CSM 15 - All You Need to Know

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Because right now, the effort involved in AEGIS sov and clearing citadels is simply not worth the benefits. The gameplay involved is not just boring, but actively annoying, both on an offensive, and defensive standpoint.

Even if you do slog through the mechanics of entosis warfare and multiple timers for each structure in a system, there’s nothing actually guaranteeing you the fight you wanted. We went north last summer to glass Tribute under the current mechanics. Here, let me give you some light reading on the subject:

https://imperium.news/breaking-news-sh1-being-evacuated/ [Note this one!]
https://imperium.news/p3en-e-keepstar-down-another-one-bites-the-dust/
https://imperium.news/imperium-vs-panfam-a-week-of-war-part-4/
https://imperium.news/imperium-vs-panfam-a-week-of-war-part-5/
https://imperium.news/tributes-ihubs-wiped-clean/
https://imperium.news/last-panfam-keepstar-tribute-falls/

That’s a month-long campaign. We got one or two fights early, but by and large, nothing. The other side ran away—and it was the right move! That space wasn’t worth them losing their supercapitals over any more than it was worth us losing ours over in 2016.

That month-long campaign consisted of the largest organization in the game running as many fleets as we could fill, 24/7 including around downtime, for a month solid, just burning structures. Yes, for the Keepstars, we unpacked the supercapitals. It was so damned boring that we ended up doing stupid crap like coordinated ‘everyone Lance the Keepstar all at onc-OOPS WE TOTALLY DIDN’T MEAN TO KILL A FEW OF OUR OWN FAXES THAT WERE IN THE WAY’.

There is a level of work involved in making a bloc-level war happen that just does not exist in any other part of the game. A hundred or so people work non-stop for weeks to get things set up just to move the coalition to forward staging. Coordinators, FCs, logisticians (haulers, not spacepriests), diplomats… and that’s before the fighting even has a chance to kick off.

Scared? Hell no. It’s not a matter of ‘scared’. It’s just freakin’ imaginary pixels, what the hell is there to be scared of? But there’s no payoff. You don’t get the big supercapital fight that would actually matter, would actually siphon off some of the wealth that needs to get removed. HAC fleets? Let 'em burn, they’re cheap compared to the real money items. Keepstars? 1 of them costs less than 5 titans, and you have to slog through like 4 hours[1] of shooting 1 static object that doesn’t even bother shooting back, just to get one explosion, and oh yeah, there’s forty more structures in the system that all have to be hit 3 times on 3 different days.

It’s. Not. Worth. It.

The mechanics involved simply don’t make the grind worth the payoff.

Edit to add: Give us a system that works, please. Give us a system where something like the current ADMs keep bloc footprints as small as they can be—only make it, you know, do what we were promised with ADMs. Make it count everything people do in the system. Because right now, it doesn’t. Industry doesn’t count. Trade doesn’t count. PI doesn’t count.

Then marry that to a system that gives an active defense a signficant bonus, but otherwise? Hell no. If you don’t show, if you don’t actively defend your crap, blow it up. Make absentee landlords lose their crap easily—but make the attacker actually have to put skin in the game. None of this ‘one idiot in a frigate’ crap.

You want to take a system, you make an investment of time and effort. You want to hold a system, you make an investment of time and effort. As soon as either side isn’t willing to make that investment, award the damned point to the other team and let them get on with the next one.

Do that, and FIX SUPERCAPITALS, and maybe then, people will actually fight.

1. In order to realistically threaten a keepstar, you need a supercapital force. That means time dilation, so you spend longer shooting it than the ‘15 minutes to RF at damage cap!’ mechanic promises. It’s stupid.

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184

Battles and wars are happening at smaller scales all the time. zKill is full of that. But they are just “rounding errors” when compared to the scale that Arrendis writes about.

Edit: let me turn this into a question: Will additional capital EHP nerfs on top of the 20% module resist haircut we’re adjusting to now, make deliberate supercapital commitments even more rare?

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As long as it is necessary for a group to have as large a supercapital fleet as they possibly can in order to remain a viable strategic player in null, anything that makes it harder to keep it alive will reduce the likelihood of people committing things they cannot afford to lose to a fight.

It’s that simple. It’s like saying ‘hey, listen, if I get rid of half of the oxygen in the room, are you going to be more willing to take a gunshot to the lung, or less?’ I don’t care what you do to the air in the room. Make it full of cotton candy, I still don’t want to get shot in the lung. I NEED THOSE.

If you can’t afford to lose it, you can’t afford to lose it.

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OK, first of all if each seat in the CSM was tied to a specific segment of the game, you would only run for one specific seat that is tied to the segment you have the most time and experience with.

Just because you travel through all sectors of space doesn’t make you qualified to represent all of them, especially if you spend 60% or more of your time in one specific sector of space. Same goes for all the other game segments of Eve.

Sure you may interact with the Market a lot, as does everybody else in the game. But do you spend the majority of your time only doing Trade in-game? Just because you’re familiar with all the various aspects of the game doesn’t mean you’re qualified to represent each and every one of them. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a fool at best. And like I said earlier, you can only run for one seat that represents a specific segment of the game.

Anyway, the candidate’s eligibility to run for a specific seat would have to be first verified by CCP. They have access to all the info needed to determine where you spend your time and what activity you mostly do in the game.

How to keep all the seats from being gamed by a single entity or Alliance is the tough part. Hopefully it won’t be so easily done if each candidate is thoroughly vetted first. To help keep a diverse CSM, a cap could be placed on how many characters from each major entity can actually run for the CSM.

Anyway, don’t know why there’s so much opposition to changing the procedure and policy for CSM election’s. Everybody knows the current system is greatly flawed and unbalanced heavily to favor large Null Sec groups. I’m more inclined to think those opposing a change to the election policy just want to maintain the current Status Quo’ instead of trying to figure out a better procedure to enable a more balanced CSM, one that actually represents all segments of Eve.

If that’s the case then I’ll gladly throw my vote in for disbanding the CSM because in it’s current state, it doesn’t represent the playerbase majority.

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Believe me, ‘can we do something about the godawful timers?’ has been something the CSM’s been asking since citadels went in. CCP’s been trying to address it, but they haven’t done anything near ballsy enough to actually fix it. And part of that is because it’s a ‘one-size-fits-none’ problem.

What works for bloc-level warfare probably won’t work in highsec, and probably won’t work for structures in FW Lowsec, it won’t work for WHs. What works for each of those won’t necessarily be good for each of the others, either.

And FFS, they need to get rid of asset safety. After all that work, when you get the explosion… unless you’re in WH-space… none of the crap inside the structure drops. Just the fuel, the fit, and the salvage. That’s it. It’s worth maybe a third of a supercarrier. Maybe. For something that you’ve assembled hundreds of supercapitals to kill. It’s garbage, all things considered. All the stuff people had inside? Perfectly safe, sitting somewhere in lowsec so they can get it, for a very small (15%) fee.

I get why they did it. They replaced nullsec stations with citadels. People who leave the game have always had their stuff waiting if they come back. And that’s good! That provides an incentive to come back. But people can just put in a ‘hey, I’m going inactive’ ticket. Or when an account is 6 months inactive, it can get cleared out automatically[1]. Either of those preserves the ‘you can come back to the game’. Let people who went inactive unexpectedly and had their stuff get blown up less than 6 months later petition and get their stuff restored. But kill asset safety. When you kill something, you should get freakin’ loot—especially when you didn’t get a fight.

Edit: You want a good example of ‘one size fits none’? Right now, how you kill a keepstar is supercapitals. That’s basically it. It’s theoretically possible to do it with smaller things, but you’d need a massive number of them, and the keepstar can probably kill them quickly enough to unpause itself.

So how do you kill the Perimeter Keepstar? There’s nothing you can use in highsec that can do the job without having hundreds of them involved. Not even Leshaks, because the range they need to be at means the Keep has no trouble obliterating them. You need massed numbers. In highsec.

G’luck.

Second Edit: As for this…

Remember, that’s just the structures. Actually taking space means entosis warfare, and entosis warfare means:

Step 1: Set the initial timer. This involves 15-65 minutes of orbiting a thing (like an IHUB or Territorial Claim Unit, a TCU), using your sov-laser on it. Only 1 person counts toward doing this. Anyone else there is basically just sitting around babysitting. So, if nobody defends, hey, that’s an hour of a whole fleet sitting there with their thumbs up their butts.

Step 2: Come back 2 days later. Now you have to do that same thing again. Except it’s not the thing you sov-laser’d before, it’s the Command Nodes that spawn. You have to go and sov-laser those. You need to successfully sov-laser 20 more than the defender does, and they’re spread all around the constellation. BTW? You still have to do the full time you needed the first time, so each of those 20 can take an hour… the defender only needs to do it for 10 minutes per node, and he only needs to win like 8, because even while everyone’s running around trying to race to these nodes and hoping there’s no hostile fleet there to kill you, the nodes naturally decay, so if the defender does nothing and you just didn’t bring enough hackers… he wins[2].

Step 3: Congratulations, you won! The structure blew up! Your fleets never shot it, and they weren’t anywhere near it because they were covering nodes, and hey, again, no loot, but yaaaaay! Now bring in your hauler and drop your own structure… aaaaand sov-laser it for 10 minutes while making sure the other guys don’t come in and blow up your hacker and try to sov-laser it themselves. Cuz really, if they do that, they get it right back.

And mind you, this is the improved version of Aegis sov. It used to be worse, back when trollceptors could run around pinging the notifications on each hub you owned, and then zipping off and cloaking up someplace.

1. Fun story: something very like this happens—or used to happen—in wormholes. My old WH corp lived in a C4, and built a Rorqual in there to compress ore, back in 2009-ish. You can’t get a capital in or out of a C4 hole, so when we decided to take a break, we level the Rorq logged off with mining ships and a tower in the hold, so we could come back in and get set up. We left a scanner in there with him, too, so we could actually find the place again. A year later, the rorq pilot gets to the login screen on that account for the first time in forever and says ‘hey, why am I in Korama?’ I check the scanner (my alt), and sure enough, I’m in Korama on that account, too. The rorqual that couldn’t ever leave j-space was in low-sec, where we sold it off for a decent chunk, back then.

2. Granted, you’d have to be REALLY inept to not have enough hackers to at least slowly grind out some progress over the course of the day… but it could happen.

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Aryth does. In Jita. Is he a high-sec player? The work he does in Delve is all done at the planning level, out of the client.

So how do you tell the difference between a guy who’s gotten fed up with null and moved back to highsec… and someone who’s just acting like it to get on the CSM? How do you account for the fact that even while you’re on the CSM, EVE is still happening, and characters, corps, and alliances all move around?

After all, The Judge was in CO2 when he was first elected. ExookiZ was in Scary Wormhole People. Jin’taan’s last term, I think he was in either TEST (or was it Brave?) or even CVA when he was elected. It’d changed between when the votes went in and when the results were announced, even, and changed twice more during his term, IIRC.

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After doing some more digging i realized i need more data

sorry for another request

Was watching the CSM 14 short video by @JintaanEVE and he brought up a good point:
What is low sec for?

Some at CCP don’t even know.

I got thinking and realized i have a lot of cool ideas for LS, but don’t know what is LS’s purpose. Is it a place to day trip? To build a fledgling corp/alliance? A place to avoid, farm, a necessary place to pass to/from null/HS?

I ask (again) for those who ply the skies of New Eden to fill out a survey on your thoughts of Low Sec


#eveonline #tweetfleet #CSM15

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I recall a Querns post saying that Goons were well-positioned in Delve, if major changes to Asset Safety occurred they could encourage members worried about assets to use NPC stations. However, other “riskier” regions don’t have that fallback, potentially becoming a new farming ground. That geography seems “unfair.”

Some players have called for every null region to have some NPC stations, which could also be used by smaller groups to provide “local trouble” against sov-holders.

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It is. Those same stations that could potentially provide us with a fallback for anything smaller than a supercapital, though? They’re also where our enemies store their dreadbombs for attacking us. They keep jumpclones in those stations, have ships there, etc etc… and don’t ever have to worry about us doing the same thing, because those ‘riskier’ regions don’t have that ‘benefit’ of those stations, either. So it’s unfair in both directions, in different ways.

They could. And every region should have some NPC systems… or none. Either way, just make it fair.

But don’t imagine for even one moment that only the smaller groups would do that. After all, Olmeca and Mar5hy’s attacks on us involve a whole bunch of PanFam members in those dreads.

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Its been great for giving subcaps a role, skirmishes can break out in multiple locations. I think you are just explaining it, nicely detailed as always - hoping for some optimizations - not necessarily advocating a return to what came before.

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Subcaps only have a role until the fax-hackers or dread-hackers come out. With the reduction in resists, does that change? Honestly, I don’t know—the subcaps lost resists, too. What role the subs still have… is probably going to be like it is with everything else: If it doesn’t fit an ADC, why the hell did you bring it?

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The game does need a proper sov capture overhaul for sure.

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I think 300 is the latest published number.

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What are you better than other players? Who are you? No one…

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When did I ever say this?

Right back at you, kid.

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I’m Batman.

C’mon. Someone had to say it.

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This is correct. You have the bitter vet attitude of someone who has played this game for 15 years, but you’ve been playing for three. It’s not as bad as you think it is, the things you think are pervasive are not, and the CSM isn’t the root of all evil.

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GAAAAAAAAAAA! Why do you all make me care about the game?

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It’s not.

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Brisc’s right: it’s not. CCP’s working to try to get things reined in, and Rattati’s got the job—finally, they’ve put someone on this—of actually seeing how all the pieces fit together and what needs to be changed to make those pieces work together. I’ve been incredibly dour about the direction of things for a while, despite being generally upbeat about the efforts of individual devs—Rise, DelegateZero, etc. But that dourness has come from the fact that there wasn’t anyone actually looking at how things fit together.

I mean, you’d think that sort of thing would be Burger or Mannbjorn’s responsibility, but I’m not even sure the latter even really exists. Still, Rattati’s got the track record (from DUST) to make me think that yeah, he’s up to the task, and from talking to him directly, I believe he’s got the right attitude and perspective to tackle the job without getting overwhelmed or frustrated as things need to be rethought now and again.

Give it time. We’ve got probably a year of belt-tightening ahead, but hey, most of us needed to lose weight anyway. :wink:

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