Player Features and Ideas Discussion

we don't get fights with enemies in interceptors, a ship designed so you never have to take a fight you might lose

I don't really see a problem with trollceptors for the simple reason that 1000-man coalitions will always have a numbers advantage no matter the mechanics. As Stalin said, quantity has a quality all its own. So that's a given. What is more important is to create a mechanic that allows anywhere from 10 to 100 players to take a system, barring resistance. If a coalition responds then it's not going to happen, but if they don't then it happens.

Should a coalition system be taken, then the next question for the coalition is did they really want that system anyway? Maybe they just want fights and so that's great. On the hand, what if a neighboring coalition decides to allow a few systems to become independent buffers and spare themselves the added involvement. That frees them up to hammer the next-door coalition that's so intent on fighting every border battle. This sort of thing is good for EVE.

interceptors don't generate fights, they run away

why would you contest sov with anything but the cheapest, most maneuverable ships in the new system

the point is our numbers allow us to defend our sov, but the fact that you need goonswarm federation caliber supernumeracy to hold space is a bit of a problem for anyone else

First off, Fozzie, thank you for taking the time to give us a better idea of the intentions and thought process behind the Entosis Link. As you can see from many of the comments, the idea that the victory should go to the side that can maintain successful military control of a grid isn’t one the community feels is a bad idea. Yes, there are almost certainly people who will feel that measures like this are functionally nothing more than games of ‘capture the flag’, but to those individuals I say: What isn’t?

Blowing something up, after all, is really just node control - you carved out a period of time where you were able to click on the flag (ie: do dps) while the other team couldn’t do enough to stop you.

More importantly, ‘capture the flag’ itself is simulating objective control is actual warfare. It’s how people for a very long time have represented being able to take a location, or secure an objective, or destroy a target. So if something resembling the oldest form of wargaming finds its way into our game simulating war… where, exactly, is the problem?

That said, I believe the Entosis Link, by its very nature, falls short of some of your goals.



If the Entosis Link is functioning as a barometer of the fight (or fights, in the case of multiple command node spawns) for control of a Sov Structure, then it makes sense that you don’t want it to effect the fitting of the ships used in these fights any more than necessary. It is, of course, almost impossible to do so - at the very least, as a module, it will take up one of the ship’s available slots. This, in turn, pushes the metagame toward ships with utility high-slots, such as Ishtars, Hurricanes, Tempests, etc*. Any ship that sacrifices a weapon to fit a link is reducing its contribution to actually controlling the grid, in favor of being what amounts to a battlefield reporter, letting CONCORD know what’s going on.

That’s suboptimal.

In addition, as you can see from the comments in this thread and the original one, the restrictions and penalties on the Entosis Link aren’t well-understood yet. Does it prevent cloaking? If it doesn’t, does the module deactivate as soon as you cloak, or does it complete its cycle? If it completes its cycle, does that cycle ‘count’ for the structure?

And that’s just asking about a Cloaking Device.

As a module, the Entosis Link cannot help but affect the combat effectiveness of available fittings, and through that, the choice of viable ships to use the link and what role those ships play in the larger combat.

But what if it’s not a module?

My first thought was an implant - but then you can’t have it not effectively interfering with allies’ defense. What would be needed instead would be some form of social construct that allowed players and organizations to select which ‘link’ (or links) the structure/command node is influenced by at any given time.

Like a fleet.

If, instead of a new module, a new fleet mechanic was used as your barometer, then fitting requirements and concerns, and the attendant ship selection issues, all vanish. Come up with a snappy name for it, like ‘Fleet Colors’ or ‘Fleet Standard’, except actually snappy and not really, really bad like those two.

The idea here is that a given fleet represents a given Alliance. A fleet forming in defense of an FCON station represents FCON’s presence on-grid and potential control of the grid. A fleet representing Goonswarm on that same grid doesn’t make FCON’s space any more FCON.

Obviously, then, you need to have a method for determining who the fleet is representing. The equally obvious metric is ‘who’s in the fleet?’ While single-alliance fleets might seem like the way to approach this, it’s also likely this will simply see the current blocs consolidating into as few alliances as possible in order to simplify defense and coordination - in effect, creating ‘CFC 1’, ‘CFC 2’, ‘N3 1’, ‘N3 2’ etc, with membership based purely on regional location, and member corps ‘deploying’ from one alliance to another within the same bloc.

Which, while it might be rather amusing to watch, won’t really solve anything.

Instead, as a simple framework, I suggest simply using leadership. The Fleet Commander is the obvious point, but this introduces a single point-of-failure, and as we all know, single points-of-failure are bad. But a fleet ranges in size from 2 people to 256, with anywhere from 1 to 31 leadership positions. Use those. 51% of a fleet’s leadership positions (Fleet Commander, Wing Commanders, Squad Commanders) would have to be members of the same alliance in order for that fleet to represent that alliance in Sov warfare. Hodge-podge fleets where no single alliance is capable of mustering 51% of the leadership would simply not exert an influence on grid control, but alliances able to muster a solid leadership cadre would be able to take advantage of allies willing to fly under their colors.

In addition, each fleet would only be able to influence a single Sov Node (structure or command node) at a time. This way, rather than (to continue our example), FCON forming up a single fleet and contributing 16 people (51% of the maximum number of leadership positions) in order to defend 10 Command nodes, while CONDI, RZR, etc fill out the fleet in warm bodies, the leadership of the defense would need to fall on the shoulders of the defending alliance. Of course, filling a fleet with warm bodies opens the door to spies reporting precisely which pilots are in leadership positions, and so need to be killed in order to cripple a fleet’s influence.

(Continued)

(Continued from above)

Fleet Influence on a sov node would function in a manner similar to the Entosis Links - at 51% of the leadership of a fleet being from a single alliance, the effective range of that influence would be limited to 25km from the nearest command-level ship to the Node or structure. At 75%, the range increases to 50km, and at 100%, 200km. Similarly, the fleet’s influence does not effect the node/structure until the node/structure has been in range for 5 minutes for 51%, 3m for 75%, or 2m at 100% alliance leadership. Any ship which is cloaked or off-grid in a leadership position would not count toward establishing Fleet Influence.

This way, in order for a fleet to actually represent its alliance, the leadership of the fleet must be on-grid, uncloaked, and vulnerable. Defending leadership assets would become of critical importance.

Obviously, it’s not a perfect proposal - you can’t reasonably have all of your fleet’s leadership unable to be remotely repaired in most fights, but at the same time, without that vulnerability, how do you prevent node contests from simply devolving into ‘drop supers on it’?

At the other end of the scale, though, a trollceptor is not going to control a grid - unless it’s unopposed, in which case it certainly should. Undefended space, poorly defended space, these things shouldn’t take a lot of pushing in order to topple. And sovholders should definitely be required to show up for the defense of their own space. The idea of leaving the defense to ‘Papa Goon’ or some renter alliance’s landlord coalition would only leave us with the current sprawling morass of systems that nobody with the wherewithal to take and hold sov wants to live in, but plenty of people who don’t have the strength to stake their own claims are willing to rent out. This only serves to stifle any hope of a dynamic nullsec, and funnel money into the pockets of the Coalition landlords.

But when there’s a fight - and there should be fights - the Command Node system will effectively force responding forces to spread out around the constellation in order to facilitate defense (or capture). There will have to be multiple responders, after all, or it’s simply a case of ‘the fastest ship wins’, and that’s really not in keeping with the idea that this is meant to represent effective military control of space.

What’s needed under this idea is a way to prevent every fight from simply becoming an escalation to ‘who has supercapitals nearby to drop on the nodes?’ The jump changes helped in this regard, but only to the point where subcapitals would now be used as skirmishers to delay any hostile victory until the supercapitals can arrive to lock down the node/structure.

Even with that obvious work still to be done, I feel this idea better matches your goals than the use of a new module does.


*- NOTE: These are examples of utility high slot ships, not necessarily optimal ships for any given situation.

we have the npc/moa crowd demanding to use ships that absolutely cannot be caught for their entosis hulls, while we're saying that we're fine with anything that will actually be at risk and we can blow up because then we get to blow it up

sounds like you have a reading problem to me

Interceptors destabilize sov, and the threat of losing sov DOES generate fights, with plenty of advance notice.

I think you mean "Nothing warps faster than an interceptor using an entosis link that can't even start its warp for 2 minutes..."

And the fallacy is revealed...because pretty much everything other than a freighter can do that.

See: