Jita Park Speakers Corner

This post may be revisited and re-structured with a better format and overview at a later time...

It has dawned on me, more lately, that many of the reservations i have with this game and many other recurring topics that appear on these forums all tie back to the mechanics of the political system.


The numbers paradigm is derived from powerful mechanics in the game

Many of those features are simply way way too powerful and that is what drive numbers and the mysterious "blob". The ability to set people red or blue have no limitation. Setting up an alliance rather seem capped toward the total playerbase than anything else, as we see standalone communities of 10.000 players who operate within larger coalitions.

What is amiss here is what i would label as "cumber in number". How a growing volume give you advantages but usually come with disadvantages as well, raising the demands on your organisation. Mind you, i'm not saying that organizing a large alliance or coalition in EVE is easy. It is however not balanced toward the advantages it bring, and running a 10.000 man outfit is not appropriately more complex to organize than running a 1000 man outfit. More importantly, it is not balanced in the game mechanics. The challenges you face running a large entity tend to come from the outside.

This aspect of the game, with inifinite volumes that have no mechanical drawback, only meta-derived ones, also have a tendency to trickle down and affect issues some people belive are unrelated.


One example of relation is the discussion of removing local

Is the problem characters appearing in local? It could be in low-populated systems, but the comming to terms with that is rather to endorse movement in those systems to make a "visitor" less outstanding. Compare deep nullsec with lowsec in that regard. Lowsec residents are simply so much more used to ships passing through their systems that they do not pay them enough note to consider them a threat. If they did, they would see threats everywhere. While that's likely why some groups do not venture into lowsec as well: The point is that traffic will numb sensitivity.

Instead the problem is the political system. It's not "people in local" that tend to alert players, it's "neutrals in local" because a neutral is an exception, a threat. Instead of removing local you could just as easily remove political standings from local. If people acustom to neutrals the issue is contained. It could still be an intel tool in combination with intel channels, but it would be less powerful as a tool that detect exclusion in volume.


What about the common reservations?

To "numbers" discussion someone is likely to suggest that: If you limit corporation and coalition sizes more, larger groups will just create wings: "The largest alliances would just create Token Alliance 1-10".

Another common reservation is that "people will still have friends". People will still collaborate politically and you can't remove that from the game.


Here's where it get interesting: We don't want to remove that from the game, i do not anyway

The problem is not that people collaborate or have vast outside community pools to pour members from. The problem is the power of the game mechanics that enable them. The problem is game mechanics like inifinite blues, not player disposition for safety in numbers. Outside tools may have cumber, or theoretical- or meta organisation may, but the ingame mechanics are "flawless".

It doesn't describe itself in reservation of "human nature".

This also trickle to issues like Supercapitals or lag, server/client performance and TiDi. Supercapitals become more important when scale have no drawback and content is continuously increasing in volume.

In fact, we want behaviour like in the examples above. We want a large organisation to splinter up in a complex organisation of many corporations and alliances. That means they can still be themselves, but it comes at the price of demanding more from them on an organisation level using the ingame tools.


Meta is the mediator

They all point to one intersting thing: meta will always exist and it is the defining point of balance.

If you provide more or less powerful tools you will just shift the meta. If you provide faster servers we will grow our numbers to match. If you let alliances be larger, it will simply mean that more people are needed to fill out the coalitions.

We want the meta.

The player creativity start outside of the tools. Regardless of mechanical volume or power.

We want people to continue to collaborate, have political schemes and deal with diplomacy. We do however want to strain that diplomacy more as size increase and we want more conflict derived from it. A diplomat in EVE must have an incredibly easy time today as the removal of blues from overviews and similar ensure that there is little to no snafu that can lead to diplomatic incidents.


What snafus?

If one large group have friendly political connections to another and they collaborate and share a grid, that is fine. However, if they do not see each other blue or can remove each other from overview or grid their mass of numbers also ensure the cumber of letting other ships hide in the mass, and (risk of-) "blue on blue" misunderstanding.

When it comes to finding targets you have a direct cumber there. The more you grow, the more difficult will it be to effectively detect a target through your mass and organise a collective effort against that target. It put more strain on FC's that command larger fleets. Even with powerful tools such as broadcasts (that send a target to overview top, or let targets be locked from broadcast windows) it will be much more difficult to determine and organize based on broadcast, rather than just organising based on standing with broadcast as a crutch ontop.

Erm.. nope. Removing standings wouldn't make any real difference in null. People would see new pilots. They'd either recognise them or do a show info to see their standings. The character would end up in the intel channel and there would be no difference to the current situation other than it being a little more cumbersome.

I'm against arbitrary limits, a limit to the number of blues would be just such a thing. Another mechanism would be found to work around any such limit. It may lead to more 'blue' on 'blue' combat but nothing significant. I've been in fleet fights with neutrals before, both working to a common aim. It's different, but workable.

The Empires do fall. Large entities have been built up and collapsed in EVE before. Just because we currently have the CFC doesn't mean that they will survive. They may, but groups will probably splinter off and other groups join. Nothing is fixed, people's priorities and objectives change. Leave the sandbox open ended.

To say there are no disadvantages to running a large organisation in EVE does the CFC but in particular Goonswarm (Or TEST for that matter) a lot of discredit. Even though they like to tell everyone they suck at EVE and they are all fat neckbeareded morons, they are actually really well organised.

Don't forget that this game attracts a certain mindset. The GSF and Test have access to people like Lawyers, Corporate Managers, Accountants, Hackers, Engineers, Programmers, Designers, Media people..... pretty much every walk of life. They organise themselves into what they enjoy doing (no matter how boring everyone else finds it) and they provide their expertise to keep the alliance and coalition going.

These alliances have built themselves to remove single person dependencies and to allow the entire group to run on a day to day basis without necessarily needing a massively involved leader. They are, in my opinion, fascinating reflections on human nature.

Massive coalitions and alliances have strained relations, logistical issues, technical issues, personality issues etc magnified ten fold that the two biggest power blocs (CFC and HBC) have found intelligent people to work hard on. To take that all away by limiting standings is ridiculous. If Null Sec was ever conquered by a single alliance I would genuinely be worried.

Not because of the game, but because those people performed political and organisational feats that should be pretty much impossible in their spare time. God knows what they would do without EVE to take up their time!

I'm not inferring anything.

You're saying there is no downside to having an alliance of 9000 people (GSF, TEST) or even having a coalition of up 15000 people (CFC, not sure about HBC numbers, but cant be far off). I'm saying that the inherent drawback in having a group that big comes from economies of scale. When you're small (and therefore likely to have hardly any blues) you can trust 1 person with access to the corp hanger. When you're a sprawling coalition the only way anything gets achieved at all is through superhuman feats of organisation.

The drawback of having a 15000 member coalition is, in fact, having 15000 people to co-ordinate.

There is no reason to have a hard coded game mechanic because we are all human beings and getting 15000 people to get along and do things together (regardless of the colour on their name) is difficult work, a lot more difficult then even a 1000 man alliance requires.

If this was some rubbishy game where we build our own fleets and the ships all obey our every command when I tell them to do something then yes I would agree there would need to be some downside. However having so many blues and working together is inherently difficult, plus it opens you up to even more chance you'll get an entire corp go awoxing or some such.

Forming powerblocs is a natural part of societal evolution (The Roman Empire, The British Empire, The French Empire, The German Empire, WW1, WW2, The Cold War, The UN, The EU, OPEC) and what's more the larger they become the easier to destablise and fragment they become. Every Emperor claims their Empire will last 1000 years but so far no-one has really achieved it, because humans are human.

What I'm trying to say is: Stop crying because you don't have enough spacefirends.You don't need a game mechanic to punish someone for having so many blues, because the downside is inherent.

Even if I change GSF and Test to "Big Alliance A & B" and the CFC and HBC to "Coalitions A & B" the point still stands, the fact that I am part of either (actually part of both) is irrelevant. It equally applies to NCDot, -A-, Solar etc as well as any future powerbloc that is formed. Again, I'm not inferring it as an attack on anyone specific, nor did I say that (though you assumed I did, which would suggest a guilty conscience. Now THAT is inferring) I just used them as examples.

You argument is largely a strawman argument. You say that co-ordinating a 15000 person alliance isn't as hard as it should be, have you actually talked to anyone who does it? Have you even been a part of such a big coalition? Because frankly I don't think it is "too easy" because if it was there would be more of them.

Saying the "political system is hard coded" is like saying the American political system is hard coded due to the fact they have a constitution, and therefore the human factor is irrelevant. In reality a popular and charismatic President wields a lot more power over Congress and the Senate due to the fact the members of those houses want to be seen as "in" with the President. Just because the President can veto a law according to the "mechanics" of the American political system doesn't mean he can politically.

You're arguing about interfering in something that is fundamentally human in nature with programming? Don't be absurd.

I like the way you also picked out WW2 out of ALL the examples I picked. How about you pick out the EU? And OPEC? Both of which are power bloc formed within the real world without some weak attempt at passing it off as some Godwin's law palm off. Fact is humans group together in bigger and bigger social groups of people who have similar outlooks and goals to protect themselves from those who don't have the same outlooks and goals. EVE's NullSec is pretty much a mirror into the human psyche.



I don't really see your point. What difference does it make ever? You basically just want to create a situation where allies open fire on each other BY ACCIDENT more often. What does that achieve? It adds nothing to the game but headaches, there's no point in adding a game mechanic that punishes player for achieving feats of diplomacy by making them still accidentally blow each other up.

Please don't compare this to a ship, the comparison is frankly ridiculous. You saw my post where I stated if we were talking about something that responds to your every command I would agree with you. However this isn't the case. To pick some examples that I know of recently (despite being blue) a small Test gang and CFC gang exchanged fire causing a diplomatic incident. These people were given clear instructions and yet found a grey area. What you're talking about is getting 6 MWD's on a ship and making it go 13km/s every time i press the button.



No it wouldn't be more fun, and if you think it would you should actually be in a Null Sec alliance and take part in the thing you are criticising. All you would be adding is people shooting each other that didn't mean to shoot each other, when they realise they would stop.

Coalitions need the system for the same reason any number of real world coalitions use call signs, frequencies and hell even flags to identify each other, because when you have put in all the effort to get so many people on side and co-ordinate several different military forces the last thing you want is them shooting each other by accident.

Frankly I'm starting to suspect you have no clue what you're talking about or you're a troll, so I'm leaving this here. Especially since no-one at CCP would be moronic enough to implement your idea.

Don't be so sure. I recall hearing about a CCP dev that thought capping the number of pilots in an alliance would make the map become more fragmented.

Of course thankfully he was informed of GSF1 -> GSF99 but still, you never know.

I have to agree with inquisitor, the balancing factor against large coalitions is, frankly, themselves.

Coordination is a torutrous assignment given only to masochists with delusions of grandeur and eve-conquest. I've seen alot fo players struggle to corrdinate a couple hundred pilots in a single combat operation, so i can somewhat imagine the insanity of keeping logistics chains and combat operations orderly in soem of the big 0.0 alliances. And as for size, have not most alliances in EvE died form the inside out? They either have roles and authority so spread out between the participating members, that either A) Groups disagree on a subject and splinter apart, or B) someone goes AWOXing. or their are so heavily controlled by a single person on eve 24/7/365 that one week he ahs the flu (or dies) and everything falls apart.


The true issue with 15000 people, is the 15000 people themselves, all arguing, fighting, and eventually, blowing eachother up.





Its 4am and im tired, i hope what i typed was close to coherent, meant to type it up earlier, but i got distracted by an unopened box of white-chedar cheezits.

http://kos.cva-eve.org/

/thread

Sometimes, people end up shooting blues. And when that happens ...

Hi Courthouse! I am Noisrevbus, a terrible forum troll.

As a man of decorated insight into and understanding of the political mechanics of EVE, i would be very interested in seeing what you have to say about the topic itself (as opposed to the circular discussion that came later, or any uninteresting insinuations, that strain my efforts trying to get this back on topic).

Read the first two posts and help me talk about the mechanics of the political system (rather than people's hearts and minds or the outlook on "getting friends"). I'm interested in game functions, not the culture of communities.

How do you feel about functions such as "setting red or blue" having no counter-weight (in the system itself), or how it in combination with overview settings enable you to filter and remove marked characters to distinguish neutral characters in large mass (eg., enabling you to filter 1000 players from an overview to clearly distinguish 1 neutral player as it represents a political anomaly)? The standing system and overview filtering are examples of very powerful tools when dealing with organisation of numbers, more powerful as numbers scale up, that in my oppinion are worthy of attention and discussion.

If you are interested in the topic - come talk the topic: the mechanics (it doesn't have to be my examples) .

I can't stress that enough, i have a problem in this topic: the people posting so far doesn't want to discuss the topic with me, they want to sweep around it (or sweep it under the rug). I'll double back here every few days to see if someone talk game-design and ingame mechanics.