Thanks for the question! This has a ton of points to it, so Ill try to address all of them
- Sov timers and small groups: I think how ADMs interact with timers should change. There is a community-wide discussion going on atm related to the math behind timer rolls, which I support.
I think also the ADM system is incredibly one-sided. With no way to lower people’s ADMs (shout out to StormDelay for eloquently bringing this up the first time), it is simultaneously a little easy to hold on to vast swathes of space, and annoying to do so. I would welcome a discussion around a way to attack ADMs that bring a military objective for the attackers into it that isn’t pure entosis, like having ADMs decay if the hostile force does something. My initial proposal was if they reinforce and/or kill skyhooks, but the idea has no been explored in depth, so take it with a grain of salt.
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One of the recurring game design points I have heard from devs in many of the games I play is that the community is great at describing the problems, ok at describing what they want to have the outcome be, and terrible at designing a solution. FC Okami talks about affordance theory, in that players only know of solutions that they already know about, and I agree that Fenris have the ability to come up with new solutions to things that the players wouldn’t. I think for the players, that is often because we want our solutions to be quick, easy and elegant, because we worry that we cannot get them implemented if they are not. When it comes to game mechanics that allows for smaller groups to exist and thrive next to bigger ones (as the Ansiblex change is meant to help), I think we definitely need Fenris to add things to the game that are currently not even conceptualized by the community.
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At the risk of saying we need another sov rework (I honestly felt like equinox wasn’t as much of a sov rework as it was a resource rework for nullsec), I think the system currently is a little half-baked. The floofplains of the last system, the current inability to build tall rather than build wide has a number of problems: needing more space to support a population just spreads everyone out thinly and that is mediocre for many types of content. I have been spending more time in lowsec recently, and the game feels way more alive with many hostile groups living nearby.
The other issue (which Kazanir has put in a way I like), is that sov has to be worth holding. And it has to be worth holding in a small amount AND in a large amount. Let people customize their space to suit their needs and play style, whether it is massive mining, ratting OR passive income to support a core of people who mainly want to PVE. Make taking a single constellation or handful of system worth it for a small group. The current system makes it feel like one must own a lot of sov for there to be a lot of benefit, which naturally means that huge organizations will do better than smaller ones.