Dynamic System Security Status

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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Purpose: To spread players out, limit the size of coalitions, encourage conflict, create more player organizations in null, and limit the amount of space held by any entity. To make space a more dynamic and realistic place where going in alone has greater rewards than being in a huge alliance sitting in a rorq mining with zero danger.

Overview:

  • Each system gets a category of Empire, Outlaw, Wildlands, or Wormhole (today’s high, low, null, and wh respectively)
  • As activity in a system increases, the security status of that system should increase.
  • As activity in a system decreases, the security status of that system should decrease.
  • Remove system upgrade structures and the concept of ADMs such as iHubs
  • Empire never becomes nullsec. It can fall to 1.0.
  • Outlaw space can become high sec or null sec and experience the full range of possibilities
  • Wildlands can become low sec 4.0 and no higher (Never gets Concord)
  • Wormholes would have a separate system and be unaffected by security status.
  • Resources would need to vary dramatically from the highest security (none) to the lowest (massive). Grouping together in high sec systems would reduce income dramatically.
  • Security status lower than 0.0 = local chat infrastructure does not function

Instead of having ADM increase with activity, have security status rise.

  • Security status of players is affected by combat
  • Gate guns spawn on gates
  • Bounties tumble in value
  • Anoms spawn in lower quality and lower quantity
  • Asteroid belt quality drops
  • Cosmic signatures of lower quality and fewer quantity spawn
  • Bubbles begin to malfunction

What would happen?

  • Many barely used or ignored systems would fall in security status to become far more valuable yet more dangerous. That high sec system you mine in alone after a week becomes low sec.
  • Overused wildlands areas where ratting supercarriers congregate and run all of the havens and sanctums while people in Rorqs burn down the rocks rapidly become less valuable low sec systems.

Hoped for results:

  • Groups burn down their space and need to roam or expand to continue to bring in isk. This encourages conflict
  • Groups cannot “hold space” and keep it valuable. It is one or the other. Too many players = shitty space. Too few players is indefensible. Groups must find the balance of activity to keep their space valuable while not burning it down.
  • Players are encouraged to move next door because no one lives over there and engage in more profitable activities.
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This is where it dies.

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Lowsec may not have havens and sanctums but they are in no way less valuable, just more dangerous.
If you find an empty lowsec system, you can even do the anomalies but you wouldn’t run any of them in Tama or Old Man Star unless you have your buddies ready to press warp.

I would propose to downgrade the bounty payouts by risk. If you bring a sooper dooper dooper mothership, the payouts drop to the level 1 highsec anomalies and if you bring a Brutix or similar or a tech 1 cruiser, you get the regular payout.
If you bring an afk Vexor, you will only get the payout of a highsec den.

That way the risk versus reward scale is back to where it should be.

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I like the idea of adjusting the Sec statuses, but not this… dynamically. Sec Status is a measure of the Empire presence in a system, not the Player presence.

Personally, one thing that bothers me is the presence of “Islands”.

How can you jump through several Low Sec systems, and arrive at a single High Sec system with only 1 way in and out? How can that single system possibly have better patrols and reinforcements than the troubled path leading there?

And by the same token, how can you have a Low Sec system flanked by High Sec on either side. A system with 2 Gates, each leading to a different High Sec. But this stupid little bottleneck is Low for some reason?

If I were going to do anything with the Sec Statuses of the systems, I’d probably make it stagger off properly from the various Capitals and major systems.

Each major system would be a 1.0. Then the next, say 2 hops would be 0.9, then 2 more at 0.8, and so on. If you start to overlap (such as the trade route between Amarr and Jita) then you won’t drop very far before you start going up again towards the next Capital.

The further out you go, the lower it gets. And it doesn’t fluctuate after that. No more 0.5-0.4-0.5 and no more 0.4-0.4-0.5. If you travel down a Low Sec route, it’s only going to get lower and lower.

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Conflict is created by unlimited demand for limited resources. Eve has to be restructured to work like the real world: consumption lowers available resources. This breeds conflict and lessens the blue donut. Neighboring space is rich so you want to move there and take it. Your own is burned out and now needs to recharge.

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Eve is directly contradicting this with system indexes.

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I like that you made a suggestion for encouraging better risk reward balance.

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I know. I think those features need to be eliminated to encourage movement and conflict.

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What is it now? Should people group together or should they not? Can people make up their minds?

Why would you even run anomalies as main income source in low sec? Missions in low sec are by far more profitable and safer as you need to be scanned down first before someone can engage you. The same goes for NPC null sec. I do not understand and do not want to understand why people would ever argue that low sec and NPC null sec income sources should ever switch to the same boring, dull anomalies that make sov null sec so great.

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I never said anything about running anomalies as income. You can make some isk with DED complexes in lowsec.
And I also never said anything about making lowsec or NPC null less valuable.

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They should group together, but with a law of diminishing returns as their groups get bigger and bigger. Why? To prevent a blue donut and ensure there are border wars.

Also, what is really interesting about the dynamic sec status concept is that if you are engaged in a war, cloaky camping will not cause your ADM to fall to make the system less valuable and easier to conquer. Lack of activity actually lowers the sec status and makes the system more valuable.

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What kind of mind control are you proposing that’ll prevent people from talkin’ to each other declaring the blue donut? There ain’t no game mechanic that’ll make the nullbears fight if they rather jew around.

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The hypothesis I am working with here is basic economics of conflict: unlimited demand for limited resources results in conflict. If you krab, you kill your own ability to krab. You run out of things to mine and rats to kill. Your space gets more shitty the more you sit in it. Just like what real nations do - when they run out of resources, they have to invade a neighbor to continue their civilization. Would it be perfect? No. I’m sure that plenty of agreements would be had about leaving buffer zones and allowing alliances to burn one area and then move to another - rotating crops as it were.

But what we have today is proven to not encourage conflict. As space is used, it becomes more valuable. Security status is fixed, so certain systems are highly valuable for ratting, and the more they are used, the more they produce forever.

That encourages people who mine and rat to stay put and not move around a lot. They live out of a single system with low sec status - say a dead end system - bubble the ■■■■ out of their gate, and never move.

My hope is that by doing something like I have recommended, or some variation of it, krabs have to pack up their ■■■■ and move somewhere else because they used up the system and it needs to cool down before it will produce again.

During those moves, they are vulnerable. That increases conflict.

The more players there are in a system, the faster it is burned down. That creates internal conflict. “GET OUT OF OUR SYSTEM< ZORBERG !!! YOU ARE RAISING THE SEC STATUS!”

As people spread out, they are more vulnerable, both due to moving, and because of a lack of concentration of other players in the area to put up a defense.

Look at Delve: Under this system, by the end of the week Delve would be a wasteland producing nothing. What will Goons do? Stop krabbing? No, they will push into space that has lower sec status. This creates conflict as well.

Sure people can still sign NIPs, but creating a world in which there are stressors on relationships and economic need to betray one another to continue playing increases the statistical probability that there will be war.

But there is another feature to this. Would you continue to recruit everyone and anyone to come to your space if there was a numerical limit on the number of players who could use a system without raising the security status too high? You would control recruiting more carefully instead of just stuffing everyone you can into every system you can. Doing so would burn down your space. That may control the size of organizations to some degree or at least influence it downward.

What would certainly reduce the size of organizations would be the statistical chance of two corporations in an alliance getting angry at each other because of system usage. Alliances work because corporations can work together. The more they work together, the more the game rewards them. This system doesn’t reward that. It rewards working together in a limited fashion, and then fighting with everyone else for what is yours. It encourages you to be mercenary and protect limited resources.

At least that is the idea.

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