That’s what we got already – and it made everything worse. Null sec was best and most enjoyable when you didn’t have destructible structures. Instead of introducing EVEN more busy-work, even more tedium, even more annoyance, we should go back to Outposts.
With ouposts, you could go on an adventure, leave your stuff behind, claim some other space, live there for a while and if you got kicked out or didn’t feel like it’s a good thing anymore, you could go back to your old space. You could also leave the game for a while without having to tediously move your assets out of harms way or have to pay ridiculous amounts of ISK when you return and have to get your assets out of AS wraps and out of tricky AS stations. Outposts also required the spread of activities because they could not support more than one activity. If you wanted more than one activity in a system, you needed to resort to POS, which were easier to attack in meaningful ways. Outposts also didn’t allow super caps to dock, which in turn required actual players to sit in them logged off or the storage in SCapArrays in POS, which were easy to find and were lucrative attack targets.
No, what I was saying was that I agree with them because I cannot stand doing this in hisec with two accounts.
I don’t, I don’t mine in hisec because of this.
OK…, something that would hurt smaller alliances a lot more, so lets continue on with this one…
Back to a block thing, but now look at the brave groups that refuse to be part of those blocks, most fight because they want to use that space, taht is a good enough reason.
And here you agree with me.
By making them decide to go in with a small footprint because they could lose it all when a blob just blobs them.
Interesting take you have there, asset safety is a backstop for people who will always get flattened by the big blocks once they decide to roll over them…
PS I should point out that I had gone through several evictions and evacuations with Outposts, in that system you did not lose your stuff, what happened is that you were forced to fire sell what you left behind to the victor, which often meant doing contracts. I tended to wait a while after the initial sales. The asset safety effectively mimicked that by giving the same cost to the loser in terms of the average discount I saw, but gave no benefit to the victor in that they no longer gained cheap stuff from the losers. So I partially get what you are getting at.
Whenever I need new ship I have to fly around gathering pieces of the fit in the radius of many jumps away from my present location - if i want to avoid crowded systems like Jita ofc. I know this “ship scarcity” should force me to gitgud, but …it actually bottlenecks me by forcing me to plenty of yack shaving first before I could fly again. I don’t fear loosing stuff anymore in New Eden. I fear the grind before having fun. I don’t mind loosing ship after ship unless I have plenty of same replacements at hand. I know, I can prepare in advance and stash few dozen fitted hulls …but it takes too looong
Another solution would be a kind of buy contract prepared from saved fits with an option to negotiate payment at the end… but it requires somebody at the other end who would scan for such contracts to fulfill them.
This can’t be stressed enough. For me, the biggest pain in the back when losing a ship is the annoying process of getting it back and getting it back where I need it. If, for instance, people’s wishes of dismantling Jita into more smaller markets came to be, this annoyance would increase tenfold. More busy-work instead of more of what people like to do.
Strange, coming from a wormhole player who can literally isolate the space he’s exploiting or invading.
Anyway, slogan-esque responses about “nullsec”, carebear heaven, asset safety, force projection etc are hardly constructive or to the point. It just shows you dislike certain elements at best, or nullsec entirely at worst. That doesn’t take away from the fact that nullsec is the true balancing part of the game in terms of building and destroying, just as much as hisec is the true trading part of the game.
And if that heart screams “murder”, you’d better listen.
There’s too much of a disconnect between the state of (nullsec) gameplay evolution as it happened during more than two decades and newly introduced game mechanics. That is what this crisis is about.
That is a complete myth, spread by lazy and risk-averse people.
You can always decide to start small, investing only a fracture of your potential and begin to drain profits out of an area. Once you made profits, invest in infrastructure that can multiply your profits within a short timeframe, so the bet is high that you can keep long enough to get their price back + make additional profits. Have a good EVAC plan to make sure you never lose more than the structure itself, not granting the attacker any reward but the core (a mechanic that needs to change imho, the core should drop with the same 50% chance like any other loot).
You can have EVAC procedures on standby all the time, members can be schooled to not hoard millions of m³ in resources but to bring them to the market quickly, they can be thaught to only have the ships and equipment there they do actually use and not stockpile what they can’t evac in a day. I’d even agree to a basic asset safety for casuals, like a 100.000m³ container per char (Omega) where someone can store his most valuable stuff like BPOs or overseer loot or whaever, to be sure not to lose everything if the station gets blown up. But other than that, no. Ships, Capitals, Supercaps - shall all be open for destruction and loot by possible attackers all the time. You want to keep that, protect it, at all costs.
And last but not least, nerfing geography-skipping-instatravel into oblivion would make it much less convenient to just “roll over someone” who is 40 jumps out if you have to travel all those 40 jumps per gate where you can run into an ambush or trap by a thirdparty - just to shoot an Astrahus of a small group that will probably drop nothing of value. Getting rid of convenient instatravel powerprojection actually makes it a lot easier to survive as a small group, thats why they can do that in WH space, but not in space where the blob can easily come trough a magic portal in a blink of an eye.
Thats nonsense, and you should know it. A small group is for 99% only active in one timezone and usually has no chance to even hold hole control against a larger invader. So, for like 18 hours each day we have absolutely no control over our connections and all those myths about "WH people always isolate themselves* are completely wrong. Even in our own active timezone, if a 20 man gang from a larger group appears and camps our entries, to bring in siege forces and seeds there is nothing you can do as a small group to prevent it. Even if you can take hole control at some point, you can’t get rid of their seeds that begin to open all the entries once we log off.
So please, stop pretending that WH space is “safer” in any way, our entries are completely open most of the time, like the gates in NS are. It is just more effort to attack someone there, thats why most bigger groups don’t bother to “roll over” smaller ones, investing days of siege for basically no loot. And if the same can be established for NS (aka making geography meaning something again and making small-groups structures unlucrative and boring to burn down), those smaller groups can begin to settle, rise and deliver content there.
Thats why I am always a fan of having NPC stations scattered in every NS region. Can be SoE embassies, ORE Mining Outposts, Interbus Depots or whatever. All of them only provide repair, refit and reprocess options but not cloning or industry lanes. Clone-Jumping into them can be restricted if the System is under SOV. They can serve as local HQs, fallback points, staging points for invaders and will probably be very good content locations, camped/bubbled/ambushed by one side or the other. Locals can store stuff there that is safe from destruction, but in case the area is taken over they will have to find ways to bring their stuff out.
Not sure about the old Outposts with their complete takeover mechanic.
Cough, so you think that setting up numerous stations and putting assets including doctrines to fight against much larger and better supplied potential and real enemies is risk averse, OK, that just seems dumb.
I don’t operate in WH space because of that risk, you are OK with it so that is fine for you. I really dislike WH players trying to impose their play on others, including their contempt for local. Stop it, if you like WH space then operate there, along with the few people doing it!
Pretty standard operating approach, you build up over time…
Evac procedures are there, but what happens if you are holding onto space when your enemies have taken out your Large structures, you have no market, but you are still hanging in there. With your suggestion and the weakness of the medium structures they will just headshot the staging and it is done, over and out… They do now, but people spread things around and use asset safety to move things to other structures, so your suggestion will actually reduce resistance so you can have the same loot windfall as WH space. As for capitals, you can’t put them in medium structures. I am talking about the reality of smaller alliances getting dog piled on by bigger groups and coalitions. So what you suggested makes me think that once the Large structure goes, then give up, so I only have what I can take out with one carrier, so I don’t have the doctine ships for a long fight, sounds rather sub optimal… But if that is what you want, who am I to say otherwise… Hell roaming gang comes in, looks at ships hanger, no suitable ship to counter their kitey gang, wait them out, sounds like fun?
It is not as if my alliance did not go into sov nullsec expecting to hold it for a couple of months and are into their second year against all the odds, yeah being schooled on this by a WH player, though I do admit that I am not doing much as I am not in the TZ when all the fun happens…
These guys have protected it at all costs and don’t need your WH play style, what they need is the medium structures improved, which were nerfed because many nullsec sov alliances could not motivate their players to shoot them…, never mind the excessive amount of baby sitting we do now on the medium structures that is burning people out, but I digress…
Capitals are a part of the game and a fact of life in nullsec, I mentioned the 5 minute to DT super drop on medium structures to put it into its final timer as a risk averse lame capital use that sticks in the gullet a bit. Anyway as I said you just want to apply WH play to nullsec again.
Hole control is not part of nullsec life, we can bubble gates waterboard people and in sov nullsec use cyno jammers at key moments, you just control the hole or close it, there you go. Nullsec is more dangerous because of that capital aspect, even if it does produce lame risk averse play at times…
I appreciate you saying that. I take it you don’t have Skyhooks, and only Metenoxes which do not require 24/7 babysitting.
Having been on the receiving end of “rolling holes” while traveling, it’s fairly common practice. We even advise our wh diving gas huffers from nullsec to roll the connections if they want to really get their time’s worth. I take it no one stays up for 24 hrs to run the sites in a wh.
And in terms of isk generation, the wealth of wormhole space, that’s also a myth ? Right.
Except that, like Asher wrote in his open letter, that is exactly what is not going to happen with Equinox, quite the contrary.
I’ll add to that that Equinox, due to the nature of the “power, workforce and reagents” determining the infrastructure deployment (which is based on planets generated in 2003), and due to the importance of “true sec” in determining the effective value of upgrades (I guarantee you that no one in e.g. Providence will be able to have more than 1 Sanctum generated in any system that can be powered up sufficiently to even have one Major 3 upgrade), leaves no choice. Poor regions, whatever one does, stay poor. The only “easy” solution to that would be to re-determine or re-shuffle the true sec status of each star system, but that is not going to happen - the fallout is impressive.
The geography factor has effectively been introduced by Equinox but (!)… it was pre-determined what the outcome was, relying on historical distribution of planets and true sec values in this case. We’re now back at the technetium moon situation, in that sense, a factor which was exploited to genius levels and led to the growth of the military might of a power block. Good luck living in a region with too few ice planets or bad true sec or both. You won’t grow as much, if you grow at all.
Speaking of tedium: These Skyhook theft double notifications are already getting on my nerves. This is such a poor and frustrating mechanic, even and most importantly for people who don’t care about it in a given area of space.
You were not forced to. You could easily leave the stuff behind because no one could touch it. You could just come back later via alts to get the stuff out or when you return to the space one way or another (blues, reconquering, joining the once hostile group) or even get BlackFrog to move things out for you. But since outposts could not be destroyed, your assets were not at risk and need to be moved somewhere.
“We’re super-excited to introduce this massive nerf to core game elements because, um…, well because our team lead told us to be. Or else.”
I criticize CCP quite a lot, and have for a long time now, and a large part of that is because they apparently believe that simply putting the right spin-words on a pile of shite is enough to turn it into gold.
Sorry CCP, shite is still shite, no matter how super-excited you feel about it.
Parts of what CCP has done over the past year and a half or so I’ve found at least a little encouraging - it seems they’re actually trying to add things of interest to players to the game. (Trying does not necessarily mean succeeding.)
However even as a non-nuller it appeared to me that Equinox was a major nerf, and the SKINR cash grab is basically Monocles 2.0. This recent stuff was a real disappointment and an apparent return to the nonsense mindset of “if you crush the economy, then they’ll all play harder to keep up”.
Sad. Hopefully there’s enough protest and dip in play levels, and some way to salvage Equinox mechanics so it isn’t another boat anchor.
Of course, I thought that was obvious, I was just pointing it out in terms of the loot context that he was focussed on and that for many smaller groups they needed the ISK value or a part of it to setup again so had to fire sale.
I’d mention the changes to FW, which were well received. That was a success.
On the other hand “fixing the economy” by figuring out that there’s too much ISK being collected and thus (silently) deciding that “ships need to cost more” was very far off the mark of thoughtful game design and guardianship. The “let’s make (nullsec) space less valuable and a lot more of a burden” and announce it as “reinvigorating” follows that same pattern, yes
Eve is playable. Ccp is fixing the game with the updates, they are making it harder for large groups, to afk, multibox and bot, rmt etc.
These sov changes are great and better for the game as a whole. It makes the player base spread out, and with the workforce and such, it makes it so ansiblex gates will be harder for power projection, thus enabling smaller groups to hold sov. Since it will take larger groups longer to get a large group to kill them.
Small mining sites, go to places where their bigger. They are small in sov space to prevent afk isk printing rmt. There are bigger mining rocks in poch, wormholes, low sec, why don’t the null sec folks go there. Answer is they can’t afk or semi afk, bot, rmt.
They want to be perfectly safe and print massive amounts of isk. This is bad for the game. We went thru that era, we are done with it as a whole player base, high sec er, wormholes etc. Null sec has dictated things for years. That’s why it’s a bot wasteland who players semi afk or totally afk print isk. We are fixing null sec. By making the large groups break in to smaller ones. Sites shouldn’t suport massive amounts of players, that’s why it’s good the mining sites are small.
We don’t need 10 roqurals out there mining. Look at homefronts in high sec, 1 multi boxer with 5 toons. This is also bad for the game. This needs to be fixed as well. Smaller rocks and spawn timers forces players to spread out, hold more sov, as the ansiblex gates power projection goes down, and forces long jumps from places groups will form, and null sec will go from 2 large blocs that dictate everything to the rest of the game, what we are seeing is sov being fixed.
The games funner with any smaller groups the. 2 large ones who dictate everything. Now what we need is sites that scram on grid, so those Ishtar and alike can’t warp off as soon as a neut enters local. . They should be content. This behavior needs to be caught, and brought to justice.
