Small corps, structures and a theoretical idea

Communications Center General Discussion
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So in another thread there has been a chat about how small corps have no right to own structures and expect to keep them safe, now in Eve nothing is really safe but if players work together so much more can be achieved.

I proposed the idea of an organisation of small corps that want to come together for mutual protection in the form of a new corp with the soul purpose to try and save each others structures.

Now we already have organisations design for a dedicated task, the TTT used to have the perimeter police force a group of alts as the 1st line of defence for the TTT from all different organisations that had an interest in defending The Tower. (not sure if it’s still going)

Then we have The Hek mining Association, miners coming together for mutual cooperation.

So my idea is that each corp supplies a minimum of one alt member to this corp as a combat pilot more obviously the better, alpha and Omega could be accepted as corp would join in as allies in any wars.

Now I know what people will say “you will never defend against people the likes of Black Flag so what’s the point”

A good point but not necessarily true there are many ways to fight in eve and any new group will have to find there feet and learn, we all know pilot skill in eve is more important than any skill points.

Now the other opposition to this idea that’s been talked about is that small corps are to stupid to change anything, mostly this comes from gankers types and alts that have a vested interest in this type of group never forming.

So please reply here as to how this group could work, not really the tactics that’s for those who understand that side of eve but more on the practical side like, time zones, areas of operation, type of commitment, and how much time for training and what ever else a group would need.

Think about it 100 corps sign up, that’s 100 combat pilots willing to give it a go at the minimum, 100 destroyers would be a pain for any attacking force.

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I think you have your work cut out for you. If I knew how such a group could work, I’d have made it myself.

If your defense corporation gets 100 alts, that does not mean they’re all willing to fight, even assuming they’d all be available at the same time. Unless everyone’s going out in a corvette, you’re going to need some funding from somewhere, whether that’s in the form of bringing your own ship, or membership dues. Like any other system in Eve, people would be looking to exploit the maximum amount of protection out of this organization for the lowest cost and effort. This organization appeals to PvE players who do not want to PvP, but requires PvP pilots to work without offering them an incentive.

For such a defense organization to be viable in my opinion, it can not seek to recruit from PvE factions exclusively, nor try to force a PvE faction to PvP and expect to get quality results. If it were me, I would take an asymmetric approach where I had PvE players donate isk, ore, or ships (Isk from PvE players who primarily make money, ore from players who primarily mine, ships from players who primarily manufacture, whatever their PvE strength is), and then offer free ships and PvP opportunities to entice defenders who enjoy PvP.

The problem I run into is that people don’t want to surrender any wealth in exchange for protection, and potential protectors don’t want to protect those who do not value them. If you can find PvE groups who do value PvP players enough to offset the PvP expenses, you may be able to make a workable arrangement. I have my doubts that trying to form a PvP force from exclusively PvE focused corporation alts would be as effective.

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Some good points thankyou

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Like for accurate assessment. Also structure defense needs well skilled and dedicated pilots (people, not chars). And there is the blueballing thing to attrit those who actually want a fight.

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Isn’t it the same fundamental issue though that now small corps have to sign up to be part of a big blob in order to get by? Just now it’s a big blob with security holes and members with low skills and likely limited experience.

Before cores small groups could run citadels because there was little incentive for a giant group to chew through multiple timers for no gain. Small corps would fight amongst each other and some would hire in larger third parties, but there wasn’t mass farming of small corp citadels in the way there is now.

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But not all people living in high sec are 100% pve, it’s the same with null most people pve, even the new fw is pvp with lots of pve added, a great way for all to try both things.

The biggest problem highsec structures have are the number of players in a group, that then get overwhelmed by numbers and skills. If such a group formed would the prospect of pvp not attract more pvp orientated players.

It’s not just structure defence, many war decs are just for targets to kill, so the potential for constant pvp is high for people so inclined

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I don’t think you can rely on target availability alone as an incentive.

People who like FW will just continue to do FW since it requires no commitment, is always available, and offers rewards for participation. A HS defense fleet trying to form has to compete with that offering, plus comes with the disadantages of:

  1. Not having available activities in predictable locations the player enjoys at all times the player may find convenient to play.
  2. Requiring participation at the time, place and in the ship with the fit the defense fleet needs to effectively defend its charges.
  3. Not having game generated payouts for completing clearly defined objectives.

It would be up to you to provide whatever incentives, be they monetary or otherwise, to make joining and participating in your corporation attractive enough to overcome these disadvantages.

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You know…

You can do all that were a group of small corps come together and assist on wars by just removing the need of the corp/alliance to have a structure in space to be an ally.

That should be a rather simple change for CCP to make in the check for ally request.

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So, I like your idea, and in general, I feel a good idea requires support rather than 20 different ways it won’t work.

With regret, I literally cannot think of any good support mechanics or logistics or motivation to help your concept work. It basically requires too many pilots, available across too many parts of space and too many time zones, contending against larger corps who make a regular business of nuking and looting structures and obtain significant profit from doing so.

More power to you if you can make it work.

This is a problem with EVE’s current design structure. I applaud your desire to do something about it using the tools and players we have at hand, right now. However I believe that for this to work long-term it would require game mechanic support.

For instance, if CCP were to add defense contracts to the game. You hire a merc corp to defend your structure for X time at Y reward. The merc corp puts up collateral/a bond saying they will do so. If your structure is there at the end of the time slot, they get paid. If it gets blown up before the time slot ends, they lose their collateral. Defense contract history success/failure would be tracked.

EVE, in general, lacks “conflict driver ecosystems”. There’s good motivation/reward to be a pirate, virtually none to be a cop. There’s reason to be a ganker, very little to be a space patrol. There’s plenty of incentive for large groups to roam and destroy structures, very little reason (other than the owner’s personal stake and resources) to defend them.

IMO this is the primary reason destruction and conflict have always lagged far behind where they should be in EVE - because EVE lacks balanced conflict drivers. The conflict balance in any area is way off: in FW the payoff has always been on the winning side, in Nullsec it’s always towards “lock down territory and completely secure it”, in high and low it’s about looting anything that isn’t defended by a bigger group than yours.

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The net result would be less destruction, and thus less demand for the very stuff many such corps produce.

Many of the corps will be rivals, and those that are not because other corps are too far away…well, why would they care that station bashers are attacking systems on the other side of Eve and not them ? In fact, with alliances that have specific HQ for an entire such season and bash one specific area…I suspect the true response from small corps is ’ thank God its not our region this time’.

Also, any small corp might actually want to lie low so as to not get noticed. If they turn up as part of a 100 man fleet, I’m sure any attackers will be taking note of who is there. Which means your mutual defence system would have to always work and always defend everyone, or attackers could simply pick them off one by one from the said list.

Which would be fun and great content !

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This idea (like most ideas that would be presented by an AG) is flawed in the sense that it’s completely self-defeating. If the plan is successful, it leads to the effective removal of the underlying reason why the plan was needed in the first place. If there’s a mutual agreement to field a blob to protect any station that gets attacked, well, then small groups aren’t going to attack stations anymore, are they?

But this actually goes deeper, and deals with CCP’s fundamentally flawed game design principles. They changed the entire war system to rest on a single, absolute, uncompromising focal point, which is to fight to destroy citadels. Whether as an attacking force, or as a defending force, it all comes down to blowing up the other side’s station to make them no longer eligible for wars as the sole winning condition. There are no smaller objectives, and no room for any asymmetric warfare, because every war comes down to a fight within a few kilometers of a structure. In such a system, the blob always wins, because half a dozen god-like players aren’t going to beat a sixty-man gang that comes to force a timer fight. You can’t go guerrilla mode and pick off players from a group that severely outnumbers you and given enough time actually really hurt them or even win the conflict, because they’ll just show up to your house and knock it over and that’s that.

In the absence of meaningful changes to the system, which will never ever come (I guarantee this), I think a much better solution is to simply turn off wars entirely (along with ganking). Non-consensual PvP is a relic of a bygone era, and isn’t the way toward this game’s future. Get rid of it entirely, and send all the griefers to fight the REAL PvPers in null-sec, where they belong. It’s pretty obvious that over the past few years, CCP has actually been trying to go in this direction, but they’re just too afraid to commit because they fear a marketing fiasco when gamers start making fun of EVE for going soft, just like they did with New World. But CCP can easily counter this by mentioning how there’s plenty of PvP in EVE arenas and FW battlegrounds. They should just change the game to be 2023-compliant, and then act like it’s always been this way.

Actually, I kind of wonder if CCP changed wars to be like this intentionally in order to turn them into these stagnant AFK-siege gang-bangs, and are waiting for the forum complaints to reach critical mass before finally gutting the system entirely. Except they didn’t foresee that players would instead choose to hyper-whine about ganking for five years instead, and the whole war thing took a backseat to that. Maybe this will finally change now that something like 80% of the gankers have quit.

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Critical mass…from the same old half a dozen players out of 21,000 online ?

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Reddit is the big one. It’s also the much more hard-line anti-PvP one.

But you should already know that it doesn’t take a whole lot of genuine, unique individuals to create and maintain an actionable narrative around here.

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You think someone at CCP looks at the forums and thinks ’ Hey…that one whiny player who’s been whining about the same issue for 7 years, lets change the entire game just for them and screw what the 21,000 who said nothing think about it’.

Hmm.

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They don’t do it to appease some serial whiner. They do it because new/potential players see the rants when stopping by for any reason, and then self-brainwash themselves by starting to think “wow, that sounds terrible! I didn’t know things were so bad in this game! Maybe I shouldn’t subscribe, I don’t want to get griefed too…”

CCP is well aware that the public’s perception of their game is that of a griefer’s paradise mainly played by social rejects to seal-club endangered, innocent family men who just want to log in and have some fun mining ore for a few hours after a hard day of work. It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be how people perceive the game (and they do, if you check out other places online), and this is costing CCP lots of potential revenue.

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Highsec PvP is especially played risk-averse, you only engage if your chance of winning is very high. When you muster a big defense fleet, nobody will show up to fight. Nobody needs to take a “fair” fight, there are no real reason to fight in highsec, so you have no force, in contrast to sov nullsec.

The easiest solution would have been to disallow structures in highsec altogether, but this boat has sailed …

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Why would null-sec be different? If a group of 500 gets invaded by a group of 5,000, would the former hit the asset safety button right away, or only after feeding a few thousand ships to the latter? Only one course of action actually makes sense.

Not that anyone really fights in null-sec these days, but you know, hypothetically.

Citadel and asset safety mechanics are probably the worst addition to the game ever. Even worse than FozzieSov.

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The people attacking stations are generally going to be in high EHP battleships with lots of logi as support. And they will be in doctrine ships…so generally not some kitchen sink fleet.

That means any Small Corp Union would have to have doctrine ships too, specifically to counter what turns up. What’s more they won’t know in advance what doctrine is going to show up…there may be several available to the attackers precisely so defenders wont know what to expect.

Then they’d have to all arrive from far and wide…almost certainly further than the attacking fleet would have to travel…and on time. It would probably be decided that it was not worth mounting a defence and losing ships over the shield…so it would be the hull timer that mattered. Bear in mind also that their goal is not simply to destroy attackers ships but to prevent the station being destroyed…which the attackers may still be able to do even with ships lost.

And, each member of this coalition would have to trust that is was ‘all for one, and one for all’ every single time.

A tall order.

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Actually, I just thought of a further…serious…problem.

Station attacks occur as part of the wardec system. The corp that owns the station is declared war on. That is what gives the two sides ‘permission’ to engage…and in highsec security status is actually left on green for this.

Any group joining in is not going to be in on this wardec. The attacking alliance is of course not going to declare war on the Small Corp Union for that very reason. Which effectively means the role of most of the Union is that of gankers…and they are not going to want to zoom in flying battleships and such. In fact their role as effectively being gankers seriously limits what they can do.

The only solution is for members to switch corp ever time there is an attack…which I think adds yet another obstacle. People find it a pain in the proverbial even switching corp within a single alliance…let alone totally switching corp to some completely different group.

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I assume the plan is that the Small Corp Union would join the war as an ally.

Yep:

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