Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Its part of many changes that invalidates needing to project big fleets and full super fleets.

Null fights having cheap dps fleets attacking each other is way more fun than fleet after fleet standing down. It would open up a lot more options.

Its not that the leadership doesn't want conflict, it does. How else are you going to please a few thousand ravenous battle beasts without fights? The insidious thing about the Sov system means that as soon as an equilibrium is reached, further conflict is wasted and even makes you weak. Why fight for more space when your ratters are happy ratting in the good truesec space and providing you with enough in ratting taxes for your SRP, the mooons in your space provide you with enough to pay for the sov and strategic upgrades to your space, your logistic personel can probably handle a few doezen more systems, but why? Any weakness is ruthlessly purged from ownership of SOV, so if you continue with fighting it only wears out your troops, thus making you weak, and soon set uppon like the main course at a shark feeding frenzy.

The Dominion SOV system forces us to maximize SOV, even to the detriment of the players of this game. It is forcing our hand to come up with ever increasingly efficient SOV taking/holding fleets. It doesn't allow for any "little guy" to come in as that would only weaken your position. It forces alliances to form coalitions to defend/take SOV from other entities. It is forcing the boot/wreckingball meta as the current most efficient means to take/defend SOV, untill some devious little mad scientist comes up with a new meta that is more efficient at taking/holding SOV. No the Dominion SOV system needs to be taken out back behind the barn and shot, otherwise we will again be dealing with a stagnant nullsec once the new equilibrium is reached.

What's best for the game is not best for Dominion SOV, in otherwords you didn't read anything I wrote, past the line you quoted.

Simply put, and I'll use small words so you get it, Fighting past the point of ballance means you get tossed out of the SOV buisiness, and the remaning coalitions pick the corpse of your former alliance for anybody useful, and we are back to where we are now again.

Pleading to our alliance leaders will do nothing as they are locked into the Dominion SOV system themselves. They are trying to do the best that they can, and that right now means no great war.

You've failed to convince me that there is any game mechanic holding the leadership back from destroying one another. Your argument seems to be: War is not as profitable as peace, so why do it?

Because your game is dying.

Before i start, gonna say TL;DR. I skimmed the op, did not really read the replies, but if this has been suggested already then cool.

First real fast back ground. 10 year eve player, mostly mining. Ran two alliances, once failed due to being a confederation and the other failed due to a series of unfortunate events. I have been a guest in 0.0, owned space, rented space, live din wh, npc null and null. With that said i was posting on a horrible idea for 0.0 fixes today and sparke don an idea i ran with.

I'm going to disagree with the op. "Power Projection" is not the problem. I honestly was ships to move about faster. I honestly don;t want to take 3 horus to get from say HED to AZN (in fey) TBH, the proliferation of super caps is an issue, there ability to move around is not. Why? Because there are ways that can make an alliances abilities to move irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

The problem, imo, with Null is that you can;t have more then 10 or so people activly working a system to make it lucrative.

A few years ago, the alliance of FiX fell to the onslaught of IAC/AAA/RZR/ and the north. My alliance, at the time Brotherhood Of Steel (BoS) was sold systems in quirious. I had about 500 pilots, maybe 100 of which were active in null. It became apparnt real fast two very simple things:

1) no one wanted to play outside the station system. and
2) the station system could not support 100 players.

One of the reasona large alliances need such huge areas of space is both so there members can do stuff without stepping on each others toes, and for the moons. In order to do a full moon chain i needed something like 8 systems. I could not defend them, but i still needed thouse 8. It was not ideal. So CCP change dit with Dominion, claming 200 people could not live in a system... that was far from the truth. My alliance at the time had major issues resource sharing. I had a corp that would get a system to industry 4/5 and then want the system all to thereselves.. i had people fighting over sanctums, it was a pita.

I think the easyest way to fix sove is not one big cure all, but some little fixes over time. Power Prpjection i don;t think wpould be a big issue if you made ti so allainces can do more with less. A few things:

1) Remove moon ore form moons and move it over to active mining. There was an idea by an ex dev called ring mining, which if you combine this idea with Exodus' system wide asteroid betls and comet mining, you would give miners a reason to undock, and alliances would not need as many moons.

2) in these new betls they would have more pockets of npc' for more pve play. also more anomalies and other things to make pve's active.

3) you tie the sov to the industry and millitary index, if you don;t use yoru space, then its a simple matter to take it, just be active.

4) you tie war to a mechanic like FW (i think i understand that mechanic, i coudl be wrong) so pvp now becomes a viable way to flip a system. this means you will have to undock and defend your space or you lose it. This would also make small objectives and counter atacks a viable option.

In addition, it would force power projection to be a non issue, if say goon's have 8 regions and test wants space, they would pick a system goons are hardly in, deploy a force and start working that system. Goons can decide to counter attack to take ti back, or ignore it. If they couter attack, they leave themselves open for a second attack elsewhere. So in theroty a coalition could tie goons up in a war on many fronts, splitting there power, and gaining footholds all over. This would make patroling your space a serious matter.

And the final piece... So you migth say 'well i'll just ignore that and wait till they sleep and counter and get my system back' but then all player made stations can now be destroyed. So you add another peice, where the attacked coudl either conqure the station, or blow it and all its contents to hades.


The point in short, more ways for the individual to make isk and want to play, reasons to want to undock and pew pew, reaons to wan tto patrol your own space, and possibly shrink to manageable space. Oh and alliance' would not get income from taxation as oppose to moon goo, as they should.

Just an idea, and i welcome flames and comments.

To lazy to spell check learn reaperese

Outcome = I bring PL all the supers and titans within reach of your space. I make your members life miserable. I force you to pay me or I take your space easily when your indexes fall from being camped or griefed. Or CFC decides to take their ever expansive jumpbridge network and does the same thing to you. Or they just convoy everyone down to the closest dockable system and then endless JF's stock up war supplies and you get PWNZONED.

You can do whatever you want to the sov system you want. As long as power projection is left unchecked supercaps or the blob will just march over you.

Anyone who isn't a established nullsec coalition is at such a severe disadvantage you are beaten before you start. Lets make a checklist:

Do you have:

A community of players
Strong Independent Logistics core
Experienced nullsec bloc level FC's
Command and Control systems and redundancies
Advanced IT infrastructure
Spy & Intel network
The means(isk) in which to sustain a prolonged campaign

Both sides have impossible to break defensive fleets. We could wage a forever war and get nowhere, hence why we dont bother.

We would be in the exact same situation as now only it would take 4 hours rather than 2.

Since I first found this thread a few weeks ago I've been thinking a lot about the issue of power projection. What I see is that EVE is a massive game travelling gate to gate could take hours or even several log ins, depending on ship, to get from one deep dead end system to the system that is the maximum number of jumps away (someone will have to look up how many that is). Indeed a common feature of most sandbox games is that you as a player have the ability to cross the game world reasonably quickly. EVE is unique though in that your ability to travel quickly affects other players ability to carry out operations as they risk a swift punch in the face from literally the other side of the universe.

Stagnation will therefore be something of a balancing act and is directly linked to how quickly players are able to move around. If it is too hard to move around you will get stagnation because people will not be asked to move more than 10-20 jumps from home, especially those people who can't play more than 2-3 hours in a sitting. If you are able to move too fast, you gain too much influence as you are potential reinforcements who can hit the field in minutes from literally anywhere. Currently EVE leans too far in the quick moving direction. I've seen calls for jump drives/bridges being removed from the game or only linking to the next system allowing you to bypass the gate and allowing capitals to use stargates. Most of this feels a bit heavy handed to me and risks heading to the too slow side of things.

So where is the middle ground then?

Well I think we could do with a two-fold solution first you stretch out space by increasing the light years between all systems in the game by about 20-25% (negotiable), the map is not flat so this should be an average not a law, some systems may see more or less increase then the average. At the same time you do not add any additional range to jump bridges or drives with the exception of Black Ops. Black Ops were rarely used prior to their quality of life buffs for their jump drives and this would effectively revert some of those changes. Black Ops do not have nearly the power projection issues that capitals and entire fleets do, especially as they are not really insurable hulls, so whelping a fleet of them is quite costly. The skill Remote Sensing for PI and Blops jump drives would therefore see an increase in their utility equal to the expansion of space.

Secondly add a 10 minute cooldown timer to the pilot when they use a jump bridge or drive which will disallow them using another jump bridge or drive for the duration. A flag could even be placed into the top left of your screen just like your pvp flags which will show you exactly when you can jump again (note that this flag will not prevent the use of a stargate). From a game perspective this is admittedly a somewhat inelegant way to put a cap on the range and power you can get out of a bridge network or jump drives. We put the timer on the pilot as well to prevent any ship swapping shenanigans to avoid the timer. From a lore perspective this is easy enough to justify. Remember that implant in your head that allows you to transfer your mind to a new clone on death? Well when you jump light years at a time without the aid of a stargate that connection suffers some degradation and repeated jumping could cause it to sever completely if you do not allow time for it to recalibrate (not that I suggest we allow anyone to risk it). Stargates are equipped with beacons that allow the connection to perceive the jump as though you were travelling at sub warp speed, passing the signal directly between them. By doing it this way jump drives and bridges do not project fleets as far or as quickly. You can still travel multiple relays, but the more relay cynos you need to make, the longer the enforced time is that the trip will take and the stretched out space means you will need more relays to cover a given distance than you do currently. At the same time normal gate to gate travel is completely unaffected by any of this, whatever time it takes today is the same amount of time it will take you tomorrow.

What should be obvious then is that your power projection within one bridge or jump of home is completely unaffected, this is by design. You ought to be able to respond to a threat in the space you could reasonably hope to use around your home system(s). Likewise roaming fleets should know roughly when they are in danger of hotdrop and from whom. It should also be obvious that parts of a coalition spread across the map will not be able to respond within minutes of a fight breaking out half the universe away even if they were formed up before it happened. This is also by design, as it will allow an attacking force to imagine how long an objective will take to reinforce for example and plan to be in and out faster than help can arrive. In essence your alliance will have lessening influence the farther the action is from home, which sounds about right to me. With jump clones you could even have more than one "home", though good luck defending them all at once should you need to.

I feel doing it this way will certainly slow down a redeployment for example but not to the point where it becomes unfeasible while also preventing forces in Dekelin, from being in Fountain in 5 minutes flat. Any changes to sov I will not comment on since I have never been bothered enough to learn the mechanics (low sec for life), but this should allow for some quick movement without allowing instant deployment of heavy assets to anywhere. We'll keep capitals still unable to use stargates for now because let's be honest a large part of the stagnation problem is from cap and super cap proliferation, the solution will not involve expanding the current use for capitals as much of a pain as it would be to take them gate to gate.

Yes I see the point of N + 1 but and there is a big but because you have many ways to counter those logistics, let me see.
1. lock-breaker bombs
2. ECM ships kitsune blackbird falcon scorpion
3. dampening ships
4. a good spy! (you have your pilot in enemy fleet you field him the FC with 5 more ppl target him so he broadcast for reps now and then or have him in perma rep with 10-20 ships hitting hit (you get the point)
5. get a warp in right in their face (probe them)

all the above need effort but you still want F1 peasants in a DPS ship to make the difference in sov null?

Nope RR is not a problem, you can brainstorm in something else now.