Okay, so, I yank CCP’s chain pretty hard at times. (Not that they notice or anything.) This is actually not because I dislike CCP (I like them, but don’t like their corporate culture/performance/decision making process), it’s not because they ruined my playstyle (I never really had one), it’s not because they aren’t ‘free’ enough or ‘easy’ enough or whatever.
I just wish they would stop pretending they know how to design games and focus on getting some people and some programmers on board who can actually turn EVE into the amazing game it’s always been capable of, rather than the mildly interesting game that it’s usually been (for my taste, YMMV).
THAT SAID, I say “Kudos to CCP for taking the risk with the Blackout experiment and seeing what happens”.
Some people will say “Great it’s over, never shoulda happened!”. Others say “DOOM! CCP chickened out!”. But they said it was an “undetermined duration” event, and so it was.
Nullsec Local Blackout Incoming
While the matter is still fresh in everyone’s minds, we should forego the vitriol over “Hated it/Loved it” and instead bring some analysis from the players perspective on what specifically was good about it, bad about it, and most importantly, how it could be tweaked to make it better.
I’m not a nuller, and I don’t care much about the effects of null aside from the fact that the current Null setup (pre-BO) is boring and uncreative and leads to economic distortion and lame playstyles.
From my view, all I see is that BO drove down Plex prices (which can be good or bad depending on your view) and caused major drops in a lot of game statistics.
What do people who actually have direct knowledge of Null think? What was the single best and worst effect from the change?
As for ‘ways to make it interesting’, I’ve been thinking about ways to make Null better (which is hard because I know very little about it aside from other people’s reports/guides/posts). One idea has been to make Sovereignity a kind of ‘currency’. With new activities that increase sovereignity, and other activities that entities can use to decrease the local owners sov (sov ‘mining’ and theft, as it were).
In this concept, things like the number of people in your corp/alliance would both cost Sov in upkeep, as well as generate Sov with certain activities. They might even be Sov-taxed. Whereas hostile entities could mine/steal/redirect Sov with various black ops, structure, or device mechanics. Sort of like setting up that structure that steals ISK from bounties. Perhaps purchasing Sov could be used as an ISK sink.
So what if maintaining “Sov local” cost Sov, and hostile entities could try to interrupt/blackout your Local by anti-Sov operations? It could also be that “Sov local” only works for the specific corps that pay for it, rather than a whole alliance or sector. That means even Renters would have to mine/buy/acquire their own Sov currency to be effective.
The first problem I see with this is that, as usual, this would be way easier for the big corps/alliance to pay for/maintain than for the small guys. Unless you maybe put a really big Sov fee on “number of members in corp” as the count gets higher. Which would make smaller corps more effective. And make Sov local more expensive the more corp members that share it.
Anyways, TL:DR: specific discussion of benefits/downsides to BO without the love/hate politics. Anyone up for it?
