Player Features and Ideas Discussion

We shouldn't, though. Grinding EHP sucks. Grinding EHP is also the only way to take sov right now. Those can't go together when the only thing that lets you grind EHP without suicide involves 300b+ in supercaps and a batphone to your friendly neighborhood CFC/PL/N3 supercap FC who will show up to save your bacon if your unfriendly neighborhood PL/N3/CFC supercap FC shows up to blow you up for giggles.

They are cool and exciting because they're the only thing left where losses are significant - back in the day wiping a dread fleet was a horrific disaster, while today we could have the HED turkey shoot and have the CFC show up next week with a brand new dreadfleet. But you risk mudflation by just saying well now supercaps must be a thing because we must have a more expensive thing.

And we have so many of the things because for years you needed supercaps to be anyone. Moving minerals to 0.0 might be an easy day's work, but getting them compressed, and getting them uncompressed and into the tower...not so much (you're looking at 50 round trip freighter runs on the 0.0 side - you can outsource the highsec ones if you can afford to risk your build station being overloaded when they arrive). People would have built nearly as many if they were five times as hard to build because you simply had to have them to be anyone in the AOE/Tracking titan era. Now, less so, but you're building as fast as you can con people into flying them and so are we because we can'r risk the other side getting a definitive supercap edge.

Basically the idea that you can just nerf specific things and solve power projection is a fantasy. It's garbage and while you can slap on individual bandaids to prolong the time people will suffer through the current model the best you can do is manage the symptoms.

The complaints about power projection really add up to complaints about one thing and its side effects: bipolar eve. Bipolar eve is the creation of tons of factors that make it so that the only viable way to survive is to be able to count on about half the universe being blue to you if things really go down. That is the child of tons of factors, most poorly understood by the Marlonas of the world. Manny - though I disagree with him a lot on the changes you need to make - gets that you need really fundamental changes that rework core aspects of the game.

The main driving forces behind bipolar eve are:

1) Survival. It is possible for any war to become a galactic war. Just being bigger than your neighbor doesn't mean you can beat them, because your neighbor can beg admission to a coalition and suddenly call in a lot more support. This support can come from anywhere. Many people focus too much on rapid movement - that PL can be anywhere on the map in 10 minutes. That's a thing, yes, but not a big one. If PL takes two days to deploy, they still can deploy and suddenly shift the tide. As a result, even if you have resisted joining a coalition, any war you get into can rapidly escalate to one with a coalition on the other side and you simply must be friendly with their enemy to survive. Most stupid responses to bipolar eve just tell people to have less blues. Idiots who follow this advice end up like TEST. You may not like coalitions, but you'll learn to live with them or you'll learn to live in highsec in the current system. There are countless things that feed into this. That you can cyno capitals from one end of the map to another, and fight on two fronts at once. That modern doctrines use small ships (HACs, T3s, etc) that can often be imported much more easily than battleship fleets. That alliances are rich enough to stock markets themselves and not rely on motivating their members to do it. That alliances can import battleships en masse anyway when they're not using small ships. Jump clones. Podding. Dominion sov. All of these feed into it and you can't just hit one and expect the problem to go away.

2) Lack of serious inhibitions in controlling space. It is trivial to have bills automatically paid and maintain sov over an entire region without any serious effort. As a result there's nothing that really disincentivizes sprawling as far as you can. Keeping sov only requires effort when you face an attack. With pos warfare, you'd have to fuel a tower in each system you wanted to keep - but having only a single tower meant it was easy for a surprise attack to overwhelm you as your attacker got up more POS by surprise because you were lazy about the region. Now, any attacker hitting some renter system that no goon has been to in a year faces nearly the same obstacles as if they choose to invade Deklein itself. Sprawl does not strain an organization. Many people try to say that cost should go up exponentially. That's just not workable: cost does not balance things well in EVE, especially in 0.0 where the old guard will always be richer than the upstarts. Plus, you just evade the exponential costs through one of many obvious and unpatchable ways around it. Maintaining an empire needs to cost effort. We can always find more isk. We can't always find more people to run towers, in space we don't live in.

3) Dominion Sov: Nobody likes this. The fundamental problems with it however are generally not comprehensively understood: people see individual things wrong with it but rarely assemble them into a coherent whole because Dominion Sov is bad both for the attacker AND the defender, something people often miss.

Why dominion sov is bad for the attacker is generally understood: that all your progress resets entirely if you lose a single fight, fights are based on gigantic bricks of EHP, and that when facing an enemy who has given up you still have to grind every bit of that EHP anyway.

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Dominion sov, by reducing everything to timer fights over EHP, screws everyone.

4) Supercaps. Death to supercaps. It is one of the great things about B-R that now that there is rough supercap parity, everyone can finally agree on death to supercaps in theory without it being nearly as political. Supercaps make it essentially impossible for anyone to field any supercaps or capitals without being able to batphone 51% of the galaxy's supercaps. Their speed and their invulnerability to anything but more supercaps make them utter death to new alliances in EVE. Nobody can build a capital fleet or a supercap fleet without being on good terms with their local supercap lords - and with Dominion sov, you need those.

TEST died because they're morons. They got the full backing of the N3 coalition despite their idioticy - they just had to cede an entire region to get it. They just lost anyway because they were irredeemable morons. You've got to love that every offensive N3 managed while Goonswarm was cocking up the initial phases of the war ground to a halt without us lifting a finger because TEST didn't notice the altcorp we had in their alliance despite months of SBUs vanishing, and that was just one of the many hilarious TEST cockups. As to the second thing, I don't know what nonsense you're referring to but it assuredly didn't happen.

More to the point, your entire post is emblematic of the biggest mistake people make discussing the survival issue. EVE's gameplay forces coalitions. You cannot solve it by whining about hostile coalition lords: they're coalition lords because that's the only way to win. People who won't play the game get thrown out by people who will. You can't solve the problem by bitching about the bad people who are winning the current game because if you take them out they'll just be replaced by new people willing to play the game as it is instead of how you want it to be. Evolution is a ***** when it's selecting for something you don't want.

Ironically the highest posts objecting to Manfreds ideas are members of the CFC. Which really should come at no surprise. TEST may have died but for all their blathering at least they broke away and did things away from the HBC.

Cool you burn you're inteceptors over here and project you're power with the stockpile you have. While you are gone I am gonna burn your house to the ground. What are you gonna do burn 250 back? Great your power has been halved in both places.

Burning a fleet far away from home make it very vulnerable to ambush, even if it's inty fleet. None of the FCs is protected from retards in fleet and number of retards in fleet grows with geometric proportion compared to size of the fleet. That itself will encourage people to camp the route from point A to point B in order to kill strugglers, slowpokes etc. Also don't forget that in order to stockpile ships somewhere u must deliver them there first, which won't be an easy task as well.