EVE General Discussion

No, but now a single player is enough so a single player is enough to force the defender to respond, every time. If the attacker has no interest in actually taking sov and is sending one person to just ping the timer, that shouldn't force the defender to respond every single time. Citadels have the base damage mitigation you have to reach, so you can't just send one person to shoot it and ahve the defender rally a force to then have the solo pilot run away, so it takes a sligtly larger level of commitment.

How is that a bonus? SOV already had timers and it also had a significant minimum number of players that had to show up to be a real threat.

Why should every single player of any size be able to force a defensive response? A solo player in a frigate should not be a threat to sov.

Because it's constant and the mechanics to do it are boring. Plus you keep saying it only takes one, but it doesn't, because at the point the timer is rolling there has to be a defense force sizable enough at the ready in case an actual attack force does show up.

On top of which, fighting off an attacker doesn't make them go away and they lost nothing by losing the timer, so they have no reason to not just come back and do it again. It's a game of whack-a-mole and it's completely pointless.

To put it simply, if a defender doesn't follow through on a defense they lose their system, if an attacker doesn't follow through on an attack, they lose nothing. How can you not see the imbalance in that? It's like playing poker against someone that doesn't lose their chips when they lose the hand while they still get to take yours if they win.

The window is a 2 edged sword. Whoever play out of that window is pretty much free to do whatever he wants while the people who's playtime is in-line with the windo currently gets to run around chasing no-commitment doctrine around. There is next to 0 benefit to committing for an attacker anyway because you gain next to no effectiveness in your attack. Every fleet I have been on to "save" timers, win or lose, the end comments from the player are the same depending on something completely different than if the objective was met.

If the enemy had nothing but no-commitement ship doing the attack, everyone is bored out of their mind because nothing happen, It's warp-warp-warp-warp-warp and stragglers from both side getting killed usually because of their own misstakes. If a fleet show up, people are happy even if we lost it because the timer was fought over.

With iteration to the game every ~6 weeks possible right now, trying for a single cycle to "force" a committed attack one way or another and then see how each side of the coin feel over it, we might actually get some steps done toward a better product. Roll back the change the next iteration if it's a disaster. I'm pretty sure people won't get completely butt mad if CCP shows they are trying to check what could work better for everyone. Hell maybe people don't want to commit more because they feel it's not worth more but CCP would probably benefit from learning that if it's the case.

Except that was never the case, since you had timers for sov in the old system. You actually know what the old system entailed, right?

Passive regen won't necessarily beat it out, and there's no way to tell what is a gang and what is a single ship without showing up and finding out. Waiting until they are already hitting it would be a bit late to stage a defense. It simply shouldn't be viable for a single player to attack sov.

Except they don't want the space. They can attack space with no commitment because they don't actually want it, so if they catch it, great, they cost you, and if they don't, great, they still wasted your time.

I'd rather see the mechanic binned. Reducing timers would reduce how many people have to play with the crappy mechanics but not deal with the ultimate problem they have.

It doesn't really accomplish that though, since the only reason small groups are able to live in sov is because nobody is bothering to play with terrible mechanics to boot them out. If the russians for example wanted a small groups space they'd just move in and it would be theirs.

"but they do provide fights and contents so it suits that need as well"
Hardly, there's small scraps between tiny ships from time to time but most of the fights are happening either in the same way the used to from grudges like MoA vs Imperium or over moons.

"I but beyond that it does serve well for a sov mechanic thats not based around suppers"
It' obviously doesn't which is why it's almost unanimously hated by sov holders. Most sov holders think it's either awful or barely passable. Hell, even CCP have pointed out how bad it is. The only people thinking it's great are people with no interest in taking sov just an interest in annoying people who do want it.

Nat, would you not agree that anyone too lazy and incompetent to defend their space would lose their space? And that's not happening, so obviously laziness and incompetence is not the problem. Oh, look out, your obvious bias is showing.

So what you’re saying here is the people who own sov hate it and the groups that attack them love it. I agree that it could be a bit better balanced but shorting the windows is a direct nerf to attackers and a supper buff to defenders. Strange I have no grudge with you or the imperium and I’ve been fighting your canes for the past few days so I think your biases for large fights is showing here because it hasn’t been over a grudge or moons.

If they bin the mechanic of sov and change it to something else, I’d be fine with it I am curious what would you like to see for a new sov mechanic and how would you like to see people engage in sov warfare?

i tried out entosis warfare tonight it seems to pervoke fights. either way it was a good fight guys.

I feel quite conflicted on this topic. On the one hand, I think that people who want to hold sov should be able to do so, and that it should be difficult for them to be kicked, or harassed, out of their space.

On the other hand, I think that enormous conglomerations such as the Imperium are fundamentally bad for the game and that sov mechanics which assist in these being broken up are healthy. At least for the moment.

I guess that leads to a further question - would the Imperium form under the current sov mechanics?

So what you're saying is you don't like a mechanic because it allows for open ended gameplay. Sounds to me like you are adverse to the very things that make Eve different from all the other pixel generated fantasies.

Sov is a both a privilege and a liability. I wonder how long it will take to understand this, its not something that was a given right to every person. You don't have an unalienable right to own Sov in this game. Attempting to own Sov is a two way thing, it can give you economic benefits, but also make you a target for enemies. You need to decide if it's worth it, and then if yes how to maintain your level of playstyle while going against others. Claiming that several hundred pilots beat out the second largest alliance in a broken mechanic that favors defenders just shows entitlement.

If you truly want to own space and still be the size you are, fight for it, actually commit to it, don't just wallow in the background until something changes. In that case, will there be anything left for you?

I'm not even sure how you reached that conclusion. You are able to read English, correct? The issue isn't open ended gameplay, it's that attackers don't have to commit anything and can attack sov even if they don't want it. Sov mechanics should a way to determine ownership of space, not a way to allow small groups to force big groups to do repetitive mundane task, and certainly not without having to actually put anything at risk to do so.

Well no, it's pretty much just a liability at this point. And sure, we don;t have an unalienable right to sov and if a player want o attack and take our sov they should definitely be able to. But once again, to do so should require some commitment. The attacker should want to commit because they want the space. As it stand they don't want the space so they don;t need to commit a thing.

That's not what's being claimed. What's being claimed is that mechanics to deal with sov are boring and that people are having to spend an unreasonable amount of time defending against players who don't actually want to accomplish what the mechanics are there to do.

But don't you understand that's impossible to achieve? Even if the mechanics were changed to limit alliances to 5 corps and corps to 100 members, people would still work together and would always achieve more by pooling their resources than solo players. What's dumb is that these mechanics make sov uninteresting to deal with and make travel a burden, and so they are more likely to create groups of players forming together so they can accomplish more with less individual time spent. Even look at the people attacking us right now, there's multiple alliances and a coalition (including two alliances who are in the top 10 on member count) working together against us because it's easier to do that.

I imagine the overarching issue is that they've lost sight of what sov is actually for. There's been a big move to crush down power projection and make sov easier to take and no real increase in reasons to take it. While big groups have to worry about dealing with multiple timers, small groups still have to worry about being roflstomped by big groups. The mecahnics are now a mashup of various concepts with no real direction.

Personally I still think sov should just be a direct reflection of system activity, so as you mine, rat and kill players in the space, or have things like industry queues and pos modules active you accrue ownership points for the system and if someone else gets more ownership points their name goes on the system and they get associated buffs to income generation/yield, etc. It should just be a reflection of who lives there rather than a beacon you take. That way even for a big group to take over a small groups space they would have to physically live there for a good amount of time before they could flip it and as soon as they leave it would just flip back as activity resumes from the original owner.

Times like now when groups like ours are getting hit we'd have to be active and it we just stopped and our enemies were active we'd lose our space and the benefits we gain from it, like we should. But nobody would have to mess around with gimmicky mecahnics.

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