Okay, here’s some general stuff proposed and backed by a real person -me.
TLDR: Keep HS reward the same, but increase risk and the opportunity for more emergent game play opportunities.
Here are some ideas that I’m been toying with:
Buff ganking/nerf EHP’s/reduce concord response times so that it doesn’t take as much DPS to take down targets. Specifically, I want to see bigger engagement profiles for solo and small teams, less need to multibox, and less pressure to join a big group.
Get rid of tether in HS (but only if ganking is buffed so that multiboxing isn’t so important).
Make every station in HS a kickout station (players can still use insta undock bookmarks).
I am open to the idea of “dynamic concord response times.” This would encourage gankers to fly around more, creating more opportunities for AG’s, and less ability for guys to optimize towards boredom in quiet systems. However, it would also make ganking and ganker logistics more difficult. Thus, I would like to see it balanced by making it easier to kill targets in systems with less ganker activity than it currently is (hopefully that sentence made sense).
Make more players eligible for war decks (I’m not set on who, or what the incentives to flag for war decks should be. All I know, is that I want more people flagging for war decks).
Reduce the cost of freighters (they still cost too much for what they can safely haul, and this would be even worse if ganking got buffed). I’m also open to the idea of giving them mid slots and more fitting room. What, I don’t want to see, however, is ridiculous EHP’s that only the absolute largest gank fleets can take down.
Reduce the cost of many faction ships. They are too expensive for what you get, and what it takes to kill them.
The cost of many T2 ships probably needs to be increased, but you won’t catch me complaining about it.
Oh, and because so many people have said it -no, marauders do not need a buff or a change to the bastion mod.
Change all instanced content so that it is no longer instanced. PvE difficulty and/or rewards should be adjusted so that the content is still worth running.
Clearly advertise Eve Online as challenging UPvP game, so that it attracts people who actually want to play the game.
Increase the salvage that can be obtained from wrecks, but make it take longer. I want to see salvaging be made a more viable career, and more guys in space that can be killed by solo and small ganker teams.
Make ninja looting more viable for new players, at the expense of older players who are lazy, inattentive, and/or unknowledgeable. But, this is a can of worms in and of itself, so I’ll leave it at that for now.
The NPE should, at the very least, be introducing players to risk management and PvP avoidance. It doesn’t have to teach them everything, but it should at least be introducing them to these ideas.
Stop making ads that insinuate that players can microtransaction their way to success.
Specifically on this topic, being war eligible is just too expensive. I could not reliably convince people who already wanted to fight in a war to take structures from me for free so that they could participate. Taking something that valuable made them feel bad, so I decided not to press the issue because I didn’t want people to feel bad. Other than ganking, I don’t know of any means in highsec to enforce a territorial claim that doesn’t require upwards of a half a billion. Small groups can’t afford to waste that kind of (virtual) cash on what will, early in their career, probably be a bloody nose. Failure should have some sting, but it has to be affordable enough to gamble with for the participants you want to participate. Or at least cheap enough that people don’t feel like they’ve done you dirty if they accept an offer from you to pay that cost for them.
Are you looking to refine the idea or why are you posting it here to trashcan thread?
Ninja looting is mainly knowhow based activity. When you know how, it is very easy, affordable and risk-free activity. In worst case you get killed and you lose nothing because you flew there with rookie ship and empty pod and that loot was never yours to begin with.
I will tell you story of mine. When I was in noob corp, we eventually moved to new place and started staging into lowsec. Which the already established corp in that ls didn’t like and so they were ganking and hunting us in low and mocking us to fight. And so we did, we started fleeting up and fighting with them. And I was the one who profited on all of this because while I was fighting with my main, my secret spotter alt was nearby ready to loot the remnants of the battle. Really, nobody has time to catch and kill neutral hauler and I usually waited till there was noone on the grid. You see, pvp players doesn’t collect loot immediately because pvp ships have small cargo and they often carry ammo and cap batteries so they can’t take much. Plus if they loot someone and then they die it makes it the loss more “painful”. And the fleet won’t wait till you collect it into nearest station if there even is any. Eventually the other side managed to kill me as they brought two ceptors for which my 3 stabs weren’t enough back then, but that was one badger for 300mil of loot.
So that is one way how to do it, not sure if such conflicts still exists out there though. Probably not. But there are many other ways and much less risky than what I was doing before (as those fights took place near gates). The availability of ninja looting is huge, even in highsec. I even collect cans with garbage in them like civilian guns on my way in highsec just to help clean the space .
Jita is probably the most lucrative place anyway, ninja looters gained from my victims over 6bil ISK total ever since I came back to EVE - is it 3 months already?
That’s a lot of proposed changes. Some of them are quite interesting.
Is the price of faction ships not dictated more by the players grinding the LP and the industrialists creating the base hulls? Doesn’t seem CCP could or should do too much on that one without interfering with our sandbox.
The one I’m really interested in hearing more on is your thoughts on instanced content. I agree instanced content is a bit tricky for the sand box. However I’m stumped as to how you could remove the instance from abyssals without letting people abuse them. I feel like as soon as you put them in real space you’d have people sharing book marks to their own ships and warping in battleships to make light work of them.
I like the idea of freighters having some fitting abilities but I’d like to see them have more interesting modules that are specifically for freighters. Something for the haulers to train into for a bit of an end game.
I saw a great idea for revamping salvage on Reddit once and that was to get rid of the current loot box mechanic. Each wreck is a sealed container that takes time to salvage in space and the salvagers work like relic/data analysers. You play some sort of mini game and the choices you make determine wether you salvage more of the salvage items or get a better chance at loot or go middle of the road and have an average chance at both. Of course the chance exists you break the wreck and get nothing, no loot or salvage items. MTUs and salvage drones could be changed to do a mediocre job at salvaging the wrecks with a high chance of just breaking them. You would balance the failure rate and time by giving more salvage loot per wreck. They also suggested similar changes to mining to make it nigh on impossible to AFK.
I like the idea of being able to war deck people but don’t like the idea of it just being a throw away thing people do to troll smaller corps. Perhaps you could make it so that you can war deck corps without structures but the cost increases exponentially and the war dec should be limited to the territory you want to exclude them from?
Players can microtransaction their way to success, that is if you consider success being able to fly and undock whatever ship you want. You just need to be some kind of oligarch/1%er.
Off topic, I know you said no buffs to marauders but I really would like to see a buff to the paladin and all other amar battleship’s capacitors. Not a huge one but the abaddon caps out just firing it’s guns! They really are the garbage tier of battleships in that respect.
I would also like to see a change to security standings in high sec. If you are flashy yellow everyone still gets to hunt you, if your security status is bellow a certain threshold then you flash yellow if you go into too high a security system. Balance that with better less grindy ways to fix it. Same applies for your empire standing. It would give more pvp options in high sec that don’t involve sitting around waiting for someone to do something naughty and whoring on the kill mail or throwing away your ship for the kill. You could even remove the empire ships chasing you down because it would be up to the players to provide that function.
While I tend to think of FacPo as unnecessarily oppressive and would not mind if they go, I know of at least two people who like the extra challenge of operating while being tailed by FacPo so I would have to make sure there was a sec status threshold that preserves the status quo. I think they’re nuts, but I can’t think of a good reason not to let them have what they want.
The first issue is that there is no good balance reason to reduce EHP’s, not one single one. Small and medium teams already have their engagement profiles in time limited protected space. And big targets require group play.
Tethering and ganking are not linked as such other than it enabled easier ganking , tethering was introduced for other reasons, Caps basically. There is no link to any need for a buff to ganking, ganking had a huge unwarranted and undeserved benefit from tethering which destroyed AG hunting. You had the cake already by the ease and protection it gave you, can’t see why you have to benefit from a gain in function being removed like that.
No need for kickout in hs.
Dynamic CONCORD response times would likely be RNG’d if not it would be gamed by the gankers like it is now.
The war decs I agree with, I would remove the need for entities to have a structure to be war decced, I would enable three concurrent war decs max for any entity unless they put up a war HQ in a Astrahus only in which they have to link all their war decs in it. Characters will have the war follow them for 24 hours even if they leave an entity. I would also make it so allies in a war can rep each other.
Reduce the cost of freighters period, I agree, but the EHP is weak enough as it is.
DBS and ESS would not work in hisec. Would just annoy people with already low income except for Incursion runners…
The main problem with Freighters is (imho) the fact that they are capital ships (with all the high cost in blueprints, production and skillpoints attached), which should not exist in HighSec anyway while other transport ships in the line of Battlecruiser- or Battleship-size are completely missing. I’d say scale them down to Orca-Size (Production Cost, Ingame Model, L-rigs, Mass, Speed, Aligntime, comparable PG/CPU and Fittingslots etc.) while reducing their Cargo-Capacity and Hitpoints slightly (below 1M in Max-Cargo-Fit, around 500k eHP in Tankfit).
And then create another line of XL-Transporters exclusively for 0.0 and Lowsec with Cargo Capacities above 1M, which cannot enter HighSec.
of course under -5 it would work normally if I understand his suggestion correctly, the suspect rule will only be in play in case you are under -5 but lower than that security system minimal security value
A dynamic system is open to exploitation. If you made Concord response time faster the more ganks there were, haulers with billions to haul could simply gank lots of cheap ships of their own to effectively clear a fast Concord response time path through lots of systems.
There is not even a T2 Orca, so why suddenly create a T3 one? Not even mentioning that it has nothing to do with the currently bad design of freighters. Or the issue of suicide ganking in HighSec -_-
Yeah, I don’t like that, and that’s some of that can of worms stuff I was talking about. Ideally I would like to see
it easier for newbro ninja looters to make a living siphoning off a small portion of the income from lazy, inattentive, unknowledgeable, and/or risk adverse players
PvE/PvP activities remain worthwhile (i.e. it isn’t too easy for a ninja looter to steal too much of a site’s payout, resulting in people stop doing that PvE)
A relatively clear progression path for ninja looters (i.e. stealing from mission runners → Explorers → Gankers → Abyssal Runners → Incursioners → Structure Bashers, or whatever)
That the risk and skill required to ninja loot an activity be proportional to the payout (i.e. can’t steal a portion of a payout by just sitting cloaked in a site and waiting, or rookie ships being viable ninja looting ships)
I’m hoping that all of this would get more newbros into scumbagery, lead to more emergent game play opportunities for ninja looters, PvE’ers, and suspect baiters, and make Eve a much more fun and interesting place. But it’s also an extremely complicated problem that would require looking at all sorts of stuff including, but not limited to, cargo bay sizes, item volumes, what percentage of an activity’s reward is stealable, NPC agro towards ninja looters, and possibly even looting mechanics themselves (i.e. distance you need to be from a wreck and how long it takes to loot a wreck). Moreover, let’s be real here -there is no way that this wouldn’t result in a lot of guys crying about how easy it is for people to steal “their” stuff. Oh, and people have also been complaining about ninja looter bots recently. So, ideally you’d try to find ways that would make it harder for bots to operate in the space.
So, will it ever happen? Doubt it. But a man can dream though… a man can dream.
I did not mention T2 or modular techology at all. I just said Freighters in Highsec would fit better into the game if they would be at the scale of the Orca and not being Capital Ships.
→ it would follow KISS (no capitals in highsec)
→ offer an advantage of Low/0.0 Industry and Corplife over HighSec in terms of easier logistics
→ offer another motivation for industrial players to leave highsec because they can fly capital haulers there
→ it would balance the industrial ship lines better, the jump from the biggest T1/T2 hauler to Freighter in Terms of Cost and Skill requirements is imho too high without steps in between.
→ they could get Fittingslots without the need to balance anything around CapitalModules, they simply would use L-rigs and subcap Modules like the Orca
→ a reduced base-cargo would make it impossible to transport repackaged Caps (1.3M m³) in Highsec, even in MaxCargoFit.
And I can see no real downsides, except hat the max-cargo per run in HighSec would be nerfed by like 25% (around 750k m³ maybe). But really, would that be a bad thing? HighSec is quite centralized these days, most stuff going to or coming from Jita. A nerf of logistical capabilities in HS could strengthen regional markets, producers, miners etc. because transportation of huge amounts of raw materials or bulky products over large distances would be harder.
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