Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Seems like hot topic lately: The problems with nodes and blobs.

My suggestion would be to add a new mechanic to ship interaction called interference. Every ship would generate X amount of interference and every ship could also handle X amount of interference before negative effects due to excess interference apply. This would not directly affect the maximum amount of players people can get on grid, but once different ship's interference peaks start to fill up, you probably don't want more there.

Negative effects could be things like smaller targeting range, scan resolution, sensor strength, agility and speed.

+1

Prepare to for thread to be flooded with blobbers telling us how terrible this is.

I have heard a few people push this idea over the years. It always sounded to me like something worth investigating. Yes in a perfect world CCP would just fix the code to allow 10,000 people fights, but we all know that is never going to happen. Eve is stuck as a single core process with very little hope in sight for going multi-core. As the tech world really isn't increasing clock speed much and focused on adding more cores, buying new hardware won't help much either.

I assume different ships would produce different amounts of interference, could this break the Capital blobs?

At the very least it should be debated and looked into. maybe there are really good reasons not to do it, I would be interested to find out what they are.

The one thing we all know is that the current system isn't fun at all. There isn't much they can do that can make it worse than just flying in, assisting drones and sitting in 10% TiDi

And here you expose the problem with the "omg, I have a brilliant idea no one has ever thought of before" crowd. The don't even look for the downsides , even though it take other people all of 5 seconds to look at the idea and find the obvious weakness.

This is also why studies show that just reading the features and ideas forum for 5 minutes kills 1 million brain cells (look it up, it's scientific fact!) lol.

There should always be diminishing returns. They had the right idea with ship modules, but it's too bad they didn't extend it to the rest of the game.



Is this before or after the node crash? Or is it during the structure shoots that make people want to tear their eyes out?

This thread has been moved to Features & Ideas Discussion.

I also have removed a rule breaking post.

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Commonly known as flaming, personal attacks are posts that are designed to personally berate or insult another forum user. Posts of this nature are not beneficial to the community spirit that CCP promote and as such they will not be tolerated.

Let me list some of the "anti-blob" proposals that have been proposed over the years and the problems with them.


Idea: Damage has stacking penalties attached to it. The more people that focus fire on a single target, the more the damage from each person is limited.
Problem: Fleets will start setting up "damage chains" akin to what they do with remote repairs... but with low-dps weapons (or even high-dps weapons, just stack the ships' resistances more to neutralize the damage profile) . With enough people you will be able to mitigate a lot of incoming damage... which make high EHP ships like capitals and supercapitals nigh invulnerable because they require a ridiculous amount of damage to take down in any reasonable amount of time.


Idea: Remote repairs has stacking penalties attached to it. This prevents people from creating "repair balls" that only alpha-strikes can punch through.
Problem: This would merely push fleet tactics more towards "bring the most people" rather than "having a better plan."


Idea: Restrict the number of people in a system to something more manageable.
Problem: One group can pile all their forces into one or two systems and virtually deny all access to any opposing forces.


Idea: When massive fleets enter the same grid the server will "split them up" and create various instances for different sections of the fleets to slug it out on. As the numbers dwindle, the different instances will be recombined on to the same grid.
Problem: Besides the technical feasibility of this... fleets are rarely uniform and often rely on different hyperspecialized groups for support and effectiveness. You could have a situation where a group of logis will be stuck against battleships and/or cruisers pitted against supercarriers. Or worse... two fleets that are allied with one another get stuck in the same instance (because computers can't distinguish player intent) and can't be returned to the original grid (with all the hostiles) without killing their own forces.


Idea: (similar to yours OP) When enough ships enter the same grid then all ships will begin to take small amounts of damage (to hasten the battle).
Problem: Still favors the group that brought the most people and/or less remote repairs... also favors bringing in more massive, tanky ships.


Idea: Bring back the old Titan Area of Effect doomsday weapon the clear out blobs!
Problem: There are a lot more Titans than there used to be and multiple Titans can be brought on-grid to wipe out anything that isn't tanky enough (see: any and all sub-capitals).

interesting idea but what about super-capital grade smartbombs, titan only and titan gets some bonuses to its range (maybe up to 50km? might be used more then the DDD and could be used as a spearhead with energy and rep-support as id ploughs forward into the blob.

This already more or less exists. It's called the "Pipebomb" / "Disco" tactic.

Basically you fit your ship with only a certain type of smartbomb (e.g. EM only, Thermal only, etc), fit for maximum resistances against that damage type, then either hotdrop on top of a hostile fleet or sit at the edge of a bubble they have to go through. Space Perverts pioneered this tactic and Rooks and Kings applied it to anti-battleship/capital warfare.

Honestly, the only way I can see to implement something like this without giving a decided advantage to any particular established module or strategy would be to use something similar to the target breaker's mechanic. Essentially make it a chance to lose target lock with a fleet threshold of a certain number and the chance increases at an increasing rate as more ships enter field.

But this is assuming that blobs are a problem. I'm not in that camp. I think blobs are part of what draws in new players and lends the game credibility on the public stage. IE: The Battle of Asakai

So even after fixing the OP's original idea I'm against the idea.