Equinox will finally kill small groups

What mechanic was in the broadcast that give this indication? The big power blocks are not going to care if a few systems are crap, its all going to be part of the floodplain and there will always be a renter willing to till the fields.

The current borders are defined by the ability to project military force, not how hard a POS is to fuel. Its not like the new structure will require more fuel blocks to be flown about, only if the new drill are being used is any additional resource transport required at all.

Its probably in the EOFY budget already.

The current capitals could turn in to garbage, but only from a farming perspective. The strategic positioning and market mechanic will be unaffected, so this assertion seems irrelevant from a military perspective.

Even in the day of passive moon ore not every moon had a drill because, will, an R4 is not worth mining, even if you get a structure to do it. Would not be surprised if its more profitable to simply trade the ice/lava fuel than anything that comes out of a shitty moon.

Barrier to entry is less, but economics will still apply. Only a fool would spend more in operating the structure than what it produces in value.

Small groups were in wormholes, better more PvP focused groups kicked them out. That was EVE working as intended. There was a streamer about 3 years a go who tried to one man a wormhole and people were telling him he could not defend the thing on his own. Damn fool would not listen. Though really, what do wormholes have to do with Null? WH life is about blue loot, not rocks in space.

Why lobby the CSM, when you can just become a CCP employee?

No, which was why jump fatigue was a thing, but then the big null groups complained and space is back to being small again.

You first over the wall then.

Based on what fact? No numbers on M^3 per hour, no numbers on cost of the drill. The drill only has to mine more than it costs to build and run and there is no way its going to cost the same as a properly fit Rorqual with reinforcement times that have been listed.

One system with dad drills is going to make more than no drills at all.

Each one of what? The drills? Drill fuel is transportable, and ‘power’ from IHUB 2.0 is not required.

If its just a game, why not undock in all your ships and self destruct?

Being crushed like the worthless impediments they are…

True, but now they can just roll in, take all the moon goo like honey from the hive, while the small group gets to pay for it all.

Really? Where in the stream did it show that anyone had to do anything to keep iHUB 2.0 running? Even if it needs fuel blocks, what’s one more when people have like a hundred already?

Except you’re not explaining it. You’re just attempting to create excuses for it and for CCP.

It doesn’t even work that way “in real life”. Large corps face anti-trust suits and government regulation. Large groups face lawsuits by smaller groups and class-action suits. Large governments face rebellion by their own citizens, by religious groups and militias, or opposition by groups of other countries.

“That’s just the way it works”, is, sorry, one of the dumbest excuses ever for bad design. CCP doesn’t design the game according to some “universal laws” of “how things work” - especially when you get it wrong to begin with.

CCP clearly designs EVE in various attempts to push players into grouping up into mega-groups, fighting large wars that make the news so Hilmar can feel proud, and paying for more alts and more subs so that fewer and fewer actual real players can continue to fund the game.

The design issues here appear to be trending towards the problems the OP stated: the rich get richer, easier and more automatically, and the small get smashed. However, as @Gerard_Amatin said, it will depend on the implementation. I disagree with Gerard that this set of design features will “create opportunities for disruption” - it seems clear that the benefits will go to whoever can grab the most territory and project the force needed to remove interlopers. And the current problems with force projection are already well known.

CCP is well known for doing foolish moves in an attempt to stir up interest and subs (see Rorqual introduction, or even Citadels) and then needing to take drastic steps years later to clean up the mess.

We’ll need to see how the introduction of this pans out. I’m encouraged by the fact that CCP seems to be working harder on upgrading the game this past year or two, but discouraged that they still seem to be as bad at game design as ever.

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The Metenox may be less efficient than manual extraction by players using an Athanor or Tatara, but instead, it slowly collects the resources obtained from mining and refining moon ore in an automated fashion. This gives smaller alliances and corporations normally more focused on aggression the ability to mine moons, even if they lack the necessary manpower. For those groups that do have the manpower, they can focus their attention on the high-value moons while the Metenox takes care of the lower value ones

While this is true, to me it seems that Equinox is about to introduce profitable disruptions that scale with the amount of space a group has.

Passive moon mining and passive planet mining that both can be stolen within either a day (upwell timer) or within minutes (ESS-like timer) is about to create a lot of opportunities that will reward guerilla tactics of smaller groups against a larger force.

The larger groups indeed have the ability to project force, but will they be able to send as many response fleets for all these additional small objectives?

A larger group holding a small part of space may be able to deal with it, but this passive earning scales with amount of space you have.

The ESS is a similar profitable target for people to hit. But the ESS is filled by activity in space and the reward for hostiles scales with the amount of active people the local group has to fill the ESS, unlike these new targets (skyhooks, passive moon mining) which scale with amount of space (moons and planets) the local group has.
Have too much space for the amount of players you have, spread too thin and your not-unlimited amount of people will be busy with response fleets all day to save some skyhook or passive moon mining timer.

Maybe I’m just a bit too optimistic, but I hope this update will make groups consolidate their space more than today, and open opportunities against groups that are spread too thin over too much space, who then get into trouble for it.

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The skyhook provides power for the sovhub. While they did not specify if sovhubs still consume fuel blocks (or any skyhook energy) in their un-upgraded state, any upgrades will consume the energy provided by the skyhooks. The ADM system will be decoupled from the type of upgrades (and probably retain its effect on timers), likely making the energy resource the key factor in what can be slotted in.

If you’re willing to pay rent for an un-upgraded system, be happy with a poco, do some PI stuff, mine the existing asteroid belts (in their current form), basically live in a glorified tent camp in a billabong or the boondocks, consider going to NPC space instead and not pay rent at all.
“It may actually make renter space shrink”, is what I wrote. Renter bosses may be able to make it strategically feasible to provide at least some infrastructure and upgrades to make the place habitable and attractive enough for renters. Or they may not, and simply produce a menu of rent based on proximity to their power base. Others may see the potential for decreasing the value of renter systems by attacking the benefit providing aspects (like skyhooks),

For example, one of the backbones in renter space is the jump bridge network. Those will need sovhub upgrades, which in turn require - you guessed it - skyhooks. Which also explains why ccp opted to give these skyhooks the usual (or similar) Upwell defence/attack mechanisms, making them the same hassle as before. Still, a situation with multiple timers in narrow time frames will be a real challenge for anyone with bloated sov claims, I would think.

We’ll see. There’s potential there.

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“That is a really nice moon drill you have there. Think I’ll take everything in it.”

Said the larger alliance, soon, probably very soon.

Not it does not. If a entire region deploys no moon drills and only mines from moon pulls, there is exactly 0 change in gameplay.

Is this an assertion that null won’t black ops cyno a metric ton of T3C’s onto of the skyhook faster than you can say hot drop o’clock?

It scales with the number of moons you have that are worth mining, if the cost of fuel is considered trivial in cost.

A sensible alliance will just let those moon drills die that cannot be defended and tell people ‘if you wanted the damn ore so bad, mine it yourself next time’ or they will defend the drill because it gets taxed to the point where its worth defending as it pays for SRP etc.

The top 5 groups do not have a manpower issues, they have motivational issues.

Still consume fuel blocks? iHUB/TCU only cost a weekly upkeep bill, not a fuel bill.

Its going to be changed the second the CN-TZ reinforces everything while the EU/NA are asleep and steals everything while you are sleeping.

A traditional central piece of CCPs marketing is to show the “massive space battles” . And it works, the media is always willing to talk about “EVEs new massive battle gaming record”.

And how do you achieve record breaking massive TiDi battles? very easy, with a lot of players in mega-groups and by making the members of such mega groups willing to undock titans and other expensive stuff.

Then it is important to activate the cycle again, passive moon mining and other goodies to help the mega-groups hoarding wealth.

Not the first time, not the last.

I wrote Sovhub, not iHub/TCU. And coming June they will consume the resources from the Skyhooks, depending on upgrades installed. Nothing was said in the stream about base fuel/energy/workforce/reagent consumption of un-upgraded Sovhubs.

One would hope so. TZ tanking is not a trivial problem if ccp is looking for a balanced solution i.e., fair to all player groups involved. Btw, it goes both ways too, and there are far more players in EU/NA TZ’s than there are in CN TZ. I doubt some groups will start shifting TZ’s indefinitely for this rather silly purpose which makes little to no sense to their members in the long term. It’s more a matter of not being an a-hole all the time, but only some of the time - or whatever it is that diplo’s come up with

Because that’s stupid.

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Why? Its just a game, right?

Right. So you should calm down and not start spewing idiocies just because you’re frustrated with the game.
I repeat, it’s just a game, no need to get your knickers in a bunch, baby.

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I am not frustrated with the game, I am disappointed at the propensity for people to claim it is just a game to treat it as anything but when asked to demonstrate it as such.

Still not seeing the part where you undock and blow up all your stuff.

You’ll never see it because it’s a moronic idea.

Ooh that’s a long sentence. Lots of complicated words in it… Hey, I know. How about I tell you it’s just a game and you ought to quit your whining?

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It’s Elokan, he will never stop whining. Not even if the whole game gets tailored to his every whim.

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They’re in every forum. Apparently they keep playing the games they don’t like :person_shrugging:

Why do you think this? Smaller groups will be stretched more thin fighting over nonsense minigames while bigger blocks who already own all the space just needs to occasionally bridge sov materials around. Its no different then jumpfreightering fuel and cores. And passive moon goo will enable big blocs to deploy more characters since they no longer need fleets of rorqs mining goo.

The advantage of being a smaller group is flexibility and agility, getting more bodies to move in a shorter timeframe than a larger power bloc, these minigame systems are inherently designed to favor stagnation and punish people more for owning sov who aren’t controlling multiple systems of passive goo miners.

These changes actually increase upkeep and if you know anything about real life sov people who expand too big crumbled away.

gorilla tactics are going to be extremely powerful so its better for everyone to down size and pick the best few systems for their alliance. On top of that the new upgrades will probably mean they can generate more isk with much fewer systems which is good imo as then it becomes sustainable.

Stretched thin doing what exactly? There is no way that Frat would be able to defend stuff in Branch if they are mostly focused in Vale or in the south east fighting Goons. Where a small group doesn’t need to defend anything and can strike whenever and where ever they desire.

You need numbers and discipline for gorilla.
Barely anyone could rush over whole goons or panfam space with it every day.
While metenox dont care. It just mine the goo for it’s masters. 25/8/366.
Now imagine dozens of it per system, hundreds per constellation, thousands per region.
Noone will ever care if you reinforce one or two.

1 drill per planet. Is there really dozens in a system? Doubtful