How do you want to do that? It has been tried. The big blocs can always just form an agreement about how to split the resources and create an effective monopoly.
Okay maybe it wonât work in nullsec. I am not that knowledgeable about nullsec mechanics and politics. If nullsec players are willing to drop their identity and join bigger blocks then there is not much we can do, but even if it wonât help nullsec it would be step in right direction and would have an effect at least on lowsec and highsec players who are much less willing to stop their solo playstyle and join âbig blocksâ.
Maybe I need to rephrase:
- any attempt to force anyone to fight, can simply be circumvented by agreeing not to fight and cooperating for mutual profit
There is simply no way to force players to âfight over resourcesâ. Lets say, you create the new mineral âUnobtaniumâ and you need at least 1 Unobtanium for building any ship in the game. And to âmake people fightâ you place only 4 locations in the entire game where you can harvest it. And you need it, else you cannot produce ships any more.
So, what will happen? Instead of âfighting over itâ, the largest alliances leaders will simply meet up, discuss a bit about the long-term implications of that change and after that they create a Consortium Corporation, controlled by their Alts. It is agreed that no one of the big players attacks the harvesting operations of this Consortium Corp and that any outsiders who try will be beaten down. And voila, they have a monoloply. The profits of the consortium will be shared among the participants and thats it. The big blocs again control close to 100% of the resource and get even richter than they already are. And still nobody is fighting over anything.
It also doesnât help to âmake the universe smallerâ. You have a huge part of the population in the game that simply does not want to fight. They want to build up, create stuff, play with their friends and besides that, they largely want to be left alone. They still generate content for the PvPers because from time to time you can raid them and snatch a sloppy miner or ratter. But if you take away their little krabbing areas, they donât suddenly turn into fighters. They just quit the game.
An even smaller universe just worsens the problem of power projection, because one large group can even more effectively control larger parts of the space available.
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The problem with attempting to force players into doing anything is that Eve is not essential; itâs not a job. Itâs a game. Players (many of whom are like me paying a monthly fee to play the way we want) will simply choose not to log in rather than be dictated to in the manner youâre suggesting.
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I used wrong word. My suggestion doesnât force anyone to fight. But smaller universe means less opportunities to do stuff undisturbed, to play without any player interaction.
Either way, both you and @Syzygium counter argument is - players will quit. I say let them. If they are so weak willed to ragequit because there are less systems to farm in, then we donât need them. I actually donât think there are so many. I mean, nullsec players are supposed to be the elite players who are willing to fight for their space, arenât they? Lowsec players have no reason not to like trimming the available lowsec system a bit. The only wild card are highsec players as they are the most weak willed and prone to ragequitting. Lot of them ragequits over their first gank or at least they claim so. So if you take them their pocket systems where they farm Dens and Refuges they might ragequit indeed. But if they do⌠goodbye and good riddance.
Also, if I would trim the universe I would do it as a new game event. First I would identify which systems are the least important and thus subject to this cleanup - dead ends with no stations and not citadels. There are plenty of those and give the players opportunity to save those systems from being taken away if they really really want that.
How does the solution create a better environment then? How is a server with less players better than one with more players? I mean, you donât generate a single additional target by pushing players out of the game.
Nullsec never was about âelite playersâ. It always was about having a handful of good FCs, a very small elite of hardcore orga-players that run the corps/alliances and a large number of more or less expendable F1 drones. The absolute majority of the Nullsec Population is mediocre at best when it comes to having proper fighting skills or even understanding the mechanics. But they secure their areas by being able to outnumber you quickly. Everyone uses the tools he has available.
You miss one important point in your argumentation: The reason why the Game was so much better 15 years ago was not that it was somehow smaller. No, it was actually a lot bigger. Smaller groups could brawl it out on their smallscale-level without the big groups being able to touch them. Because omnipresent power projection didnât make the universe as small and conveniently shortcuttable like today. It was very high effort for very low gain to actually try to blob out a small 5-10 man gang that was roaming around with your 30 man fleet.
To solve the problem you want to solve, you have to make the Universe vast again. So vast, that small groups have breathing room, room to grow, room to move, room to learn, room to develop a fighting spirit and gain experience. And you only achieve that by making geography count for something again, have low-access backwater areas where almost nobody lives and nobody burns down any attemt to settle there immediately because itâs so incredibly easy to just push a whole fleet through a cyno. You basically need all those uninteresting, non-claimable, non-controllable remote areas, because that is where the small gangs can fight without fear of being immediately blobbed by someone bigger.
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But it is! Half the systems I travel through are half-empty. And about that 10% are completely empty with only travelers being there. Nullsec especially has hundreds of empty systems. But they are inside some blue donut territory so they are basically useless for anyone else than that alliance that controls it. That being said even NPC nulls are empty. Syndicate is a waste land these days. Barely anyone plays in that region.
But that is your opinion that deleting some unused dead end systems with no station and citadel (in a form of an ingame event so players could save those systems if they really wanted it - but you ignored that because you know very well that nobody will bother) will cause some massive player ragequit wave.
I donât agree with that. It will be a minority. Really, players who are so weak-willed to ragequit over something like this canât even exists. Majority of the EVE players are hardcore players because pussies doesnât play full loot non-consensual pvp games. (And the few that does is being weeded out by ganking anyway.)
In fact this has tons of positives. At least outside nullsec. Not sure how many of these passive moon mining farms exists in null to claim anything about that type of space. But since passive moon mining is not a thing in high and low what happens with such change is that there will be more content in less systems. Right now these dead end pocket systems with no station or/and behind lowsec are rarely visited and what happens is that the finished signatures and anomalies accumulate there as nobody is farming there. Sure you can say that it is a nerf to those who are going there to farm it, but that doesnât seem to be that common. My alliance is checking some of these pockets like Ossa periodically and there isnât anyone most of the time. So if these systems are removed it means that more of the signatures and anoms will respawn in âcentralâ of the map. Which will mean that it will be less likely to make 20 jumps without seeing any Refuge, Den or data/relic. And that is a good thing. Those who want to farm in solitude can go exactly there, Solitude, ghost land for last 4 years with minimum player and tens of anomalies and signatures in those few highsec systems. It was great region, but lack of players killed it.
I also disagree with your statement of âuniverse is too smallâ. It is way too big filled with needless systems that nobody passes through because JFs exists and filaments exists. We also have less players than anytime before. Yes I am aware that the player count is kinda stable for more than decade, but you can sugarcoat it as much you want, but if you actually played 10 years ago and compare the systemsâ population before and now you gotta notice the differences. The players arenât there in regions like Solitude, Aridia, Syndicate (those are those I know well, there are probably more dead regions than that). This is because real players did their â â â â everywhere. Multiboxers have their alts typically in same system instead.
Ok, first: I really do like you. You have some âfighting spiritâ and I am absolutely convinced you want the right thing.
What I have to question is your perspective of the bigger picture. I fear, you simply misunderstand how things work on a larger scale.
Thats your first misconception. How many players you actually meet has a lot to do with your own timezone vs. the timezone of the people living there.
As you can clearly see, even in Syndicate you have multiple systems or chains with hundreds of jumps per day. In some systems many hundred or even a thousand NPC kills. That mean people do live there. They just may be online when you are not.
In our WH for example, you can visit 16 hours per day and you will notice close to no activity. Just no one online. In our primetime however, we sometimes have Fleets of 20, 30 or 50 people. Same can be true for every system you visit: Since the âlocal residentsâ of the system are only active for a few hours, most of the day any system (unless controlled by a multi-timezone mass-alliance) can appear empty for someone who travels trough.
My question is: How does it make the game objectively better or attract more players in the future if you force âEventsâ onto those people? Events they probably do not really like, if they may lose their preferred home systems over them if they fail? I canât see the logic behind that. Who exactly benefits from it? Just let them play there as they like? And you can bet, some trolls will just keep âinvadingâ such Event-threatened systems to make the locals fail and see their system go vanish. For the pure lulz.
Your second misconception: âSizeâ is not defined by the actual number of systems, but by the amount of effort and time to actually control an area. 15 years ago you could live, fight and grow as a small and independent entity, even with a bigger group having their main staging a handful jumps away. Why? Because you couldnât really hotdrop a subcap gang. It just took too long to bring ships through the cyno. By the time they actually were in the system, the gang you wanted to drop had disengaged and warped off. At most, you could kill one unlucky guy that your bricktanked bait could hold. And that wasnât worth it. Also, nobody had BlackOps, barely anyone had Titans avialable for bridging. Dropping caps was horribly inefficient against a small subcap gang, Dreads didnât hit subcaps very well, Carriers were slow and very limited in range.
You could even hold structures, nobody bothered to siege your Large POS unless he wanted the moon for himself or you really had provoked it. There simply wasnât anything of value to loot and all the time to grind through 100+ million eHP of the POS shield was a huge waste of effort. And of course you couldnât do it conveniently AFK with a bunch of Altâs, a well-armed POS required quite a good fleet to reinforce it, because they actually fight back even if no one is online.
Todays mechanics of power projection that make Cyno Warfare basically omnipresent is what makes todays universe âsmallâ. And the more systems you remove, the more you force everyone else inside even more cyno-blob ranges.
The Stagnation you currenly can see is a direct result of a completely out-of-control power projection, a horrible Citadel Design and the hardcore design focus on Alts, Alts, Alts instead of real and more casual players. And unless those points are adressed, no amount of âforceâ being put on anyone will change anything to the better.
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Really.
Iâve been in Nullsec corps/alliances, how about you?
Iâm where I am now not because Iâm weak willed ( I better be careful what I say here), Iâm here because I simply got fed up with the life in null.
I have better things to do than gate camp or constantly look for anyone not blue 10 systems away.
So I returned to HS where I do what I want, when I want and answer to nobody, and Iâm all the more relaxed for it and enjoying being boring.
So how about you keep your insults to yourself?
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I miss my Deathstar 
There is a small error here. 15 years ago (around 2010) hot dropping wasnât more difficult or expensive or time consuming than itâs now.
- There was more than 1 cyno bridge in 0.0-sec systems.
- There was no jump fatique.
- You could jump gates/cyno while being under warp scram.
- You could put cyno beacon on every ship.
That what I recall right away. Couple months into 0.0-sec life Iâve seen first nerfs to power projection. Iâm pretty sure there was some changes prior that time.
But I remember PL âhotdropping everyone and everythingâ and âno carrier can be used in pvp unless the fight is over in a couple minutes, else everyone will be roflstomped by PLâ.
So, maybe your time has finished before 2010.
Also, I remember out little gang of carebears searching for troubles meeting a neutral Titan on a gate. Needless to say, not all of us managed to warp out 
Titans were really scary in that Era. It was 2012⌠Then they were nerfed and limited to structure bashing and supercarrier killers.
(PS: Itâs fun to browse old zkillmail records about myself. I donât even remember how I got some solo kills )
No there isnât. I begun with EVE in 2009 and for the first few years Hotdropping roaming gangs wasnât any issue in Lowsec. Yes, I heard the PL stories, but that was mainly Nullsec.
The main difference was the system change time, which took more than 30 seconds under the old animation. Together with gridload, this gave the dropped gang roughly 40-45 seconds to react before they could be fired upon. Enough to make a decision: Pull range, deagress and jump the gate/dock, overheat DPS on the Cynoship and break it, undock own reinforcements etc⌠that was tactical gameplay.
Today itâs just âcyno upâ and then like 5 seconds later a whole T3 gang with RR, Neuts, Jams, Longrange Tackle and DPS is on Grid and just obliterates whatever they get a point on. Instead of maybe losing 1 guy that can simply reship and you move on with your gang, you lose the entire gang and then people often simply log off because they are fed up about that nonsense.
The second large difference was the absence of T3 Cruisers, which meant BO-Drops were MUCH less scary. They could only drop Bombers and Recons, the BlackOps Battleships werenât used much because almost nobody had the skills for them (and they were MUCH more expensive compared to the income sources).
I know exactly what I am talking about, count on that, because that was my prime PvP time. With the increase of Corps owning Titans for bridging (after the famous RnK Videos inspired many players to use them) and the incredibly sped-up new System-Change animation, Lowsec became more and more a hotdrop zone. And it is till today. All those ânerfsâ you mentioned, simply changed nothing on the problem, because all of them either donât apply to hotdrops or can easily circumvented.
It is funny that this is the only differenceâŚ
That was nerfs (not ânerfsâ) because they affected null-sec citizens life in a bad way. And all of this was done in the name of reducing power projection.
Thatâs why I donât support all these requests. Because, as You pointed, they nerf gameplay of some players while not solving the issue.
It is the one difference between a totally crazy OP curbstomb mechanic and a handable mechanic that allows tactical gameplay and allowed smaller groups to live and roam more or less independently among the bigger ones. Sadly, you donât realize that.
It is also not the only one, as I already explained. The much (really: MAGNITUDES) higher amount of Titan-, Capital- and BlackOps Chars today AND the existance and potential of T3 Cruisers all in combination with the above, is simply game breaking. It has lead to thousands of smallscale PvP players leaving Lowsec. Partially fleeing from all these hotdrop blobs into WHs, partly even quitting the game.
It is very easy to implement mechanics that are a) only effective in LowSec and b) only affect smallscale-hotdropping, while not interfering with Big Alliances Capital Warfare. Very easy.
Yet CCP constantly do the same: change things which do not help but affect players. In the name of fixing issues.
Which is no argument for not trying to change things for the better. Every change that helps someone, also hurts some else. If you ânerfâ the big groupâs ability to conventiently remote-instacurbstomp smaller groups, those small groups will say itâs a good change. And the big groups will claim âit ruins the gameâ.
The point is, EVE has lost objectively a lot of real players and smaller corps, while partially compensating the losses with gains in alts and even more dominant big alliances that more or less share the power in the game among them.
The problem with that is: A long-term healthy game environment cannot be achieved by having all the power concentrated in ever fewer hands. More and more people will quit - or not even join - because they simply see no reason to play if all they can do is either be prey on the constant run or vasall to the landlords. Just look at how the Serenity Server ended up as exampleâŚ
Long-term playerbase growth does NOT come from the big established alliances. It comes from new people entering the game and finding an environment where they can at least try (with a reasonable chance of success) to create their own sandcastle. Following their own vision. Play independently, accepting some limitations in power that brings, but at least being able to participate without needing to bow to the establishment constantly.
And that is where CCP made a major design error decades ago. They are so much focused on their few âmass battlesâ, that they totally forget the grassroot-growth coming from smaller groups of players which could become the next competitors, rivals, empires in a few years if they just had the room and opportunity to learn and grow without constantly being cut down by the larger existing groups. Mainly because doing that is so easy, so effortless and so convenient because basically every mechanic in the game favors the larger group.
Other games have made much better design decisions here, making sure that âbeing largerâ doesnât give exponential but diminishing returns. To even out the field and allowing new competition to rise. The bigger you are, the more immobile and restricted in projection you have to be. It is okay, if a large alliance can hold nearly unchallengable dominance over their home system and maybe a few jumps around. But they should never be allowed to control entire regions of hundreds of star systems, while not even having a permanent presence there to guard them. Just because they have a magic instant teleporter that can throw entire fleets on anyone who dares to set a foot into there. Thats incredibly bad design and hurts the game for decades. With all the results we see today. Renting empires, barely used systems, low player retention and a very bad reputation that results in a ever shrinking niche position on the gaming market.
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I totally agree and I hope my next comment isnât seen as off topic.
Having a CSM dominated by the null blocks isnât good for the game, donât we even have devs that are/were part of those same blocks now?
How do you combat that unless someone in CCP is willing to get a grip of whatâs happening?
Having an alliance that is able to instantly send a fleet anywhere is just wrong, maybe putting a timer on it would help that would restrict the number of ships that could use it at any one time the further it is away?
I mean that at the max range say only 5% of the fleet can jump at any single time, or 10%. But the closer place you are jumping to the more that can jump at the same time.
They could of course jump individually, but fleets would be size restricted the further they jumped.
Big alliances and big battles are selling point for CCP. Thousands of players killing thousands ships and hundred thousands RL money in the process.
Nobody comes to this game to play in âLow-secâ (what is this even?) or to do âa small gang roamsâ. Players can choose this when they have already joined the game and found it to be their liking. But nobody outside would even understand it.
Thatâs why CCP keeps ability of players to build huge Alliances and perform huge battles.