Are Mega-Alliances and Coalitions Bad for EVE?

Communications Center General Discussion
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Over the last 3-5 years, maybe a bit longer, alliances have been growing larger and the creation of coalitions has been forming more and more. More players have been joining one side or another and it has basically driven the game to become somewhat stagnant. Yes, PvP still happens, wars still rage on, but with the consolidation of power to so few groups, it has limited the engagement between players.

These Mega-Alliances and Coalitions are basically the main reason the game is in the state it is at the moment. If these groups were broken up and actually fought each other it would bring new life to the game as a whole. More content would be created not just in PVP but also in the manufacturing/industry. The vast amount of ships that have been built and stockpiled would finally be used or possibly be used. The armadas of supers/titans might actually be used and not just sitting in a Keepstar only to be used when there is no risk to it.

Another bonus to breaking up these groups would be the control of inflation to the economy of EVE. More ships would be destroyed and items would be lost. Supers would not be used as much to rat with and be used instead to kill other ships. The Isk faucet would decrease and the Isk sinks would become larger. The markets would come alive more with new players trying the fill the gaps that have been created with the changes.

I am not sure what a good size would be for the alliances to max at, but anything would be better then what they are at now. Coalitions, on the other hand, is something the game developers can not really control. As most of these agreements have been outside the game and built over the many years of the game. It would have to be the players on this end to lead the change. Tho that seems like it could never happen as no one wants to give up the power they have been able to gain. It would be a huge sacrifice, though a necessary sacrifice, for the game to grow again and become what it is supposed to be.

I know that a lot of players would not like this idea, but it is one that has been on my mind for a while. Any feedback on this is greatly welcomed. As I know there are a lot of different ideas out there and just as many opinions on them, just give it a thought and maybe we can work something out as a community.

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You ask a question and then give YOUR answer. In my opinion, Eve is only mimicking the real world. Your solution is fraught with danger. Who decides who, how, and where to break up these groups? There is NO answer to any of those questions.

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Maybe.

But here’s the thing. For better or worse, they are EVE. Have been since forever. Not just the last few years. I can’t personally picture EVE without them.

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How would you do this?

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To be honest, I do not know. I am sure with all the great minds in EVE, people can come up with something. I know it is a lofty idea but one that i wanted to ask and get others thoughts on it.

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I totally understand where you are coming from. EVE would not look the same. Though would it be better for the game in the long run for changes like this to occur? Maybe who knows. I think it might create more content and bring some fresh air to the game. People have gotten very complacent with how things in the game are.

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Yes they are, but you can’t really get rid of them.

Let NulLSec stagnate and rot until those players are so bored to tears they start unsubbing and leaving. And let them blame everyone else except for those who are actually responsible (themselves) on their way out.

Honestly CCP should just fix LowSec and to hell with Null at this point. Null has taken up so much dev time over the years and it just gets worse each year.

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You can. Make it so API char access can’t be and is not allowed to be shared with third parties. For example having to login with your account credentials.

No shareable char data access will require personal trust within player groups to work, which limits their size in a „natural“ way.

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I don’t see how that breaks apart mega alliances. It just makes it slightly more annoying to coordinate.

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They are terrible. And every single person who joins one of them just because they want an easy life is responsible for a worse EVE experience. If you see a char who has recently joined TEST or Goons or any other big block, you should hunt them and make their EVE lives miserable. :slight_smile:

How would you fix it, though? Low sec already has very good income potential with L5s, large pools of non-FW L4s, It has many R64s if you want to moon mine.
It has gate camps where people actually fly through because they are shortcuts between high sec, or to desirable space like Delve or Fountain via Hier in Aridia. On the other hand, this is actually something that could be improved. The route Jita-Hek via Miroitem/Rancer is a very nice shortcut with a lot of risk for taking it. One could introduce a similar shortcut to Dodi via Olettiers (not via Tama because Tama gets enough action as it is) to cut that trip down from 15 to 7 jumps. Not sure about Amarr because that high sec route is already very short.

Do you remember that time many years ago when local didn’t display standing tags, which led CONDI to exchange externally saved char portraits via a third party program with standing tags. This was apparently so successful in providing CONDI with extremely good intel and left anyone else in the dust so that CCP in the end had to introduce standing tags in local for everyone? Now, people will naturally claim again that Remove Local would fix that but it did not really during the 2 months of blackout.

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You’re completely wrong about LowSec. I don’t care about “potential” I care about boots-on-the-ground reality. And the reality is, LowSec outside of FW space is a wasteland, unless you’re some tryhard camping a gate for easy Iteron Mark V kills.

The rewards in LowSec don’t match the risk/effort needed to get them. Players have pointed this out for years. Nothing has changed. LowSec remains a wasteland.

R64’s are irrelevant as long as supers can be jumped into LowSec.

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Don’t remember the standings thing. But as today everything in regards of ingame access is handled with ACLs, you could restrict their usage to only one alliance, and everything outside this alliance can only be „all“ or individual players together with number restrictions.

Access to infrastructure can’t be compensated by out-of-game tools.

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A wasteland in terms of PVP or PVE?

Missions are pretty good, especially since Burners. I was about to show you an area in Aridia that used to have a very high number of NPC kills (comparable to null sec) but there’s not much there now. I am not sure if this is because of Burners or because the people there left. A problem with the rewards are that FW keeps devaluing them. Mission LP are practically worthless and the goodies you get from mission LP stores don’t compare to the cheap prices from FW LP stores. Maybe that could be a vector to fix rewards.
Similar to my suggestion for fixing Data Sites by introducing mandatory building materials for pirate faction ships, you could also introduce mandatory building materials for empire faction ships in non-fw, low sec mission LP stores to give them something unique over the FW LP mass production farms. Prices for BPC could be lowered to somewhat compensate for the cost increase.

Hier gets more than just Iterons. ^^ But what is the balance for more danger? The more dangerous you make a space, the harder it gets to do something there. Take this Aridia example: If you are not part of the LSH group, you cannot do anything there for prolonged periods of time. If you want to do serious mission running to support your PVP activities, you can’t just run a way and dock from them as a neutral every time they come into your system with a combat prober. So, by having a very tight PVP grasp on the region, the very dangerous LSH inhibit to a certain extend that more people could be active there.

You could mine them with Skiffs or Procurers. I know a few people who do it that way because Rorqs are simply not possible for their group size.
However, holding the structures now is pretty much impossible. Again taking the Aridia example, most of the good moons there are being held by the mega blob goons. Even if you could not jump supers through low sec, they would still blob your structure to death with their large sub cap or capital fleets.

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No, they aren’t.

What’s bad are the people who are running them.
They’re liars and hypocrites.
They don’t give a ■■■■ about the game, or their people.

The lack of war in null is not CCP’s fault.
It’s the fault of those who don’t wage war.

They telling you otherwise is logical.
People believing them is stupid.

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Simple question to the OP

WTF is stopping you from creating your own corp then an alliance, finding more like minded individuals, train capital ships instead of bitching about it and the point of this rambling question was…Why are you not making a difference? To hard? To lazy?

Players can change the map, Goons started out as nobody and became a mega force only because of a spy. Help yourself, create your own content to enjoy the game or just shut up with the complaining.

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You’re wrong.

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Both.

Yes, I know - you can point out individual systems that are still "active’ - meaning, they’re camped. These systems aren’t lived in because living in LowSec is any good, they’re lived in because of their geography (Old Man Star, Tama, Amamake, etc).

No one does level 4 missions in LowSec. You can do level 4/burner missions in HiSec without needing an alt to scout for a gate camp or facing an appreciable risk of losing your Battleship. Once someone figures out you run missions somewhere, they’re gonna find a way to drop carriers on you just for lols.

A chokepoint is camped 24/7, imagine that.

Good. Players should be able to stake an (unofficial) claim to an area of space and hold it. But how does LowSechnaya make their money? Do they make it locally, in the systems they live in, with mining, industry, PI? Or do they have alts (or even mains) in NullSec, WHs, or even HiSec making their ISK for them? If they operate entirely in LowSec and make their living there as well, I’d be very shocked.

And, save from other diehard PvP groups, has anyone tried to get rid of LSH? Why would they? In order to stake a claim to those lucrative LowSec systems? Hah.

Yes and you’re probably safer on a moon than a belt - at least from random passerby. But for anyone who’s been scouting the area, I promise they have your structure bookmarked, and once there’s an active field they will have pings all over it for quick warpins.

As far as cap blobs: I think it’s silly how easily caps can move between LowSec and NullSec. Not just supers, but regular caps.

Players are very limited in their ability to hold and defend an area of LowSec and the rewards don’t incentivize this.

I have an adult life and lack a wife that supports me financially.

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Your suppositions appear to be unsupported by any facts. Also, “the state the game is in” is driven by the overall game design and risk/reward balance, not by Null power blocs.

The players in Null are doing the logical thing that you would expect any group of semi-rational people to do: CCP handed them a big fat valuable resource, the Null blocs spent a ton of time, effort and coordination taking those resources over, locking them down, and then they proceeded to exploit them for the maximum benefit possible.

People are wired to do exactly that: spot the opportunity, gain possession, exploit it to the max.

I’m not sure what the fascination among many EVE players is that “I don’t like the way the game is, therefore, if I take other people’s gameplay away from them, my game will improve.”

You don’t improve games by taking away (except in the case of egregious exploits) - you improve them by adding better play choices.

Null is boring because they have a massive source of wealth to exploit, and they have almost nothing to do with that wealth that has a reasonable cost/benefit/risk/reward payoff. Fighting massive wars is going to cost them a lot and likely pay little back.

While the massive battles make the news, they aren’t something you can base EVE design around for day to day gameplay. There needs to be design support for small-scale conflict, limited engagements, short term goals. The power bloc members should all be off doing small/medium scale things in smaller groups, and the whole bloc only stirs when something major threatens them.

Forget about breaking up other people’s game play. Add interesting game play at the solo/small gang level, and find a way to implement limited engagements so people can risk X ships without the extreme likelihood that 2X ships will be dropped on them, and people will start engaging.

Leave it so that farming is way more profitable than taking risks, and the game will stagnate. People will farm wealth even when they have no use for additional wealth, simply because they are far more wired to gather resources than to take risk of loss.

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I would remove Asset Safety. When a structure is killed everything in it would drop as loot or be destroyed.

I guarantee you GREED > loyalty.

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I don’t know how many of the nullsec alliances and coalitions are made up of carebears, but I’m quite sure that there will be plenty who will leave instantly. I’d be all for that if the game can handle it, but in the current state I doubt it.

CCP slowly replaced the population at least once and they will do it again.
It just takes time.

The only uncertainty is the direction they’re heading.

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