Been dealing with responding to thefts and also doing them - so far noticed that in some cases the response time is a bit slow unless you’ve got a fleet on standby and basically using up characters and starving gameplay if nothing happens. Probably somebody has suggested this already or something similar.
My suggestion would be for ESS / Skyhook theft mechanics that the time would vary upon value. So i.e. if the value of contents is low the timer would be on the short end while the value of it being high would increase the time to respond. Also the radius of the alert of a event going on could increase with the ammount of content being stolen.
This would keep the possibility to steal the resources and force PvP encounters but also increase the risk for stealing as most gangs might filament in/take wormhole and can pre-setup on the ESS/Skyhook grid with bubbles etc. greatly reducing their risk as after the theft they’ll just bounce around and then filament out.
This would also encourage people to let the items/bounty accumulate in Skyhooks → Giving out a larger payout for theft → Giving more incentive to steal the resources for others and also reducing the incentive to selfsteal when it’s optimal.
That’s just straw manning the argument but it’s understandable
At the moment, Skyhooks and ESS function more like a doorbell and in most cases is used as such. Gangs filamenting in or coming via wormhole would willing to fight the few players in their ships not fit to fight other players but the moment there is a ship or gang in equivalent force or advantage all the gang does is bounces around system for 15 minutes then filaments out.
This does sum up EVE PvP well as “Elite PvPers” who are willing to engage ships not fit to fight back like mining barges, industrial cynoships or ratting ships with overwhelming odds hiding under “intended system of punishment.” – etc. while missing the point of door swings both ways. As most people should also understand that engaging a 5-10-20 man gang in a wrong shiptype would also be “risk free engagement”.
So instead of straw manning and missing the point especially with skyhooks etc. it takes time to form and move a equivalent gang or larger to have a chance fighting back and having it risk free for the aggressor. This is mainly to increase the incentive tot let Skyhooks spool up for longer instead of stealing them yourself “incase somebody wants to steal it” and also make ESS i.e. it doesn’t automatically pay up instead you could in example pay it out after the current 2h 45 minutes or let it grow even longer. The faster the payout rate would increase the amount Reserve bank – while having it accumulate more ISK over 4-5-10h would also increase the amount being paid out to i.e ESS theft.
And we all know the 3-5 man gangs dingdong ditching a ESS or Skyhook do practically always run away when they get outnumbered when they get outnumbered in equivalent odds 1:3-5 but thats pretty much the norm in EVE and I’d also do it when outnumbered so don’t blame anybody there either.
I agree with Syzygium: an increase of loot value should not make it easier to defend the loot.
Comparing these thieving opportunities to ‘doorbells’ just because some groups use them as doorbells as a basis for your argument to reduce the thieving opportunities looks a bit selfish to me, or at least tunnel vision.
The purpose of Skyhooks and ESS is to encourage roaming of space and therefore conflict opportunities by giving these fleets access to thieving opportunities in case defenders do not show up. This in turn creates opportunities to earn value by defending (instead of docking up and waiting for the hostiles to pass), which creates PvP content.
There is a delicate balance between roaming opportunities and defense options.
Your thread is basically this:
“As a defender I say: buff defending and nerf roaming”.
My response: why should defenders get such buffs?
If not enough defenders are in range of a skyhook, couldn’t that be solved by better communication?
And if you don’t have enough defenders spread across your space to defend (or even notice) skyhook raids, wouldn’t that be a sign that perhaps your group has overextended too much and has taken more space than you have active players?
I am not conviced Skyhooks are the issue here.
I do agree that the incentive to selfsteal should be minimised.
Back to straw manning the point or maybe I’ve simply explained it in a way the whole message doesn’t come out in the proper way.
Wouldn’t shortening the time be a nerf to defending it?
While increasing the pool to be stolen also be an incentive to steal resource? Majority of ESS what have been attempted or stolen are pitiful value wise 10-100m or less and personally not even worth the effort to go there. So that’s just a doorbell to dingdong ditch and then just run away back to a wormhole or bounce around and filament away after their aggression drops.
Most Skyhooks are self-robbed incase somebody robs them and due them being spread out - and the ones which do get robbed by others are so spread out there’s barely anything to steal and in most cases it’s almost like the philosophical question “Does a tree make a sound when it falls over when there’s nobody to hear it?”
So wouldn’t it be an incentive to let things pool up for longer times increasing the payout for theft and increase the risk of theft but also as the risk loss grows for the defender. Like manually postponing an ESS payout and increasing the pot inside while if the payout is what it is now would be the same or even shorter if the value is low?
Why shouldn’t the aggressor also have an increased risk? As it seems most “thefts” are there to “increase PvP” I fail to see how “ding dong ditching” and filamenting out is considered PvP.
Whole point still stands – there’s no incentive to let any value accumulate as its self-robbed/paid out at optimal times just because it might get robbed in the windows there’s nobody present to notice it.
So increasing the area of alert / time to respond would also encourage the amount of stuff to accumulate and increase an incentive to steal/contest with even larger fleets and also incentivize to respond with larger fleets. As the whole point force engagements instead of being a doorbell to dingdong ditch. As there’s no point of dingdong ditching a empty house and claiming its incentive for “PvP” or “not worthy of owning sov” as nobody owns sov they occupy it until something pushes them out.
You have to remember there’s two sides to the coin.
I just don’t think that ‘easier defence at high value’ is the right way to go.
Perhaps harsher penalties for self-robbing would decentivise such strategies?
Or adjust the rate at which you gain value to not be linear but faster while risking more, so defending it the last few days pay significantly more than the first days?
That would make people choose defense instead of self-stealing.
So there is no “problem” at all? Because you know about all the ESS mechanics and since you live in that system, you could pre-fit an ESS-defense doctrine, ready to use at a station in the system. The moment such a gang (and lets be honest, thats usually 3-10 ships, not 25) enters your system, your pilots in the system go dock, board these defense-doctrine-ships and warp to the ESS, pushing the linked ship off the beacon. 6 Minutes are plenty of time to do that.
Your real problem is that all of your guys go docking or warp under a forcefield and then just do nothing but pinging the staging fleet. And that often means they don’t care to come for a lousy 100 million or come too late because they need to make some jumps. But YOU could have pushed back like 90% of all ESS raid attempts with just 3-5 ships easily. Instead of learning how to do that, you now want mechanics that basically increase your chances of blobbing the attackers by just doing more ratting. I don’t believe you for a second that you want more “nice PvP”, because I have done some ESS raids in the past myself and the locals never wanted an even or somewhat equal fight. In 100% (ZERO exceptions) they waited until they could blob us at least 3:1 in numbers with a called in fleet, if they couldn’t they simply did nothing. And your idea just pushes this forward. You want the attacker to need more time to be successful, so you can mobilize the blob more easy.
Teach your guys how to cooperate instead of each one running their own site, instantly running if anything happens. Have them form a fleet to rat and have a pre-fitted defense doctrine ready. 5 heavy tank ships with RR are more than enough to push back more than 90% of all raiding attempts because those are usually done in small groups utilizing low-dps 100MN cruiserfits, counting on the fact that they local’s won’t form an initial response, but still fast enough to dodge an incoming fleet by just burning out of the ESS zone quickly and warp away. Your behaviour is responsible that people are raiding your ESS’ the way they do. Stop blobbing 3:1 every time before you do anything but jump on them with 5 ships and a good plan and you will see 2 things happen: a) you will have a lot success in stopping raids, b) your members get some mindset of fighting for your homespace and be proud of the success they have c) having some nice smallscale training content.
If yo don’t want all that, live with the loss. Be glad that CCP still is so nice to crabbers, if it was up to me, NPCs in 0.0 wouldn’t give any bounty but only lootable tokens, like in WH space or Abyss. You would have to fight over your MTUs and your loot or lose 100% of it anytime someone comes to challenge you. Be damn thankful that you get paid automatically without needing to secure loot, transport it to HS and selling it, all under the risk of losing all your money long after running the sites by some trap or gank.
edit: I am explicitly not refering to Skyhooks as this mechanic is pretty new and will surely get tweaked over the next weeks or months. I agree that self-robbing should be made unlucrative tho, but surely not by making defense easier the more value is in it. Dropping such a thing is a strategical decision, if you have spread your forces too thin by claiming too much space that is not really defendable, any group should think about concentrating their forces (and skyhooks) in a lot smaller region to have a better response time. Groups claming too much space, often a lot more than they can fill with active people, is a real problem in EVE. And the only reason they can do is because all that space is so easily accessible for their blob, so no one else could actually try to settle there, he would be burnt out instantly. CCP seems to have realized this problem, thus why I have read several times in the last few devblogs that they want to adress the concept of “power projection”, rightly so. Hopefully the ability of large fleets to conveniently and quickly travel large disctances gets nerfed a lot and claimed (controllable) space of all the big groups shrink by at least 50% (hopefully more).
I do multibox like many others due necessity in EVE as one ship as obviously I’d be unable to deal with a semi organized gang out numbered 1:5 regardless of if it’s on a gate or in an ESS or etc. Same goes for others as they rarely want to engage my setup me overwhelming them in 5:1 ratio. I’m personally at the point that I don’t really need to farm to make money in EVE so it’s not MY problem. And there is no need to go all-out on a personal extremist offensive if something doesn’t appeal to you. Simply a suggestion trying to accommodate both sides, where you can be mature and disagree, agree or build upon instead of taking it as a personal offense
If you’ve ever raided an ESS or Skyhook you know what kind of kitchen sinks are thrown and it’s great content. I’d personally want more chance to join and participate in other systems as well as quite a few gangs also do the same.
My main point is more directed towards Skyhooks so it’s my fault as haven’t got the message through, while also suggesting increasing the pots in ESS with the changes to sov mechanics. They’re also changing i.e. the amount of anciblex and cyno beacons available and you can not simply be everywhere at every point of time. I recommend greatly increasing the incentive to let Skyhook/ESS resources grow to a larger content also forcing larger fights, but you also have to provide a incentive to do so for both parties. As right now it’s optimized to the point that alliances just self-steal the Skyhooks and ignore lower paid ESS. So, they mainly function like a doorbell.
In general gangs who use these doorbells – don’t really gain resources and if the response time must be within 5 minutes. Eventually when the sov changes fit in you’d have to have a fleet on standby which cant be everywhere so it will come to the point smaller gangs get blobbed even harder by full-scale fleets.
And blobbing/ganging up in a ratio 1:5 is just a multiple of a similar ratio as 5:25 or 10:50 – and like I’ve stated. Nobody wants to fight an uphill battle and quite a few flee from an equal battle as well. So forcing a faster response time won’t shrink your response fleets, it will do the opposite of having proper doctrines to fight off gangs especially at a Skyhook.
Dropping such a thing is a strategical decision, if you have spread your forces too thin by claiming too much space that is not really defendable, any group should think about concentrating their forces (and skyhooks) in a lot smaller region to have a better response time. Groups claming too much space, often a lot more than they can fill with active people, is a real problem in EVE. And the only reason they can do is because all that space is so easily accessible for their blob, so no one else could actually try to settle there, he would be burnt out instantly. CCP seems to have realized this problem, thus why I have read several times in the last few devblogs that they want to adress the concept of “power projection”, rightly so. Hopefully the ability of large fleets to conveniently and quickly travel large disctances gets nerfed a lot and claimed (controllable) space of all the big groups shrink by at least 50% (hopefully more).