Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Oh well - i see more hate incoming but i post it anyways:


Locking down a station is an option - its not mandatory. Logistics between high sec and null is an option - its not mandatory.
Everything stated so far about what keeps industry etc from developing in null is BS - sorry for the word. There are options already but they simply dont get used.

If there would be any interest to develop the local industry there would be many ways to make that happen - just look at Providence. But running NBSI and not maintaining ones space is simply easier and cheaper than actually caring around it . All other ways than the current ones require active maintenance and management. As long as any activity is purely measured in isk/hour changes have to be forced or they will simply not happen at all. This attitude has made complex space into a pvp desert where only killing ships matters nowadays - the space itself has no value anymore beside being rented.

I can understand the issues nullsec alliances have with this, but it's always the same:
On one hand everyone wants to rat and farm ISK in peace and on the other hand everyone wants targets to shoot.
Only you either get both or nothing.

TL;DR: Bye bye flat rat shipping...hello, having all courier service priced by the light year (LY) and YOU paying double to triple what you use to pay to move one m3 of cargo.

First a little background....

Galactic Hauling Solutions Inc. (GHSOL) has provided the Eve community with a 70M flat rate, low/high sec courier service since the beginning of this year. This service has been wildly popular, and at our height we moved almost 800 loads of cargo per month. That's about half of what Black Frog does (remember they serve both low and null sec), and we used easily a quarter of the JF pilots that they have. If it wasn't for the competitive pressure, I doubt Black Frog would still be charging only 75M for low sec trips under 11.25 LY.

Despite what CCP and the fuel markets did this summer, the 50% increase in jump fuel consumption and another 50% increase in jump fuel prices caused us to increase our rates by only 40% from 50M up to 70M. We worked hard at insulating our customers from these increases and becoming more efficient. We even held off on these increases till August hoping the jump fuel markets might settle down requiring a smaller increase.

During this whole process we tried to educate our customer base that they should start using local trade hubs instead of Jita. This actually matched our how we organized our back end. See we use a regional model where our JFs try to stay in a small set of regions for faster pickup and lower fuel cost. But today still over half our contracts are either to or from Jita, and usually all the way out to the boundary of low/null sec.

Today Jita bound cargo can be moved with 15 to 20 minutes of game time effort with re-using lit cynos, med clone suiciding and using small numbers of high sec jumps to do one less cyno hop. But with all these mechanisms going away or being severely hampered, next month it's going to take over an hour to complete a contract. And if a JF pilot was making between somewhere around 150M ISK per hour before CCP's proposed changes, shipping rates will have to increase substantially, or that player just looses interest in hauling.

This week we raised our prices to 10M ISK per LY of distance traveled from the starting point to the destination with an 80M minimum. It may seem like an enormous jump (unless you get wise and start using the regional trade hubs), but the other courier services are going to follow suit next month, especially since all the competitive pressure has been removed. And I would have liked to wait till after the patch to see how things shake out before raising our shipping rate, but this summer we took a huge hit in recruiting when waited. So we did this price hike to get ahead of the curve...maybe we'll be able to poach a few of the competitors' JF pilots who are dissatisfied with their leadership not seeing which direction shipping rates are going.

I wish this all turned out differently, but this is a direct consequence of CCP's 1 LY per game time minute for JFs. That's my name for "jump fatigue"...it's just a speed limit, and I do realize that the 90% reduction in effective range causes JF to be affected least. But if you want your shipping rates to be lower, JF's need more.

ps - I've pushed for 95% reduction in effective range for JFs in other posts, but that didn't seem to gain any traction within the Eve community.

No, you can get targets to shoot by having a sov system which doesn't eventually end up with a cold war like we've got today. You don't need NPC systems in the middle of every small region for that, as evidenced by every roam running around more or less freely today.

Catching up on older stuff...



No, it's somewhat more subtle than that.

One of the pillars of a good sandbox is that you're presented with a lot of choices. Another is that those choices are real choices, each with pros and cons, rather than false choices with only one good option.

We're committed to trying to make EVE good, which means that any time an important choice collapses down into a single best option, we have a design need to either make the other options comparatively more viable, or to strip the choice out entirely.

For nullsec in particular, there's a clear need for a diversity of strategic choices and organizational cultures and best practices, so that each new war is interesting and different rather than boring and the same. Currently, there's one dominant strategy, which is to form a huge coalition, rent space out, and defend it with as big a capital fleet as you can muster. This is uninteresting and ungood.

We feel that limiting the degree to which you can rapidly deploy military power over long ranges is a necessary prerequisite for creating more diversity in nullsec. To this end, we're committed to achieving the goals laid out for these changes, primarily the need for gate travel to be the fastest way to move long distances.

We generally want to be as hands-off and unrestrictive as possible with changes, as this creates more options and, through the interplay of many, many different individual decisions, allows for the emergence of interesting and novel tactics.

When we're working with player motivation (ie giving more options for things players want to do), we do end up being very hands-off and very "do what you like". However in cases like this one, where a change we feel is needed to make the game better is working against player motivation, experience strongly suggests that the approach most likely to achieve our goals is to mandate the change needed in the most direct way possible, as attempts to be delicate or minimalist in the core change simply lead to circumvention.

However, this still needs to be balanced against our other goal of allowing for as much emergence as possible, which generally pushes us away from doing completely bullet-proof things across the board. With these changes, we could prevent all possible workarounds up front, but we'd like to avoid doing so.

The reason for this is that the oft-stated maxim that "if players can, they will", is not in our experience always true over the long term. We expect everything that people have suggested as workarounds to be tried at least once by most organized groups. However, a more complete model of what players will do would seem to be that there's always a tradeoff between "what can we do?" and "what is it worth doing?". Perhaps the canonical example here is the old "one per alliance per system per day" starbase limit - this is obviously gameable with dedicated anchoring corps, and this was used several time, but my experience with this change was that, after trying it a few times, most alliances didn't bother in most cases because it wasn't worth the hassle.

So we're planning leaving the door open to a lot of the possible workarounds in the first release, because we're trying to balance achieving our "nerf travel" feature goal against our "support emergence" overarching goal, and we'd rather not block things off unless they have a decisive impact on the game. If certain things do come into *widespread* use, we will nerf them - not because they give advantage, but because they take us back towards the sorts of tactical and strategic monocultures that we want to avoid. If people use the Battle Rorqual every now and then, that's excellent, the same way that the Battle Helios is excellent. If either of those strategies become *dominant*, though, we will adjust them, because dominant strategies lead to stagnation and boredom, both of which are anathema to a healthy sandbox game.




The restriction is "can't move between systems if destination is in hisec", so no, they're still locked in place.



Absolutely willing to revisit 5LY if there's a good reason for it. We kept it uniform because it's simpler, it breaks fleets up less and requires a somewhat smaller cyno network for optimal operations. We were throwing around 3LY and 5LY, and settled on 5 in part because it covered most of the "short" inter-region gaps. There will be some chokes, I would assume, but that's intentional.

Yes, go ahead...

Wouldn't it be more effective to start off with the sov system, which is the reason we're seeing the stagnation we're seeing? It is, after all, the reason why the SOP of wars is "he who can stuff the most people/big things into one system on the final timer, wins". If it hadn't been this way, i.e. if we had gone back to something akin to the old POS system, or an occupancy-based system (I don't really care which, as long as it encourages/requires lots of smaller fleets engaging more constantly than today's once a day/once a week), then I'm pretty certain we would not be seeing the current 2 coalition nullsec we're seeing now.

Don't get me wrong, I'm positive to the cap distance changes, but I just would've thought the sov system would've given more bang for your dev hour.

So there's two factors here: one is that we place somewhat more of the blame for the current equilibrium on jump travel than you're doing here; and the other more important one is that we felt some change was needed ASAP, and that travel changes both needed less further design work and needed less time to implement than a sov rework. They both need doing, but in this order there's a chance of something interesting happening ingame over the christmas holiday, rather than not having any changes hit before probably January.

The problem is, while you're changing/fixing something - we're playing it. For you some fail may be just an unsuccessful experiment, for us it's several months in that environment. I hope you (devs) keep remembering this all the time.

Developed in series rather than in parallel, sorry :)

I gave CCP Greyscale a +1 just for the use of the word, 'ungood'

I still think that CCP caved in to the, 'me and my zillion alts are gonna un-sub' crowd, but having said that, it would appear that in the longer term CCP want to severely limit the use of Capital ships in terms of hot dropping cruisers on the other side of the universe.

It is to be hoped that the, as yet to be disclosed improvements to null as a whole will make the rage quitters less likely to do so, and more players both current and new will attracted to the game in general and null in particular.

I think this will be good for the whole of the game in the longer term.