I recently decided to give the lore article regarding interstellar travel in New Eden another look, and upon reading how stargates in the lore are not the one-to-one connections we see in-game I began wondering why this difference is a thing in the first place. It also got me wondering what would happen if CCP decided to make each stargate connect to multiple systems, such that players could warp to a gate and then choose to jump to multiple different systems.
Now obviously, it’s unrealistic to expect that CCP would do this since the game is nearly seventeen years old and players have been using the one-to-one stargates since it launched, but I thought it would be interesting to imagine how the gameplay would change if this was implemented. (Who knows? Maybe one of the devs will see this thread and decide to comment on it.)
First and most obvious, people would need to rearrange all of their tactical bookmarks around gates. I can see this causing a lot of angry posts on Reddit, but unlike the rest of the resulting changes, it’s nothing game-breaking.
A more important point to consider is how the gate connections would work under such a system. If stargates connect to any other gate within a certain LY range (barring some lore-compliant exceptions) then it would significantly increase the number of jumps needed to get to from one side of Empire space to another; like the Yulai superhighway before it, the Jita-Amarr trade route would become a thing of the past.
I’m pretty certain that this would result in Jita being dethroned as the economic capital of New Eden with one stroke. Players would have to choose between hauling their stuff across much of New Eden or congregating in regional trade hubs, like Rens, Amarr, and Dodixie. This would certainly lead to a great deal of rage from players who have dedicated their in-game lives to working in Jita, but it would also give other industrialists the breathing room they needed to set up their own markets in other regions with the expectation they could become just as lucrative, given time.
This would also lead to the end of certain systems’ status as pockets, but I don’t really have enough experience to know the effects this would have on the game.
On the other hand, if connections were not based on LY but dev fiat…I honestly have no idea how that would play out. There are just too many ways they could go with it.
In either case, another point of consideration would be gatecamps and ganking. Since piracy is intended to be a viable career in EvE the devs would probably need to implement some kind of cooldown timer when people make jumps so it’s not too easy to avoid players looking for a ship to loot.
Or maybe not; just dumping the player’s ship 15k off the gate like it does now would probably be enough to stop people jumping from system to system as fast as the session change can take them. I’d probably have to ask some of the dedicated gankers how they see it working.
If you have anything you want to discuss about this potential change or see anything I missed, then please comment. I like having constructive debates.