Should Alliances unable to fight during the day be allowed to hold space?

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
21

Good to see that we are thinking along the same lines. That doesn’t happen often on these forums :wink: All we can do is not present “ideas” to ccp, but ask them to consider the right questions. They have plenty of grey mass and creativity to tackle the problems.

There’s only one element where I do differ in opinion, to a degree:

0.0 groups already do what you say in the quoted part. And it already takes a lot of time to move the biggest stuff across regions, not to mention the risk involved. Should they be able to deploy anywhere, anytime and anything in their own home region ? Of course.

Sure, the HACs and the kikis get anywhere on the map fast, but they do so only for tactical purposes. In that sense the bridging in is nothing but a tactical element of surprise and convenience to get to the content. That type of power projection does not even decide major conflicts. Only supers and titans can decide those because everything in nullsec is designed with their existence in mind. That’s why you won’t see an end to the “conflict” in the north any time soon (re current economy / risk avoidance) and, for that matter, neither in the TTC & Co hisec conflict. Those weapon platforms are either not risked or not deployable, which affects the quality of the conflicts themselves. Not a good thing.

Then, as to the decade+ old question of renter space, of big groups dominating smaller groups, it’s not even a question of supers etc. The largest group can field the most guns, and will often have the better meta that they themselves have researched, trained, and experimented with. More people simply equals more possibilities and avenues. Even if it requires them to deploy slowly, eventually they will roflstomp a small group into the ground. I think we both agree on possible solutions there (tie sov to sov holder activity and indeed make the interesting weapons available to the smaller groups). Disclaimer: I wouldn’t dream of suggesting any of these solutions in the real world, lol. Here we want the conflict. in the real world not so much.

Back to goo mining, maybe in a month or four I’ll finish a dread (single account, never outgrew what a buddy of mine recently called child’s play)

Anyway, thanks for the exchange !!

22

I think we aren’t so far apart really. If we consider that be both share the opinion that “home” and “own” should be defined by activty and not just placing a “sov”-token into empty systems to make them “own” on paper, I think we are even pretty much on the same road here. Because if SOV was based on activity, this “own home” would probably quite a bit smaller than what alliances can hold now.

Pando once said an important thing on his stream (well, I believe others have said it as well, but it was a moment that I can remember and must say I felt so understood when it happened, because he said what I thought all the time and that without us ever talking to each other). The statement was along these lines: “Instant Power Projection can create content, but nobody can see all those fights that never happen because of it”. And that is so true. I bet all this “surprise & convenience hotdropping” creates an atmosphere of paranoia and risk averse gameplay and I am absolutely convinced that any power projection that enables a side to drop any kind of force, from the smallest frigs to the biggest Supercaps within a few seconds right on top (aka at zero) on other forces is bad game design. Because it prevents a LOT more fights than it creates and it basically rewards only patience (boring), blobbing (boring) and risk-aversity (booooring).

Oh of course they can, but it would be in the games best interest to add protection mechanics to prevent the big guys to roflstomp the small guys “just because they can”. There are some ways to achieve that:

  • make it non-rewarding (financially).
  • make it time-consuming (boring).
  • make it costly (losses).

This way, the big group still could raze and dominate the small group, no doubt. But it would become a strategical decision: Is it worth it? Can’t we just let them live and have their small remote corner in a System we don’t use much anyway? Maybe even approach them nicely and offer them something instead of demanding allegiance and taxes “or we will come and raze everything you build!”. Making it inefficient to jump on any smaller group because it eats up too much time, it bores the members and it brings no financial reward gives smaller groups bargaining power. Yes, if the big guy wants the small guy to die for whatever reason, he will die - still. But the big guy will pay a price for it. Currently, he makes a profit with it. And thats wrong.

My pleasure.

23

Exactly, a declining “sphere of influence”.

One can easily turn this around and say “look at all the fights that happen because of it”, and that is the only correct way of connecting “bridging in” and “fights”.
Linking “fights” that did not happen to “bridging in” as such, that is equal to claiming that one single variable is responsible for the outcome of a multivariable equation (rendering all other variables meaningless). We’d have to interview Pando to hear the intended nuances of his statement.

The possibilities of bridging in or cynoing in are of course a psychological factor - which is quite useful and an integral part of any conflict. Should it create paranoia ? I thought most eve players were “paranoiacs”, lol. It makes us deal with risk, let’s us make better choices and decisions, both on an individual level and on group level (ceo’s and fc’s), it keeps us interested and turns this game into 4D chess.

The bridging in that we seem to stumble over in this part of the discussion occurs in many different ways.

I don’t see an issue with blackops/sb’s/t3cs. It’s not decisive in any large conflict, and it’s unlikely to have anything to do with sovereignty claims. It’s small scale, it’s fun, it increases the risk and danger, there are counters and it even enables the existence of public fleets. At a similar level is filamenting in, which in certain cases gives even less advance warning than a cyno popping up. And filaments were “invented” to make more fights happen… Along the same line, wh and drifter connections in general, again generate faster access to content, and those even with quite considerable forces/numbers.
All this “content” via bridging and wh traveling requires a lot of effort. Scouts are constantly roaming around for potential targets, mapping connections, looking for opportunities. It doesn’t happen in the blink of an eye, and the attentive target should be alert for signs of scouting (even on “unassociated” characters that do not broadcast who they are scouting for). It’s high level gameplay, with limited effect overall but challenging for both sides.

Titan bridging. If you don’t know if you’re in range of a titan bridge, you’re doing it wrong, your spies were discovered and your scouts are hybernating … If you do know you’re in range of a titan bridge, and you have no answer to it, then what on earth are you doing there ?! If not laying a trap for a counterdrop … get out fast, lol. And let’s not make RnK’s Clarion Call IV a new sad memory of something lost :wink:.

Let me just say those bridges are necessary to prevent nullsec from becoming encased in concrete, where only border skirmishes and intra-border deployments are possible. Nerfing bridging would mean hampering full force deployments and sov invasions, making large fights impossible and essentially preventing the lines on the map to move. Bridges don’t enable renter space per se, what we are discussing. But they are a necessary element in the necessary power projection in nullsec. That basic fluidity is needed, I think. And no, supercaps are not deployed at the drop of a hat. They gather in staging systems weeks before, during the build up phase of any serious business between groups. Neither do they get deployed when a fleet of marauders come to gank or rob ESS’s. They don’t get bridged in either… In a home region, different story of course, as it should be unless rendered completely useless until the next big conflict, economy permitting (which it isn’t).

Not sure where you’re going with this. You can’t punish a large group for being large, that would be bad game design. You could however challenge their possibility to hold sovereignty as we discussed before. In that sense, roflstomping is just content (having lived in NRDS Provi for 4 years, I know, lol). Simply said, just as coalitions don’t officially exist within the game’s mechanics, you can’t even define the “size” of groups, because they are fluid in composition and associations, unless you would only permit official wardecs with listed participants - which defeats the purpose of nullsec again. Which leads me to the previous conclusion, activity over time based sovereignty. At least today, lol, until more people give their view.

24

my opinion of it is that to balance the holding of space between blob and skirmish type pvp.
Is that the inability to defend against skirmish-style pvp starts to seriously hamper your alliance’s daily activities like jumping bridges through to making structures in systems that have a track record of poor defense become increasingly easy to kill. Poor defense in systems that house high amounts of alliance infrastructure should see impacts on industrial costs.

As I stated I think ESS should be changed to encourage fights more and more via the distribution of reserve banks in a region in some form of trickle-down.

It’s just not good game mechanics where the holding of space is entirely down to numbers and the member’s piloting skills are barely part of the factor. And yes part of this is encouraging the entire coalition of alliances problems that ironically are being complained about by some of these daytime zombie alliance leaders.

While my thread title is clickbait. The obvious answer to it is no they shouldn’t. But neither should raider groups who target null blocks be able to take the space without being able to take a blob style fight.
My point is there now need to be a move to implement mechanics that balance two types of PVP that occur in null space.
And yes if that means certain groups face only controlling 1 or 2 constellations rather than 1 or 2 regions. Good. The vacuum would soon be filled.

25

Well, I like to question that logic a bit. Some things are so obvious, there is no scientific research needed to forsee their effects. That doesn’t mean it’s a black/white scenario which makes all other variables meaningless.
I for myself believe that a mechanic so powerful as bridging simply needs some restrictions (timed delays, mass restrictions, fuel costs) to counterbalance it. And this balance is currently not very good in my book.

Have to disagree here. There should be parts of the game (after reaching a certain size and power, aka big corp or alliance level) where pre-planning, excessive scouting and a lot of patience (aka 4D chess) is playing a major role. And this shall be the place for all those FCs, CEOs and Officers who really like that.
But I also think that effort and level of 4D-chess should scale down with engagement size. The small gang of a handful of cruisers or BCs should not have to scout a dozen systems all around for suspicious cyno chars that instantly could bridge a whole fleet upon them. Or check the background of 23 guys in local before engaging a Drake they happen to catch in a belt. In my book, all Bridging needs delays that counter the power behind it. The big guys could still do their big stuff, raze structures, bust hostile capital ops, engage sieges Rorqs and so on. Nothing would be taken away from them if a Cyno would need 10 seconds to light. Or a Jump would take 5sec for a Frig, 10sec for a Cruiser and 15sec for a Battleship. Nothing. they could still do everything they can do now and dominate every sector. They could just not jump on small mobile gangs any more and basically wipe them out completely in seconds. It would only affect small/medium gang warfare and not in the slightest hurt bigger conflicts.

Not even close. Really. The difference of a far superior gang that knows your ship composition bridging in at ZERO on you and the randomly opened filament that brings a gang into a system where they don’t exactly know what opposition they will find and even if something engagable is there, still have to warp to it and tackle it - thats worlds apart. If you get caught by a Filament gang, there are only two reasons: You have been in some kind of Siege/Indu mode where you can’t move (bad idea if you do not have support available) or you have completely ignored the local. But in both cases you would have died to a Cynodrop anyway since you were obviously easy to find and unable to move.

Can’t agree here as well for reasons given above. The Killboard Stats are speaking a clear language: Almost no risk involved when using them, almost never countered efficiently, almost exclusively used against weaker targets with great success. Thats not fun. Well, okay, its fun for those rich vets that don’t look for fights but for roflstomping newbs or weaker groups. Thats not balanced. Their extreme combination of instant-travel and damage and remote-support and EWAR is giving them an extreme level of power. And power always must be counterbalanced by the lack of agility/mobility. BOs were fine when they were originally implemented. At a time when there was roughly a minute of delay between opening a Cyno and ships switching system, loading grid, locking opponents. This was okay, since the dropped side had a chance to react. Today, its completely OP and unnessessary so. It is simply not needed for them to be this fast at zero. They would still perform incredibly well if given some delay and countertools for smaller gangs like HIC-cyno-supression bubbles. The BO gang does not suddenly become worthless if they need to cyno in at 30km instead at 0km. They just won’t catch 100% of their prey any more. Which is fine for me.

Well that means that you simply can’t live in Lowsec any more as a small/medium independend group. Because you are in TitanBridgeRange of someone almost everywhere. It was really really bad at some degree, which was the point when many many smaller Lowsec corps simply left. Some quit the game, some did go to WH space. But I witnessed that first hand when you literally coudn’t roam any more in a cheap BC-gang without having a goddamn map open and half a dozen scouts around and somehow wiggle between those few titan-free spaces. It was awful. And it has caused the exodus of Lowsec we could see, which has only recently been halted by changing the FW areas.

That is not true. Because “nerfing” is a wide span of possibilities. There are changes possible that won’t have even noticable effects on large conflicts, but seriously increase the survival chances of smaller groups.

26

Forgot that one: Nobody is doing or planning that. Some people have a strange oipinion on what a “punishment” is. Nobody ever said that above a certain size special “punishment” mechanics shall occur or anything. Just that moving around really heavy guns shall be so costly and so slowly that it simply isn’t worth it to do that for smaller targets. It’s not like the big groups wouldn’t have simply the option to send a small and agile fleet, nobody “punishes” them for “being big” at all.

27

As expected, the discussion tumbles into a hole where nerfing, encumbering and adding cost seems to be an answer to everything, anything and anytime, while not addressing the core issue of bloated sov claims and renter space/extortion - part of which should be tackled via sov mechanics and not by making significant forces impotent. It’s destined to smother playstyles because “the small groups need to have their chance as well”, be it sovereignty or small scale pvp vs a more powerful opponent who now should have one arm and one leg tied up, under the flag of “we’re going to nerf but it’s not really a nerf and anyway it’s for the good of the game”. Just like a discussion on the need for warHQ’s for one man operations wanting to poke the nullsec groups with a maximum of personal risk avoidance. …

Yes, yes, independent verification can be an inconvenience.
/sarcasm
The fact of the matter is that bridging leads to encounters. In logic an AND operator only gives a True answer when all elements are True (1 AND 1 = 1), and when the state of one element is unknown (1 AND ? = ?) the answer is unknown, not 1, as your use of Pando’s quote suggests.

You can’t have mechanics for “fair fights”, which is what you (and OP) imply in your posts, in an open nullsec map. You could have “fair fights” rules if you made arena style encounters mandatory - which would at least prevent a large number of players from bothering with this game after it lost its sandbox character.

I can imagine strong nullsec alliances, living in a very well defended, populated and active region, and having at its borders neighbourly groups that behave well, through diplomatic contacts and fun skirmishes and w/e. I can also imagine bloated sov claims and renter space backfiring e.g., where low sov holder/landlord activity in certain areas automatically lead to a deterioration of all their systems. That would likely make it much less attractive and very costly for the large alliance involved.

There is absolutely no need to nerf anything in terms of ship movements, response times, risk and ability to defend one’s systems. If small groups have the nerve to attack bigger ones on the latter’s turf, ballsy yes, but don’t claim “unfairness” after you face the realistic consequences (or forgot to filament out, or use a wh connection). And, related to sov of small groups, If they are under the threat of extortion, they should seek powerful friends. This is an MMO with a strong social aspect.

Our neighbours in Aridia, OR/CR, the npc pocket in FTN, and any wh connection users seem to be doing okay … They come to gank us, steal from our banks, attack miners, drop on us regularly. Same with wh groups, and sometimes we have the pleasure of welcoming public NPSI fleets. Sometimes they are successful, sometimes not. All involved seem to like it, since it repeats itself every day, even though we have a considerable bridging capability and the numbers…

Perhaps the depopulation of LS has more to do with the lack of benefits of even living there ?

I can dream up a scenario where a large group officially splinters into a bunch of small groups that still function as one large group, making any nerfs and any advantages quite pointless.

Small groups wanting to establish sov ? Best have the necessary diplomatic contacts to support you in times of need, as it always was. That’s perhaps the easiest solution of all. With the eagerness of large groups to have a steady supply of content, that should not be an issue. And they’re going to need the agility via bridges etc to take punitive actions on behalf of their protegees.

28

Well, you seem to be under the constant impression that I somehow want to enable small groups to claim SOV, poke larger groups significantly without them having a chance to fight back or something. That entirely isn’t the case. I’ll cut the discussion about all the other subtopics here, I think I said what I wanted to. Lets agree that changes to the SOV mechanics that would lead to a more compact area of influence, defined by daily and regular member activity is a desirable goal. And that abandoned systems with little to no activity should fall out of SOV at some point.

All the other stuff is maybe better disussed in seperate topics, to not clutter up this one with side skirmishes :slight_smile:

29

Agreed :smile:

30

Yeah, Player Features & Ideas became a trash bin of the forums. I used to like reading it, those posting here directly were actually suggesting something interesting, usually at least, or something worth to comment on. Now this section is littered by trash ideas to bury them from Communications Center which has the highest views and players discussing.

31

You don’t need to imagine it. It exists in the game today.
What you describe is essentially how pvp wormhole corps behave.
We live in our little fortresses, that are well defended and difficult to invade, so long as we’re active and aware of what’s coming into our out of our home systems.
When we connect with another wh Corp, we have a throwdown. These are often organised between us.
There are certain honorabru rules of engagement that are clearly spelled out between the parties prior to shots being exchanged.
We then meme and roast each other mercilessly.