System Wide Resource Spoilage

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

alright so while typing up the mobile mooring station idea i had this one.

this one is a small rehash of the triglavian invasion stuff we saw before and the new crystals we have in game.

Crystal Type C allows for spoilage to occour this way you can remove an alliance’s resources. well as much as I like this idea, I think we should look at a concept which applies to system wide effects, this would radically scale up the seriousness of Resource Spoilage

following the example of the triglavians and the whole “stealing entire solar systems” thing.

what I propose is an deployable which can be placed at the sun, this would need to be defended of course as it would fire a beam into the sun, which does some new eden science fiction weather effect which then slowly begins chewing away at the available resources.

this idea is mainly in mind for sov null warfare, but I figured it could be interesting to see people use this in WH’s too however I think that is simply a bit much.

between the crystals and system wide spoilage I think there could be something spicy to the idea.

thoughts anyone?

2

I like the way you think. Unfortunately, I’m thinking the nullbears might not be too thrilled with the idea (especially on the back end of scarcity).

3

I Agree that nullbears won’t be too thrilled, however in my humble opinion the rarer the materials should = more conflict.

high sec is safe, you could probably get some trit easily and everone needs it.
in null, if you want shiney space rock, you need to fight for it.

having an enemy FC land a system wide spoiler would be feel like a good old fashioned kick in the family jewels thats for sure.

would make for some great re-occouring clean fights without huge Tidi, with good measurable consequences.

4

What is the purpose of this idea?

Is it to add an objective for conflict? Because as I see it null sec has more than enough conflict objectives already in many forms for short roaming fleets in the form of ESS, strategic conflicts in the form of taking down ansiblexes to cripple enemy movement, setting timers on enemy structures to force them to follow up or strategic conflict objectives when taking space in the form of Sov warfare.

I do not see why another form of conflict needs to be added, rather than spending that time tweaking and improving one of the existing objectives.

Next, you want to introduce ‘resource spoilage’ as a new strategy. While such a thing already exists!

If you wish to take down enemy moon resources or enemy belts, why not bring a mining fleet over and mine their resources? Bring a defence fleet as well to cover them and you’ve got a lot of fun opportunities for conflict for many playstyles. Miners, fighters, haulers, they’ll all be necessary!

Instead, you want some deployable that replaces all those interactions with yet another static objective to fight over, something we already have in many forms?

I don’t think it’s a good idea.

5

We could use this argument for all sorts of things. Why add new ships to the game when we already have ships? Why add new features to the game when we already have features? Why add new players to the game when we already have players?

Eve is at it’s best when there are a variety of options to choose from in terms of conflict.

That said, the specific idea in question seems too artificial to really make it feel like it properly fits. If there are enemies around, pve players wont be doing pve. And once the enemies leave, the mobile device could easily be destroyed, so it wont really have much of an impact other than just to annoy the locals.

If you want deployables for conflict escalation. I suggest something like a zerg beacon, where you can cyno in friendly npcs to accomplish an objective (CCP suggested this type of thing might be possible with the fw iterations) or the ability to deploy a Dimond Rat fob which will start harvesting the 'roids in the system.

1 Like
6

I agree it’s good to have a variety of options.

But adding more options just for the sake of more options doesn’t seem useful to me. Adding more ships for the sake of having more ships leads to situations where you can have many ships doing the exact same thing that CCP now has to balance.

A few years in:
‘But CCP, we already have 12 interdictors by now and it would make more sense to do something about the Marauders that have been dominating fights everywhere for the last few years!’
‘No, we’re going to make even more interdictors, because someone said more variety is better’

Of course, more adding more variety can be a good development direction, especially when it’s done for a part of the game that is lacking such variety. And is done with a good idea of the purpose where the new feature should fit in.

For example, if sov null sec is lacking objectives to fight over and needs another tool to get people to undock and fight for their space, such a system-wide resource-spoilage structure might be a good objective to fight over.

However, sov null sec already has many objectives to fight over from ansiblex jump gates to shoot with a small gang to encourage fights or strategically impair enemies, IHUBs to take space, shooting structures to take down enemy ability to defend certain gates or shooting enemy staging structures, there’s many objectives already.

And for the sake of making people who live in that space undock to defend their ability to make ISK in that space, CCP already had introduced a feature: ESS. A feature that has many flaws and could really use development time for iteration instead of wasting that development time to add yet another thing that does essentially the same thing but worse.

7

for me its not so much a case of “there are a lack of objective” its more a case of what those objectives are.

EVE is meant to have on some level, somewhere in the universe some kind of war going on, between player run alliances or between npc factions, everyone is at some point going to be at war with each other.

information, technology, resources, assets, politics.

these are things which wars have been fought over before.
destroying assets is suppose to hinder the enemy war effort, while capturing is suppose to benefit yours.

yes we have resource spoilage. however if a small group is trying to hinder a larger group, they’ll be simply out gunned.

the way it works right now in my mind is a small group of say 6 people run into a shop and start smashing things up.

shop keeper is part of an alliance of shop keepers who send 100 thugs to beat up the inital 6 and they all have better clothes, weapons and vehicles to out run you with.

assuming a smaller group is going to use such an effect would you rather go one rock at a time or show you’re an effective combat unit by taking down a whole systems worth of resources at once.

to prevent this being used against smaller players or alliances you could disallow such a device if you have sovereignty. this would mean if you’re ever in a pinch you could make a shady back room deal with some low sec bandits to come along and trash your enemy resources.

part of EVE is not just about how hard you can hit or even take a hit, but also more about how you fight. this is mainly shown in fleet compositions however someone with a lot of buddies could call in some favours and hit a large group pretty hard in a well co-ordinated attack.

making a possible profitable area for an alliance potentially take a loss, even for a short time.

if you had to break 100 glasses on a table would you pick them up one by one and drop them, taking more time OR would you tilt the table and destroy it all at once.

8

So, the idea is that this is used by small groups against bigger groups, but not the other way around.

And to prevent it from being used by bigger groups against smaller groups, you want to ‘disallow use in systems in which you have sovereignty’?

I don’t really see how that’s going to work. Why would a big group not have sovereignty? And what would stop people from using it against small groups that aren’t even big enough to hold sovereignty?

9

you misunderstand, i should of been clearer.

what i mean is for groups who have sovereignty their pilots cannot use it.

sometimes people don’t want to go that far, maybe they’re just not at a point where they’re ready to take on that level of risk / responsibility.

well in my mind i’m thinking specifically of lowsec groups, so you could disallow it in empire space.

to clarify i’m thinking and talking about warfare between the demographic playstyles of lowsec → nullsec and vica versa.

considering that in the game there is meant to be an idea of not only trading between systems for resources such as veldspar, kernite, omber, etc but making sense that people become more diplomatic with each other as some groups would then be more capable than others.

in terms of the lore i would recommend writting that TCU’s disallow its placement from other sov entities.

this way the game becomes more along the lines of “i know a guy” or “i have an alt”

i’m not fond of the latter, but a trade doesn’t just have to be for goods, it can also be services.

goods for goods
goods for services
services for goods
services for services.

it depends on what you have to offer, so if lowsec had something it could offer players in both nullsec & high sec by hitting big sov alliances in big ways, it then gives a bit more credit to small gangs or small corporations.

this way its not just a mechanical aspect like how rooks and kings used to battle, I forget the specific quote from the vidoe but its something like this “providing our ships repair rate was higher than the damage taken, we would ultimately win the battle”

small groups hitting bigger targets in the real world do hit critical resources and infrastructure, guerrilla warfare is a prime example of maximising damage while suffering minimal losses and can be use to ultimately shift the war effort massively.

its hard to keep up the demand of your supply chains up when someone keeps making your systems loose resources.

a small alliance getting raided by a larger group could easily recruit some pirates to lay a few of these down in enemy systems, give them a nice pay off, etc.

but at this point in the game should people be interested in that, it will be more more player vs player and politically driven. unless you’ll fight anyone anywhere for danke isk.

10

So, let’s say something like this is implemented.

And timezones exist.

So every day when the majority of your neighbours are asleep, you destroy all their ores and other resources with this deployable.

What’s your idea of counterplay?

At least when you want to do it with your own mining fleets using type C crystals you have to risk your own ships in space for a certain amount of time during which any roaming groups can come by and engage your miners. But if you’re using these deployables in a fleet of combat ships to target an entire enemy system, nobody else but those enemies will really care about you destroying those resources.
Since you’re in a combat fleet defending the deployable, random roaming groups probably won’t engage you for fun either, unlike if you were flying those mining ships to do the same thing.

I see less options for counterplay and less people in space spending less time to accomplish the same thing, which is to destroy enemy resources.

How is that an improvement for the game?

11

well to start with the idea isn’t to just deploy and have it instantly destroy all resources in a system.

I don’t see why it couldn’t be progressive meaning people could scurry and mine out the system before the slow burning candle whittles down the systems resources.

in terms of counter play, honestly i hadn’t considered that, however I’ve come up with something which i think is unique and interesting. please see below

considering it’ll take a team effort to put it in place, perhaps a team work counter play using the exisiting hacking mini-games.

the resource spoiler can run for a week, has no vulnerability timer, HOWEVER.
a group hacking effort will give you a piece of a code (so everyone working together gets the full code)
so once everyone has the pieces of the code, they can have a number of attempts, say for example 10 attempts in 15 minutes (failure of all 10 attempts locks out all capsuleers for 1 hour before being allowed to try again)

if you input the right code it creates an immediate vulnerability window for say… 2 hours, this way if you’re just one guy who decided to have a crack at it, guess it right but you didn’t write the code down, you could then ping FC’s to do a CTA to come and poke it.

circling back to this concept. i should specify that because its a concept its liable to change, i did think a big solar bomb would be cool but it doesn’t stand well for you to just nuke all resources and rinse and repeat, regardless of how fun space nukes could be.

with the idea of it degrading over the time, over hours, days, etc, it will act like a deep cut on skin, the longer you leave it, the more infected and nasty it gets. however, you treat it right and it’ll clear itself up and go away.

i think some form of code breaking would be fun, especially if you get the numbers after successful hacking, it loweres the number of possible combinations down. but honestly this is what i came up with on the fly.

however I see it as an improvement on the game because it brings people together to solve a common problem which directly effects them as well as the cause and leadership which they fight for, it gets people talking and interacting with each other and is a factor in the spirit of team work.

the code breaking is just an example i’m sure there are other forms of such a thing to achieve the same end result.

for clarification on some level it would mean less people in space to acomplish a goal, but thats the point, as you’re not considering the social stress of the situation, its well known that some players will intentionally go out of there way to agitate players and cause them to quit the game, because “they’re playing a different game” large groups like alliances will suffer a low amount of social stress which accumilates untill it caps out at loss of resources and someone deals with this situation (which then means happy industrial times as you gotta work to get the ADMs back up. which means content and profit.)

a large sov based alliance could endure this as they’ll likely have more than 1 system, some players will hate this while others will relish the challenge presented in front of them which also makes a solid contribution to the greater good.

because I was winging this, I am curious what you would propose as a counter play

12

My solution to deal with the lack of counterplay is not to add counterplay, but to rethink the purpose of this deployable and rethink if the game gets better by adding it.

As I see it, it’s lacking a purpose because you can already take down enemy resources. With already existing mining ships. Which creates content for a lot of players and already has counterplay.

13

well thats just the thing you can’t efficently do such a thing, if someone sees you’re in their system soiling their resources they’ll call a response fleet, how much of the resources is your fleet of miners going to get through before HAC’s come crashing down and send your ships to oblivion, how is a mining fleet suppose to stand up to a response fleet without having addition fleet support?

so you’ll actually in reality only be moving high value assets into enemy territory just to be blown up, the amount of resources you’ll remove will be substancially less than what you lost, meaning the op isn’t worth it.
it makes more sense to have something work away at it slowly over time and pass the ball into their hands saying “tag, now you deal with it”
like in the adam sandler movie billy madison where he and his friends leave a flaming bag of dog turd on someones porch, the guy stomps it out and still has to deal with the end results.

14

Like I said, people aren’t going to be able to call a response fleet when you’re doing it when they are asleep.

Timezones, you know?

Other roaming groups who are active might be interested in fighting you, but they’re not going to bother ‘defending’ space that isn’t theirs. So if your fleet isn’t engage-able, they just won’t bother.

A mining fleet is very engage-able, a group of combat ships on a deployable somewhere in system much less so.

Next, you do not need to move high value assets into enemy territory to mine their ores. Barges and frigates aren’t all that expensive. And if you have a few cloaked combat ships next to the mining fleet you can have a lot of fun baiting their response fleet.

Anyway, I’d much rather see CCP encourage more offensive mining fleets than to see them replace that with some deployable that destroys resources.

15

why not have both and the deployable acts as an aid to the mining fleet?

16

Maybe have the deployable act to boost all residue mined?

Not on it’s own, to help miners offensively mining.

17

actually, that makes more sense, this way when a fleet enters an enemy system, someone can go off and drop the system spoiler, this will change the amount / provide a bonus to resources spoiled within said system, this way the miners can get to work salting the earth.

response fleets then have a choice of going after the miners, the deployable or the i assume to be present combat fleet.

1 Like
18

This will get people to actually undock :smiley:

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