Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Both CCP and the player base are confused about what the economic indices mean, and how to respond to them. In the light of this new unsubbing movement in response to recent changes I am genuinely worried that this confusion will end up Eve losing even more subs. Here is what I think is the problem. I originally posted this on reddit, but I am posting it here in the hopes that I can catch CCP's attention.

Inflation and immense gaps in mined/destroyed values are economic problems that are real and haunting this game. But these are not general problems caused by the entirety of Eve. These are specific problems emerging from specific regions. These regions are non-exceptionally farmed by organized entities. Some of them include Goons, TEST, C02, NC, Darkness etc. What distinguishes these regions from others is that the entities inhabiting them are admirably organized. Especially Goons.

Now here is what was wrong all the time. Eve provides organized entities conditions and mechanics to use their capitals in PvE almost risk free. All you need to do is to have a supercap/titan force that is regionally uncontestable. You have it on standby in your staging system, and you have license farm however much you want with your capitals and not lose them ever, provided that they light the cyno for help. As your supercap/titan force is uncontestable, everyday forces, such as a blops fleet, or a roaming fleet exiting a wormhole, will not be able to challenge them and kill your PvE capital. And this is the essential factor that distinguishes these regions that are disturbing the Eve economy. Go and try to hunt PvE capitals in these regions in an everyday fleet, that this is what you will get without exception.

Here are some knee jerk issues that people had with what I said, when I raised these concerns before. They said they have the numbers that explains the mined value. But Cobalt Edge was mining similar to Delve a few months ago. It was just two alliances, Care for Kids and In Panic. It means that anybody can farm as much as Delve. What happened? HK, a wormhole corp, moved a super force into the region and farmed them, resulting with an immense drop in the amount mined. Meaning that capital forces on standby of these alliances were no longer regionally uncontestable. Exactly as my theory predicts, the mining values were fixed back to normal.

People also have argued that there are ways to go around this issue. Firstly, you can have your own supercap force like HK did to In Panic. That will work vs. smaller alliances, but not larger alliances, because they will have larger supercap/titan fleets. Unless something like WWB happens, and everybody else unites, this won't happen in Delve. The other potential counter is dreadbombs, which is how PL killed most of the Rorqs in Delve. It works, but it is a minus sum game with lots of SP requirement, which makes it an activity that only a few entities (like PL) can pull off and then sustain. And even PL does not sustain it to a meaningful degree.

Thirdly, they said organized entities are entitled to their safety because they are organized. To me this entitlement is directly tied to Eve economy. The health of the ecosystem comes first than the free access of nullsec alliances to options that diminish their PvE risk. If the amount of risk/reward in your activity breaks the economy, panics CCP, causes them to make bad moves that hurt everyone, including you, you are not entitled to that particular ratio of risk/reward in your PvE activity.

So, these few organized alliances already had license to risk-free farm as much as they want, given they had one real people per a few PvE capitals (although some like Gaara took it to the extreme). And then the Rorqual changes hit. Now they have the license to risk farm simultaneously with however many PvE capitals per person. This just accumulated/will accumulate more wealth in the hands of these people, resulting in more accounts, more mining. The more titans you have, the exponentially more you can build. I hope you can see how uninteresting and stagnant this is for Eve.

CCP tries to address this problem. Some of the moves, like anomaly respawn changes, makes sense. Nerfing PvE capitals does not. It will just hurt the little guys in little regions. I heard Rorquals make 200/300m per hour. If we nerf it to 150, then all you will change for this person with 50 Rorquals is that he needs to mine 10 hours instead of 7 to to plex his account. Any further mining activity per month is still a plus in his wallet. He still has incentive to mine with more and more multiboxed Rorquals. Same goes with anom running supers. As long as you don't lose these ships, you will have incentive to make money off them. Thus a blanket interference with everyone's ISK/hr will not solve the problem. A more localized interference with the amount of risk that is taken by PvE capitals of a few alliances will.

For the last year I have argued time and again that the low rate of relative risk that PvE capitals of organized alliances were taking was the real problem. Right now I am legitimately worried that this game is getting closer and closer to a crisis that will end up diminishing player count more, because both the player base and CCP fails to acknowledge this problem. My proposed solutions included introducing a balance between scarcity and risk, so that alliances have trade offs in both expansion and de-expansion. The risk balance would be nerfing capital force projection by giving attacker forces better means of cyno inhibition and by nerfing capital jump ranges (although keeping their speed across the universe same). If people have subcaps to go for aid of their capitals, rather than just instantly jumping their entire regionally uncontestable force, then that would make a more interesting.

You might or might not like my proposed solutions. I am really, fully open to any suggestions. But can we please agree on the problem?

What inflation?

I think your over generalizing the issue to one problem but it is an interesting read worth taking note in.

So what your proposed fix for this?

I completely agree, I've actually mentioned this long before in the AFK cloaking sticky (different account). It is evident in the most recent economic reports that show most of the destruction occurring in Hi-sec. Null sec is way too safe for an area that is supposed to be dangerous, a huge part of this problem is the massive amount of intel that local provides. A complete rework of offense vs defense is needed, with an objective of creating more destruction. I think a focus group on this subject might be helpful.

Nerfing ships is not going to solve this problem, because the ships are not the problem. The problem is current mechanics that make attacking much harder than defense. The resource density should also be changed to force people to spread out over greater distances in order to harvest resources. The jump changes that were supposed to affect power projection did not really have the effect they were supposed to have because small areas are able to support high densities of players. This has led to the current situation I've seen described where there are large null blocs surrounded by empty space. This I think is contributing to the lack of destruction because it reduces the need for conflict as well as the potential for it.

Don't nerf the ships, nerf the sites. Spread them out make people compete for them in order to increase the destruction. CCP needs to foster a major war. That is how the material inflation and isk inflation will be solved. And nerf local while at it to make guerilla warfare a viable tactic against the large blocs that have damn near established monopolies.

1) Nerf the capabilities belonging to most organized alliances of being able to respond to any aggression in their space by instantly counterdropping a regionally uncontestable force. I would go about it in two steps.

1A) Improve cyno inhibition for the attacker side..Make it so that you cannot light a cyno in a nullsec system unless you have the subcapital dominance in the system. I would imagine two kinds of cyno inhibitors. One is small in volume and cheap. It can be carried by hunters. It has really small AOE that is about 10-15 kilometers. It shuts down active cynoes as well as prevents in active cynoes. You deploy it really close to your target ship, so it cannot light a cyno. The second is a system-wide cyno inhibitor. It can be carried at least by a blockade runner (10k in volume etc). It anchors in perhaps 30 seconds. If the defending force can manage to light a cyno in 30 seconds and get their capitals in then they are fine. But if not then now they have to come in the system by other means, and kill the inhibitor for their capitals. The system wide inhibitor provides a warpable beacon in the system, and has some EHP. To kill it you would need a subcap force in the system. I imagine this would also change the way nullsec conflicts work overall. But I think the change would be toward a more interesting game, as it would diminish the power of having N+1 capitals.

1B) Nerf capital jump ranges. This is simple. Alliances shouldn't be able to cover huge ranges by only 1 capital jump. There needs to be middle cynoes and some time between capital help arriving to the tackled capital. To balance this change jump fatigue needs to be tweaked, so capitals should be able to move through the Eve cluster at the same speed, although they would need more middle cynoes.

2) Introduce scarcity. Anoms in a system shouldn't sustain more than 3-5 rorquals or 1-2 ratting supercapital. If you have more people you would need to expand. This is already a path CCP is on, as they just decided to nerf mining anom respawn rates. We need stronger steps here though. Plus, fighter mechanics for Rorquals do not sound to nerf inactive mining does not sound bad at all.

So what would all these achieve? Firstly you would need to have a local force to shoo off an attacking force. You would need to take gates, middle cynoes, or spread out and coordinate your forces beyond your staging system, etc, instead of instantly being able to respond to agressions in your entire region by 1 capital jump. If you fail to take down the system-wide inhibitor, you can always light a cyno at the next gate. But then the attacker can counter that by bubbling gates etc. A more interesting game for everyone. Overall, alliances would have motivation to de-expand their space.

Yet, since scarcity is also an issue, they would also have a motivation to expand their space. This would not only solve the issue of really small spaces mining %75 of Eve's materials, but also create meaningful content drivers for people who want to take control of resources and for people who don't want to give them up.

So in the end you end up with a very meaningful trade off between security and access to more wealth. If you spread your farmers then it will be harder to secure them. If you flock them in the same areas then it won't sustain too much farm. And this balance would both result in a better more sustainable Eve economy, and would provide the very much needed in-game reasons for conflict to the currently stagnant universe.

Again, you might disagree with these if you think these ideas are bad, and you have better ideas. As long as we agree on the problem I would be more than happy.

And I don't think I am overgeneralizing, given the huge gap between Delve and the rest of Eve, mine is the best explanation on what distinguishes Delve from the rest.

To decide the fair amount of reward one gets from his PvE activity and the fair amount of risk he has to take while doing it is a developer issue. In many Eve trailers you will see it is being advertised as a universe with meaningful risk/reward. If that ratio stops being meaningful, that it is a developer issue.



There is only a handful of such people who can do this in Delve, compared to shitloads of people who do is anywhere else. That is Delve's privilege arising from being the largest titan force. But that privilege is breaking the game. Hence it becomes a developer issue.

I think you are pretty spot on with this. however, you don't address the massive advantage given to defenders by local. This is one of the main factors of risk mitigation, as soon as a potential hostile shows up people can dock up. Anyone that simply monitors local has little to no excuse to be caught. This intel is what makes it so hard for attackers to do anything meaningful, and it is why so much more destruction occurs in Hi and Lo Sec where local is not as useful.

This is the core problem.

Mechanics such as local being an almost flawless intel source enforce this core problem.

Alliance space is too easy to make almost completely risk free for economic activity. This leads to a situation where people can exploit the increased payout of nullsec without having to deal with the associated risk. Sure sometimes stuff gets destroyed anyway, but it is a tiny, tiny fraction of the benefits.

That is one colossal wall of text. Unfortunately, there is not one single problem to pin an answer on, as has been said.

Multiple people mentioned throttling the spawn rate of high end sites. What I wonder is if the spawn rate should be inversely proportional to how many get completed in a region. So in empty regions, they'd spawn at the shortest interval, in crowded regions they'll be "over fished" and become less frequent. Or maybe some better way of tying it to some measurable statistic of risk vs reward. Maybe have it proportional to regional losses? So a newly conquered region will be far more productive than a stagnant region? I'm a fan of the concept of self-balancing mechanics, and it makes me question the absence of them in EVE. (I'd apply them to every single economic system in EVE if it was my call.)