Hey All,
Here are some ideas I was thinking about for the game. Let me know what you think about the ideas.
Warping and Warp Mechanics
So when you enter a system as a hunter everyone warps off. Sucks to be you. Well I was thinking of a way to balance this that isn’t BLACKOUT.
Players should have a warp scan window that shows the map of the current system. When a player warps from grid it’ll show a lot of details, direction of travel, possible end points, whatever. So it’s not just grabbing the d-scan and trying randomly to find out where the pilot went.
When a player warps in the system but not on grid the pilot can see less detail but something like general area of travel.
You can get a few new skills around this that would improve the response time, scan details or whatever.
This leads me into the next idea. Warping. Warping itself is great. You get to travel millions of KM in a few second. But it’s a bit op. Once you’re in warp there’s little the hunter can do. They can try to get in front of you and get you when you land or maybe on the other side of the gate. Maybe in a fast ship this is possible, but not really an option if you’re just docking up.
So warp times should be increased for common ratting/mining ships. Not really talking about capitals here as they take forever to warp anyways. Mainly for sub-caps. Then when a player lands there should be a delay between being able to jump systems or dock. Not a ton but enough for a solid pilot to be able to try to catch you.
Another idea is an increase to the capacitor need for entering warp and maintaining warp. This way if you try to run during a fight but you’ve burnt your cap, you can be hunted down until you have enough cap to jump again.
Tackling should be changed a tiny bit to offset some of these changes. For example you could have a chance to fail modifier on ships. This Chance to Fail for tackle would be dependent on the size difference between ships. A small tackle vs a large prey would have a high chance to fail. This would help to offset a bit the increase in gate jumping/docking features. This chance to fail could also be included in the bubble mechanic.
Or another idea is to include an additional ECM specific slot for common ratting/mining ships to allow for burst jammers/target breakers.
All of these ideas come from my personal view point that this game doesn’t utilize it’s real estate enough. When you’re hunting it’s either at the gate, the ESS, or if you get lucky an afk ratting/miner. But a solar system has so much more space it’s crazy. Eve really should make players feel like they’re living in space and not just traversing gate to gate or station to gate and that’s it. Overall there should be a lot more going on in systems, more players living outside the stations.
In some of my follow up ideas I’m going to talk about game activities you could implement that could add to the “living in space” concept.
These are just some ideas. Let me know what you all think!