So, I think we all know that the elephant in the room is that Eve politics and power cause large blocks of alliances and coalitions, and the phenomenon known as the blue donut. The power lies with the few alliance leaders that head the largest alliances.
Now, I don’t expect this to come from the CSM, because they’re all alliance leaders with power. They’d have to be willing to change the fundamental power structure to keep Eve alive, and I don’t know whether that’s possible, but here goes:
Corporations hold sovereignty.
Corporations can only hold sovereignty in a single constellation.
Corporations own all upwell structures.
Limit the number of corporations in an alliance to (some number, probably not enough for an alliance to hold an entire region. 10?)
Reduce the number of characters in a given corporation to (some number… maybe 500? 1000?)
The effect of this is that power will be held at the corporation level, with alliance leaders having to keep system and structure owners (corp CEOs) happy, and coalitions will be very loose concepts. The distribution of power to corp level with the limit on how much a corp may hold will create the level of instability necessary to keep sovereignty and power structures more fluid.
Obviously a lot of thought would have to go into the economics and logistics needed by corporations to move things to and from NPC space. Creating some NPC system corridors might work.
And a thousand other things that would have to go along with a fundamental shift such as this. And this may be too radical. Maybe more sane limits, or just shifting power to the corporation CEOs would be sufficient. I don’t know.
But I don’t see another way to keep Eve from stagnating into big blue blobs of carebears and ti-di, where one big blue blob has to declare a war against another huge blue blob to try to keep things from going that way.
I’m not an alliance leader, and I have no real power.
This isn’t going to have a major impact on how alliances will run. What will happen is small corporations will die off and be replaced with Horde style mega-corps. Even limiting the number of characters wont matter because of alts. The people in charge will still be in charge. One of the benefits of the alliance structure is that it allows small corps to exist. Coalitions, which are entirely out of game, will negate reducing the number of corps. In the end, there is no realistic way to limit social interaction.
The issue isn’t who controls sov, it’s that there are no good reasons to take sov, the taking of sov is a pain in the ass, and so it’s easier and more profitable to sign diplo agreements and not fight.
Now, we’re sitting on the edge of what appears to be a major war, so all this may be flying out the window, but I don’t think these changes would do what you want them to do. They’d simply become a small obstacle that would easily be overcome. As for the big blob tidi fests - you’re never going to get around those.
The blue donut exists because the sovereignty game is no fun, interminably slow, boring as all ■■■■, and by far the best choice is always to just avoid dealing with it.
So people just make more alliances? I’m not sure what your idea does.
Nullsec Alliance 1 has 10 corps that hold 10 constellations.
Nullsec Alliance 2 has 10 corps that hold 10 constellations.
Nullsec Alliance 1 and 2 set each to other blue and hold 20 constellations.
All alliances are owned by alts of the guy in charge.
Rinse and repeat as needed.
They all use the same internal forums, discord servers, mumble/teamspeak voice comms, etc.
The blue donut was an inevitable effect of fozzie sov. Without a major redesign (again), I really don’t see that changing in a meaningful way. Unless Eve 2.0 is in the works?
I suspect that CCP would love to come up with a way to Balkanize sovereign nullsec but, since most of the infrastructure that supports the coalitions is outside the game, you can’t prevent them.
If you want to change behavior, you need to change the incentives. Something like restricting sov bonuses to the capital constellation would discourage large alliances and complicate rental empires but it wouldn’t prevent them - it would take a lot more ALTS to run a coalition. Question is, would people invest the additional effort to maintain the status quo or would the blocs fragment? The only way to find out is to try it.
This really is the ticket. Until the cost to fight is less than the pain in the ass to do so, we will keep having a blue donut because the possibility is there. Recent changes just stack the cost higher, so the less than factor isn’t really coming. If you think about this game as an alternate simulation of life, every living thing wants the most comfortable life you can get. This is human nature. Eve in it’s purest dumbed down form is making your life as comfortable as you can possibly make it and still make isk. So we have the blue donut. Until CCP comes up with a way to make the donut cost more than taking not taking another piece of the pie, we’ll continue having the blue donut.