Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hello people,

We would like your feedback on the various new structure lines presented during Fanfest and on our latest structure blog.

This particular thread is going to be around the mooring and docking features tied with those new structures.

• Mooring is intended for the largest ships (supercapitals and maybe capitals) to be safely stored around those new structures. As long as they are within a specific radius of the structure, they would be invulnerable and could not be bumped. They would otherwise not be able to interact with their surroundings or other ships on the field as long as they would be protected. This is meant as a replacement for Starbase forcefield which currently has a certain number of issues.


• Docking is intended for smaller ships to be able to get inside the structure and be safe from direct assault (just like in NPC stations)

We are aware mooring presents a lot of discussion points, some of which were expressed during the Fanfest structure round table:

• Having (super)capitals visible from space, even if invulnerable to direct assault, is going a huge intelligence boost to opposing forces.
• Having (super)capitals traceable in such a manner could allow third parties to ambush (super)capital pilots as soon as they remove moorings to destroy the ships before they can escape.
• Having a fixed mooring capability on those structures will create problems if the structure mooring capability is full when another (super)capital pilot tries to use it under pressure.

We are considering various ways of solving the points listed above, like giving some "buffer time" when pilots moor and remove moorings to give them time to react by either jumping / warping away or aligning to another structure with available mooring capability.

In W-Space, intel is gathered by d-scanning and looking on-grid (at POSes) to see if any players are active and what kind of ships they're in.

Do you intend to permit docking in W-Space? This would make intel gathering much harder unless mechanics are put in place to see what the docked players are doing. This is my biggest concern with the proposed "anchor any structure anywhere" philosophy you outlined at the fanfest presentation.

As a regular scout in w-space, I can only emphasize again Enta's point : removing this huge intel tool will be incredibly detrimental.

Maybe a half way meet between removing the full power of d-scan while allowing us at least some intel would be to have the possibility to see who and what is in the station once you're on grid with it.

A second concern I would have is timers : how do you intend to deal with the unavoidable station games that will come out of this ? As it is today, once you're out of the forcefield it is possible to bump you and keep you away. The way docking works, it will be much harder to get somebody out of docking range, and thus decrease the risk of undocking in a shiny ship.

If a supercapital is XL sized the station it is moored to should be XXL just to be reasonable in size.
Combined with the idea of having weapon highslots on structures the defence of such a station should be more then enough to keep a few ships of the grid.

Honestly, I don't see these as issues.

Supercapitals in particular are supposed to be strategic assets, not personal playthings (the last few years of Eve not withstanding), and as such, some thought should be put into their basing, advance, and withdrawl from the field.

To point 1: You know how modern navies hide aircraft carriers? Answer - they don't try - they're too farking big. Anyone with a halfway decent mapping sattellite can find them pretty much all the time, if they're willing to put in the time to look. Hiding the location of a super carrier is like trying to obscure the location of Central Park. If you're going to put supers out, you invest in keeping other people away from them. You move them from time to time. Or you use the ultimate cloak and log out in them, just like today.

#2 - You're saying this like it would be a bad thing. If you're going to unsling your supers on someone, shouldn't you have - I dunno - some kind of support fleet to protect them at their most vulnerable? Wouldn't knowing the time of an enemy operation, and surprising them in dock drive content?

#3 - Being able to play mooring games with Nyxes sounds like a terrible way to spend an evening. If the super cap pilot, not to mention the FC, isn't thinking far enough ahead to check the availability of moorage points before they put their ship in harm's way, then the ship deserves to die in a fire.

Honeslty, it's time everyone stopped trying to treat supercaps like battlecruisers. Stop trying to protect them like babies in a cot.

Fighters will still be assignable after Scylla - you just have to actually put the carrier in harm's way to do it.
Seems fair to me.

Would it be possible to consider the best of both worlds when it comes to Forcefields and Mooring, mooring does seem like a cool idea to work with, but it has so many flaws previously pointed out in this thread.

Since there's an emphasis on the customizability of the structures themselves why not give the option to fit a forcefield? Obviously it would have to have a negative impact on the structure through high PG/CPU and even requiring multiple modules to function.

This would make having the mooring system far more flexible but then if you would rather a forcefield around your starbase you can compromise the utility in order to have one.

This gives people the option to do what they want and would accommodate for all types of players.

Posted this in another thread... but prob makes more sense here...
What im really interested in is how close we can put these different structures together....?

Can we put smaller structures closer together and make a space community thing?
Can we put smaller structures close to large structures...?

I would like to be able to make a hub of activity in a system... obviously without breaking things so that it gives an unfair advantage... i just dont want to be warping around a system doing stuff i can now do simply all in one place... and separating people out that are now all living together...

I can only echo the last poster on this. Without some sort of forcefield mechanic, there is no "staging in space". Nowhere to keep a titan, safe-align a fleet etc. What mechanism/structure will ensure that gameplay is kept?

Moored ships should not appear on D-Scan.