Or how about we just leave things alone, and let players figure out how they want to deal with each.
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Feel free to leave Horde if you donât enjoy the benefits of the blob.
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The problem is, that Ansiblex gates cut down asymmetrical warfare way harder than Filaments/WH/Thera allows or benefit asymmetrical warfare. Mainly because an Ansiblex Gate is targeted and if set up as network offers way too much targeted insta-travel. It is direct power projection. WHs or Filaments are all random and size/numbers-limited, yo never know where you land, what you can do there and how much defense you will find. You can only take so many ships with you, while you can always send a basically unlimited blob trough the Ansiblex Network.
Tbh, WHs were a good way to break up the bottleneck-camped 0.0 regions that were often completely safe if just a scout or camp was positioned at the entrance and warned everywone waaaaaay ahead of any incoming threat. Filaments were in my opinion not really needed but on the other hand, they are pretty limited in capacity and, as said, completely random in target location.
So yea, even if we would agree that WHs and Filaments hurt nullsec inhabitanta, the power projection level is way below Ansiblex gates.
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Yes, that is the point. The defenders - that is, the people who own the space and live in the space and have invested in infrastructure to upgrade the space - are able to determine the routes they find most useful and set up systems to allow themselves to move around.
WHs and filaments are random, but thatâs fine - if youâre a roaming gang, and youâre actually just out looking to find somebody, anybody, to fight, it doesnât matter where you end up as long as youâre not in the middle of a bunch of blues (a reason not to be part of a big group). Now, if youâre only hitting one group, thatâs different.
Ansiblexes cost money. They cost fuel. They can be destroyed and otherwise interdicted. They require an infrastructure team to maintain and they require defenses to secure.
Depends on the filament. Pochven filaments are much more targetable. But this has less to do with getting into a system than it does getting out. These are a guaranteed get out of jail free card. After 15 minutes of bouncing safes, small gangs have a 100% get-out-of-jail-free card. Even if you manage to bring extra bodies through an ansiblex and trap the roamers in somewhere, unless theyâre completely stupid, youâre not going to kill them.
There is no reason to mess with any of these systems - other than they one thing I have advocated (getting rid of ACLs and letting anybody who pays the fee use a gate), all of the suggested remedies, from removing ansiblexes to fatigue or polarization or whatever, have a worse impact on the game than what exists now.
I will try my best to as succinct as possible:
The anisblex gate has removed the existence of âbordersâ and âborder tensionâ sans a giant war.
Although I shall be using Goonspace in the following example, it applies to all the large blocs.
There was a time when the Goons had a border, the more distant a system was from the Delve staging location, the less security existed in that system, the more able a small gang was to inflict damage on that border.
Eventually the roamers would whelp their fleet in a pipe so they could go to bed by traveling further into Delve.
Nowadays the roamers involuntarily whelp their fleets upon first contact with the enemy border if they travel the old fashioned way (without a filament), because the Defense fleet had already taken a handful of anis from Deep Delve to the border of Fountain/Outer Ring (J5A-) when they were spotted coming through Cloud Ring/Syndicate.
In the old days there was always a hefty gate camp in J5A to prevent small fleets of 1 to 10 pilots from coming through, but not enough to stop a 25-40 man cruiser roam.
Today, you can still pass J5A with a 40 man roam, but your fleet wonât get any further than APM before being met by 100+ ships that virtually teleported from Delve staging.
You will get surrounded. You will die. You wonât get any killmails either. Itâs not a guess, its a guarantee. Because borders no longer matter. Security is uniform across all of Fountain and Delve, regardless of systemâs location from Delve staging.
The same is true in Panfam space and Frat space, etc. Hence, no one roams. No one finds suicide enjoyable.
In order to get some PvP, players now minimize the number of pilots in their fleets to reduce loss of cohesion before going on a âfilament roam,â taking only specialized hulls and real life skill with them.
Thus kitchen sink roams have become legends of the past. You will never fill a fleet for it. No one will join, even with free ship handouts.
2008 called. theyâd like their whine thread back plz ⌠
Come on dude.
Maybe when thereâs nothing else going on, but when the entirety of the Imperium is deployed, you arenât going to see the scenarios you are talking about.
These happen all the times with the big groups.
Well, I think we are on too far away ends of the stick to come to an agreement here. In my book alliances already control way too much space with their power projection and the bottleneck-safety of null regions before WHs/Filaments was just a very bad situation, so these changes brought the game more to a desirable state. The power of Ansiblex Gates however is on a complete different scale for instant and targeted deployment and is in my opinion not even comparable. Also the âcostsâ are completely irrelevant given the current financial situation of the game. Some things are just too powerful (aka balance breaking) and shouldnât simply be in the game, period. Ansiblex Gates are one of these things in my opinion.
Large distances were once a natural barrier, limiting power projection of the blob because even if you had a huge numerical superiority, you couldnât defend every corner of a huge empire at once - travel times made that impossible. So you had to decide: Either control less space but have it more secure, or split your forces and giving up a part of your numerical superiority or let agressors have minor victories at your outskirts if you came to the conclusion defending that attack was not worth the effort. But these days you donât have to do these decisions any more, you can react with double the numbers and a perfect countersetup from your staging system within minutes. And again with the same guys half an hour later at the other end of your empire. And thats just nonsense and its incredibly bad for the game as a whole.
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I found the reddit thread that links my original post with the anisblex.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/wrqn65/hey_ccp_we_dont_like_ansiblex_gameplay/
This imbalance over a prolonged period of time leads to a further centralisation. It is no coincidence that Goonswarm, Pandemic Horde and Fraternity are accumulating their highest member counts, while many feel like New Eden is emptier than it has been in a long time.
This centralisation can be felt on the microcosmus - when a small group enters an ESS that was supposed to lead to a local response but is then answered by a large fleet from the staging system that uses the Ansiblex network.
This centralisation can be felt when bringing a sizable fleet into hostile space. When a fleet appears on a local Intel channel the response time to the incursion into their space is reduced. This leads to less of a time margin to play with. With the current fast responses, one needs to be prepared to face the whole staging. The only way to face such a staging response with reasonable risk to reward is by adding numbers to your side. This leads to a centralisation spiral to get to competitive number counts.
ya well âŚ
null sec didnât like jump fatigue that limited this instant travel , and made fleets prioritize large ops over a small roaming gang .
they didnât like nulliceptors , either .
and fighters being jammed .
seeing a trend here , but theyâre the ones keeping the lights on so âŚ
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Theyâre the ones keeping the lights on because of the successive changes made over the past decade, that drove away others that would have also kept the lights on.
In restrospect, after reviewing the arguments on reddit concerning Ansi power projection and my friends that started the conversation over it, there is actually nothing wrong with the ESS or its timerâŚit is indeed the ansi gates.
I had viewed it through the lens of my microcosm of ESS robbing, and didnât see the ugly monster behind it.
Funny, because I have alt eyes on the key ansis when I rob the banks, but it never occurred to me that the ansi itself was the problem instead of the ESS timer.
But the more I thought it about, the more I realized it was was true.
I have alt eyes on the ansis.
I do not have alt eyes anywhere elseâŚbecause anywhere else is irrelevant for both the attackers and defenders.
I never steal an ESS in an Ansi system.
I think I won eve.
I think thats the biggest misunderstanding ever. The power accumulation on a few central entities only appears to keep the activity up, but you can never see all the activity their existance and ability to project their power prevents. In my opinion the big blocs are not the ones keeping the lights on, but the ones who keeping the lights dim.
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Not incredibly relevant, but please call those gates âansiâ if you want to shorten the name.
Theâre called Ansiblex jump gates, Ansiblex, or âansiâ for short. Not Anisblex or ani.
Correct. I am never going to support nerfing ansiblexes to the detriment of tens of thousands of players because 15 small gangers donât like them.
Thats a true politician 
, never leaving without a last bold statement putting the own position into the best light possible. ^^
However, most people I hear arguing against too much power projection are not emotionally disliking these mechanics, they see them rationally as balance breaking and thus hurtful for the game as an interesting product for many players. And I am not convinced that your comparison of âtens of thousandsâ vs â15â does fit here. I am rather convinced that all these mechanics make more interesting gameplay disappear than they provide, thus making the game less fun overall, directly resulting in players leaving and never coming back.
I too enjoy the benefit of ansiblexes, how they make travelling through space faster and safer for me, but also see the possible downsides of ansiblexes, as have been mentioned above.
While itâs understandable you would lose popularity amongst the âtens of thousands of playersâ that are other players of null sec blocs, Iâm a bit disappointed to see that you arenât willing to discuss any nerfs to ansiblexes to increase the health of the game.
Null sec alliances also benefit from a supported existence of small gang roamers; small gangs make the game more fun and exciting, more alive because they add content, even though it means more danger for people krabbing in space.
If thatâs all youâre hearing, youâre not listening to anybody who disagrees with you. I can guarantee you that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of actual people in your alliance who do not want to see Ansiblexes nerfed. They like having the ability to move around the space they control with less tedium. They like being part of a big group that provides that kind of infrastructure. And they like fighting the other groups that have these gates and using them to provoke fights.
âMore interestingâ gameplay is entirely subjective. Frankly, I would rather not change something that will negatively impact thousands to provide âmore interesting gameplayâ for a couple dozen.
And thatâs why Iâm going to fight as hard as I can to stop these idiotic nerfs before they happen. Every time CCP has nerfed something players like to cater to the small gangers, it has cost them big time. They need to stop listening to bad advice.
I donât care about popularity. I am not willing to discuss things that are bad for the overall health of the game. Nerfing ansiblexes will not make the game more healthy. It will simply ratchet up the tedium. Nobody needs that these days. Thereâs enough of that in this game already.
Thatâs why you donât see me advocating for things to nerf small gangers. I like having them around. I wish there were more of them. But I know full well that nerfing ansiblexes isnât suddenly going to create ten thousand small gang pilots. I donât know why anybody would think it would.
Well, that goes both ways I suppose. There are interesting articles about the topic âWhy the majority is almost always wrongâ and that applies to so many fields, from actual politics to everyday decision making. EVE is a game about decision making and in order to have a working environment you canât base design decisions on âwhat the majority wantsâ, mostly because everyone is biased towards his own benefits and experiences.
You can of course do that, but then you create a boring and dull environment where people get used to all their benefits and the fun is getting thinner and thinner until no one even knows what he is missing. If you sacrifice balance for convenience, you ruin the game.
But you do. Ansiblex Gates makes it incredibly easy to respond to any roaming gang or assault with a perfect countersetup and 3x the numbers from the alliances staging ground within minutes. And even trap them by shortcutting any available exit routes. You complained about âfree-out-of-jail-filamentsâ but you basically force them to do that because first you blob them with far superior numbers, then you donât even pursuit any more, no matter where the roamers want to leave, you simply jump in front of them again via Ansiblex, bubble and camp the gate and then blame them for filamenting out? Saw that on several streams in the last weeks, itâs simply lame and boring.
Ansixblex gates also completely remove the need for any local inhabitants to even care or fight for their space, thats all done by teleporting power projection. By that enabling alliances to remote-controlling A LOT more space than they should be able to, denying that space to everyone else but their alt-farmers.
Limit short-term fleet deployment capabilities and distance is a means of defense again, allowing smaller (note: not tiny or very small) entities to actually live and thrive in space that would simply not worth protecting/invading/harassing for big groups because it would take too long to actually bring big fleets to there for too few possible benefits. Thats the CORE of the argument, it should take LONG to bring reinforcements to remote corners, so local conflicts can arise without the risk of the blob appearing and ending all fun by bringing the hammer of the staging fleet. And if you really for whatever reason want to get there fast, use fast ships like skirmish cruisers/HACs or AssaultFrigs travelling manually, itâs not like doing 20 jumps in these would be unreasonable. And maybe it would even some kind of challenge to attack a fleet of 30 bigger ships with it. But well, who wants a challenge these days if he can have quick blobbing victoryâŚ
And if itâs 50 Jumps, you simply should not be able to interfere there quick time, simple as that.
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No, it doesnât. I hear from the small gang whiners constantly.
In a game where people can walk if they arenât having fun, not catering to the majority is the quickest way to kill the game. This isnât a question of âwhat is correct,â itâs a question of what do the most people find the most interesting. If you have to take away something that thousands enjoy to make the game more interesting for two dozen, that is the quickest way to kill the game.
Nobody wants to play a game where it takes hours and hours of prep time for fifteen seconds of enjoyment. Thatâs too much like marriage.
Ansiblexes are the status quo. Me rejecting most (Iâve given what I think is the best solution) small-gang fixes isnât me nerfing small gangers. Iâm simply saying the game as it stands now is better with them than without them.
Itâs not lame and boring for the hunters, let me tell you. Catching one of these âelite PvPâ kids in their 200+ killmark ship and finally killing it because they â â â â â â up is quite satisfying.
Somedays you find content, somedays you are somebody elseâs content. Unless, of course, youâre an elite small gang PvPer - if youâre one of those, youâre never supposed to lose a ship, never get trapped, and if you do actually die itâs just because you didnât feel like staying up any later.
This has to be fought in the game, not by CCP. Thereâs a war right now that has a renting component to it. Honestly, though, this is a crocodile tears argument - you arenât interested in holding sov, are you?
So you want to remove jump clones too?