Is it? Then its not doing its role.
Mechanisms that make a stalemate a certainty certainly would suggest the opposite, as you mention with Sov.
Those mechanisms dont appear to be the result of player effort.
As blackup has gone, the comments regarding it are pretty much worth the paper they are written on.
Well thats the exact reason it needs an update.
I proposed to have one HQ structure per constellation, if that falls sov for that constellation is lost and all structures in that area go into final timer.
Would result in a much stronger incentive to actually fight over those structures and reduce timer grinding by a lot.
Wont a single strategic location mean thats the only place thats ever going to be struck?
I havent been able to play in proper null so far, so I cant say I know much about it, but wouldnt it mean that fights would automatically be limited to that system and thusly it would be the most heavily defended in the whole constellation?
Yes, thus perfect for smashing Titan fleets against each other.
But also if an alliance holds an entire region theres a decent number of constellations and therefore still a number of places to fall back, strategise etc.
Instead of loosing sov system by system it would be in chunks and the structurte creep can be cleaned up without having to spend months and years grinding timers.
Like I said, no familiarity with High Null operations, but it just seems then it makes knowing where the enemy will attack a certainty rather than a guess so that the defense will always be too heavy to bother launching an attack.
It’s still only one HQ structure.
Safe log cynos in system ahead of time and have a big fight on the in gate, then fight over the HQ for the constellation.
Having them try to defend is the whole point of going to war so thats a good thing.
Presumably no one would be operating an HQ like that without full TZ coverage.
How many HQs would there be and would they be pre designated systems?
Catch has 15 constellations so it would be 15 HQs.
Delve also 15, some of wich are NPC space so less than 15 HQs.
Shure there is going to be coverage - thats the point.
SOV warfare now is bad because of too many timers for entosing and a completely ridicolous amount of timers to clean structure creep.
All of wich rarely get contested at all because making an invasion as boring as possible for the invader IS the defence strategy theese days.
With the HQ theres a clear target and severe punishment for not defending - so we get to have BIG FIGHTS and more fluidity in borders.
Ok, well you would know more about it than me.
I just figured dozens of potential targets woukd be harder to defend than one, and depth of defense traditionally creates more stalemate situations than breadth of attack.
Yes thats pretty much the thing right now.
A raitaru here, an ihub there doesnt really bother anyone so it simply does not get defended unless the odds are extremely in favour of the defender while attackers get burned out from the boredom of staring at count downs the rest of the time.
I imagine if there is more urgency people are more likely to risk a more even engagement wich can then lead to the destruction of capital fleets.
If they choose not to defend the sov is gone and it takes only a couple of days to remove the structure creep - new space for new blood.
Im not saying theres anything good that Ive seen about the current way, but I dont have the experience to see how your idea would change it.
And I really dont see anyone really wanting new blood in the tank.
True and also not true.
For any one capsuleer it’s easy to find a corp in Nullsec to join.
Theres also Providence.
Or do a lot of PVP so you can apply to join an alliance with your corp.
My Corp did a few rounds of couch crashing just to join fleets and make a name for ourselves before we setteled down.
Taking your 12 man indy corp to some empty system and setting up camp will ofcourse result in desaster but theres enough options.
edit*
just don’t rent - thats for peasants
Diplomacy is the way to go.
I can think of at least one that isnt true for.
And Provi isnt really High Null, as such. Besides, last I heard it was caving in.
And doing PvP was the purpose for many to get in there, not to do it just to get in.
Basically, its the same as its always been; be good enough to make trouble and get invited, or know someone in there.
I rarely go to provi but yes they say the lack of cohesion really hit them hard during BO - wich also brings home the point that this whole thing was a massive failure if the goal was to weaken the big blocks and do something about Helmars purple donought problem.
As i said my Corp went the ‘make trouble’ route and it was an awesome achievement when we got to the point to basically pick an alliance of our likeing to join.
Also the best way to learn the game imo. I honestly don’t have any problems with being seen on intel - i wanted to fight the resonse gang in the first place. Nullsec small gang PVP should not be about sneaking around like cowards, thats what wormholes are for.
And despite TiDi being a pain in the butt i also love those fights and want sov warfare to be more alive.
Sounds solid 
Wish I had friends to do this stuff with lol
join chemikals 
No, no moving the goalposts at all. You said I’d written that play style off as tedium. Please show me where I said anything about exploration/gas mining/anything in j-space being tedium. Show me where I said anything about them at all.
And yes, I did point out the utter idiocy in suggesting Helium in its most common form, literally 1/4 of all the matter in the universe, should be ‘rare’. Because the idea was so stupid, I admit: I could not get past that colossally idiotic part of it. Turns out, the rest of the idea was just as poorly thought-through.
It won’t. The big blocs will be the only ones who can devote the manpower to looking for this stuff, day in, day out, all over New Eden. They’ll be the only ones who can mobilize enough people to go and take a crap all over anyone whose space it’s in. And since destroying structures takes a week, they’ll have plenty of time to hoover this crap up and then get home.
Assuming they don’t just say ‘we don’t need the entire supercapital fleet there, we only need 200 or so of them, so we can create enough tidi to get everyone else there if something happens’.
Which they will, because that’s what we already do.
As a result, no, nobody’s going to try to fight back. After the first two or three months of the blocs stomping all over this crap, nobody else is going to bother even trying. It won’t be an opportunity for a fight, it’ll be a tedious grind.
And when it shows up in high-sec, we’ll send entire fleets of subcaps to sit on it while resource-harvesters hoover it. What’ll be left for the small groups will be drips and drabs. It just won’t be worth the effort for smaller folks.
They already do. They have to defend themselves and one another. The stability that exists only exists because players make it exist. Local is not a magic wand that says ‘hey, look, you’ll be fine. You’ll immediately know where hostiles are a half-dozen jumps away. If you get tackled, you’ll be able to get rescued’. Local doesn’t do that. Players do that.
and…
This doesn’t provide that any more than a structure would without the nonsense super-rare fuel added in. The structure providing local already gives the hunters a way to potentially turn it off. All the ‘rare fuel’ complication does is make it more annoying. Congratulations, you’ve invented something worse than FozzieSov.
It’s not so fun for CCP’s bottom line.
Won’t do it. Structures will blow up, but structures are pretty damned irrelevant in the big picture anyway. You can lose every structure you own, and still be able to take and hold space.
Not a half dozen jumps, no, same system it absolutely does. It provides perfectly accurate intel as to when a potentially hostile pilot enters the system and in a manner easily exploited by bots. There are other ways bots can detect people entering the system, but local channel is the easiest of them. Not just bots, the pve’rs too, bots just react faster.
I think you over estimate the willingness of your alliances pilots to day after day chase after some resource when it would make more sense for them to buy it from those that do go out and look for it. Were they really there bosoning all the gates during the blackout? I went looking but didn’t find any.
You’ll send whole subcap fleets after it? I very much doubt that would continue very long.
You seem to like to crap all over any idea suggested here, but I don’t recall you suggesting anything constructive at all.
Neither did you. Make EVE more grindy and give free kills to gankers doesn’t make anything better about nullsec.
Well, then you should work on your memory. Or maybe pay more attention.
Let’s start with the easy pair:
Laying out how structure use and the hacking game could provide that ‘nexus’ you’re so hot for.
Then calling for addressing structure spam as part of a comprehensive Blackout system.
Before that, we’re looking at a whole lot of analysis about the Blackout’s impacts and effects. And frankly, the BO didn’t solve anything, because the problems aren’t ones it ever could solve.
Hilmar openly said that the bots adjusted after only 2 days. We’ve got 2 options here:
If we take him at his word, then ‘fixing botting’ can’t be something we use as a consideration for ‘Local/No Local’ systems, because the Blackout didn’t actually address that. The bots adjusted. They’ll adjust again.
If we don’t take him at his word (ie: if we insist that the bots didn’t adjust, and the BO got rid of them), then we have to figure out some rationale for why he’d claim there was more botting going on in EVE than their actually was. I don’t have enough tinfoil for that, so I’m gonna choose (1).
So the question becomes: ‘Why?’ Just what is the Blackout supposed to do? What’s it supposed to achieve? As part of Hilmar’s ‘Chaos Era’, a ‘let’s see what they do’, it makes a certain amount of sense: it’s a change that disrupts normal patterns of behavior, that can be easily implemented and easily turned off. So they did that. And it did disrupt things. But things also (within 3 weeks) settled into their ‘new normal’. That ‘new normal’ included an accelerating decline in player count. So, off it went, and Lo! numbers are coming back up so far.
But if you’re going to implement it for a reason beyond temporary upheaval[1], it has to be done in a way that doesn’t create that loss of players. That means it has to be done in a way that requires more effort than just turning local off. So developer time has to be committed to providing that effort. So: why? What is the actual goal and purpose that is served by devoting some of the finite developer man-hours into creating a system by which Local can either be or not be, without crashing activity numbers?
You need that goal. You need that ‘why’. What is it you are trying to achieve? What problem are you trying to solve? I promise, if the only problem you’re trying to solve is ‘some people liked it’, there are a lot bigger, more pressing issues for developer time to be devoted to, with a much higher number of ‘people would like it if we solved this problem’.
Which moves us past the Blackout, into the realm of all of that stuff you got dismissive about with
Because it’s all inescapably tied together. PvE gameplay, sov stagnation, FW, missioning, player retention… everything impacts everything and influences everything else. Trying to say ‘we’re going to only address this one bit and ignore the rest’ is like trying to manage a healthy ecosystem one species at a time.
It only ever leads to unintended complications and problems. EVE is a vast, interconnected set of interdependent systems, and the number of things that can be addressed in isolation is vanishingly small.
So no, I haven’t made a huge number of suggestions on how to implement this one single, isolated, utterly meaningless measure. Because the issues are bigger than Local/No Local. The problems are more systemic than the Blackout could ever hope to address.
So yeah. Where the Blackout’s concerned, I mostly talked about tamping down expectations and following the data. I often tend to look more at the big picture. I’ve tried to address ways to offer more and better options to players. I’ve looked at ways to address the stagnation in more than just one area of EVE. And I’ve been willing to look at the issues that, for years now, CCP has told us they desperately need to address, like player retention and getting new players integrated into the game itself.
You say I’m overestimating the willingness of our pilots to do what they need to do. We already do it. Locustfleets are regular as clockwork. Recon already watches over movements and infrastructure all over the game. And highsec war fleets only ended because Horde decided they wanted to make money, instead of spending it, in Perimeter.
You’re one of the folks who, from post #2010 in the original BO thread, was cheering it on, all full of confidence that it would be an unmitigatedly good thing. Eager for it. One of those whose expectations and predictions about how players would respond on the bigger scale (ie: login numbers, not individual actions) was proven to be completely wrong.
I think, if I had to decide which of us is more likely to have a clue about large group behaviors in response to a given set of conditions… I wouldn’t go with you.
1 The upheaval from any change will always be temporary. People settle into predictable patterns of behavior. We want patterns. We crave patterns. Even people who love spontaneity and excitement want them within the context of a larger, stable pattern.