Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You've got a massive uphill climb to convince me that your convenience is worth more than the game's overall health. I have long since concluded that making it easy, or even possible to move bulk material from point A to point B in an instant was not a good direction for Eve Online. Its past time it got a second look, and it is, in my opinion, worth throwing away the things you like about the status quo to make Eve a better game.

I'm not exactly jumping for joy over the suggestions here simply because I don't seriously believe PL would just dump the current rental empire model for the sake of the health of Eve.

Where were these radical ideas after the moon goo nerf? Where were these ideas after the Halloween War? I understand you are all so terribly bored you drop Supers on cruisers but honestly? I doubt you could convince people to give up easy income.

Rental income is the easiest thing in existence. Basically CFC/Nc./PL have become landlords nothing more. And due to botlord agreements for both sides to abstain from hurting each others rental space these ideas make even less sense.

Can you seriously convince these people to unclutch their pearls long enough to see there's more to Eve than a blinking walllet? I doubt it.

And what of PL's super cap force? There's just too many unanswered questions and even though the ideas are radical and refreshing, I doubt they will ever come to fruition.

CCP depends upon these once a year proxy wars to advertise 2000 man space battles to draw more people in. What these people don't understand is the 10% tidi, the billions of isk needed to field huge behemoths let alone the years to train such ships too.

So it's a catch 22. You either revert Eve back to an even more niche game and lose half the subscribers or you let the coalitions become so bloated and fat that the line members eventually bleed off and you lose those people anyway.

These are fresh ideas but hardly practical and certainly laughable when leaders of entities like yours scoff at anything that would hurt their easy income.

You can achieve much of what you want with some smaller changes:

1. Mass limits on individual cynos


2. Jump drive cool downs on combat capitals


3. Titans can no longer bridge


4. Capitals can use stargates


5. Military/Industry index gives bonuses to defending a system


6. Cyno jammer cost decreases with each level of military/industrial index, reaching zero when both are maxed.


7. Sov costs increase exponentially with number of systems held, distance between systems held, and number of systems held by blued entities. (i.e. prevent Goon1, Goon2, Goon3, NC1, NC2, NC3, etc). This may need additional work to prevent out of game blocs from circumventing this intention.


8. Super capitals have a monthly maintenance fee (XX% of their value) that must be paid before they're able to perform any combat action. This accumulates even if the account is unsubbed. This is intended to return super capitals to semi-rare alliance level assets that take significant resources to use, in the spirit they were originally designed to be, rather than personal IWin buttons that accumulate in mass numbers and break the overall design of the Eve universe.

PL has been through times where we were scraping along on the bones of our arses. The vast majority of PL pilots are PvPers first and foremost. If it meant we got to go back to our old way of life, living out of NPC stations and taking contracts on people, fighting against 100 man fleets instead of 1000 man fleets, PL would take it.

If, by then, there were good fights to be had, then people would quickly get bored of dropping no risk supers on everything and go back to flying conventional ships and just having fun. A lot of people would take a hit, but I doubt any of them would mind if it meant we got to go back to what we were doing when eve was not about how much you can bring to a fight.

It's probably hard to believe, and you're right, if supers stay as they are now, you will always get bored PL members dropping them on people. That's why they need nerfing.

Supers are goddamn boring and if we were to get rid of supers altogether I don't think many tears would be shed tbh. The only reason WE have them is because other people have them and the only reason other people have them is because we have them.

Changing things doesn't mean they have to be hard it could mean you arrive to same endstate via a new or different means.

It seems we are of the same mindset then. I gotta say I certainly smiled reading a response I was hoping to get. Content over anything else. And isn't that a shame though? That people put profit over content, fights are secondary instead of a focus?

Man the game has shifted terribly these last few years. Eve has just outgrown itself in some regards.

My analogy of Supers being Eve's ICBM was correct then. They seem to be more of a deterrent than anything else. If you could get seriously backing in PL for Manfreds ideas there would be some weight to it. Not that Manfred himself isn't weight enough behind them.

You got my support on this. Gate camping shipping lanes? Holy **** it's almost like Piracy would be profitable again!

While I do agree that restricting jump drives to adjacent systems is a little too harsh (significant range penalties would be preferable in my opinion), I think people decrying how any reduction to JF projection ruins logistics to the point that null will empty are also overreacting. Admittedly I live in a highly populated region close to empire space at the moment, but it seems most of the concerns about logistics still make the assumption that groups will try to maintain their multi-region empire. The idea of Manfred's changes is to make this a thing of the past.
Yes, maintaining logistics for 3 or 4 regions with your current number of logistics pilots and the proposed changes would be hard. That is the idea. This would encourage reduction in the amount of space held, thus opening up null to more groups, and would also encourage the development of null industry to allay those logistics issues through local production. Frankly, the reason why things like sov timers and logistics work is because the only way to prevent players from simply burning everything is to make the means to do it distasteful. The only way you will break up the current super-coalitions is if it is more of a pain for them to remain and fight together than to break out into their own little sections of space and set up a whole bunch of little blobs.

To draw a real-world comparison, you have the world pre-industrial era and the world in the modern era. If you want to promote massive, devastating wars, certainly modern transportation and infrastructure has facilitated this in the past century. If you wanted to look for tons of small wars, you want to look back to when food and equipment were serious impediments to the mobility of your armies. Since unlike in the real world, in Eve, most of us WANT fights, its better off if we have a less globally connected, more isolated universe if we want to promote hundreds of small conflicts, rather than tedious peace interspersed with massive wars where a single pilot or small group simply doesn't matter.

The stories told by players to their friends have always been worth more for gaining and keeping subscribers than these flash in the pan battles ever were. Losing the 2000 man giga-battles will reduce the number of new player spikes, but the ones who show up at the insistence of their friends will be far more likely to stick around.