EVE General Discussion

I made my original post here but I thought it would be worthwhile to post this on the actual official forums. What I'm looking for is your experienced with fozziesov so far - not your opinions or feelings - but actual stories about what you've done with fozziesov to date. Good experiences, bad experiences, funny anecdotes.... please share them all. Thanks!

Original Post Below:

Hey everyone!

The CSM just got out of a meeting with CCP Seagull, the Executive Producer of Eve Online. Although the vast vast majority of what we discussed is obviously NDA, one of things that came out of the meeting is that CCP is actively looking to tweak fozziesov, and is willing to have that change based on actual player experiences and anecdotes. So, as the CSM, we need YOU to share your anecdotes about Fozziesov! We'll be collecting them and forwarding them to CCP Seagull herself, as well as other developers.

• Has your small alliance been able to capture space for the first time ever?
• Are you playing World of Warships while AFK capping 800 command nodes?
• Has your corporation or alliance's playstyle been radically altered by fozziesov?

We want to know these things, both positive and negative, so that we have real player's opinions and experiences. This will help give the CSM the firepower we need to enact real change and make the sov system better and more enjoyable for everyone. If you have any questions, I'll do my best to answer in the comment section below despite the NDA.

A few extra tidbits: CCP doesn't like the term "fozziesov" which implies that this update has been a one man show. CCP Fozzie is the lead designer for Team 5-0, which is the team responsible for the sovereignty overhaul. There are 7 developers on Team 5-0, including CCP Mimic, CCP Punkturis, CCP Masterplan and CCP Lebowski. Anyway, this discussion is expected to continue into late august, and the CSM hopes to have the majority of sov's current pain points resolved by the next two patches. Help us make it happen!

Edit: If you're wondering, the preferred term is "Aegis Sov"

Ok, how about "FoMiPuMaLe SOV?"

I'll just copy paste my post form another thread. Overall It's not all that fun to me, the 'Focus" is wrong. It seems like something that appeals to small gang types, not "Fleet Fight" guys like me.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=5931530#post5931530

Owning and taking sov by being afk for hours and hours orbiting a node is just too tedious, we don't want a game turning into a boring second job, I'm sure that every competent entity in the game would prefer to have the old hp grind back.

Entosis links shouldn't be able to be fitted to any ships below the size of cruisers.
Removing the entosis time penalty from capital ships would make suffering fatigue actually worth it. (you should be rewarded for your sp/ship price)
It makes no sense to punish the older alliances who have put a lot of time and effort into gathering and building supercarriers and titans, they should be perks and not unsubed accounts.

The entosis times are way too long. (42min at index 4? 10 times? are you taking a **** m8?)

Should have never hit TQ in its current state, and probably never would 5 years ago.

This is based on my alliance's experience in Vale of the Silent. Aegis Sov requires tedious PVE grinding. It requires the defenders to stand post for hours in order to respond to someone who will most likely run away and avoid a fight, if you actually respond. The balance is off, since the offense does not really have to commit anything to the fight in order to threaten space.

Grinding up defense indexes is a tedious activity. Eve players consistently complain about the boring monotony of running anomalies and mining for hours on end, but that is exactly what Aegis Sov requires. My alliance now has mandatory fleets for ratting and mining. This has been very bad for morale and has resulted in decreased numbers in corp chat and on comms. Part of this may be bitter vets being perverse: some of the same people who refuse to join mandatory ratting or mining fleets are the same folks who complained about mandatory structure grinding fleets in the past.

Actual fighting under Aegis Sov thus far has been limited to the normal small gang skirmishes against the usual suspects (e.g. good PVPers like Chessur visiting through wormholes). These are the same fights we would have had before. Almost none of these fights were caused by Entosis, or even the threat of Entosis. We would have gone out to fight these people anyway, because home defense fleets are fun.

There has also been a certain amount of chasing away trollceptors - who are not looking to get into a fight or even provoke a fight. They burn off at a high rate of speed as soon as you respond.

In one case, someone did actually Entosis something to the point that nodes spawned. No fight came of this, since the hostiles never came back. It just turned into a waste of time as we went around looking for the nodes and turning them off without any opposition.

If someone made a real push for another person's space, brute force and numbers would win the day. Aegis Sov comes down to knowledge of game mechanics and N+1, just as with Dominion Sov. I do not really have a problem with that.

In a fight between two evenly-matched groups, however, content denial is still the best strategy for contesting sovereignty (just as it was with Dominion Sov). Repeated harassment, followed by blue-balling, followed my more harassment, until they just stop logging in is the order of the day. Harass the defenders by using an Entosis link somewhere in their space. In an Interceptor, you can have an alt do this while you do something else. If they respond, burn off at high speed. You literally cannot lose your interceptor if you are paying attention. If they do not respond, then you just caused them an obnoxious number of nodes to spawn. They are forced to commit several times the effort now, or risk losing something nice. If you give them the satisfaction of a fight, you are doing it wrong.

That is why I believe Aegis Sov is a failure thus far, because it does not lead to more fights.

Id like to add to Jayne's noble thread a little. Do you all feel like my Narwhal game has been on point (no pun intended), or can I do better?

It seems to me like most people just don't understand how Aegis-sov works.

Too many years of Dominion-sov where only the last timer counted, has left most people with that mindset, and dealing with the resulting node aftermath.

Aegis-sov is about preventing the first timer. Messing with nodes means you screwed-up.

That's just too complicated /sarcasm

Preventing the first timer means no content. You are asking the defense to stand post all the time. To maintain an unrealistic level of readiness and alertness for a game. Or to blob up to the point that no one really wants to attack you (see, e.g. the Imperium).

As someone who has been in the military, standing post is boring as hell. Most of the time you stand there trying anything you can to stay awake, alert, and focused. A very small percentage of the time someone shoots at you or actively tries to kill you. Frightening as that may be, it's what you live for. I've consistently trained my Marines to "be a hard target" - to never let the enemy get the drop on them, to always find them prepared. Given the choice between attacking my Marines, who were alert and heavily armed, versus the Afghan soldiers two miles down the road, who were lounging around under the shade smoking marijuana, the enemy almost always went for the Afghans. Unfortunately, it does not translate well into a game. Yet that is what you are asking the defense to do in Aegis Sov.

No one seriously wants to have a go at Deklein. It's got an entire coalition crammed in and around there. The indexes are good. Poking Deklein will result in 10,000 bored and angry bees swarming after you. It is a hard target.

As for getting outside the wire, the real life equivalent of a roaming gang is a patrol. Just as with standing post, most of the time it is just tiring, boring, and stressful. Patrols suck when you are out on patrol for the 12th time in a week and nothing happens, but then a friend gets shot by a sniper you never saw, or steps on an IED, laid by an enemy you never saw. Even if you find the IED before it finds you, then you get stuck with more waiting, while EOD comes out to deal with it. Once again, that does not translate well into a game.

For an example of this, watch this video.

If Real Life was a game, no one would play it. Games are more fun when you are getting shot at, when someone is trying to kill you. Eve is fun when content comes to you. When that WH to Thera opens up and someone comes in to kill your weakest links, then you have a good brawl with them. If content does not come to you, then you go looking for it. Your roaming gang finds an enemy ambush, or catches some careless ratter, or otherwise interacts with the enemy.

Aegis Sov was supposed to promote confrontations between players. It was supposed to provide a means of encouraging the defense to undock whenever the roaming gang came through your space. For years, roamers complained that "everyone docks up and denies us content whenever we come through. We need some farms and fields we can pillage. We need someway to make them suffer for not fighting."

We have that now, but the balance is off. The defense has plenty of reason to be vigilant. It has plenty of reasons to get out there and fight. The offense, however, is not forced to make any level of commitment.

Part of the problem is tactical: kiting tactics are still king. Eve continues to be a game about evasion. Roaming into someone's space in Battle Cruisers or Battleships is usually a recipe for getting slaughtered. You are operationally unwieldy. The enemy can see you coming and get well-prepared to crush you. Tactically, you are also unwieldy. A more nimble enemy can dance around you and pick you apart. A stronger enemy can simply up ship you or outnumber you. So, the dominant meta for roaming gangs is agile, fast ship doctrines, built for hit and run. Get in quick, kill someone by surprise, run away before the blob can get after you. And now we have turned strategic combat into that same combat style.

Aegis Sov would be great if threatening space required the offense to bring a doctrine that could not simply run away and evade combat. If you want to come to my space and make me undock to fight you, then you should have to be in a ship that requires you to actually fight me. It should be a doctrine available to any group, without the need for sovereignty to build.

There needs to be a balance. If someone wants to actually get a fight out of you, they should have some means of doing that. But it has to be balanced on each side. Content denial and evasion has to stop being the best strategy.

As an Imperium member, I resent the implication that I would ever attack the Imperium. At least so long as my corporation is part of the coalition.

I am very familiar with our way of winning wars - blob, blue-ball, deny content, destroy enemy morale, win. While it often is a horrid way to play, I'm too committed to my wonderful corp mates to go elsewhere. Without the guys and gals in my corporation I would have "won Eve" a long time ago.

I blow up a russian POS and i like it :D

(Re-posted from another thread)

We had an entosis skirmish that escalated.

We started off in sniper Corms as we were entosising an IHUB. We killed a Maulus and jamming interceptor that tried to disrupt our operation. Then Goons escalated and brought a Caracal fleet, a harpy fleet and a mixed bag fleet. We burned back to our staging system and reshipped into Cerbs with Logi looking to try and defend our entosis ships and were doing well till Goons escalated with 2 Titans and a dozen or so carriers.

We still had fun though, no major head on fight but several skirmishes and a few good kills (including t2 cyno fit cruisers).

A few of our guys were complaining about overkill from Goons but if they have Titans and are prepared to throw them on grid fair play IMO. If they'd have stuck with the cruiser and Frig fleets we would have taken the fight but as always with CFC the strategic objective is far more important then any 'good fight'.