Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Sov War 2.0: noobship blobs feeding into DiscoSovGrinders.

can some one provide a link to a sov-map of the chinese server or a link to a dl?

Two things:

1: I like the idea of the Sov system encouraging people to be active in their space.
2: This isn't quite the way to do it.

Fundamentally, Sov warfare is a PvP game, and basing it mostly on PvE activity would be a rather significant change. After all, the 'big deal' here is the massive capital fights over significant objectives. If there weren't any significant objectives, just an overall counter of PvE amount, that's nowhere near as dramatic, and would lead to less interesting conflicts, IMO.

Which is not to say that it's entirely a bad idea, just incomplete. What I would recommend, instead, is for the listed factors to contribute to a 'Stability' rating, or some such... which has a beneficial impact on the tankiness of Sov structures. Accordingly, a popular, active system will be much harder to take down, and an unpopular backwater will be vulnerable to a much smaller fleet.

Similarly (and this WILL be a big deal), let foreign (read: non-alliance) PvE activity in your space decrease stability rating. That will be a huge deal in terms of inter-alliance relations, since your 'allies' hanging out in your space doing stuff is actively bad for your system security (in some small but meaningful way). It won't lose you the war outright... but if you have blues hanging out in your space, who aren't contributing to war defence, then that's a real incentive to have less blues, which would create more overall conflict. Additionally, people without the ability to actively and personally grab Sov over an area, can still help to undermine their enemies by doing PvE in hostile territory. Indeed, the aforementioned unpopular backwaters might have their primary defences mostly undermined by a simple and 'harmless' fleet of miners over the course of a night or two... leaving the critical Sov structures vulnerable to a quick raid, and potentially putting the defenders in an untenable position (as they'd be trying to defend a glass house, in a fleet-on-fleet situation).

Structure grinding should be removed as much as is possible from sov warfare. That said, the current system has a lot less structure grinding than the one before it.

I would like to see a few baby steps introduced:

Make it easier to destroy TCUs

Stations (if present) override the TCU (owning the station grants sov) and are still a ***** to capture

This would make it easier to capture non-station systems, but the big alliance assets in their staging systems would still be safe.

Here's what I mean by "make it easier to destroy TCUs":

1. Instead of having to anchor X sov blockade units, attackers only need to anchor their own TCU
2. Once 2 rival TCUs are online in 1 system, the system becomes "contested"
3. TCUs in a contested system lose their invulnerability and a chunk of their resistances/HP/EHP/whatever

The absolute last thing we need is to make Nullsec carebearing even safer than it already is. Making a system that can only be validly reached by alts either by significant advanced warning (and sort of reinforcement on the gate before allowing neuts through) or by random chance (WHs), or by having a cyno character already inside, would be absolutely ridiculous. Perfect safety for nullbears.

Also, within maybe a month, every single such system would have at least 1 permanent afk cloaker with a cyno, just to combat the absolute ridiculousness of getting there otherwise, and thus afk cloaking threads would become even more of a scourge than they already are.