The rationale for most changes to eve these days is a simple: “more destruction”. I’ll speak out loud and say more clearly what is actually wanted:
Someone mining, someone killing that mining ship for their own profit, the mining ship joins a fleet of mining ships for more security, someone awoxes them with a fleet, the mining fleet hires a merc alliance to protect it, now they mine peacefully (until the merc alliance awoxes the fleet and gain a bad reputation).
The problem here, is that
- Miners are not aware of these options they can do, and neither are they inclined to spend so much effort in the game.
- Pirates only roam for fun, meaning there is a lot less pirates there. Most miners survive by being lucky, and even those are rare (most people mine near jita lol)
- Mining isn’t profitable enough to rationalize a merc fleet. (and if you buff it there would be too many minerals and the fight doesn’t really matter *already replaced)
- This will end up with economies of scale (bigger merc fleets are more trustable and lose less ships) and bigger merc fleets which eventually end up in truce for profitability.
- People don’t trust merc fleets (they are so hungry for content they would POUNCE) and don’t trust new miners who want to join their fleet (also for good reason).
1 is happening in highsec, 2 and 5 are happening in all areas of space, 3 is happening in lowsec and non-sov null, and 4 is happening in sov null.
We need much better ways for information to be passed throughout the playerbase to solve 1 and 5.
We need smaller gangs (it is impossible to give someone 1 bil so my ship could be safely moved through Niarja gatecamp, because TEST is big) We need ways of strategy, of small gangs killing hordes of enemies with intel and strategy, or trustful cooperation between multiple small gangs to engage a bigger gang.
We need much more profitability from both mining and PVP. We can have higher drop rates and a heavy buff to mining (and allowing mining ships to drop huge amounts of isk that can be carried).
I understand that eve is a trustless world but we can’t have it be TRUSTLESS. The thing with eve now is that there is too little trust between all players. The only way to get someone to trust me is to join their corp or if they’re incursion fleets or NPSI (or one of us shot the other in PVP or something). (and the joining corp part is stupid because I can join corps with alts)
We need more trust for all kinds of warfare and transaction to happen.
My proposals:
Make a isk “stake” for a character. People could always get new characters for new merc fleets and scam more people, but with this stake they can’t do that so often.
Encourage participation on the forums, point players here for guidance/advice as well as reports on scamming merc fleets (with video evidence).
Heavily buff mining income, have a cloaky mineral carrying ship, and heavily decrease mineral size.
Incentivize (by whatever way) joint activities on group levels and singular levels (e.g. NPSI) in order to decrease number of blobs. (I suggest making “group” a decentralized ingame entity, which you can join multiple and doesn’t show on your board, and “group merge” mechanics.)
Maybe, have metaliminal storm areas have huge amounts of 7x->10x profitable ore for its duration. Nearly all roaming gangs would go over there.