Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Supercapital proliferation is intrinsically tied to the current 0.0 woes and I dont think any of it can begin to be addressed until CCP can decide if they are comfortable with thousands of titans and supercarriers floating around like they are now.

People will just keep the blue list on a separate app. Irrelevant of what game mechanics you change, you cannot stop the alliance leadership from saying "We have a treaty with this other alliance. Don't shoot them, or you will be booted." All you can do is make it more annoying to figure out who is who, making players do look-up tasks that are better suited to a machine, not someone playing a game for fun.

because what YOU want for the game is always whats best for the game right?

man... you really are that guy...

Could not agree more. Well said.

Nothing will prevent alliances from forming - except cost scaling. Players will follow the money. Alliance wealth needs to scale poorly while individual wealth should also be 2nd rate. There should be a middle range for smallish corps and alliances that has optimal Return on Investment.

• Perhaps the new contracting system could help.
• Corp wars could be made more profitable. like you take their income for a short time, diminishes to nothing.
• nullsec space could be like PI, diminishes resources value if over time, needs to replenish. some will migrate and take over sov, like some use teams for indy (a Push system)
• Home sov (a pull) has to have some advantages

i dunno, you guys (CCP are great at this). I look forward to seeing what you do.

0.0 goals have to be broken in to 4 parts: removing the overwhelming defensive advantages, removing the predictability of war, balancing ship classes (especially at the capital level), and limiting inter-regional movement.

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Part 1:

Defensive advantages at the moment include jump bridges, massive structure hp grinds, cyno jammers to name a few.

-problems here include the one sided advantage of defending a region where you can cut off enemies routes, slow them down massively, and force other timely goals that only benefit from larger numbers to accomplish reasonably.

- jump bridges are at the point in the game where they need to be replaced with gate building without tower defense advantages. Allow players to build gates with high maintenance cost that require regular community activity and not just one guy fueling the thing with a hauler. Allow attackers to damage or destroy gates pretty easily through a series of actions. I'm thinking a combination of hacking and defender NPC's hired by the gate builders with similar abilities and AI to incursions. This slows players down, but limits the time they are stagnant without making more numbers really matter that much. 10 minutes or less to take out a gate, with a minimum of 30 minutes of downtime to fix the thing through activity that is more engaging than remote repairing and requires activity beyond onlining.

What I would do to fix a gate and make it a teamwork activity is have the gate parts explode into 100 parts and scatter up to 150km away from the hulk location. Players would have to tractor the parts back to the gate hulk and then reconfigure the gate. More players equals faster time... and requires heavy exposure until all parts are collected. Then have a 30 minute onlining time.

- Massive HP grind makes no sense. it's there to limit speed, but numbers contradict the goal and it only plays to the defender's advantage. The old POS grind made more sense because there were stages of the goal and way more regular conflicts that mattered. Morale could be broken over the course of time without as much of a feeling of the grind... until players started spamming towers.

So lets look at the old POS system concept, but make it actually work. Make every planet have a 1 mil HP shield generator that defends all the stations in a constellation. Attackers can hit the shield generators to reduce all of the constellations stations' shield HP at any time they want. Once the generators are down or if the attackers just want to hit the station immediately, they have to grind only 5 mil HP armor. Station Reinforced timer's are maxed out at 24 hours, which means they require a rapid response from the defending alliance.... meaning long distance travel becomes really hard and localized defense more meaningful. This also provides mini goals that can harass the hell out of a defender who just bunches up in one system to defend itself. It can add a chase element where defenders can't sit stagnant and defend a constellation, because small groups of attackers can offline shields in other systems and make you more and more vulnerable for sitting on your ass.

Cyno Jammers are just dumb. TLDR, make them more of a tower concept that takes up a moon slot without defense, reduce their HP, reduce their armor, make their shields regen pretty fast and make it a very very small slow down mechanic, not the "effort" it is now for smaller groups. Make the fights about the planets/shield generators for the stations and make the cyno jammer just a very small goal.

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Part 2:

Predictability of war is heavily centered around timers. They're too long and too easy to plan.

There should not be a defensive timer in game longer than 24 hrs, period. Timers should be swayed by your "defensive morale" in a way. If you're losing tons of systems, you should also lose more and more control over your timers to the point where attackers can finish off the war quickly if you gave up.

If the max timer is 24 hrs in a constellation, then every system lost should decrease that max timer as a % of control. If you lost half of a constellation, then the max timer should drop to 12 hrs.

This means the defender's can't live halfway across the galaxy and have plenty of time to get home. They better be actively defending their space. If they lose ground, it can cause the collapse and quick loss of a constellation... meaning they either have to mount their own attack to take it back, or defend the next constellation better.

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Part 3:

Ship balance still sucks:

I've said it so many times, logistics (especially carriers) and bombers have way to much impact on war/fights.

-Capital logistics are in need of a big nerf. It's simple though, tie the range of capital RR to Triage. Make the default RR range of a capital repair module 10km, and offer a 100% increase in range per level of triage when active. This means the only way to get significant repair range with carriers is to make them more vulnerable in fights.

-Logistics ships are too powerful in small numbers. I don't know how to fix this issue because combat mechanics are slowly coming around after many years, so it might just require a wait and see approach.

- (contengent on other changes) Bombers need a small nerf. This is only true if the other Parts of this don't work enough.
In the current mechanics of eve, bombers can change a fight way to quickly if done right. It's obnoxious, not fun to deal with this mechanic and makes fights less fun for most involved.


continued................

The fundamental problem with theory crafting at this level is you cannot truly understand what people are going to do or how they are going to react.

Sov Null suffers from a few things.

1) EHP of the structures you are required to shoot to take a system.

2) The ability to be at multiple timers that are very far away from each other very quickly.

3) The fact that there is safety in numbers.

A few suggestions I've noticed are:

Limit alliance blues: "Newbro's, see this list of alliances, right click them all and set to blue. If you shot them, you'll be shamed."

Escalating sov costs: "I have three characters on each account I have. Each one starts an alliance and holds the optimal number of systems."

I'd like to try out different sov systems. I know if CCP were to throw together a bunch of early build sov systems, put them on SISI and ask the community to come out and try them, I would be happy to show up, it would be a safe guess that a good part of the sov null scene would too.

For example, copy+paste FW into sov null, try it out.

I honestly have no idea how feasible this would be, but giving the players time to break your sov stuff and experiment with it would be a interesting way to figure out what works and what doesn't.

Everything doesn't have to be secret secret, we know you are as perplexed with the situation as we are; really, nobody knows what will actually fix null, and what will just make it weird and unworkable. The best option in my opinion is try every stupid idea and whittle them down into workable non stupid ideas.

You don't need in-game standings to be blue to each other.

If CCP removed in-game standings in the worst case you'd end up with sth like the CVA KOS list (which I can tell you from having lived in Providence for a few months is completely workable), best case you'd do some sneaky client modifications to bring standings right back in (e.g. back in the day people replaced the cached player portraits with - / + pictures to see at a glance how much of local is red/blue).

might of been addressed, my guess is with all the hundreds of threads it is easier to look at all the ideas if they are gathered in one place and easily 'digable'

And i'll pipe in, One thing i think needs to happen is moon goo becomes more of an Active mining activity and not passive. The Ring mining idea was brillant, and the rorq coudl have roles change dot be a cap miner. This would mean alliances need to work there space more and would want to defend it to keep it open for players.

sov should be tied to use, and yes power projection tweeked. I'm not god at holding sov, but thats my thoughts.

Seeing as I was with the 85% of people who hated these changes, yeah.

Also seeing as I couldn't care less what is done with 0.0..

Just stating that CCP has a history of asking for feedback, then ignoring it. (and giving two examples)

So we can plant N+1 players in a system for X amount of hours in cloaky ships to flip the system?