworked, completely disregarding the current model. At the moment, you simply throw as many people as you can at a timer and hope you out-blob the opposition. There is very little tactics in this. Changes such as fixing population caps or applying stacking penalties does not change the core 'idea' of simply throwing more people at a problem to make it go away. The skill of the pilots is arguably lost when it takes 15 minutes to activate a module. It becomes 'Who Clicked First'. That's not how warfare in this game, in my opinion, is supposed to be played.

Take for example, small scale warfare. I'm talking 50 - 150 people. At this level, the actions of one pilot can arguably change the entire course of a fight in seconds. It comes down to the individual skill of each pilot, the ability of the FC to react under pressure and the level of thought that has gone in to the setup of the ships in the fleet. The better prepared fleet, which may not necessarily be the fleet with the most numbers, will win. That is what EVE warfare is about, it shouldn't be about 'I clicked lock first, so that person will die'. Other games work like that, but that's not what attracted me to EVE.

I would propose a potential solution to this problem. This is basically a stream of conscious thought, so pull holes in it or whatever, but please do not just 'hate to hate', try and rework my ideas if they are not to your taste and offer your own solution instead of simply slandering the ideas of others.

Here is what I propose:

Sov warfare, as I stated previously, revolves around timers. The destruction or repair of the structures these timers correspond to decide who can take the system in question. This is on a very basic level but it is the truth of it. It is easy to see how one can simply 'bring' more players and therefore win the fight through overwhelming force..but this does not rely on the skill of the pilot, but rather the size of your blob.

What if, instead of these massive blob fights around an object, a complex of 'rooms' is created. Lets say this is only for the iHub timer and station timers, arguably two of the most important. These 'rooms' have strategic objectives. These strategic objectives must be captured/destroyed or defended by whichever team wishes to take or defend their sov. These 'rooms' exist independently of each other, and thus it does not matter whether they are all active or none of them are active, they should operate under their own power and not cause TiDi to the others. A 'special gate' will take you to whichever room you choose. Inside of these rooms, I would imagine an arena much like the Alliance tournament arena. Grid is, lets say, 350km across, and if you should stray outside of this you will be destroyed. Coming through this gate commits you to the fight. Only two fleets, regardless of faction, are allowed into this room at any time. This will cap the size of the fight. In order for the objectives to be destroyed or repped, the entirety of ONE of said fleets must be destroyed. This is either through fighting, or by violating the boundary rule. Multiple entry gates to these rooms should be hidden within the system in question, and they will have to be scanned in order to be found. They should refresh every 10-15 minutes to avoid camping. Capital ships may use these 'special gates' in order to enter the fight, but no cynos may be lit within the 'rooms'. Capital ships may cyno out of the room but ONLY when all of the opposing fleet has been destroyed or has violated the boundary rule. Cynoing your capital ship out whilst a fight is in progress will result in an unstable jump and rip your ship to shreds before it lands at it's exit point, depositing your capsule at the exit cyno.
It is possible as well, two have two fleets in said room fighting over capturing the sov, with no defender present. Again in this instance, the entirety of one fleet must be destroyed or violate the boundary rule before the objective can be touched.

The amount of rooms and the nature of the objectives are irrelevant but CCP can surely come up with some fun lore about what you have to do etc etc.

This will only apply to sov warfare. This obviously isn't a perfect idea, and i'm sure there are holes in this I haven't considered, but it is one 'out of the box' idea to counteract massive blob fights over nullsec sov.

And if you've read this far, I applaud your concentration and apologize for the long-winded explanation :)

Any and all feedback is most welcome :) What do you guys think?