Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Every activity in eve should be balanced in terms of risk, reward and commitment. I hope we can all agree on that.

If you want a great reward, lets say for example make a lot of isk, you should either risk a lot, for example by flying a very expensive ship that you can loose, or show great commitment, for example by activly flying a low cost ship for a long time. In the case of ratting this is relativly easy to break down in a single figure of merit L, we could for example define it by L=I(S)-S*R, with I the income per hour (depending on the ship of course), S the cost of the involved ship and R the chance to loose this ship per hour. Maybe we could approximate I(S)=a*ln(S), since flying a more expensive ship usually gives greater income, but at some point you only get small gains for a big inrease in price.
Of course we could involve other factors, for examle how good you can watch tv while flying this ship, but lets leave this out of the example for simplicity.
If we balance everything right, all ratting activities should be able to achieve a similar L. Of course only if you optimize L for your surrounding, obviously choosing a very big S in an enviroment with a big R is stupid, since the cost term S*R is linear in S while the reward term is not...
Also I would argue that R1>R2 => L1>L2 (for optimized L) should be true. Or to formulate this differently: If you take greater risks, the expectation value (NOT just I) of your net gain should rise, to encourage players to actually take risks. And this is necessary for content generation. If everyone uses perfect safety because its not only safe but ALSO the best way to get rich, then there wont be any targets to shoot at.

Measuring the reward in ISK is one simple way, but many activities give a different kind of reward. Some people collect tears, they dont care if they get ISK, they just want to make others loose them. Or they want to become famous. They want killmails. There are many different kinds of rewards, but in the end everything has to balanced out with risk and commitment. This is the reason why cyno doomsdays were removed, or why fighter assignment will be removed. Both mechanics give great rewards with basically zero risk, although one could argue that there is at least some kind of commitment since it requires a big investment. Still I think ccp was right in removing this. In the the risk was still too low compared to rewards and commitment.

Now lets apply this to Nullsec, to local and to cloaky campers.

It should be very easy to see that cloaky campers are completely broken in terms of risk, reward and commitment. I doubt there is or was a single mechanic as broken as this. The risk of a cloaky camper is basically zero. If he does not want to be found he is IMPOSSIBLE to find. The commitment really really small. A bomber with cloak and cyno is extremly cheap. And the player does not need to do much. He just sits there, watches tv, goes swimming, plays on another account, whatever. There is literally nothing he has to do besides logging in after DT. It is also incredible easy. Warp to spot, activate cloak. Done.
The reward on the other hand is great. You have an enormous impact. You can stop the activity of a whole system. Everyone either has to stop ratting, or rat in cheaper ships that they can risk to loose, always have a huge fleet on standby in case you open the cyno. The damage in ISK is orders of magnitude above the cost of your ship. You dont see the damage on the killboard but its still there. And there is absolutly nothing anyone can do about it. You're invincible in your cloak.
This is completly broken and should not be in the game.

I never saw a decent argument against this, actually I can not even remember having seen anyone TRYING to argue against this. Some say you can just leave the system (well its easy to camp a constellation, but thats beside the point). But that is not argueing the point, in that case the damage is already done, you were forced out of your system by a player with zero risk and commitment. Some say dont rat in an expensive ship, again, the damage is already done from someone with zero risk and commitment, since your ticks are lowered. Some say well, without cloaky campers the null is too safe, and I might even agree, but thats also besides the point. A single player with zero risk and zero commitment should not be able to be the deciding factor if a system is too safe or not. Either null is too safe in general or not. If its too safe, something has to be changed, but the status should not depend on a single players decision to harrass your or not, with zero risk or commitment.

A few posts ago somone asked if it would be better if a cloakless cyno ship simply warped between gate spots. Yes that would be better. In that case the player actually has to do something. And if he stops doing it the effect is gone. And if he makes a mistake he can be found and killed. Of course while he is there the effect would be the same, but at least he would show some risk and commitment to achieve that effect.

I am not suggesting a solution, because there are already a ton of suggestions, but this problem NEEDS a solution. The mechanic is simply broken.

Now to delayed local. As some mentioned this solves the problem with cloaky campers. It solves this in the sense that the risk that is added by a cloaky camper is now ALWAYS present. The extreme power of the cloaky is gone. This might add another problem which has to be solved, but the imbalance of the cloaky camper will be gone. It IS a solution to this specific problem.

continued in the next post

Not once did I see you describe how broken it is, to be able to use local's pilot roster by PvE, in order to fully evade all hostile contact in sov null.

In each case the complaint revolves around how the player refuses to undock in the PvE craft, and cannot seem to lure the hostile with a combat ready PvP hull.
Somehow this is portrayed as broken, since the hostile won't leave and allow the PvE craft safe activity again.

You suggested using a 3b ship as something that would be lost, in the event local became delayed.
... in the so called unsafe area of EVE, the bling is somehow safer than anywhere else thanks to local ....

Yes, cloaking might be broken, but it is not alone, the PvE defensive immunity to hostiles is equally broken.

and you stink out the thread with cheesy parroted one liners. What Marranar is talking about is risk vs reward.

Where is the risk in covert cyno ganking off a near disposable character when you're in and out in less than 30 seconds?

That is a good point, and generally speaking you are right. Adding the lost wealth in increased rewards should have no bad influence on the economy. But this is a simplied model. Two important things are neglected:
1. We use the same name "wealth" or "value" for two different things. We use it for the bounty and for loot and we use it for the ships and the modules. While we can measure both in ISK, they are not actually identical. The Anos will mostly generate pure ISK and what is lost will be ships and modules.
2. Nullsec is inhomogenous. Some regions are a lot quiter then others.

So ANY increase of R and I will lead to two things:
1. The remote regions will become more attractive for ratters
2. The inflation will increase, since a lot of ISK is added (the kills also add ISK due to insurance), but goods are destroyed

That should not be much of a problem for a moderate increase, but as already stated, I expect that the increase has to be really big if local is simply removed. This might be risky for the economy, so I would start with a less drastic change. Maybe increase the risk and rewards later if it works well and the effects are well understood.

I dont trust people with baby faces

Well, read the sov mechanics replacement and its clear that some big changes are around the corner. The kind of changes that by itself can easily warrant a major reward overhaul. So again, there is no argument here except for an attempt to delay or soften the changes.

On a joking note: I read somewhere someday that eve is infested with middle management staff. Absolutely right.

No, you didn't. You didn't even read the posts I linked above.



Let me take some effort off you and make it as easy to grasp as possible: I will quote relevant excerpts below:

Yes, we discussed watchlists. Assuming you followed my posts on hot-dropping, I apologize. Nevertheless there is not much point in asking me "Where is the risk " in a mechanics whose use I consider potentially frivolous. At several places in this thread I stood by the opinion that a hot drop should be a commitment for the attacker.

again with this ****?
i have read the damn thread from the beginning rereading the same thing every few pages does get tiresome tho.
first off i agree that any one sided solution will be devastating. my favorite one being REMOVE LOCAL

I also see delayed local as the solution failing because it will make the logoski traps broken.

so i agree there maybe a way to tweak the system, and it will have to be a combination of things. as changing any one thing will shift the balance so quickly it would give people whiplash.

but lets stop arguing the same thing over and over lets propose a damned solution like civilized people.

we agree there must be a number of them, i think we can agree that vigilance should matter,
so first off delayed local, lets start with that.

what would you have to give up as the aggressor for this not to break the game?
i think there should be a time delay of some sort,
so what sort of delays we thinking now?
delay before the said cyno becomes active and can be jumped to? which would allow the vigilant ratter some chance at maybe getting out of range and getting out, or possibly blaping the said cyno ship?

or maybe jump duration could be extended fro the blops and bridged frigs from blops that way the ratter might be able to survive lighting of the cyno but is still in a bit of a pickle? would make for some more interesting gameplay than i press cyno so i win.

i would also give the defenders a little of an advantage there say if your jumping in to system in which your alliance holds sov the delay doesn't take effect or at least reduce the delay per sov level? would make holding sov mean something.

so we have tackled local and the instant i win. sounds more balanced now?

so now we have ratter at increased risk, more of them will die but more of them will also survive getting tackled
this still unbalances the risk vs reward
i cant honetly propose increasing bounties with a red in system cause we will all just park one of our alts to increase the bounties.

so increase bounties across board for all null? seems like a bit much.

increase bounty based on the number of ships lost in system over the past 24 hours? we come back to us bringing alts and shooting them so that wont fly.

he lets go by increase bounties in system based on isk destroyed in system, this will bring incentive to both groups. it will bring make ratters want to stay more as there will be incentive to continue in a riski situation.

though it does beg the question of what would happen to incomes in systems that had something like B-R happen.
this would also give added incentive to conflict as systems at war will be quite considerably more profitable than those "Safe Heavens"

My personally favorite tools I mentioned in the post you claim you read. They are tweaks to jump distance/fatigue numbers - things that can discourage frivolous hot-dropping. If you ask me where the “frivolous” demarcation lies - that I would leave for CCP to figure out, as they have the data (and the vision for the level of risk in the game) to make an informed decision.



I believe there's going to be an overhaul to the null reward in connection to the sov changes. Which numbers will be changed, how, and whether even it will all be in isk... you can't answer that without detailed statistics. It's a CCP job.