Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You keep using this word choice a lot like it magically makes your idea better.

In reality the sort of choice this pushes on people is one between playing with friends, people they enjoy playing with, ect and balancing a really stupid mechanic with about a thousand loopholes in it.

For example the SP tax creates the sort of situation where you're effectively punishing people for having high SP and corps for recruiting them. If someone flies primarily Logi, for example, but they have about 100m SP not dedicated to flying Logi, then all of that SP is wasted and just contributes towards taxes for the group.

As another example you could have one person who could fly everything in the game, or about fifty people who can all fly T2 Frigates really well, or about 20 people who can fly T2 Cruisers really well.

Imposing a penalty and then saying "well you're free to be penalized" is missing the point of the penalty you're trying to impose here. What is being pointed out to you is that there would be plenty of negative effects on positive behavior from your proposed change. That makes this a bad change, especially with the number of potential negative effects on otherwise positive situations massively outweighs the potential benefits.

To lay it out for you:

Potential benefits:

* Maybe some big and blobby corps get smaller. Maybe.

Potential downsides:

* Lots of corps that aren't big and blobby get unnecessarily punished.
* Playing together and having a large social network is disincentivized since it's expensive.
* Playing with people outside of your corp or your corp's network of allies is all but impossible and significantly hindered.

Oh and as an added bonus any scaling or setup large enough to impact any corp or alliance of any significant size would significantly impact Eve University. An organization focused on new players which has a direct correlation with player retention.

Oh and lastly your goal of forcing people to be more selective about who they blue is unrealistic. It's basically impossible in Eve to have direct neighbors you aren't on at least passably friendly terms with. That's why Null blocks have buffer zones and tacit agreements even when they're not directly blue because having the space you use to live right next to someone who wants you dead causes burnout. Adjacent null entities either establish a buffer or learn to work together, or one drives the other out.

This whole thing seems like you trying to blow the legs off of group play in Eve because you or your group stubbed a toe on a blob somewhere.

You do realize that setting an arbitrary limit is pointless to those that know how to use apis? The availability of such tools out of game is amazing, and to avoid the whole issue of color tax orange would become the new blue. -5 would be for friends, -10 would be enemies, and neurals would stay just that.

Large groups can always be made into sub groups with a simple corp/alliance name change. Anything you can possibly suggest will be circumvented. All effort will be wasted. The thing is that complex systems are best controlled by very simple rules and that is the point of the sandbox.

As for blobing, eve is the only game that can take it to the level that it has, and it really doesn't happen as often as people think. The smaller skirmishes involving a few hundred people on a side happen in other games regularly as well. Poorly. This is the one game where a well organized team of people can be advised by another group acting in tandem to bring thousands of people together in a chatotic but organized mess.

As for plex, they're merely a goal and another tool. A carrot for the stubborn to yearn for and always have been. I'll leave the market magic to people with the deeper knowledge.

Your "blue donut" shows just how much you know. This isn't like the old days, the bets are off and the gentlemens agreements are done. Things don't change much because fozzie and his focus group lackeys made a system more tooth grindingly dull and monotonous that to expend effort for such small gains is very rarely worth the time spent not crabbing.

Fozziesov rants aside, OP your idea is bad, you should feel bad.

Unsupported.

Yes, I'm telling you it might not actually work. Kind of a moot point because CCP is never going to restrict corp and Alliance size like this, but you're not going to accept that so we'll keep picking nits.



The assumption here being that there is a point in either numbers, SP, or both that won't have significant negative impact while still having the benefits you're looking for.

I'm telling you that point doesn't exist, because groups like Eve University that are generally not a problem and whose effects and impact are very desirable exist past the threshold where a well organized group that is determined to blob can do so quite easily.

Also SP is a generally terrible metric to use for something like this. Someone can have tens of millions of SP in Research and Industrial skills and have next to no impact on a corp's combat potential, they're just there for the social aspect, but under your system they're forced into an NPC or one-man corp because otherwise they're a drain on resources for no direct benefit.

This is the sort of problem that crops up when you try to tie social features to gameplay mechanics. I've rarely seen it done well and Eve isn't setup in such a way that it's going to ever work well.



Yes, and you're missing all the cases where bluing and un-bluing the people you're flying with isn't practical but Logi are required. Incursions, Spectre Fleet, Bomber's Bar, and player run tournaments would all be impacted by something like this.

Since those are all quite large content creators, and CCP's stated goal is to get people to group up and play with others more not less, I don't see them implementing something that runs directly counter to that.



So, first off, I don't really care why you made this post. I'm rating the idea based on the idea itself and the effects I see stemming from it, not intent or wishful thinking, and the idea I'm seeing has way more negative effects than it does positives, and that's without getting into the half a dozen loopholes I've thought up in your proposed system that would need to be closed, which probably means there's about three dozen more out there, and at that point you've got something with too many arbitrary restrictions to be workable as a system.

Systems like what you're going for here rarely if ever work, and I can't think of any off the top of my head that exist in a modern and successful game, let alone an MMO.

End of the day CCP aren't going to cut off grouping the way you want. MMOs that try to disincentivize grouping up and playing together die, because the majority of people play MMOs for the social aspects. Otherwise they'd go off and play a single player game.

This is the crux of the problem, a mechanic that is punitive towards positive in game behavior is already off to a bad start. It is going to have to have a pretty solid chance of delivering some really stellar benefits, and there are already 2 ways suggested to provide at least some degree of a work around using existing in-game mechanics.

Nobody likes TIDI and nobody likes blobs unless they are the one's doing the blobbing. However, the first provides at least some improvement given the fact that bringing a friend to the fight is almost always going to provide a reasonably significant advantage. Blobbing is the result of human nature.

Ever since the days when Og and Zog decided they needed to deal with Bog and Nog and having Gog on their side…”blobbing” has been a Thing™. And people behave socially much like organisms do in terms of evolution. They’ll look for loopholes, ways around, over, under or through barriers and constraints. It is one of the reasons why things get better over time. And EVE players are no exception…and who knows might even be a bit better at it than the average Schmoe.

Given this I am skeptical your suggestion will actually deliver the claimed benefits, and given the costs it is just not a good idea. And your defense has been entirely unpersuasive. This mechanic is designed to punish. You want less of something in a modern economy…tax it. Want more of it, use a negative tax—i.e. a subsidy. Taxes are there to restrain market activities and even behaviors. We put a tax on cigarettes in the US to punish and dissuade smokers. And you clearly intend this to be punitive…hence the exponential nature of the tax. To claim that it is not to punish is simply errant nonsense.

I don't agree to tax organizations that have high aggrepated skill points. It hurts one of the distinctive successful rule of the game that your character is still advancing and getting stronger when you are offline. Players will be discouraged to invest in their characters if they get punishment for higher skill points.

Plex price rising is the symptom of reduction of active players. I think the game needs to make the sovereignty gameplay fun again and bring back more players.　The number of active players tell us that players don't like the aegis sovereignty. The game needs a rework badly. Keep it simple, stupid. Put everyone back into one system in structure bashing. Give distinctive roles to players in the attacking fleet and defending fleet. Roles like fighter, bomber, healer, enhancer, hacker are interactively working together in the structure bashing process. Remove jump fatigue, entosis link and reduce the number of structure timers. Establishing specialized structures for the purpose of defending and capturing of a system. Segment the universe for different size of fleet fight, like 10-men, 100-men, 1000-men fleet regions.

Don't try to achieve too many goals in sovereignty gameplay. Sometimes goals like reducing server load and making players happy are contradict to each other. The game needs to understand what the average sovereignty players want. Don't think that all players are the most hardcore and elite players.