Player Features and Ideas Discussion

There is VERY little incentive to own a POS in high-sec; even less than before. And the few reasons that DO exist now tend to be even easier to tear down trivially in order to dec-dodge. The only other high-sec asset one might choose to defend is a POCO, and they have, in fact, generated some valid wars as a result. However they simply don't provide enough benefit across the entirety of high-sec to be a strong driver except around Jita.

Yes, grief deccing is a thing and will continue to be a thing. I'm not proposing a single change to the wardec mechanic itself. I don't think it needs fixing; I'm perfectly fine with regular corps being able to dec-dodge trivially and don't want to take that away.

All I'm saying is these new structures present a great opportunity to provide permanent, worthwhile-to-defend assets for high-sec corps that would promote a valid use for high-sec wardecs that isn't just griefing newbies in E-UNI. And that's fine; whatever reward these structures provide should be balanced by the risk of having to defend it if you get dec'd rather than just dec-dodging. If a corp doesn't want to have to deal with that risk, they don't need to build these new structures.

Also note that I'm assuming these structures will be using e-link capture mechanics as described for sov. This changes the landscape of high-sec "structure-control-warfare" considerably, and generally speaking would strongly favor a corp like E-UNI because they can swarm the field with T1 ships and e-links.

Which is kind of the point... active corps with lots of pilots should have excellent opportunity to defend their in-space assets provided they are willing to undock a fleet that can defend the grid of their structures (or win the control-node contest) for their primetime window. And likewise in reverse; it should be trivial to capture structures/assets that corps are NOT willing to defend. Whether high, low, or null shouldn't really be affecting this basic premise and appropriate choice of ownership transfer mechanics around these structures combined with the e-link changes would actually allow highsec wardecs to function as-intended with no changes to the wardecs at all.

The cost to benefit ratio is probably never going to be high enough in high-sec to drive serious conflict between high-sec entities simply because any entity that can push such conflict can do the same thing elsewhere for more profit, because high-sec should never be a lucrative as Low or Null if people are willing to put forth the risk.

As soon as high sec operations start to approach that level of profit they also become lucrative targets for belligerently minded high-sec entities, and if you can defend against them you can make a decent fight of it in Low or Null for vastly more return on a similar investment.

Also E-Uni is never going to be capable of mass fielding E-Links (or at least not inclined to do so) as long as the cost per ship is 40-80 mil just for the link. They may make an attempt at defending structures, but while E-Uni is a big organization it doesn't have the same kind of focused investment and organization of other similar sized entities. It has a lot of spread foci and a lot of affiliated pilots have limited interest in serious ship to ship PvP.



This is a ridiculously specific situation that hands every imaginable advantage to the defending party, and it can be assumed that such lucrative space would attract serious threats who are capable of working around such defenses given enough time, effort, and people unless the defenders are willing to make just as serious an effort to hold onto their space.

Plus, if the majority of activity is in that rear system then the others are going to be easier to take, which allows a determined attacker to simply eat one system at a time until the tail end system is undefended and the attackers control the rest of the constellation.

It also makes one huge assumption that is easily fixed, namely that the effect on warp speed from these upgrades is going to be significant enough to confer an overwhelming advantage to the defender, and that there is no available counter the attackers can employ. This is rather easily fixed. Simply don't make the bonus that large, or allow the attackers some kind of counter-play, such as hacking the star-gates to allow their ships to pass through quickly as well.

Since one of the stated goals of FozzieSov is to eliminate the kind of buffer zones you're describing here I don't see this as something that's likely to make it into the game as a viable situation, even if we ignore the ridiculously specific geographic requirements.

May he live long and prosper.

Can gate* scamming become a thing?

Charging a toll was something I forgot to mention. I like the idea, but gates would need to be hackable.

On a similar note, I do not think that high sec gates should be destructible. High-sec griefing could be taken to a whole new level.

My suggestions are:

- For the observatory structures, intruders should be made aware of whatever bonuses the owners / defenders get, via notifications. If the structures are implemented as presented at the fanfest, an intruder would have to do a long-range d-scan to detect what structures there are in the solar system, and then try to remember FROM MEMORY what capabilities they may have. While this is ok for veteran players, if you're trying to attract newbies to null, they won't know this stuff. Similar to having ship charts, now they'll have to have station charts too; it takes quite a bit of PVP'ing to get a feel for what the ships do, so learning the stations may take a while.

- Let gates control movement to other solar systems and the ranges from the gate that are required for departure and arrival. I'm not sure that you'd want the stargates to determine wormhole-like effects; wasn't that supposed to be what capital ships will do? In any case, if you combine too many effects onto the stargates, someone who just wants to get rid of a side effect will be forced to blow the entire stargate to get rid of it, interrupting traffic flow too. I'd keep the stargates simple, especially since you (CCP) are going to have to debug the twisted traffic KNOTS that we'll make with them. Hope your node transfer middleware holds up.

- For both structures, there is a HUGE benefit to having traffic and activity logs (like the wallet journal) so the owner can see what happened over the past 24-48 hours, vs. just having information available whenever someone clicks the scan button (like d-scan or probing). So which will it be? Will we have logs, or will the structures behave like a system-wide d-scan? If we have logs, please log usage too (Memphis Baas reviewed the traffic logs at 2015.03.25 21:42 in the log).

Ooh yes... Maybe the diversion or free passage effect is only active while an entosis link is on.

Hacking the tolls into your account... So much win!

I meant that high sec NPC gates should be invulnerable (maybe not able to be captured too), because this would have severe impacts to new players not able to pay the tolls. Building your own gate to get around shipping choke points or a back-door into Jita could be destructible.

Make the player owned gates hack-able and send whoever jump through to lowsec near system, that is gonna be hilarious

Potential problem, I train up a hacking alt in somewhere between ~2 days and a few weeks (depending on skills needed) and suddenly I can basically throw this guy at a gate until he hacks it and get my free pass for little to no risk to myself, and certainly no standings hit.



I'll confess to being a little unclear on what you're responding to here. I'm assuming it's my post quoting you a page back but that doesn't seem to exactly fit. For one, unless things have changed drastically in the Uni in the last ~1.5 years, Unistas are only allowed in Sov Null under very specific circumstances and are otherwise not allowed in there under pain of eviction from the Uni.

Also you're missing the point a bit with AFK cloaking. The difference between a docked up character and one who is logged off is hair thin. Effectively the docked character can trash talk local, and the logged off one can't. A docked character is otherwise contained and no threat. They will show up on D-Scan or probes if they undock, while a cloaked character is capable of taking indirect action against characters in space without decloaking, and can decloak on-grid with far less warning than other ships appearing on grid. Not all of these are a problem, but on the whole the system is pretty one dimensional and without risk to the cloaked party as things stand.

None of this has anything to do with a Uni fleet looking for a fight though. If you want to provoke a fight with sov holders then attack their in-space assets, simple as that. No one should ever be absolutely forced to fight with no possible way of backing out just because someone comes looking to fight them.

Also, if installing an Observation Array means losing Local and with no comparable replacement I don't see many Null Alliances using them (at least for systems they actually intend to defend) since it's basically shooting yourself in the foot just so you can get a cast to doodle on.




This is just speculation on my part, but I don't feel I'm going too far out on any limbs here when I say:

I think this is CCP's current plans. They've got a general idea and they're looking for feedback, ideas, and the general reception it gets. If you want to wait to get more details before commenting then the answer is simple, wait.