EDENCOM content overhaul

So, I have just run across this post on reddit, and would like to throw my two cents on what to do about it.

post by Legolas170

[This is a hisec crying post. If you are a nullsec player, you can probably skip this one, but I probably feel the same nerdrage now that you felt during blackout so I can feel your pain to some extent there]

“At the core of EVE Online is a universe where actions have consequences, and this year the consequences of the Invasion storyline will have deep and lasting effects on players. Players will have to make their choice carefully – will they side with the new invaders, or will they resist?” said Bergur Finnbogason, EVE Online’s Creative Director. “Chapter 3 delivers a universe-changing event with a series of activities and player-driven decisions that will span the summer and change the landscape of EVE forever!”

  1. Having now seen the conclusion of the invasion content, we can see that the first part of this is false. There was no way to influence the outcome of the invasion. The Triglavians were always going to get 27 systems. This can be seen from the fact that we saw as many as 5 Liminality candidates pop at once. 5 liminality candidates coming under attack at one time is basically guaranteed to result in one, if not more losses. If EDI showed up to babysit the Caldari(an all hands on deck event considering the Caldari rat problems), Kybers could split up and push Gallente/Amarr systems uncontested. If we showed up to help the Gallente, they could just contest us in full numbers and allow the Caldari system to be autopushed, while they sent a small force to handle the Amarr and delay. The only thing we all spent hundreds of hours doing was prolonging the inevitable, at the cost of tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions worth of isk. On the final day, when it looked like we might have held off the 27, we had 3 active liminal candidates up, which effectively made things impossible. With almost every player between EDENCOM and the Triglavians active, it seems that EDENCOM was never supposed to have a chance to hold off the invasion.

In hindsight, if we had known this going in, we could have literally ceded every invasion system, been done with this ■■■■ in a month, and potentially still have access to Niarja if the magic 27 had been hit before it became active. The amount of burnout this content has caused has been astounding, and to find out that all of that was for nothing ■■■■■■■ sucks.

  1. The Pick-A-Side Dichotomy was a ■■■■■■■ lie. Nobody in EDI wants an exclusive region, nobody in EDI wants gates locked off. What we did want to see was literally anything. It’s become sort of a meme at this point that “We fought for months to protect the galaxy, and all we got were these lousy t-shirts”. We got mails from new players, from roleplay communities, industry corps and FW groups asking us to come in and save their systems. CCP, in their wisdom, even put up systems that were required to complete Tutorials and Epic Arcs for invasions, and some of them were lost, and new players literally got sent into systems with Triglavian gatecamps while they tried to complete their tutorials. We showed up, we worked just as hard as the Trig-aligned players, and in return got less than nothing. Not only do we not have access to shiny new systems and null rewards(none of which we have asked for nor want), but we don’t even have the ability to run any Triglavian content anymore. There is no longer a way to earn DED LP for our LP store. There’s no longer a way to make money fighting Triglavians, however meagre it may have been. There’s not even a good way to get into T-space and take the fight to them in any meaningful way, seeing anyone who see’s a combat fleet on D-scan can just jump gate and leave us behind. Even if we did catch something, it’s worth noting, Triglavian rats would defend them, and it would be very, very difficult to secure any of the loot we picked up.

  2. The current handling of the invasion is terrible for new players. Laying aside the aforementioned gaffs with newbros being yeeted into gate camps as part of their tutorial, the invasions were really good for getting new players engaged with the game. The fact that a new player could see that a system was being invaded, ask in local what the ■■■■ was going on, and then be given a cruiser from any of the races, and immediately get to join a fleet was INCREDIBLY valuable and good for the overall health of the game. I cannot speak for the Kybernaut fleets, as I was not in them, but at least in EDI we had players from Faction warfare to mission running to lowsec and nullsec PvP, to Indusry/Miners to wormholers, and the EDI fleets served as a way for them to make connections with vets and access playstyles that would have taken a great deal of time for them to access previously. I know ten or so newbies that started running wormholes consistently because of someone they met in EDI. I know several more who’ve started to dig their teeth into faction warfare after going on their first frigate roams into lowsec. All of them now know what it means when they hear “align to the broadcast”, “anchor on X” “broadcast for reps” and “primary is X”, as well as understanding how fleet communications generally work.

I’ve met a lot of new players who were either just starting out, or coming back after being bored by the game, and I’ve been told a handful of times about how this content was the first that they’d found really engaging and fun in Eve online. I know all the vets, myself included, were pretty worn out by the content by the end of it, but to a new player, hearing that the navy is engaged with invading forces, and then warping into a big fleet fight is really really cool. Finding a new player, and then taking them to see Field Bases with all the EDENCOM rats was fun. Telling people that we’d personally fought hard for these star systems, and that people fighting for the other side couldn’t come in(there are some caveats) was fun, and it showed them that even in Hisec there is such a thing as player agency and impact on the map.

We had such a high number of new players, and such a solid retention rate that I decided I wanted to run weekly fleets specifically to keep together this community that has been built up around EDENCOM through EDI. We were to run a Flashpoint fleet once a week, every week, and the beauty in that is that I could(and did) send many new players fittings that they could fly within a week. Starting from day one, in a week you could fight a Dreadnought, make pretty good isk, and get connected with players from a wide range of backgrounds and skill levels. We ran it once, the newbros had a good time, and now that content is effectively removed from the game entirely. SOL, sorry new players.

If anyone has ideas for what else I can do with them in Hisec on a scheduled basis, let me know, but I’m drawing a blank.

  1. “Well, what the ■■■■ do you actually want then?”

Ideally we’d get a new station(an existing model would be great, no need for something custom and shiny) in the Fortress systems with DED LP stores. We’d get some form of combat site to let us kill Triglavians and earn LP. It would even make sense if we had a Titan bridge(purely rp here) set up that sent fleets into some sort of deadspace pocket so we could fight them there. After all, EDENCOM controls more than double the systems that the Triglavians do, it makes zero sense that they would stop fighting now. Bonus points if Flashpoints become available again, but that one is purely self serving so that I can let more newbros fight the Zirnitra. Finally, coming up with a lore justification(advanced scouts, hacked triglavian gates, etc) would go a long way in the meantime, with the end result being that EDENCOM players would have a meaningful way to continue to engage with the content by being able to transit gates in system. As it stands, a neutral player has an easier time shooting triglavians than anyone who sided with EDENCOM, and that seems rediculous.

TL:DR: Imagine telling players to chose a side, and then completely ■■■■■■■ one side over when the event is finished.

If everything this post mentions is accurate, then it really seems like the EDENDOM side had more loses than gains, as the Triglavian content seems to have really been designed to win in the end, even if taking longer due to player resistance, and all the Trig vs EDI was just a PvP type event with some fancy glitter over it, giving an illusion of player choice, when overall the result had already been determined beforehand.

If it’s true or not doesn’t matter to me, as the result seems to have been reached, which was both sides having content to do, including PvP and PvE, and it’s now the reason why I’m making this post, as the EDENDOM side seems to be lacking any proper content now.

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My proposal.

EDENCOM quick invasion response system

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The EDENDOM players really want to go around shooting down Triglavians, but they have no easy way to do so, and no real chance of an even battle as mentioned in the OP, due to being unable to use the gates there in case the Trig side decides to run away, but there’s some fairly neat targets spread all over New Edem.

It’s the Triglavians that spawn from wormholes in random systems all over the universe.

The only problem is that I believe this system is completely random, so it’s impossible to set up a quick response fleet to one system one day, and next day the closest Triglavian wormhole is 15+ jumps away.

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Here’s where the “quick response” comes from.

Players with good EDENCOM standing, similarly to how Triglavian standing works, will be able to directly jump between EDENDOM controlled systems, so in case a wormhole with Trigs spawns near system A on day 1, players can head there and fight, but when Trigs spawn on another system 20+ jumps away on day 2, they can just jump to a different EDENCOM fortress that’s closer and go do their content without any hassle.

These invasion systems would show up on the same big agency window as before with the invasion, with something like “EDENDOM has detected Triglavian invasion forces coming out from a wormhole. Go fight them”, and on the same manner, Triglavian players would get the same agency window saying “The Klades have created a new point of contact with the old space. Go there shoot stuff.”

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Of course, no more systems would enter the liminality vs secured ratio, and it would simply create ways for players to continue EDENDOM vs Triglavian content.

Systems that generate good PvP activity could have the invasions last longer, or be more frequent there, spawning more wormholes and turning into a hotspot for content, both in K-Space and inside the Triglavian systems connected to the wormholes.

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In order to not leave new players out of this content, there could be a new Faction Warfare style of enlistment, where at any EDENCOM or Triglavian station, the player can sign up for the FW and flag open to PvP with the opposing side, earning standings and LP by doing content.

I’m not going to comment on how the players which are enjoying the new Triglavian zone are the ones who have positive standings exploited from farming rogue drone structures, as that mess is entirely CCP’s to deal with, but from the reddit OP comments, the Triglavian players don’t seem too happy with how things are right now, with bugs related to jumping between Trig systems and other stuff, making the content look unfinished, so hopefully it gets addressed soon as well. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Okay, the original post does bring up some interesting points and valid complaints. One thing I take issue with, however, is this idea that somehow players had been tricked into thinking that they had more control than they actually did. Now, I don’t know if any of you guys have ever played any RPG’s before, but this kind of stuff is par for the course for video games. For example, you can make choices over weather to save Ashley or Kaiden (one will die), to talk Wrex down or to kill him, to be an anthropocentric bag of dicks or not, and all that jazz. But at the end of the day, every choice leads to a fight on the citadel with zombie Saren and Sovereign being destroyed.

You get what I’m saying? Devs can’t design and program true freedom because the amount of work required will quickly spiral out of control. Instead, they present players with meaningful choices when possible, and try their best to make the predetermined stuff look a natural outcome of the players decisions. Naturally, they don’t always do a very good job, and players can see the artificiality of the whole thing. Players can also get pissed when they think they have agency over something, only to find that rug yanked out from under them (see color coded endings for ME3).

Triglavian things were going to happen no matter what. And anyone who thought otherwise was being naive. Devs don’t pour significant amounts of resources into designing and coding for new content, just to give players the ability to maintain the status quo. CCP did, however, leave the how of it to the players. Edencom couldn’t save them all, and hard choices had to be made, but players still determined the fate of systems.

And on a side note, the players that have the most to complain about (in regards to this) are playing on Serenity. Apparently, they use the same database, or some ship, which means Dorito space has to be the same on both servers. So, even though Serenity players overwhelmingly fought to save systems, they ended up losing systems because of choices made by Tranquility players.

3 Likes

I was fighting with EDI and completely understand the frustrations raised. I do appreciate that in some sense the 27 systems being captured was inevitable. However, I disagree with the premise that there was no player agency. Our task was essentially to choose WHICH systems we were going to loose.

Once EDI command had adjusted to this realization, as new systems went were invaded, we would assess the tactical and strategic merits of each system. Whether it was a mission hub, trade route, chokepoint system, or was a liminal candidate. Those that were considered significant were hotly contested. Those which were not we let fall.

As for the other complaints raised, in the original post, I wholeheartedly agree. I would have liked for there to be some ongoing PvE element and PvP opportunities - but it seems that this content has gone in a completely different direction. EDI now has literally nothing it can do, and this is not good at all.


Now, the way I see it there’s two directions this content can go - and that depends on whether CCP wants the majority of Invasion Content to be happening in Pochven exclusively, or a combination of Pochven and the EDENCOM Fortresses in empire space.

If it is to happen in Pochven, then there needs to be improved access for pro-EDENCOM players here. The home-ground advantage is too intense for there to be effective PvP. It’s too easy for Kybers to utilize their own gate networks and evade interlopers.

Suggestions:

  1. Create Triglavian site which can be hacked to overide the Pochven gate lock-out for non-triglavian aligned Capsuleers in that system.
  2. Create gate-key object which is dropped randomly by Triglavian vessels. A ship carrying this gate-key can by-pass the Pochven gate lock-out mechanic.

Now, if the content is to be had in both Pochven and the EDENCOM Fortresses, in empire space, then we need to have combat sites and resource harvesting opportunities in those systems. There also needs to be a means of transport between those systems in an equivalent fashion is the Pochven gate network allows.

Suggestions:
3. Re-instate triglavian sites within the EDENCOM Fortresses. As per above suggestions. Possibly in the form of a roaming content. Perhaps a wormhole, which spawns randomly within 4 or 5 jumps of an EDENCOM Fortress - and spawning precursor invading fleets to roam about that system as a low level threat. These mobile threats should be visible on the Agency tab - and running the site (de-stabilizing the wormhole) removes the invaders from that system.
4. Create a highsec jump-bridge network available to only those players with pro-EDENCOM standings (in a similar manner to the Pochven gate network) which allows rapid redeployment within Empire Space.
5. Create a de-facto wardec, whereby players with +5 standings inhereit an enduring and formalized declaration of war with players similarly aligned with the opposing side. Allowing for PvP in empire space.
6. Increase the probability of wormhole connections, or create some tactical filament which allows connections directly between EDENCOM Fortresses and Final Liminality systems.

Also, one last suggestion:

  1. Expand upon and improve the EDENCOM ship line. The skill costs, ship and module costs, and ability to earn LP and source input materials is inhibited. The ships also lack utility and need to be given a proper tactical flexibility to be useful in a PvP setting. Players need to be given better control over the Vorton projector weapon system behavior.
2 Likes

I have been a highsec guy until I eventually moved to nullsec a year ago. Having skipped the whole three invasion chapters, I am seeking for new contents generated from the aftermath.

Kybers have Pochven, where their loyalty is paid off. For EDI, there’s no such thing. I asked our nullsec residents and wormholers: “Is there any merit for being friendly with EDENCOM now?” but nobody gave a crap, “At least you’re safe while passing through Fortresses and Minor Victory systems.” Then I am planning to shoot some rogue drones to boost standings to both sides. Who the ■■■■ cares the improv faction with lesser content than the Drifters?

No standing-based incentive, ships suck, and the LP faucet is dropped, blocking access to those ships anyway. As far as I know, EDI already knew 27 systems were destined to fall, but they kept fighting anyway to protect various high/lowsec denizens. EDI is not a bunch of extras fed for Triglavian glory. In the lore they are praised as New Eden’s defenders, but the truth what I have seen is the worst humiliation to the war veterans.

How about adding highsec shortcuts for EDENCOM loyalists, as mentioned above? Giving some bonuses to the bolt-casting ships based on EDENCOM standings, like the Marshal and security status? Adding EDENCOM destroyers and battlecruisers? (Seriously, Triglavian ship tree shines with Kikimora and Drekavac. Pirates don’t have them, either.) There should be any reason outside RP to stand with EDENCOM.

2 Likes

Looks like this is already happening. Started seeing random trig fleets warping around in some systems, but they were white and at some weird locations (not planetars or stations - own bookmarks?). But today I saw a roaming trig fleet en force in one of the former trig-invaded systems, and it even aggroed me at the gate…

So, where do I sign up to join or help EDI? :slight_smile:

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