Assembly Hall

There are sov wars, POS timers, station timers, system timers, these involve big fleets and big operations.

Many people enjoy smaller fleets, with no TiDi and more personal involvement.
There are entosis links - that should be the reason for these smaller fleets to happen, but there are problems with these (see below).
I propose a new solution to allow small gangs to be involved in harrassing the enemy space, and this to be the reason for their existance. To allow for skirmish warfare - something like what the native Americans did: small bands created on the spot, going into enemy territory - for reasons. These small gangs would be damaging enough to make the enemy come out, but not really threatening to sov.

Entosis problems:
- nobody wants to be the entosis ship. Does not get to shoot anyone, and is the first to die and miss the fun. Getting to shoot things is very important in EVE fleets. Shooting at a structure waiting for an enemy response is more fun than guarding the entosis ship, waiting for enemy response.
- entosis operations, even done in small gangs are directly threatening to sov. This should not be. The defender has to run around chasing small entosis fleets, with his bigger fleet (sov threat is serious threat, the response is always big). The attackers end up trolling, the defender ends up bored running around. No fun. Sov should be harder to attack. Get rid of entosis.

Small fleets should have a reason to form - besides catching people on gates, or trying to catch them ratting.
What if a small gang would be able to reduce the sov indices? By ratting/mining/ hacking (exploration sites) in the enemy system. Requirements: be in an alliance. This would not affect the sov, but could bring a response out from the enemy. Anomalies would not be involved in this process, else people will end up forming giant fleets to farm them, to quickly reduce sov indices. Only asteroid belt rats and sites that are scanned down would be involved. So a small gang in an enemy system would be slowly but surely be able to reduce these indices.

Then - if the enemy does not come out, with the sov indices at the minimum level, it should take ~ 20 minutes for a 50 man T1 cruiser fleet to put a TCU or Ihub into reinforced. 30 minutes for a station. These timers will eventually be balanced. After that - command nodes spawn, that game mechanic is ok, entosis is not ok.

With this, small roaming gangs would feel like they are doing something when going into enemy territory, and the enemy will come out - or soon his indices will be at minimum. Again - no entosis required, the same effect is obtained - players without big guns can get into sov warfare if the defenders don't bother showing up.There will be the time zone problem - so alliances could have vulnerability windows during which their sov indices are lowered when enemies rat in their systems.

Also, see what I have written here about planets and sov. A raiding system for planets could be implemented. Roaming gangs of barbarians looting and pillaging. Imagine this: a small gang attacks a planet (a structure near the planet - the gate to the planet maybe). This structure has a vulnerability window and a reinforcement timer. If it falls after reinforcement, the attackers are able to loot everything on the planet, and this would also lower the sov indices. The loses would not be so great as to make the owners bring a capital fleet there, but would be enough of an annoyance for local pilots to make them bring out their own small gang. This could be implemented even in low-sec.

Then - once the planet is looted (of ships and materials in building there), there would be a third reinforcement timer. If the defender misses even this one - the barbarians would be able to loot the local population of the planet, and bring them to their home systems (the population of a planet would have skill indices - how skilled they are in building certain ship types, if they can build T2 or T3 they would be even more valuable - so looting a planet with highly skilled pop would be a good reason to roam). Players would be making ISK by attacking the enemy directly. Players would be able to scan planets the same as moons, but this new type of PI would be done by individual players, planets would not be managed at alliance level. So if a planet is attacked it would not be like a POS on a moon is attacked, and would not always bring out an entire alliance fleet from the defenders.

Just because you have an inability to understand the difference between ~shiny killmails~ and being the guy who actually gets the objective done doesn't mean you can apply the same to every other person.