On the premise that people can agree that F1 fleets are boring, it would be interesting to make anchoring not work on a large scale.
For example, what if one were to multiply the repulsive force of a bounce by 25% of the ships within 100 meters. 200 cruisers properly anchored to someone, for example, would amplify your bounce by 50x. ■■■■ would bounce like a motherfucker. (I’m aware exploit options exist here, polishing is needed)
Assuming the most effective mitigation was smaller groups, we’d end up with different anchors and squads or wings of ships. With different anchors, you’d invariably have different broadcasts, once the ■■■■ hits the fan and anchors are going in different directions… no plan survives first contact with the enemy, and while voice comms would help, any situation where yuo’ve got a fleet that size fighting another fleet that size, nobody’s going to be looking through their overview for a pilot by name.
It needs a LOT of polishing, but what do you think of the overall concept of decentralizing fleets into smaller groups, each group effectively a small gang fleet.
Like I said, exploits exist which would need to be addressed. I’d consider that an abuse of the mechanic, and some form of countermeasure would need to be implemented.
Any kind of concept which breaks anchoring more than 20 dudes would fit the bill, so long as it doesn’t lead to things like mega-bouncing.
100m is an arbitrary thing. It could be the server looking at how many people are approaching the same ship (or evaluate chains to defeat “I follow so and so, you follow me, and so on”.
The exact mechanics are certain to be a challenge.
It could be as simple as “fleets are limited to 20 pilots”… you can have as many fleets as you want, but things like broadcasting won’t work. Which doesn’t matter in the least when you aren’t in a big fight, but when you’re in a big fight, broadcasting absolutely matters. In which case, each fleet would need its own relevant mixture logistics, tackle, support, and dps that fits their comp and general instruction from the person running the entire group.
Or, start imparting collision damage, give stations and structures multiple ingress and egress points with traffic control. I’m 100% fine with Jita turning into a dumpster fire.
And no I’m not saying it’s a flawless thing, I’m sure it’d take you maybe 5 seconds to poke a hole in the ideas. I’m ultimately putting it up here so that:
agreement in the concept can be found, or disagreement with the concept can be found
solutions that people think are viable, should they agree witht he underlying concept
The fact that ships occupy the same space is problematic. Ships should actually bump not based off speed and trajectory buy simply because they are hitting another ship.
In the case of an intended bump, that’s what happens. Luckily, because fuel is effectively unlimited in Eve, when you’re constantly course-correcting into a ball, things hold together.
I dunno. At the end of the day, the psudoscience behind it is the warpdrives repel each other and prevent the ships from colliding… kind of like magnets repelling each other. Or something like that. I just think the effect should be stronger.
Maybe the faster a ship is in motion, the higher the throttle is.
Thus a ship with throttle to zero will bounce about as much as they do now, but ships throttled up will bounce at an amplified rate. Doesn’t fix bumping considerations like Jita, or bumping a freighter while you wait for your buddies to get on grid, but it certainly does fix afk considerations (given that the goal is solely anchoring).
Another option would be to make approach and orbit only function for limited time, while another option for formations is added. Watch a fleet warp and you’ll see all the ships arrange into a grid. It’s probably purely cosmetic, but that concept. Then you can just limit the number of slots in the formation. Hell, flagging yourself as logi or ewar could entitle you to specific positions in the formation.
Of course, it probably needs to be said that the formation itself isn’t intended to confer advantage, just replace anchoring with something that can have a limited number of ships.
Bolt of inspiration: Put a fleetmate behind the enemy (from the sun’s perspective) and then initiate warp to them. I wonder what the range of such a terrifying weapon would be?