EVE General Discussion

That's the problem - game mechanics already dictate how the game is played - any profitable/meaningful action in 0.0 involves structure grind, which calls for blobs as well as timers, allowing massive blobs to form up.

I don't complain being blobbed to hell when I enter a huge alliances space with a ten man gang, I complain because there is no single sane reason to do so from an ingame perspective.

What am I supposed to do there? Watch moongoo poses do their thing? Have a bot warp to pos shields for the time my gang passes the system? Find and gank the single human ratter that is logged in to eve?

There should be something like hackable moonmining arrays - claim huge swaths ofs space with your superblob and let them become unpopulated botting and moonmining wastelands like it is now and you'll get robbed as if there's no tomorrow.

Build densely populated space with good infrastructure and have these people defend their space.

Right now there's no reason for an alliance to even defend their space against roaming gangs, because they can't do anything anyway. Likewise, there's no reason to go to null in a roaming gang except for some epeen stuff - there's no profit to be made and no strategic impact to be had.

Blobs should win in a fair fight. But there should be a possibility for a smaller force to use guerrilla tactics, to inflict pain to the large entities.
Change sov warfare so that small gangs can disturb industry (moon goo, plexes, whatever). If suddenly large alliances need to actually defend their land from a small and mobile fleets, we would have a lot more entities in null.

TD:LR. The blob is a result a very unrealistic relationship between damage output and ship resilience in the EVE combat simulation. Fix that, and you will fix the blob.

Long version:

In game - as in real life - there is safety in numbers, and the organization is very human phenomenom. But unlike real life, there are few drawbacks to organizational size in EVE.

In real life the need for specialization in most modern militaries (compare pure infantry-cavalry armies of old with todays multitude of combat and combat support arms for example) and subsequent need for more information at greater speeds in order to make the whole complex organization function under fire puts severe limits to organizational size. In EVE, on a fleet level, large fleets are incredibly homogenous, and in terms of complexity can better be compared to a roman legion than a 21st century military organization.

Therefore, in EVE, a fleet commander can make all the calls necessary to make the fleet function. A modern day company commander with 5 platoons of 5 squads each of ten members would find it impossible to do the same. In EVE the fleet serves only to disseminate bonuses and to automate certain information functions in the form of broadcasts. There is no real need for either platoon commanders (wing) or squad leaders to perform as leaders, because the command requirements are really very very low compared to real life modern military.

An this is because the EVE combat simulation portrays a very unrealitsic relationship between damage output and ship resilience. In the entire history of warfare, raw damage output has always overpowered the defences of mobile units - if they could hit them. The low range and accuracy on avialable weaponry however, meant that concentration of force was absolutely neccesary to accomplish anything. A musketball would inflict absolutely horryfying damage IF it hit you, but the musket cound not reliably hit a barn at 100 yards. Therefore, you needed 3 rows of massed Napoleonic musketeers to guarantee that you hit anything at all. With the advent of rifled guns howver, a single gun could hit and kill anything at vastly extended ranges, as became painfully clear during the American civil war. Even today, a single anti-ship missile will incapacitate all but the largest warships. Not so in EVE. In EVE, weapons usually hit, but they do uncharacteristically not kill their target. And because they dont, it necessitates in essence napoleonic tactics on the battlefield - that is, concentration of overwhelming force on the decisive point of battle.

So, the necessity to concentrate force drives the need for simplified command and thus low organizational complexity.

So - if you want to get rid of the blob (and lets be honest - who wouldnt), the game design needs to shake up the damage-ship resilience relationship, which would then necessitate ships and tactics to avoid taking damage alltogheter (much more reliance on different forms of electronic warfare for example). This would neccessitate increased organizational complexity and increase the command requirements dramatically, necessitating a true chain of command, and force fleets to disperse rather than concentrate (a concentrated fleet would only be a juicy target).

In summary, more sneaking, more avoidance, less direct fighting. The question then is - do we as players really want that? Or are we happy with the current "bar fight" combat simulation? THAT is the real question.

With the right tactics, one guy to a fez handfull can stop a horde. Its all about choking points.

I should know.. i beat Orcs Must Die! in less than 2 hours.