Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Problem:
So i think we can all agree, Fozziesov has caused many a shake up in the world of eve over the last few dozen months, tactics have shifted, alliances have grown, moved, and crumbled, and most importantly for the sandbox, capitalist, economy that drives eve; assets were destroyed.

Things seem to be settling back down again now, a cycle eve-online has been caught in for as long as the game has existed, new content must continuously be injected into the game in order to keep the flow of assets from creation to destruction going.

Most recently we've seen injections such as NPC Gala Sites, and Blood Raiders Naval Shipyards. These gimmicks work for a short time but they don't really get people to move around and "kick in other people's S*!T" as one of my corp mates once put it. The major destruction of assets just isn't happening at a rate that is comparable to the creation especially in areas such as super and capital industrial production, we're getting massive stockpiles, with less and less need. The ISK sink just isn't big enough for some items and ship hulls.


Proposal:
Increase the severity of incursions to the point where they effectively act to evict the residents from an area and must, after a reasonable deagro time, be conquered to allow people to live in the area again.

In this scenario an incursion could slowly increase in severity, attacking and reinforcing structures and entosising, in a very real attempt to evict alliances from space.

Over a lengthy period of several weeks the incursion could escalate to a peak at which point it would make a real concerted effort to push out the inhabitants for a short time, hitting multiple systems over several time zones, before rapidly de-escalating their aggression and assuming a hold the line stance on newly acquired territory.

Anyone wishing to take the space must then fight a defense fleet, the strength of which would diminish on a log curve, so that at no point was the space vacant but after 2-3 weeks could be taken with minimal effort.

Incursion fights could escalate, the duration and severity of which could be determined by RNG. A ceptor fleet taken out to fight the incursions could cause an eventual escalation of capitals against, or vice versa.

The result of such turmoil is multi faceted:
A) Would counter the uncontrollable stabilizing factor of humans instinct to group up against common foes causing the dreaded "stable blue doughnut" by introducing a chaotic element to the game.
B) Would increase the requirement for activity in order to hold space.
C) Would enlarge the the ISK sink, promoting growth.
D) Would create content across many fields and not just for those under the assault of the incursion.
E) Would encourage small gang PVE as i think it can be assumed that when NPCs defend nodes it'll be the way fozziesov intended which will force a similar response from any countering team.

One suggestion has been, when an incursion hits, have NPC hunters; much like PVP hunters, enter an area and start actively hunting people. Warping between systems and to belts and anoms trying to catch ratters. These incursions would then have to be actively hunted down with a defense fleet formed by the locals.
These hunters could then come in varying tiers dependent on the type of ships they were hunting, and even roam around in small gangs that would require a fully organised fleet.

SOV is not a requirement for PVP. Ask anyone in lowsec or NPC Null about that.





I like the idea, but only if the incursions offer a meaningful reward for fending them off. I'd love to see the blood raider shipyard AI in use for it too.

remove reinforcement mechanics instead.

Does a freighter pilot being ganked get a reinforcement timer so he can comeback 3 days later with help of friends to fend off an aggressor, no he does not, he just dies.

In a pvp game the same concept should be played out across the board.

The ultimate standard of EVE should be, are you strong enough to take and hold some asset be it a freighter or a chunk of space or are you the prey that dies to those people that do have the power.

As, the blue doughnut is so fond of saying, you should not expect the game to hold your hand and accomplish things for you, if you cannot do it on your own or in conjunction with some group you should not get to keep it.......PERIOD !

In the long term, this would cause more settling in of empires, not less.

The reason is you'd have to end up with empires that can cover all time zones. Because of that, you'd end up with the merging of groups that are strong in other TZ's into one that can actually cover the entire clock every day. It would make it pretty much impossible for any group that wasn't able to cover the entire clock to create structures or control sov because off-timezone people would come in and kill their stuff.

We'd end up with 2-3 ultra huge groups that could have stuff... and nobody else could (in high-sec or low sec as well as null).

A smaller number of groups = less conflict.

Your example only applies if the freighter pilot is forced to log off and leave their ship in space. The fact that a freighter is only going to get ganked when its pilot is logged in (or was very recently logged in and did not safe log out) completely invalidates that argument.

I agree Eve is PVP. But if there's nobody there to fight you, is it really PVP? It takes even less skill than mining.

Specific to the OP, these incursions would start taking bits and pieces of space off the map. If they were based on the ADMs or dynamically adaptive like the bloodraider AI, even the big alliances like PH, Goons, and TEST would have a fight on their hands (barring lolpunisher spam tactics).

Once you take space off the map, players must react. I know if we lost our pocket, we'd be looking for new space. Since it's all occupied by someone, that means we'd have to either have no home for a few weeks (something that I am quite certain we would not accept) or take one from someone else. I expect we'd probably just carve ourselves out a temporary home in someone else's space, then go take ours back.

Except... other people would be in there to take our pocket too.

Nobody make a sound, nobody even breathe - what you're seeing there is the ever-rare "content". Don't scare it away!

Except it's not forced PVE. If you don't want to fight them, just roll out of the system. Someone else will be happy to move in I'm sure.

The way I see this particular mechanic working, is that it would be "just enough" (which would be very difficult to implement) to force a corp/alliance to fight hard for it.

If it were known that this corp/alliance were currently engaged in a rather dramatic fight, that might incentivize their less friendly neighbors to move in and take advantage.

"Rotating" the most valuable space around wouldn't really work. If it's close enough, they'll just move over and take it (border skirmishes already happen so there's no new content there other than SOV hell) and if it's not close enough they'll just say "meh". The small groups would never be able to roll into the bigger groups, it would always just be the big groups taking a dump on the small groups.

Honestly, the first thing to do would be to disadvantage the large groups.

Imagine, for example, one of the most lucrative Goon constellations (I pick on the Goons because they're the biggest alliance) getting blobbed by 100 NPC titans. I'm sure the Goons could take that fight if they were careful, but they'd have to commit massive resources to it. Or they could wait a few weeks for the system to rebalance. Asset safety would ensure that the members didn't really lose any of their stuff.

So now Goons has a choice. They keep their system by fighting for it, which opens them up to sorties from rivaling alliances, or they lose some of their income, which in turn diminishes their power by some (probably small) amount. Losing the constellation for 2 weeks might not be a huge blow to them, but if it happens once a month, that will start to have a cumulative effect on their ability to finance their infrastructure.

The OP's idea is PVE. But it makes groups VULNERABLE, which in turn lets opportunistic groups take advantage of them. The side effect is PVP, almost.

Just no, OP.

Eve is a PvP centric game, PvE should never replace the functions of PvP and it should never be something that is forced on players.

On top of that this isn't remotely needed. There have always been and will always be cycles of action and calm in null warfare, whether it's due to real life cycles like school and vacations or just the usual cycles of conflict followed by consolidation.



That's still forced PvE no matter how you slice it. The NPCs are coming to attack your stuff in space, you have to defend it or lose it. That's forced.

The closest we have to anything like that right now is Incursion Rats on gates, and even those are fairly easy to avoid and spawn at a distance that makes them all but harmless to anything that's not a Freighter or an Orca.