(I’m not proposing any changes, nor do I want to change the CONCORD response timer. That aside…)
A hypothetical scenario: What if CONCORD takes 1 hour to arrive?
How would it change high sec space? What would the meta be?
What strategies would change, which ones would not change and which ones will become impossible?
For one, I think suicide gankers will probably start self-destructing their ship after a gank, rather than wait out the 1 hour arrival of CONCORD before they’re allowed to swap ships/dock/take gates.
Well yeah this might have clear problems for ganking, but on the other hand, isn’t Concord what renders ships immobile and kills them during their criminal timers? If that’s the case, then there may be a hour long window in which one can repeatedly commit criminal acts without Concord intervention in highsec. Obviously this would render highsec into a delayed form of low sec, and I don’t think that would be good for the game, but on the other hand this could be rather fun and makes for an interesting in game event. Perhaps make it Triglavian related and we have a deal.
Gate camps and ganking would be at an all time high, and they’d be able to use instalockers, but if say gate or station guns still worked appropriately, this could make for a very interesting in game event.
It would mean that it would only take fewer and cheaper cats to gank the same ship.
This would rid HS of miners and low-end transporters, but it would do little against mission running in high sec.
Why would they self-destruct their ships? Kusion and Co would not need 30+ Catas anymore to gank something. They’d instead use fewer ships because they have much more time and gank more because they have the chars already who are now free to do more than one gank at a time. They would just camp a gate with insta lockers and remote reps to tank sentries and gate guns for an hour and no one could do something about it.
Another problem: Since this 1 hour delay would result in hundreds of Concord triggers, but Concord would destroy the criminals at the first arrival after an hour, the remaining triggers would just clog up the server with infinite loops.
People will still eventually and inevitably lose their ganking ship, but they could go on a ganking spree after killing the first ship.
Yep, ships that rely on ‘being too expensive to kill’ will become a lot cheaper if it doesn’t take multiple catalysts anymore.
Ships that died to a single catalyst will feel no difference.
And blingy mission runners will still be ganked for profit like before, so no difference there either.
It would indeed be a delayed form of low sec, except that you’re certain to eventually lose the ganking ship, while in low sec you can stay alive if you play well.
I do think it could be a fun event, but I doubt many of the current high sec players would agree so I doubt CCP would do something like this. It would be game-changing on the scale of the blackout, if not more.
Well if they’re actively fighting (/ganking) for an hour, people could fleet up and fight back against the pirates. They can do the same right now, but it’s not really useful when CONCORD arrives within a dozen seconds and does the same thing burt better.
Problem is that this is not enjoyable gameplay for anti-ganking people because you are never there when action happens and always available when content is not there. Plus, since gankers don’t need to use glass cannons anymore, they can just use affordable fleet doctrines of gank ships. Thoraxes with logi and the likes. It’s simply the same thing as war decs where there are no fights either even though you can fight and the ships at stake are usually well worth the fight. However, overwhelming odds make it impractical and unenjoyable to fight back.
That would dramatically reduce the cost of ganking in terms of ship loss. Suddenly instead of having one short window to kill one target, gankers would have an entire hour to kill as many as possible.
This would be a fantastic gift for gankers.
The only other thing I can think of in terms of how it would change stuff is that the people hunting them would maybe have that much more time to keep hunting.
Might as well get rid of CONCORD at that point. All of the functional restrictions are based on the criminal timer anyway, so if the gankers survive waiting out the criminal timer they keep their ship by simply docking up when CONCORD is due.
Game design wise, concord serves its role as NPE - allowing for an entry level into eve online. But all of you know that already, so on to the more humouristic side of things.
Scenario: nullsec can declare war on hisec for 1 hour. Once every trimester ? CCPlease ? Once every year ? Big Bang Event ? Yes ? No limits, all weapons, all hulls ? Let the kids see what’s possible ?
