That just makes bashing even more of a chore… and structure spam unbelievably more powerful as a defensive tool than it already is.
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No ‘potentially’ about it: members would leave if they were asked to sacrifice their assets without recompense. When our guys lose titans and supers doing the group’s business, those titans and supers get replaced, free of charge. But experience has shown us that simply handing out capitals doesn’t work. We’ve tried.
In just the last 7 years, we’ve tried capital incentive programs at least 3 times that I can remember—capitals, not supercapitals, but at the time we’re talking, capitals were about at the saturation point and use case supers are at now. And by ‘capital incentive programs’, what I mean is: Do you have the skills to needed to start training into carriers? If so, we will hand you, free of charge, the skill book. We’ll give you the hull. Free.
All three times, there was next to no uptake. Biggest group in the game, and we couldn’t give them away. The people who wanted capitals were already working toward them, and most of them, from actual observed behavior wanted to get theirs themselves. They’d be happy to take a replacement if they lost a ship on a fleet, but free out the gate? Nope. Didn’t take it.
People want their stuff to be theirs. It’s why when people download music from the apple store or other online sales outlets, they talk about buying it. If you talk to them about it, they’ll insist they own a copy. They don’t. They’re licensing a copy. That’s why you’re not allowed to copy it and distribute it yourself: you own a license, not the actual piece of music. But nobody says they’re licensing songs. Or software. They say ‘I’m gonna go buy Battletech’. Because people want their stuff to be theirs.
So you can’t just buy all the supers back, because people won’t sell. They’ll leave. They’ll go someplace else with their supers. And congratulations, you’ve just completely screwed your group over by weakening it over something as utterly idiotic as ‘who actually ‘owns’ these things that don’t exist except as CCP-owned data on CCP-owned servers’.
Well, since the only citadels w/DDs are Keepstars, this just makes it even more unbalanced toward the groups who can successfully defend a Keepstar. Which is the big groups.
Seriously, adjusting some numbers here and there won’t bring these things into balance. They need a complete, fairly extreme, overhaul.
Edit: Look, I get that a lot of people really dislike the idea that the big null blocs might actually have good ideas about… anything. I get that. But large, cohesive groups become, and remain, large, cohesive groups because they’re successful. They’re not just successful at getting people in, or at blowing stuff up. You want a group that’s successful getting people in, look at EVE Uni. You want a group that’s successful at blowing stuff up, look at Bomber’s Bar. Neither one of them is nearly as cohesive as the null blocs. Why? What is it that lets the null blocs generate that cohesion and retain it, and their players?
It’s problem-solving. It’s putting in the time and effort to figure out how we can best look after our people. It’s constantly re-evaluating our processes and procedures to ensure that yeah, we’re doing everything we can on as many different aspects of things as we can. And when it comes to ‘why is null so damned stagnant?’ or ‘why do people use or not use supercapitals?’ or even ‘just what the hell is the deal w/supers, anyway?’… those are kind of the big issues we’ve all been looking at for years.
We’re the ones who deal with this crap, day in, day out. We’re the ones who’ve had the most experience with group behaviors surrounding these things. We’re the ones who’ve had to figure out—often by sheer trial and error (and error… and error… and error) what works, what gets people to do what you need them to do… and what doesn’t.
This is literally our space-jobs. We manage people. We figure out what thing is in their interests, what they need to be doing to work toward that thing, and how we can get them to want to be doing that thing. Because they have to want to be doing it… or they won’t. They’ll go someplace else in EVE. They’ll go do something that isn’t EVE. They’re here because they choose to be. When it comes to ‘carrot and stick’ tactics, the sticks have to be extremely focused… because nobody’s a conscript here. Nobody can be forced to login.
So you have to figure out how to work with mostly carrots.
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I’d say a good start would be giving capitals a good smack with the old modular targeting method that has been in space combat sims for ages. Certain sub-systems could actually be directly targeted by sub-capital ships. So even if you save the hull you end up in the shop so to speak because your opponent blew out your internal fleet hangar or turned half your guns into scrap metal.
Capital vs Capital? Standard EVE slap-fight. Ton of sub-caps vs capital? They get to use sub-targeting and aim for expensive disables even if they cannot straight up kill the ship.
As for a cure to deal with the overwhelming numbers of supers and titans? That is one hell of an ask given how long the problem has been brewing. I don’t see it being possible without completely changing what a super capital provides. As long as they are a linearly scaling force multiplier the N+1 is in full effect. Outside of some pretty ham-handed tactics like an expiration date for “obsolescence” forcing churn and making stockpiling super-caps have a cost measured in how many do you really want as a reserve force if you’ve got to rebuild them from the ground up every X months.
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Two things you have to remove to make that work (and on the surface, it’s not a bad idea):
- Free repairs in Upwell structures. If the repairs are free, it doesn’t matter how much damage you took, or what subsystems got fried. Free is free.
- Repair on tethering. See above. I remember when a capital ship nearly dying meant a few hours (at least) of sitting in the POS with the reppers running full-blast trying to get the armor and hull put back together. Now?
That Apostle, loaded to the absolute gills w/A- and X-Types[1] ate a Keepstar DD, and 9 minutes, 58 seconds[2] of following fire from the Keepstar. As you can see by the ‘can’t tether’, I jumped out. 20s after the ‘can’t tether’ dropped, I was at full armor, full shields, full capacitor. No waiting. No cost. Nothing but Fatigue keeping me from jumping right back into the fight, not 2 minutes after being sure I was gonna die.
1. Obscenely expensive fit, for a fax. Why? To survive Keepstar Doomsdays, of course. You put faxes and titans on-grid with a keepstar, the DD’s going to target a fax. The idea is: you kill the fax, and then the bounces go to the titans automatically. Much better than bouncing it around the titans without killing anything. However, an expensively-fit Apostle can tank that DD… it won’t be fun, but it can do it.
2. I was not triaged. I had reps coming in from 2 other non-triaged Apostles, and something on the order of 40-50 logistics cruisers. I know it was 9:58, because as the cyno pilot was saying ‘hang on, let me get into position’, the DD was lighting up again, and I was saying ‘light the ■■■■■■■ thing or I’m dead.’ Normally, I wouldn’t care about losing a fax, but considering the fit itself was worth 5x the cost of the hull (and is all currently installed on the first Pirate Fax to ever exist), we didn’t want to lose the blingy-Apostles. All in all, though, a fun day.
Am I witnessing breaking news ? Batteries recharged? Some of the talk show pundits have wondered if you would throw your hat back into the ring.
This is where Brisc dekes everyone out, announces he’s running for POTUS on a platform of ‘Fix Supercapitals in EVE’ and gets elected because 90% of the voters think that means something.
I have a hard time seeing that as a bad thing. Also only somewhere else without sov.
You have a hard time seeing that as a bad thing because your intentions include stifling a play-style you don’t like (empire-building through large orgs). The only problem is, if sov-holding is possible, large orgs are inevitable. Because small sov-holding groups, absent the existence of large ones, will become large ones. That’s human nature: we organize. We form groups. When groups come into conflict, those groups grab more groups and get bigger, in order to have an advantage in the conflict. That’s how the big blocs got big, and if they were all just removed, it’d happen again and again and again.
So, if you’re trying to make EVE healthier, you have to retain the potential for large sov-holding groups. The more you try to force people into the smaller, less-consequential[1] play-styles, the more they’ll just stop playing. Push it far enough, and you get exactly the problems CCP scrambled to avert by turning off the Blackout: low user counts, and the cascade effect that has on an in-game economy that was steadily and intentionally weaned off of NPC-contributions and made 99.999% player-reliant.
Edit: and, again, this is all about understanding how people react to things, how to motivate people to want to do what you want them to be doing. Because this is a voluntary activity. You can’t force people to do things they don’t want to do. If you want to have a sandbox that works, the conditions of the sandbox have to motivate people to behave in the ways you want them to, and they have to work with human nature, rather than trying to work against it. Because human nature always wins. People find ways to do what they want. And if they can’t do it in your game… they’ll do it in another one.
1. No play-style is inconsequential to the specific player engaged in it. They are, after all, getting the exact and most important consequence they’re after: they’re having fun. If they weren’t, they’d go do something else. In this context, ‘less-consequential’ simply means ‘having less direct impact on the landscape of the game’. ie: smaller groups don’t have as much of a cosmo-econo-environmental impact as big groups do.
Without trying to add to your forum output work, what are your suggestions for fixing areas in EVE outside of NS? I think we all agree that FW needs a major overhaul and support, but what are your ideas on ( given CCP’s limited resources and abilities) workable and timely improvements on HS/LS/WH?
Well, first disclaimer: I don’t have any direct experience w/FW. So I tend to listen, when I can, to the people who do. Near as I can tell, the big issues tend to be structure spam by hostile groups or neutral freeports, LP-farmers who just do missions and run 'plexes without any intention of actually fighting, and the perception that once you control the warzone, it’s more profitable to hold it than it is to assault it, which leads to stagnation as people jump onto the winning side, rather than going to the ‘underdog’ the way the system envisioned, but again, I don’t have direct experience there, so I could be completely wrong.
For both the structure spam and the LP Farmers who won’t fight… I’d say ditch the missions, ditch the 'plexes, and use WZ-specific FOBs. 24IC/TLF/FDU/CaldariWhatevers faction FOBs that function as the stagers for empire militaries in those systems. Are you not a member of the right militia? Your structures will get attacked by the Diamond Rats those FOBs spawn. Want to contest the system and/or get offensive LP? Go take on the Diamond Rats and kill the FOBs. Want defensive LP or to defend the system? Go keep those FOBs from dying. Help the rats out.
No clue how well it’d work, but it’s something they have all the tools for.
J-space? I dunno, does J-space these days really need much in the way of improvement? Everything Exookiz was saying seems to indicate the problems there are social ones? 
HS… the Missioning system is 16 years old. It won’t get fixed any time soon. Wardecs were addressed… sort of. They curbed the most egregious issues with them… sort of… but the result is a kind of lackluster system that discourages cooperation between multiple alliances[1]. Bumping’s been nerfed, so freighters are safer. What’s the next big issue for HS? Structure spam? Don’t know that there’s anything that’ll fix that, without returning to the ‘you have to buy these things for your structure every X often’ like they used to have for POS’s.
I mean, there’s the standard answers for the structure spam problem all over the damned place, of course: Low-Power == no damage cap, no RF timer, no asset safety. Make killing Low-Power structures something one idiot in a bomber can do in a couple of hours, if it’s un-defended and he’s got an ammo truck.
As for the rest of lowsec… make it matter? I dunno, really. Haven’t heard a lot about what the problems there are.
Overall, I’d love to see a system where Security Status of systems are more fluid. If people are doing the mining etc, going and doing Security missions, or even just market-trading (though obviously, this would need massive volumes to see measurable impact), sec status rises. LS can get secured. CONCORD starts patrolling. If it’s not happening, Security Status slowly decays down toward 0.4. PvP, be it declared wars or ganking, pushes it down as well. HS can be unsecured. Imagine the unholy terror of freight pilots if Niarja dropped to 0.4. But of course, work could be done to create alternative routes of new High Security space. 
Ideally, I think it’d be cool if that were merged into FW, so warzone control depends on who’s winning fights, and how well they’re securing the space for industrial and security development. And then expand the WZ to include a number of systems that are officially HS on all sides, but make the different militias have to actively degrade security status in those systems to put them ‘in play’.
A more fluid EVE, one that’s more responsive to players’ actions, is a healthier EVE. The more things players can change, the more levers CCP has to make the NPC storyline matter to player interactions, just by leaning on this potential change or that one. The Drifter onslaught on nullsec, for example, wasn’t a bad idea… but it was horribly communicated, and badly executed.
1. Almost forgot this! Ok, so, the ‘discourages cooperation between alliances’ thing. Let’s say two alliances are allied in war, say Wardec Group A decs Alliance B, and Alliance C comes in specifically as an ally. Alliances B and C can’t operate as a single fleet. Imagine this scenario: everyone’s flying armor, and the logi’s in Guardians. It’s all one fleet. The Guardians are cap chaining. Someone in a DPS ship gets shot… 1 logi reps a guy in his own alliance. What happens next?
All the logi die. That’s what happens next. That 1st logi repped a guy with a pvp timer. So he gets a pvp timer. And he’s in an active war. So when a second Guardian from his own alliance feeds him cap, that second Guardian gets a pvp timer. And when the third Guardian, who’s in the other alliance in fleet, gives Guardian #2 cap… CONCORDOKKEN. But not just on G3. No no. That ‘YOU DONE FEKKED UP, PUNK’ propagates through the entire cap chain, and CONCORD kills them all. So the two alliances can’t operate as a single fleet, which means they’re a lot easier to split up and pick off one by one.
The normal counter-argument to this is ‘well, they can just merge into a single alliance for a while’. And sure. They could. But that means giving up the group identity they’ve built. And there are other considerations. The easiest example I know of are the alliances Praetoria Imperialis Excubitoris (PIE), and Khimi Harar (LUMEN). They used to fleet up together in highsec a lot for dealing with wardecs. Now they can’t. PIE is a FW alliance. LUMEN isn’t. The players in both groups are pretty good friends, but LUMEN is where the ones who don’t want to do FW go, and PIE is where the ones who do want to do FW go, by and large. There’s some folks in LUMEN who will dip a toe into FW, but it’s not their main activity, and they don’t, for example, want to lose access to HS Republic space.
Ok, so why not just do a temp merge? Well, again, LUMEN’s full of people who don’t want to get shot by FacPo every time they nip into the Republic. And they don’t particularly want to do FW as their big activity. So why would they join a militia and make themselves at war with all of the members of the other militia all the time? Why would they give up a long employment record with their current corp/alliance? Some people really do care about that.
And people leaving PIE?
PIE is literally the oldest alliance in the game. You don’t get that by dismissing loyalty and cohesion. So expecting people to just jump ship for convenience is… well, it’s kinda boneheaded. It goes right back to ‘knowing how to motivate people to do what you want them to do’.
So, long-standing allies. The literal oldest alliance in EVE-Online. Same war. Same fleet. No cutout to prevent CONCORDOKKEN. When people asked why, Fozzie and Lebowski responded with what amounted to ‘it’s too hard’. And it is hard. You’d have to figure out a way to do wardecs that’s less easily-abused. It would’ve needed actually fixing wardecs, and rebuilding the system with an eye toward ‘what do we actually want this to do?’ instead of just applying a small tweak or two.
Sensing a pattern on this? Fixing the problems in EVE Online isn’t something you can do with tweaks.
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Wrong, I don’t have a problem with large groups, as long as they are groups and not a collection of anonymous mostly selfish solo players. The size and power should be determined by social cohesion in lawless space, not by game mechanics benefitting only pure metrics as size and numbers.
I read through most of the minutes, haven’t finished yet. What I do see there contains too many acronyms (you might consider a glossary for the next time). I still see nothing that makes me want to take my ISK earning butt out of high sec and venture off into null, and I don’t see a lot (none so far) of talk about any ideas for high sec.
Yes, I know you low sec and nul sec people have nothing but disdain and insults for those that don’t care about your pvp wars. Maybe one day I’ll let you eat one of my frigates or cruisers, till then, I’ll be mining and making stuff. Enjoy!
Yeah, sure. Your posting history says either you’re full of crap now, or you have absolutely no idea how groups work.
Obviously thousands of players disagree with you but you like everyone else are entitled to your opinion.
And that is where the similarity ends (and should have stayed) - Wormholes don’t have fixed entry points, they don’t have cyno’s, they don’t have a lot of things that Nulsec does. Which is why it was so poorly received by the player base.
Local is the perfect intel tool because CCP gave players the tools to use it that way.
Small/er groups were affected far more than large groups during BO - Large groups showed the effects were dealt with, while small groups basically logged off.
Funny thing is, the largest groups who have “solved” nulsec were the winners of BO
Look at the “isk faucets” in the six months leading up to BO - They had been steadily declining. All BO did was show how vulnerable some regions ( those without Bloc protection) are. Activity in some regions barely registered, while others (where Blocs reside) showed drops but still produced well above “the average” for nulsec.
If CCP has any understanding of nulsec and how it is played should have had a pretty good idea of how the players would react.
NO WE SHOULD NEVER ENCOURAGE STUPID.
CCP has had this game for longer than some younger players have been alive, yet those young players who have only been around a while have a far better understanding of the game than its owners do.
What CCP have done recently is the same as a mechanic running the petrol engine of a show car on diesel to see how long it takes to blow up. He knows it is stupid, it will destroy the engine and cost a lot of money to fix but hey - lets “experiment” because quite frankly, “can’t think of anything better to do”.
Yeah, the engine can be replaced but at what cost.,.
IF CCP want to experiment, it needs to be done in a professional, balanced way that doesn’t include using sectors of the player base as “collateral damage”.
Collateral damage is what you get from wars - If CCP is going to continue to “go to war” with the player base - Who do you think will be the overall losers.
Hint - I (and 10’s of thousands of others) have other things to do if Eve continues to lose its “fun factor”.
Interesting, I’d love to see that data which is I’m sure as valid and accurate as looking out a window to find out what the weather will be like in 3 days.
Personal experience - My alliance lost over a 3rd of its members to a Bloc group during BO.
I know a recruiter for one of the biggest alliance’s who told me he had more applications in the first 3 weeks of BO than he’d had in the last 3 years combined.
Small groups basically just logged off. While larger groups continued on, sure at a slower pace but at least they were able to log in and play.
Sorry mate but unless Olmeca is prepared to post his findings - It is no different to CCP saying “Eve is in good shape and has a bright future”.
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You do know communities are formed around selfish self interest right…
I will admit that it does take alot of effort to co-ordiante thise alliances, my issue is not that but rather that those large alliances have a near infinite supply of anoms and ore to mine which makes it easier to just continue building on larger and larger scales with no penalty. In other areas of space this is not the case which becomes a self fulfilling cycle and is why other large organized groups outside of null alliances can never catch up so they instead join a coalition.
The cycle is already been going for to long and idk if it can be stopped.
On ore, I agree, the supply is functionally infinite… once you pay for it. Remember, those take IHUB upgrades, and in order to put in those upgrades requires a certain Industry index in the system. There’s work that needs to be done to get those rewards going.
On ratting anoms… there’s literally infinite numbers of missions available in HS/LS.
But no, it doesn’t scale up infinitely. That’s not to say we’ve seen anyone hit the limits of scaling, but we’ve certainly been able to project where those limits are. Triple our number of people, and Delve’d be pushing its functional limit.
If that were the case, they’d just need to go to Providence for a while. NRDS null-sec, remember? What keeps them hamstrung isn’t the ratting/mining. It’s the supercapitals. They’re what maintain the stranglehold the large blocs have, right now.
I’m curious - Just who do you think would be the winners if Goons or Test or any of the other mega groups have to start raiding other regions of space for resources?
Being in a small alliance, I certainly don’t want Goons coming to my front door to collect resources.
While depleting resources sounds like a good plan - Consider the affects it would have on small/er groups in Sov Nul.
The big groups aren’t going to “raid” the space of other big groups, they will plunder areas where small/er groups live. Why take on a war you may not win, when there is easier targets.,.
Does ANYONE really want to see all of Sov held by only a few mega groups?
Yeah sadly the care and development has been split up over time.
Various parts of a company working toward “own goals” is never a good way to run a company.
All the various parts of a company should be working toward the same goal - To improve the companies product and how it is delivered to existing and potential customers - “Lets make it harder for existing customers and make it easier for new ones”, should never be a design goal.
Balance and fair dealings are the key to success, whether you sell used cars, run a bank or a gaming company, ALL customers are valuable and should receive the same level of service.
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