Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Ouch...

I Like it, but... OUCH

So...essentially, you want to make it completely and totally impossible for alliances to function, for capitals to even undock, and for people t live in nullsec in anything other than your personal definition of an acceptable corporation, right?

I take it you never want to see a fight bigger than one fleet a side either, right? Hell, under your scheme, wormholes and faction war would be the only places to go for massed PVP, and neither of those can even approach the scale of nullsec.


I'm also not entirely sure why you think MORE people would live in a nullsec that had virtually no logistical connections of any description. Can you explain how no JF services, no jump bridges, no neutral cynos, no safe midpoints and no hope of reimbursement when PL drop three nyx on you improves the game at all?

Can you also explain how, in your strange new eve, groups like goonswarm can be challenged at all? Big groups, coming from communities outside of EVE, co-ordinating everything out of game, and enough of an IT backbone to make it trivially easy to track who has or hasn't paid the membership fees that losing all forms of corp or alliance income will inevitably create?


This 'solution' does nothing but cause a whole new range of problems, without actually solving the previous ones.

Yes, this would impact jump bridge networks, however with the large number of titans that are around, I don't think it would impact nul very much. Especially when you look at large fleets traversing the game, they generally using Titans to bridge.



This would just give more centralized power to the large corporations. It would also make corporations safer because that person that just joined your corporation, can't light a cyno right next to your ratting ship and bring in his buddies from corp xyz.



No. There needs to be a reliable way for a corporation to collect an income. Without any isk coming in, a corporation cannot support any projects. If there are no projects, whats the point of being in a corporation since you are basically doing everything by yourself anyways? This would also grant a new job someone in every corporation....the tax man. This person would have to troll the corp wallet and make sure everyone is paying their dues. Since this is your idea, I believe you are volunteering to do this for everyone.

Explain why.

Why any of the things I mentioned in my earlier post.

Why is killing nullsec as a place for fleet PVP a good thing? Why is encouraging people to blob up in corps rather than alliances a good thing? Why is making it impossible to use caps without a fleet for backup a good thing? Who would want to lve in a nullsec with absolutely zero logistics?

Should I read past the 3rd line ?

I mean the premise is already flawed ... but seemingly some like what follows. So should I ?

I set up some SRF (funds) taken by one share of operations (so x/x+1) j, so people can come and join an op and don't have to worry about what happens (and in whatever they can fly, no doctrine). And just because some can afford more then use we need to willingly stop ? Goes kind of the same way like the other thread, "if you don't destroy ISK - then you are bad for the game" ... WHUT ?

So, should I care about the rest of the post ?

I used to believe that moon mining was good for Eve. That centralized income sources would provide conflict generators. That has been made a mockery of by the current situation. Two coalitions control most of the lucrative moons. They have agreements not to attack each other's moons. If someone does have a moon worth anything, they own it only at the mercy of the large coalition blobs - those who have the huge capital and super capital fleets to take whatever they want. Taking a moon from a large coalition is basically impossible, unless you have N+1. So, moon mining is no longer an effective conflict generator.

I used to think that having a passive income source for alliances would make Eve more fun. That less time spent earning ISK is a good thing. It isn't. That takes away the consequences and excitement from Eve. When ships don't mean anything anymore, why should I care if I lose one? If I don't care about losing ships, why should my opponent from the other side? Conflict becomes meaningless - all about green killboards and e-peens. In that respect, Eve is much like the FPS games I used to play, where Kills:Deaths ratio was the only thing that mattered.

Eve is supposed to be a MMORPG where you actually have consequences for your actions. Unlike other MMORPG's, when you die in Eve, it is supposed to hurt. Your stuff isn't supposed to go to space limbo. SRP means that it basically just goes to space limbo.

Over the years, CCP has tried to remove many of the passive income sources for individual players (e.g. the major nerf to datacore production). Things that involve player time, effort, and risk should be more lucrative than things that do not. Things that put you out in space - where other players can kill you and break or take your nice toys - should be more lucrative than things that do not. Instead of making passive income sources, how about making dynamic PVE that doesn't suck the life out of you?

The strength of an alliance rests in its economy, logistics, diplomacy, intelligence gathering, and command and control. Military skills are of secondary importance compared with those above. Remember that. The CFC keeps curb-stomping the other coalitions in major wars because it was way better at those things, while at times being notably worse on the tactical and operational levels. The CFC has lost many battles, but so far it has always won the wars.

It will be interesting to see whether the other side can combine the tactical and operational superiority with the economic advantage of the huge renter base to win the next war. But that is a topic for another thread...

The problem with passive alliance income sources is that they do not encourage individual players to play the game on a daily basis. All that is necessary is to have as many friends as possible. If someone attacks your friends' POS, you rage ping for EVERYONE and blob up. Everyone who was playing WOT for the last three weeks logs in. Everyone active who is spread thinly across the universe converges on the spot for that fight. You have time to get all your friends in one place. So do they. If you have N+1, you either get a once-a-month massive brawl or more often you get a massive blue ball. The massive brawl is painful in 10% Tidi. Any losses on either side are covered largely by the alliances. Then most people go back to WOT or whatever game is actually fun to play. Passive alliance income encourages centralization of power and favors those who can organize the most people, project power, and put them at the decisive point given 24-36 hours notice.

Contrast that with an Eve without passive alliance income. In that Eve, an alliance only has a strong economic foundation if it has players who actually log in and play the game! Otherwise it has no income. Alliances full of mostly-inactive bitter vets eventually lose their space to younger, more vigorous alliances with active memberships. Those active members derive their income from using Eve space, not simply from holding key terrain and controlling passive income. Because there are pilots out in space and people want to use that space, there are targets for roaming gangs. That means PVP content for roaming gangs and home defense fleets. Ability to defend pilots in space becomes the measure of strength - not simply whether you can log in N+1 24-36 hours from now. If you cannot hold off the roaming gangs, your alliance withers and dies, or moves elsewhere.

That also shifts the meta for fleets. Fortunately, super capital fleets are largely useless against sub capital fleets. They are only great against structures and capital/super capital fleets. If I bring out my super capital or capital fleet to deal with roaming gangs, they laugh and run away. The only time that capital fleets are great against sub capital fleets is when defending a static objective (such as a moon tower or sovereignty structure). The only way to really defeat a defensive capital fleet on a static objective is with a bigger capital or super capital fleet. But to undermine my economy, the roaming gang doesn't have to bang on my tower for hours and then wait for me to N+1 the next day. They just have to deny my players the ability to earn ISK. Small roaming gangs are better than capital fleets for this purpose. Player skill is much more important in small roaming gang fleets than it is in your standard blob. You are therefore selecting for a different kind of player... one who plays the game to get better at actually flying a ship (rather than just blobbing up, anchoring, and pressing F1 on order).

Fleet combat would still occur - if someone wanted to endure the misery of sovereignty warfare. Capitals and super capitals would still be important in that meta... and the forums are saying my post is too long. To be continued...

I want to make it harder for coalitions to function. I want to make it easier for corporations to hold space, while making coalitions have a harder time functioning. Corporations can still set up jump bridge connections, but their sovereignty bills go up exponentially as the number of constellations they hold goes up. This puts a maximum effective size on a corporation's space, which makes more room for other people in 0.0. Those other people cannot piggy-back on my logistical network, so they have to be self-sufficient or develop their own logistics strategy in order to survive.

I am unclear how my changes make it impossible for capitals to even undock. Please elaborate... I currently undock capitals all the time without neutral cyno alts.

Nor do I see how my changes prevent big fights from happening - they can still happen if someone goes for the full "take all your space permanently" invasion. Then you have all those sovereignty timers to make the big fights happen. But, because it is slightly harder to move fleets around (have to use your own corporation's jump bridges, cyno fields, titans, etc.) it becomes harder to N+1 every single day. If someone owns half the map, hitting them on multiple fronts becomes more of a reality if it is harder for them to converge to form Blobtron.

These changes alone might not go far enough - other changes to titan bridging or jump drives might be needed to fix 0.0.

More people would actually live in a null sec that had virtually no logistical connections of any kind, except for exports and what their own corporation could control. Currently, people produce or purchase things in high sec and take them to 0.0 to fight in meaningless blobs. Crius is supposed to make it more efficient to build stuff in 0.0, but it falls short in many ways...

It should be possible to live in and be self-sufficient in 0.0 space. It should be more efficient to produce stuff in 0.0 and transport it to the empire market than vice versa. That should be the most efficient way to play the game. This game of producing everything in the safety of high sec and transporting it to 0.0 is what keeps people from living in 0.0.

0.0 constellations should not have constraints of racial isotopes or a shortage of a critical raw material. 0.0 should not need any raw material from Empire or another corner of space. All those constraints and limitations should be on Empire space. This encourages trade, while giving incentives to people to live out in 0.0. Those constraints and limitations encourage huge blue empires, rather than encouraging independent city states.

Now, on to the problem of space peasants...

As discussed in the Rorqual threads, this could be a purpose for Rorquals. Separate the boosts & all the other functions off the industrial core. Instead make it a Harvesting Core. When deployed on a 'moons grid' and active, it harvests moon minerals. With the proviso that a POS can't be deployed on the same grid as the gravitational presence interferes or some such method.

Suddenly you now have a conflict driver even inside a corp where some people want a POS for jump bridges, manufacturing or other services, others want to be able to harvest with multiple Rorquals on a moon. Amount of materials also becomes related to pilots in space rather than how many of each moon you own. Since you can harvest one moon with multiple people (Possibly capped but at a higher max rate than currently passive harvested since there will be down time also). And there are Empty moons for fast POS grabbing for offensive staging points making things a bit more dynamic also.

As I envision it, mining T2 raw materials should not be solely dependent on using slow, expensive capital class ships that will generally require a blob to kill. It should be something more accessible to everyone - but it would probably be okay if the Rorqual represented the pinnacle in that skill progression.

I would rather see T2 raw material gathering happen at anomalies, rather than on moons, but I don't suppose it matters that much - as long as it is relatively accessible to both PVPers and resource collectors.