EVE General Discussion

Yes, a real player would do it in 3 minutes...

Interceptors + reshipping would have to be effectively slower than taking cynos to locations and as you said it would mean a duplication of assets on differing fronts. Even with jumpclones you'd be looking at 19 hour timers for being able to relocate again or delf destructing pods and the associated cost with that. Either way the issues associated with travel, while not eliminated, would be exasperated greatly from the current jumpdrive/cyno mechanics.

Alts would still be pretty effective at moving, though as a side effect multiboxing could take a hit to the head if alts were used in that manner.

The server can barely handle massive fleets as it is.

This will not end well... it will just end with 1,000 of pilots seeing the "warp tunnel" for about 2 hours before emerging into a ginormous cluster****, where nobody moves for another 2 hours.

Good times.

You can't keep a player from wanting to be at x,y,z system. What can be done is make changes so what ship they bring and how they bring it become strategic choices. Right now, players can pick any ship they want and get them there however they like. Even when they like. So most of these choices become no brainers as the player can have their cake and eat it too.

If jump drives were removed entirely, wars would no longer be 'the north side of eve vs the south side of eve', they would be more localised - neighbor versus neighbor. Alliances would be forced to maintain fleet HQ's at various locations in their space to project power in a reasonable span of time, much like how the US fleet keeps bases in various locations around the world (because they don't have jump drives).

Jump clones and interceptors would be used to move pilots to their ships as required.

It becomes problematic for stragglers or players just logging on to join a fleet already in progress. So to is it difficult to bring in capital reinforcements, although this could be a good thing in terms of server lag in the battle zone. Certainly it's more difficult to crash a node by bringing in every capital ship an alliance has at their disposal.

Moving through bottleneck systems can be difficult too, especially if the defender has already camped it out with most of their fleet. If memory serves, this was one of the reasons for introducing jump drives in the first place. This can be mitigated to some degree by increasing the number of linked systems, especially between regions. Space is vast, but Eve reduces this expanse to a few narrow corridors, and this would need to be remedied at the same time.

With large capital fleet movements taking much longer, defending the home systems becomes a consideration if your capital fleet is 25 jumps away at the time. Keeping duplicate capital ships at various is expensive, but doable for the larger alliances.

Without the ability to project capital power within minutes and hours to practically anywhere outside of HS, smaller alliances might be able to carve a niche in the abandoned areas in space as alliance borders contract and the shadow of titan bridging (removed) is no longer an issue.

So there's benefits and problems that comes with a change of this magnitude. Simply halving jump range would be a better first step to see how it affects the game. Bottom line - the biggest ships in the game shouldn't also be the fastest, as their speed is dictated by the speed of their cyno ships.

Actually, I once had the reverse idea:

1) Put jump drives in every ship in EvE.

2) Remove the need for cyno beacons. Ships would randomly appear someplace within 50AU of the target star.

Effect: Gate camp? What's that? Jump in, jump out.

Falcons start to collect dust on the market. And there was much rejoicing.

Note that while this would make moving fleets into systems easier, there would be a significant delay for actual blobbing because all those ships would have to regroup first. The bigger the blob, the longer it would take them to group up.

Hit and run strategies would become a real thing, because a dozen ships could organize and move faster than two thousand. In fact, all kinds of strategies open up.

Meanwhile, lone wolves, explorers and even just commercial ships would be far more willing to do their business in null. More traffic = more null action. That's what the nullbears want, right? Or at least what they say they want. Of course that's not actually true - what they really want is just more serfs to make the stroke their egos, which is why non-aligned pilots are about as welcome as new strategies (see above).

Oh well.

what if...

Eve isn't real?