That’s absolutely not true.
People are indeed social animals, but CCP absolutely can break up the megablocs - they can increases taxes, decrease income, adjust alliance settings, and do other things which make large groups increasingly unmanageable. They can also introduce weapons and shiptypes which are effective against blobs, and they can also nerf blob creators (ie: blops).
If we think about it rationally, massive and powerful-beyond-measure groups being able to teleport their entire standing fleet to 140 systems around them and back to their base in an instant is a terrible idea. Strong groups should have the ability to take and hold ground as they please, but it should come with a certain opportunity cost. It should take significant time, make you open to counterattacks, require an investment of material or ships, and so on.
Right now, there is no meaningful opportunity cost. Large groups can very comfortably, and with very little risk, project their force across 140 systems, shut down any upstart groups that could threaten them, all the while never having to worry about a counterattack or losing important assets.
I think that goes against the spirit of EVE, frankly. It’s supposed to be dangerous for everyone, right? So why are massive corporations and alliances effectively untouchable?
Therefore, I think it is entirely reasonable to make a small but significant change to cynos that introduces a few restraints on force projection. Once responses are no longer instantaneous and overwhelming, small groups will have the breathing room to pick fights and contest territory, while large groups would need to strategically decide where to deploy their available fleets and which territory they can realistically defend. I genuinely believe this would lead to healthier and more engaging gameplay than what we currently have.
Of course, I will keep an open mind regarding cynos. If you have reasons or arguments why my assessment is inaccurate, and why the current state of affairs is actually the best, then I would genuinely like to hear them.
With teleported regards
-James Fuchs
It’s a question of friction.
In the real world, friction serves to limit the size of powerblocs, and to make them increasingly unstable as they grow in size. However, in EvE Online, the CSM lobbies CCP, endlessly crying about every issue which undermines nullsec interests. Those issues are the friction. So CCP makes the game dumber and easier, to accommodate the large nullsec groups, which continue to grow in size as the game gets easier for them. This is a problem with an obvious solution, but it requires leadership at CCP, and someone willing to tell nullsec, “No.”
The game would be vastly improved if the largest alliances did not exist. They should be fragmented, and forced to fight one another.
I agree that megablocs are an issue, and the cause is that it’s too easy to have everything based out of a single staging system. Ansiplexes. Titan bridges. Sov upgrades allowing player farming density that wouldn’t be viable otherwise.
Rather than 100~200 people in one system, they should be spread out amongst 10~20 systems.
Ansiplexes should cause fatigue. Possibly not a huge amount, but an amount that will build up with repeated use.
I think bridging in general is absurdly powerful and low risk. To me, carrier group jumps are much healthier in that they force you to put a highly valuable, and highly vulnerable, ship on the field. I still think jumping itself should come with a spool up time so you can’t immediately dump N+1 on a target the instant a cyno goes live. (Ala. dread bombing.)
AoE lances/doomsdays are supported to punish high density F1 blobbing, but their application against smaller ships has been heavily nerfed over the years to my understanding, or are otherwise just not good enough to justifying using at their current price tags.
Show me where it said you were allowed to setup shop anywhere you pleased, regardless of what the people already there like?
There are many ways for small and starting groups to branch out into the rest of the game, and just like the real world, forging your own path is the toughest path to take. Yeah, you can open an independent business, and if it succeeds you rake in all the perks, However, if you buy a franchise, a lot of the risk and effort is assumed by someone else. Yeah, you don’t collect as much of the revenue in a franchise, but in most instances you’re buying a license to print money if you just follow the program. Just like a Mom & Pop burger joint struggles to compete with the McDonald’s franchise down the street, independent corps in Eve will struggle against the financial power of the blocs. I’d say it’s easier for corps in Eve, because the M&P burger joint can’t politely ask to work with the McDonald’s down the street and come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.
No one asks for that.
The game suffers from McDonalds at “McDonald’s Global Headquarters” (MHQ), Chicago, Illinois telporting a hitsquad of thugs within 5 seconds to India, burning down every streetfood shop and then teleporting back withing 5 seconds back to USA.
And then calling the whole world “their own” and either you franchise and you make them even stronger (bluetrain, blockbuilding). Or you just get evaporated.
That is incredible bad game design. Such teleporters need to be removed and the ability for all large entities to move forces around in an instant needs to be removed from the game. If you want to do something somewhere else, form up a fleet and travel 62 jumps via Stargates. Then try whatever you want to try and then travel 62 jumps back. To find 12 of your stations in reinforce because your neighbors have noticed that you left your homeland undefended so he decided to come over and create some timers. Maybe then you think about if it is really so good of an idea to move your main fleet 62 jumps out just to keep someone down.
I hope you get the analogy. Large areas need to be incredibly hard to defend. Huge areas need to be close to impossible to defend. Every alliance should be forced by game mechanics to split up forces and defend locally if they want to claim more area. If they want to arrive faster, they have to pick lighter and weaker ships. Geography needs to mean something. Getting from one side of a region to another in a heavy battle fleet should take an hour. So it is by design that you cannot prevent someone from reinforcing your structures in time if you don’t leve enough local defense forces. To stop alliances and blocks to have 300 man in their staging system and “protecting” 3 regions via an insta-travel cynonetwork. Instead they need to have 6x 50 people each protecting a constellation. And thats it. No more holding several hundred systems just because you can reach anywhere in a blink of an eye with a many hundred ship strong battle fleet.
Note that some portion of them dies in highsec due to the gank or wardec Those are typically not PvP pilots of course (mostly highsec dwellers who wants to flex with Marshal or who are doing L4 or event sites with them), so the stats would be more accurate if they excluded these kills.
A related problem is that nullsec blocs get to tell their members who to vote for. In real life this would be against the law. It’s equivalent to a political party knocking on your door one day before voting and telling you that you live in their district so this is the candidate you have to vote for.
This should be absolutely prohibited in the game. CCP should take measures against it and any attempts to influence how another player votes should be made a bannable offense in the game.
I’m gonna be totally honest here – I was in TEST and their leadership and Vily in particular was the guy who pushed his choices on line members. But TEST isn’t the only alliance guilty of this. And when I was there I voted against what I was being told (with one exception of a match in a fellow TEST member who was on Vily’s list as well and who I voted for because I liked him). I looked at the candidates and made up my own mind. I never listened to what I was being told on who to vote for. But most nullsec line members don’t behave the way I do. They’re exceptionally compliant.
CSM is not a freely-elected body in my eyes until this voter influencing by nullblocs is eliminated from the game.
Then take your dollars and b!tching, and go. Welcome to fu¢king reality, cupcake. You’re not always going to be happy, and if a business isn’t making you happy, it’s your fault if you keep going back. B!tching about a mechanic that’s been a core part of the game since long before you ever started just makes you look pathetic.
Jump Drives, and the issues they bring with them, have been in the game since 2005. They’ve been here longer than you, and simply based on how much you cry about this game being unfair and difficult for you, they’ll be here long after you leave.
CCP runs the CSM as a democratic representative body, when it obviously isn’t. Not only are the votes for sale (making it inherently undemocratic) but it’s actually a focus group. The purpose of the CSM is to present CCP with perspectives and feedback which may not be well understood by CCP. Consequently, the nullblocs should ideally have the least representation. CCP already has GM alts in Pandemic Horde and Goonswarm. The nullbloc perspective is relatively well understood. What CCP actually needs is representation from smaller groups, but those groups lack the resources to win an election. The result is a feedback loop, in which the largest groups dominate the CSM and use it as a platform to benefit themselves. While this may be rational human behavior, it is not in the best interests of the game.
When you undock.
Do you talk like this to people in real life, or is this just your internet persona?
@Syzygium calmly explained what this mechanic does to the game, how it affects all areas of space, the observable consequences, the lack of counterplay, and more. He elaborated how the game could be better off without it. The fact that many people agree with that assessment should tell you that this isn’t some isolated crying about EVE being too hard or too mean.
If you think it’s wrong, then make your case. Argue the mechanics. Argue the impact on the game. Argue how to counter it. But this kind of edgy, dismissive post doesn’t address anything that was said and is of no help to anyone.
With independent regards
-James Fuchs
Would a straight exponential or even linear limit increase work? Say you are jumping a single person you jump in X time value, if you start adding people to the cyno it has to work harder and jump more mass so therefore the jump takes longer?
Or do something along the lines of mass of ships, the greater the combined mass the longer the jump times.
Increasing the time means youd need more projection of force at the site of the cyno, a better tank, etc in order to drop larger groups or to Blops/project greater numbers.
The idea would also scale for jump fatigue for projection around the universe.
Well, that would probably depend on what initial timer and what scale for mass is used.
Also how do you want to calculate the increase, because each ship activates the jump individually and cannot know how many will totally jump in the end. Or do you want every single jump to take longer than the last one? That also is pretty hard to do, because if a 100 ships jump within a few ticks, the last ones will have to wait several minutes to arrive? Doesn’t feel right.
I personally like concepts that are easy to learn, easy to memorize and still create the nessessary limits/balance that is required to protect smaller groups from too much power projection of the large ones. Which means I would prefer a general JumpDrive spool up that is long enough to give us back the old delay of ~45sek from “cyno up” to “land on grid”. Note: That is no nerf, that is simply a setback to the values when the system was originally designed and implemted - and worked well for a decade!
So if we estimate that curently a normal system-change needs around 5-10 seconds, such a spoolup timer would certainly need to be at least 30 seconds. It could be split to a 15second Jump Drive spoolup + a 15second Sensor Recalibration Delay (cannot lock) upon arrival. That would make the progress more fluid.
Also jump ranges simply need to be cut down, by a lot.
I agree that large areas need to be hard to defend.
One of the things that make such large areas of space hard to defend is that enemy fleets can operate behind your lines and can hit many places at once with their black ops fleets.
Black ops gameplay also makes the game harder for large groups.
A downside is that these same black ops ships are being used by those same large groups to defend their space when capital ships cannot do so because of restrictions like range or cyno inhibitors.
While I do think the ability of groups to move across space is too easy with ansiblexes and jump drives, I also do think the range of black ops ships is in a good place. They have to have large ranges in order to be able to operate behind enemy lines, be unpredictable and hard to be camped in.
But I do think there should be some more counterplay against blops. Whether that’s nerfing their combat damage, delaying the ability to jump to cynos by making cynos spool up or other means I do not know yet, but blackops fleets are pretty damn strong.
I just hope they stay strong at their intended gameplay (sneaking behind enemy lines, killing ships there) when they get changed for extra counterplay.
Can you exlplain to me how to “camp in” a Blackops Fleet even if it would have only the capability to jump like 3 systems away? Or 3 or 5ly? And don’t be vague, tell me exactly how you would camp in a BlackOps squad and explain what you are doing and why I cannot simply leave the system at will.
It depends on the system and the placement, but usually the NPC zone in the middle of a region. This makes it such that Blops can put a chilling effect into nearly every system just by having someone passively cloaked up there. Because any one singular T2 cloak frigate could suddenly turn into 40 Redeemers at the literal push of a button. So if someone has 20 alts just sitting in space acting as an invisible CCTV in 20 different systems…
My main problem with nerfing blops range is that it makes space a lot safer.
One blops group can go unnoticed and hunt in a region, but it’s significantly harder to be a surprise and catch people unnoticed when your jump range is merely within the same constellation.
Nerfibg blops range makes null sec crabbing significantly safer.
I’m all in favour of adding some counterplay to blops, but ‘make space safer for crabbers’ is not a consequence the game needs right now.
Please try a different form of counterplay.
I like the idea of a delay on cynos to increase reaction time between gettimg caught and the fleet jumping in.
Please don’t wiggle. You said BlackOps need jump range else they could be easily “camped in”. Explain how you camp in a BlackOps squad. In detail please. What exactly will you do that prevents a BlackOps squad that is cloaked up on a safespot from jumping out, if it has only 5ly range, but the same “whatever you do” doesn’t work if it has 10ly range?
Your idea of BlackOps being a huge threat over huge distances has effectivey lead to the scenario that everyone instadocks as soon as anything enters the local. And no one engages if a suspicious or unknown char nearby - Because:
Hotdropping is the problem, not the solution. It is the diffuse threat that robs people of motivation to fight. It’s the poison that weakens morale until they only pick 100% safe options and stop undocking if anything mildly suspicious is going on. Because no one likes to get curbstomped out of the blue.
If you want space to be less safe, other mechanics can be used to do that. But thats off-topic here. We don’t need magic teleporters to make space dangerous.
Personally i like hotdropping.
I do think it comes without much risk though. Hence this post.
Redeemers are there own discussion. All i have to say on that is there is a reason they are the most used Blops bs.
All I want Is a fun counter play mechanic that gives blops an engaging but not prohibitive to use risk.
I think the key to that is some form of mechanic to make them actually have to be well piloted during the 15min they can’t jump. Be that improvments to existing decloak mechanics or a new ship specifically able to hunt cloaked ships in some kinda sub hunt style depth charging/probing mechanic.
Frankly I don’t really care. I just want to be able to hunt them and be hunted in a fun way that gives a rewarding gameplay experiance to everyone. including the guy who might want revenge for being dropped on.