Everyone wants to win. No one logs in wanting to get their teeth kicked in. Entering the game and being surrounded by bad guys on your front door is not appealing and neither is spending 99% of your time looking for someone to shoot. So players keep their enemy at arm’s length. No closer, no further. There is a certain amount of effort they are willing to spend to get to a fight. The effort is not measured in gates, jumps or bridges; it is measured in time. If players are willing to spend an hour or more to get to a fight and you factor in all the teleportation mechanics available, the arm becomes incredibly long. So much so that it crosses the map several times over during that hour. The jump sphere on the map not only is the places you can attack, but the places that can attack you. A spherical two-way street. If anyone in the game can descend upon you before you are done killing a POS tower, onlining a System Blockade Unit, done invading and taking over a system; what is the only real defense against it? Numbers.
As this formula plays out over the years, we finally arrive where we are today. Null security space is now one super coalition versus another super coalition. Now before you go trying to show off a Verite Influence Map mesmerized by the colors and activity; remember that the political landscape of EVE on an alliance level has been irrelevant for many years now. If you take the same map and view it as coalitions, there will there be vastly fewer colors and far less movement. When it comes to strategic objectives, coalitions group up and create super coalitions. The following map is from the 6th of February 2014 and based on known standings when a strategic objective is happening:
Some things have happened in the last couple of days such as Black Legion’s assault on Circle of Two, a CFC alliance. But in the grand scheme of things, it is not a dramatic change. Due to everyone dog piling into one war you are always trying to put everyone into one system and mostly into one grid to fight over a goal. We are not talking about a few hundred players anymore; we are talking thousands and thousands. One system, one grid, one node. The server has multiple strokes and sometimes falls over dead. The technology CCP currently has simply can’t handle it. Sure TiDi often times kicks in and it does help, but it makes for a very poor gaming experience. Often times while stuck in an uncool version of Bullet Time from The Matrix, they long for the joys of smaller scale warfare. Even if the technology did exist where lag was no longer a problem, the bigger issues remain. There is a severe lack of Triple Constraint when traveling across the game.
Lack of Triple Constraint
The Triple Constraint consists of usually three aspects. If you want two of the three to excel the third suffers. You find this in a variety of things from production to war. Or when it comes to EVE, balancing. The normal three points is cost, time and quality. You cannot have a high quality project that is also fast and cheap. When you look at sub-capitals in EVE you see this in full effect. Especially after the last few years of balancing passes on most of the ships and the warp speed changes. If you want to take a sub-cap via the gates to get to a battle that is a decent amount of jumps away, you need to make choices. You may have higher firepower and resilience on the battlefield with a battleship, but getting there will be slow going. The Triple Constraint in effect. You could decide time is of the essence and choose smaller, faster warping ships, but either your firepower or resilience on the battlefield will suffer. One could find a ship that does all three decently, but not excel at any. Currently that rarely exists. You hop in the ship that will be the most influential at the destination and teleport there utilizing a variety of methods, avoiding the risk and decision-making that comes with gate travel.
Currently the Triple Constraint does not apply to teleportation mechanics and because of this; removes it mostly from ships. The time aspect is tossed right out the window because everything happens so fast. Bringing even sub-capital ships to a fight is mostly just sitting on a titan inside the safety of a POS and teleporting directly to the grid where the battle takes place. All in about ten to fifteen seconds. I use the word teleportation because that is exactly what happens. Jump drives, clones, bridges, doesn’t matter. It is essentially being teleported from one place to another in about ten seconds. Right now very few factors that are a bottleneck for the forms of teleportation and most of them are easily hurdled. Make no mistake – it needs to be nerfed.
The Usual Suspects: The Problem
Take a look at Jump Bridges and Titan Bridges. There are obviously differences, one being a structure that is locked into teleporting players to another specific bridge in another system. The other being a ship flown by another player who teleports other players ships to any cyno within range. Vastly more flexible, but of course more costly on the rare occasion of miss-clicking.
We have ships with Jump Drives. Essentially every capital ship sans the Orca and T1 freighters. Not to be forgotten, the Black Ops battleship can bridge and jump as well. As long as the isotopes flow and the cyno chains are intact; the largest ships in the game can go from one extreme side of the game to the opposite extreme side in under 15 minutes. This is not an exaggeration. I personally timed several of these cross map trips on Tranquility which usually is related to having to reclaim sovereignty that was recently dropped from an ally.
Even losing your capsule to enemies or suiciding your capsule is a form of instant travel. Granted being podded comes with a cover charge to keep your clone updated, but players death cloning to get somewhere is an often used method. Set your clone spawn via the medical station, undock and then self destruct or ask a friendly to pod you if you don’t want to wait the two minutes. A related teleportation mechanic is jump clones. With the right standings and trained skills, they can have up to eleven different clones spread across all of New Eden. Out of all the teleportation mechanics, Jump Clones do come with a hurdle that can’t be avoided by throwing ISK at it or trying to meta-game around it. Even with max skills, if you jump clone, you must wait nineteen hours before you can jump clone again.
Take the above into consideration and even the mildly organized groups can get anywhere with almost anything very, very quickly. Most certainly long before any system or POS suffers any real harm. It takes days to invade and conquer a system. Crossing the map with capital ships – minutes. Teleportation has made our New Eden into a tiny universe.
There is no magic bullet to fix all the problems of sovereignty and power projection. There is many layers and will need time. There is one change that will have a significant impact on how players and organizations project their power. It is time to change the teleportation mechanics from constant teleportation across the map endlessly into things used more strategically. And because of this it will have a healthy ripple effect on future battles, invasions, defending, the list goes on.
A Not So Little Experiment
Theorizing is one thing, witnessing things first hand with your very own eyes is something else. So I decided to see the difference between several ship classes when tasked to travel across the game map.
I researched a bit and arrived to a set of testing guidelines. Each ship class would start at the sun of one system and end at the sun of another. 373Z-7 to either SVB-RE, 3KNA-N, or BU-IU4 are the furthest systems and when taking the shortest path it is 99 gate jumps. I decide on the 373Z-7 to SVB-RE route. It is a route that starts in the Stain region and hooks west and circles clockwise to the north into Branch. Another decision was to not include time lost to warp disruption bubbles or hostiles one would encounter along the way. The fastest a standard fit ship could go. With the rules in place, I began the race of ship classes.
Super Taxi
The first ship I choose is a Crow. It is easily one of the most popular interceptors in the game right now. Instead of going with a standard fit, I wanted to see what would happen if money was no object and how fast I could make the trip. For implants I set myself up with a full set of high-grade Ascension implants. The are a new set of implants found in Ghost sites that increase the warp speed of any ship you are flying. Realizing warp speed is only part of the equation, I pick up a +6% to agility hardwiring and fill the low slots of the Crow with Local Hull Inertia Stabilizers for maximum agility. With my super taxi ready, I start at the sun and put the pedal to the metal and tear across system after system in record time.
Time to complete: 55 minutes
Crow
Now that the least likely Crow setup has been tested. I move on to a Crow fit that is the most common found in combat these days. No implants and the only item fit that actually affects anything is one Nanofiber in the low slots. I set back up in the same starting system on the sun, plot the same path to the end and off I went again. Granted the interceptor is immune to warp disruption bubbles it is important to remember that these runs also do not include time spent engaging the enemy. The fastest to make the trip with a standard fit.
Time to complete: 59 minutes
What the deuce?
What is interesting is only four minutes separates the standard fit from the super travel version. I was assuming the difference would be dramatic, but then I took a moment to break it down. Nothing affects the ships time to reach full warp speed or from full warp speed to out of warp. Also unaffected is the time during the gate jump, jump tunnel and grid load. Sure you might enter warp a second or two faster with the crazy agility of the super setup, but in actuality the time you are at full warp is very small measured in 1, 2 or maybe 3 seconds. Multiple those few seconds over 99 jumps and you only end up with just the 4 minutes. I digress.
Sacrilege
I move on to a heavy assault cruiser. This ship offers significantly more firepower and resilience to have better staying power on the battlefield. However, the warp speed is lower. The Triple Constraint in effect. Although a 1600mm armor plate can easily be used for gangs of HACs when logistics is present, I opt for the non-buffer fit. Real men dual rep their Sacrileges! Turns out nothing on the fit affects agility or warp speed. Still keeping using a clone with no implants, I make the journey again.
Time to complete: 1 hour and 32 minutes
Megathron
Time to try a battleship. Extremely common in a variety of fleet doctrines and found in all parts of the game. Also what is commonly found is buffer fit battleships rolling with a nice logistics backbone. Although I will not have the luxury of such things, I still fit two 1600 mm plates slowing down my agility a bit. Again, time does not include warp disruption bubbles and or dealing with hostiles along the route. The fastest possible.
Time to complete: 2 hours 31 minutes
As you can see, the more firepower, the larger and stronger the hull; the travel aspect suffers. If I really had to make that trip to show up for a battle, several decisions would need to be made. Sure I could bring a battleship, but it would be a long road to travel and what are my odds of getting there in one piece? Go with a smaller and more nimble ship that can make the trip faster and maybe successfully engage and defeat some of the smaller ships that would have killed my battleship? Decisions, decisions.
Archon
If you thought for a moment I would not include a capital ship, you are insane. Obviously I will not be taking gates to go from 373Z-7 to SVB-RE. Time for some cynos. I look up a jump plan that will take me the distance, pack all the fuel needed and begin. A few things to be noted is the time it takes to hit the jump to button, enter the warp tunnel, load grid, dock and undock again with full jump capacitor is about 32-33 seconds. If you are travel fit with cap rechargers and capacitor flux coils, very common, the time it takes to hit the jump button, enter the warp tunnel, load grid and have enough cap to jump again is about 50 seconds.
Cyno’s go up and I begin my run. I purposely do not use the convenience of a station to dock in to add more time to the route in an attempt to add more time. Having enough isotopes for the full trip already in the carrier and no cynos are destroyed; I also take into account that before I make the last jump into the destination system I refit for combat. Once again, a standard method of traveling with capital ships in the game. After I am refit and ready to go, I jump to the final system and check the stopwatch.
Time to complete: 7 minutes
That is not a typo. Also not to be ignored is the Crow, Sacrilege and Megathron were in danger to be slowed down and or killed 198 times during the trip. The Archon? Just 7 times. Did I mention I put the other ships I used for the test into the ship maintenance bay and brought them with me? The Triple Constraint the other ships would normally be subject to are tossed right out the window.
In Reality
Sure you will hear horror stories of capital movements taking a long time. There will be the occasional one that bumps or is tackled. Maybe the cynos were not put in place prior to the move. Someone forgets the Liquid Ozone to light the cyno. The more and more people you involve it does affect the time. Of course TiDi rears its ugly head. But remember, the sub-capitals that took gates did not take into account warp disruption bubbles or dealing with hostiles along the way. The biggest ships in the game, the ones with the most firepower, with the largest hulls and sustain on the battlefield – are the fastest traveling ships in the game.
Why would anyone choose to bring a ship with less firepower, less sustain, is 28 times more likely to run into trouble and more importantly; 9 to 21 times slower to move? There may be the occasional system that is jammed where dropping in a capital is out of the question, but taking titan bridges and jump bridges across the map is not. I did not have access to 15 titans to set up a daisy chain, but considering at most you will spend is one minute per bridge; you can in theory make the same trip in about 15 minutes. Effectively, everyone is your next door neighbor.
Everything is Connected
It is difficult to make a large change when there are multiple other aspects of the game connected to it. Even when all are broken in their own way, it is hard to change just one and leave the others as is – broken. What to remember is sovereignty mechanics and power projection go hand in hand. We have structures with millions and millions of hit points to grind because if they were easier, people would just steamroll through everything.
Of course by making the hit points so high to keep groups from doing that, you start excluding smaller groups from being able to. If anything the more hit points you add, the more incentive there is to increase the number of blues so the task can be completed faster and faster. The sovereignty system reflects what is needed due to the current power projection and vice versa.
The following is my idea on how to reintroduce the Triple Constraint back into all ship selection and how to travel with it. I can not stress enough that when reading it, you must remember that current mechanics for sovereignty and other things like industry can not be assumed to be the same. What this change does is open up the door to make logical changes to them based on this new mechanic. Just like you; your enemy is not immune to these changes. Something to remember.
Tough Love in the Cure
Each individual character will have a Power Projection Pool (PPP). This is a pool of light years that replenish over time and has a cap to the amount of light years it can hold. While aspects are subject to balance, all numbers I will be using are pulled out of my ass for the sake of having numbers. Keep an open mind and remember that this change not just affects you, but everyone in the game, including your enemies.
The following teleportation mechanics will draw light years from the PPP to do the teleportation action you use in the game right now.
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Jump Drive
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POS Jump Bridge
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Titan Bridge
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Covert Bridge
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Jump Clone
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Being Podded
The PPP has a cap of 24 light years with a recharge rate of 0.5 light years per hour. If the PPP is 100% full and a player uses one of the above teleportation mechanics the recharging of the PPP starts at once.
Each teleportation mechanic will not necessarily have the same pull on the PPP as the distance they are teleporting. i.e. a titan bridge that is 10 light years will drain the PPP by 10, but traveling 10 light years via a POS jump bridge will pull 8 light years from the PPP. This is due to the titan bridge being a more powerful form of teleportation for obvious reasons. This allows each teleportation to be balanced individually instead of a blanket change that affects them all.
If the amount of light years to be used from the PPP is not available for the teleportation mechanic the player wants to use, say a jump drive. Then they will not be able to jump. i.e. The distance between their carrier and the cyno is 10 light years, but their PPP only has 8 light years available. The exception is being podded. You can always be podded and return to where your medic clone is set.
With no timer restriction on jump clones, it is possible for a player to have several clones in the same station. While this is currently limited to two per station this could easily be increased. Each implanted differently to take advantage of the vast variety of fitted ships and fighting styles. There will always be a minimum of 1 light year consumed no matter how close the power projection action is. While this no doubt would open the door for players to always make sure they log off in a +5 implant set, it does offer the chance they might forget they are in them and lose them. Perhaps lose them on the way to the staging station.
Currently, anyone who is online (and anyone who is offline and at their computer among alliances who use Jabber or any other program to ‘ping’) can just hop into their capital ship and bounce all over the galaxy at a moments notice; or zerg out an engagement that is 45 regular jumps away by utilizing several titan bridges to bypass everything in between within minutes – as long as the isotopes flow and the cyno alts are staged. And if the battle is ongoing for over an hour (it usually is when it comes to sov objectives), any player who loses their ship can use the same route to return to the fight in a new ship very quickly. It makes the galaxy much smaller, and a majority of solar systems go completely unused as a result.
The proposed new PPP system will restrain this problem and encourage entities to take more serious consideration over owning solar systems that they actually care to use. Effectively breaking the trend of one alliance owning one or several entire regions by default. Hyper-Escalation of any battle anywhere in the galaxy suddenly requires much more strategic organization to invoke. And new alliances who want to be a part of the sov war game can more easily gain footholds in pipeline or constellation areas, rather than blueing up with the most popular coalition in the area. Generally making Eve itself as large as it should be. All of this with the help of a new UI feature to graphically illustrate your PPP status, of course.
Cliché Solutions
Some argue that having just a flat cool-down timer is the way to go. “Just make it one hour between jumps.” This will not work at all. You will still see capitals zerging across the map, but instead of ten minutes, they will take a few hours and in the end; still be able to heavily influence the course of a battle dramatically. After all, if you know when a timer is coming out, you can just start your route earlier and show up with an armada of capital ships. Even having it up to six hours will not be enough. Any alliance or corporation that is time zone heavy will have their timers at zero ready to go when they all log in. Meaning everyone could just bridge on top of someone from the start. Sure it will mean waiting six more hours for a second bridge, but that does not create any variation in ships brought to a battle from the start. It just means the first wave will be the most powerful and most likely the battle will be decided immediately from that first wave. With the PPP every one’s level of light years will vary across the board. So even at the start of the battle you will not see everyone in an alliance dropping something with carriers or being titan bridged. A part of the fleet might, but most certainly not everyone.
Just removing a ship or two will not be the solution either. Why remove the jump freighter when other types of teleportation mechanics will take its place? Players will find the path of least resistance. People in general do that with most things. By keeping the jump freighter and addressing teleportation in general it allows the player to keep the tool and reserve it for important decisions. Raising the cost to open cynos, use jump bridges and jump drives is not the answer either. The one to suffer from that change will be the younger and smaller groups. All the while the larger and richer alliances will be completely unphased.
Dynamic Fleet Battles
The number of players who want to be part of a battle may stay the same, but the ship they bring and how they get it to the battlefield will be dramatically changed. Even the term battlefield will take on new meaning as it will span beyond just a couple of grids in one system and spread out from the epicenter of the main conflict into many systems around it. Having everyone available to get to a bridging titan, undock their carrier or even log in their super capitals will become a thing of the past. Due to the PPP, not everyone with a carrier will be able to jump to a cyno, they will need to bring a sub-capital. Everyone will not be able to snuggle up next to a titan and wait for a cyno to go up, bypassing dozens of gates with their entire fleet. Even having a super capital in a fight will not result in anyone available in the game to log in their super capitals to cyno on top of you for a gank.
The fleets in a battle will start to become more mixed in sizes, especially as the battle goes on and players are re-shipping to get back to the fight. They may have to travel far via gates and thus ship down to smaller, faster ships to get to the battle. The number of capital ships used in a fight will go down. The speed in which massive numbers zerg across the map will drop dramatically. Most will run into fights along the way. Perhaps their plated up battleship is no match for the locals along the route. Some might make it back to the battle, but decided to bring assault frigates due to the distance. Deciding where to attack, where people should stage from, where to defend; all of these things will come into play. The Triple Constraint in effect. This is not some giant wall that will prevent players from going where they want. They just have to make a decision on what to bring that will get them there.
Summary
This is most certainly a game changer. Everything from how fleets are composed, to how they are deployed and even to how a battle is influenced. There are groups who focus on hyper deployment with capitals who will hate this. But, there are groups who will enjoy not having to deal with the earlier group. They can enter a cycle of siege on a low sec tower and not have to worry supers from nine regions away zerging across the map to drop on them. Yes, this actually does happen. They will still need to consider what could drop on them from the local area. Just not from the entire game map. Also large bloc leaders and fleet commanders will oppose this idea. It will complicate how they view the political map. They will have to reconsider deployments and even fleet doctrines. Very few ruling over very many will become more difficult and require vastly more effort. This of course will see the surge in small to medium level leaders and fleet commanders. Currently there is no need for them when it comes to strategic objectives. Why have a small time fleet commander lead an invasion when the big time bloc level fleet commander is on? Why should an alliance level leader decide on their own where they want to live when a coalition leader tells them where to live?
There is no denying it. A capital group can move from one side of the map to the other in fifteen minutes or less. Although it has been the case for years now, it is now becoming all too common. Especially with TiDi. A large battle erupts and everything in that system slows down to a crawl. Meanwhile everything not on the same node is effectively lightning fast in comparison. What normally would have taken a fleet from the other side of the game fifteen minutes to reach you, actually feels like two minutes for the system you are in.
With the PPP, the range of ships with jump drives are not affected at all. Players can still use them how they see fit, but the odds of everyone doing it at the same time will of course drop – dramatically. If a large entity wants to have a capital ship presence in a battle, they will need to have their capital force spread across their empire. Strategically placed for defending and attacking. Staging all capitals on a distant front is still very possible, but opens the door to being invaded on another front and having to defend without any capital support. Some players may have multiple capitals in different areas, the PPP still has an effect on how they get from one to the other and how it is used outside the system. The player might be podded while they travel or they jump clone, or take a bridge back. All of these actions drain on the PPP. It is possible they finally arrive at their second capital ship and have no PPP to jump it anywhere.
There is of course the possibility of trying to work around each persons PPP by using alts, but it is impractical to be doing such things. The positive side is it could open up the market for having capital ships on the market near fronts. After all, a capital ship very near a war front will sell for far more than one no where nearby. Maybe paying a group to move your capital ships? Again, a possibility, but this involves more effort and trust becomes an issue. Regardless of how some players try to avoid being subjected to the PPP with capitals, you can’t have someone take a jump bridge for you or eat the light year cost if you are podded.
While there is still a vast amount of work to be done to the game such as a more robust industry in null, how intelligence is gathered and even how a player engages in large-scale combat; the PPP will allow needed breathing room for new blood to enter the sovereignty conflicts and go great lengths to make the wars far more numerous and far more frequent.
Reversal of Fortune 
February 11, 2014 at 10:10 am
I like the idea but PPP is a funny name for it. Highlights the issue though.
February 12, 2014 at 8:12 am
The name is really clunky and weird to say. Someone said it should be Travel Credits or something like that. Now that you know what it is does, maybe you could make a suggestion that is more elegant and rolls off the tongue nicely.
February 12, 2014 at 10:27 pm
I think, this being EVE, the mechanic needs some pseudoscientific name. “Spatial Calibration” or something. Claim teleportation puts a strain on the capsuleer neural net.
February 13, 2014 at 4:42 am
Not bad. I may steal that if you don’t mind. 😛
February 11, 2014 at 10:34 am
The problem with the simple, rejump timer is that it makes takling capitals completely unnecessary, since they won’t be able jump away and if they warp off the are extremely easy to relocate. So that change would make dictors and hics completely useless.
The problem with the PPP is that it limits deployment to within around half the PPP range, since if they jump more and can’t return for hours, they either have to stay there most of the day or die. This change would make capitals even more useless (even after nerfing sentries and capital drone assist) and heavily favour subcapital only fights which are generally won by whoever can bring the most (the CFC). So this would pretty much destroy N3/PL, and any notion of an elite small force of expensive capitals being a match for a much larger force of cheaper subcaps.
Also having such a short deployment range would mean that anyone in control of a large area of the map (CFC) would be completely immune to capital attacks in their inner regions. Looking at the map, it would also favour the CFC as the N3 systems are much more concentrated, so a limited range from the front line give them access to more systems than the N3 on the front line, who can only reach fewer of the more spread out CFC systems.
You measured that it takes a battleship hours to cross the galaxy. and while i obviously admit that the ability to dock then instantly jump again is a bit broken, raising the transit time for capitals from a matter of minutes or hours to a whole week is not an acceptable solution. And treating capital like subcaps, with the need to have many of them in staging systems all over the place is not a viable solution either.
February 13, 2014 at 4:49 pm
“Also having such a short deployment range would mean that anyone in control of a large area of the map (CFC) would be completely immune to capital attacks in their inner regions.”
Because they’re not already immune to capital attacks ?
They are immune to capital attacks just like PL/NCdot was. CFC gets The CFC Blob + PL/NCdot’s Supercapital wrecking-ball, basically. That’s the kind of military power/assets they have.
So yeah, they are quite immune to capital attacks as all those will be mercilessly crushed by hundreds of….whatever, megathrons, dreads, supers.
Having such a short deployment range would mean that anyone in control of a large area of the map has to spread around their capital fleet, or suffer from the lack of capital support in the case of an hostile entity attacking Fountain for exemple.
This is completely logical, your most powerful war asset can’t be everywhere at once. I support this change.
February 11, 2014 at 11:13 am
As i remember6 we have discussed this problem with CCP during CSM summer (and winter) session 2012.
Also there is full explanation of problem on the internal forum too. (Pretty the same with ideas in this post).
Usually CCP need around 2-3 years to realize and cure biggest problem in Eve, after it was formalized by players.
So 1 year left but MAY be they will do something this spring %)
February 11, 2014 at 1:28 pm
Excellent, excellent article. I love the “true map” you posted! It really shows the current political climate in Eve. Won’t be long before it truly is all blue.
I’ve been having similar thoughts about the travel mechanics recently. The game is starting to feel very small. This is in part due to the politics (only 2 or 3 power blocs left fighting) but mostly due to the teleportation mechanics. If I read the tea leaves correctly, CCP’s solution is going to be to expand the map i.e. introduce new space. This won’t work. The CFC and/or N3 will simply move in and fill that space using the same broken teleportation mechanics we have now.
Something should be done to fix this. Seven-minute capitals are unacceptable.
February 11, 2014 at 2:05 pm
I would like to see this at the CSM
February 12, 2014 at 8:09 am
I think it is. 😀
February 11, 2014 at 2:10 pm
Contrary to your expectations elsewhere I think this is a good idea overall, and debate would have focused on certain specifics rather than the overall picture. Perhaps I’ll write a blog post of my own regarding those specifics…
February 12, 2014 at 8:10 am
Please do and send me a link. Would love to read it.
February 11, 2014 at 2:32 pm
Fantastic article ! Looking forward to CCP actually doing something about that…
February 11, 2014 at 4:09 pm
Not sure about the PPP idea. While it would certainly work, it seems silly to put an arbitrary limit on characters like that when the entire premise of the game is essentially “do whatever you want and let the stones fall where they may”. You’d have to come up with a pretty decent basis for introducing such an idea. “Cynosis” has been mentioned in the Empyrean Age book, though in that novel it’s from any kind of warp or jump and I couldn’t find any reference to it affecting capsuleers themselves.
A couple ideas:
1. You could do it on an individual per-ship basis and pitch it as “your non-capsuleer crew can’t handle that much cyno jumping in so little time”. While on paper you could say that it means coalitions will just start stocking midpoints with ships, at some point it also means the coalition in question will either need a safe POS to jump their titan to so they can continue to bridge, or multiple titans staged in multiple midpoints. Once you leave your coalition’s space, neither of those is an attractive/feasible option, especially if the midpoints involved include NPC null or populated lowsec. In addition, since Jump Freighters can’t make constant runs anymore from Jita, it’s possible that this system would be able to kickstart industry and manufacturing in null as it finally becomes more time- and isk-efficient to build ships at home instead of jumping them in, though realistically that’s a pipe dream at best, because multiple JFs for each logistics guy is well within the reach of most sov null entities.
Obviously, there’s still problems with having PPP be on a by-ship basis. Not to mention that the current coalitions will have to be fragmented before PPP on a ship-by-ship basis will be effective in reducing the range at which someone can show up to a fight. But it seems more logical (if a little harder to implement. What if ships get repackaged?) than having it be an arbitrary limit on the player characters.
2. Keep it as a character-bound trait, but reduce the initial amount to 8 LY. Then, to get it to the full 24, you’re required to train a skill, grants 60% increased PPP cap per level. Sure, it’s still sort of an arbitrary limit on your abilities, but now it’s the same kind of limit as the ones on jump cloning; one that you can modify with the right amount of ISK and a little bit of time.
Or, you could just make sov bills get exponentially larger with each additional system held, an idea that I believe has been suggested many times.
February 11, 2014 at 6:48 pm
A very good read. I’ve been thinking about these things lately myself, through the lens of mercenaries. The unipolarity of EVE, I feel, is a major contributing factor in what I see as a decline in the demand of mercenaries – that is to say, when an organization’s power is so great it can reach out and touch just about anything, anywhere.
I fear that CCP isn’t brave enough to make a change like this, but something that makes taking and holding massive swathes of territory a risky, fragile state is necessary. If CCP decided that this was the way to do it, I’d be on board.
February 12, 2014 at 8:07 am
Hope, has always been my friend.
February 11, 2014 at 7:20 pm
So… How does jump cloning figure into PPP? If I have JCs at opposite ends of the galaxy, am I physically incapable of going from one to the other without having bridge clones in the middle?
I feel like keeping the JC timer and thinking of it as a cost-free version of the pod express would be easier for people to understand, as well as preventing oddities like JCs that can never be reached from each other. Also, incidentally, I’m pretty sure the limit on one JC plus your current clone in a station is actually an architectural limitation, not a balance limitation.
February 12, 2014 at 8:05 am
You can always fly till you are in range and then dock and jump clone. A benefit to the change that I wish more people would consider is stacking up a few jump clones with different setups to enhance different ships into one system or station. This would most likely see more use in space such as high sec and even low sec I think as burning up PPP for jump drives and bridges would be less frequent as you see in null space.
If there is physical architectural limitations for storing jump clones in a station, then I say address it. Find a way to make it work. Easier said than done, but if that’s what it takes – so be it.
February 11, 2014 at 7:29 pm
I imagine CCP may like the idea. It would lead to players needing more ALT’s to effective have enough movement allowance to move what they want in the same way they do today.
February 11, 2014 at 7:30 pm
..on the other hand, will making the game more expensive to play reduce the size/impact of the large alliances?
February 12, 2014 at 8:00 am
Sure, but limiting the game to people who are really well off in real life is pretty selfish. EVE should be a game enjoyed by all.
February 11, 2014 at 7:34 pm
need an edit buttan. Or.. will making it more expensive just cut player count?
February 12, 2014 at 7:59 am
What do you mean an edit button? Making what more expensive?
February 12, 2014 at 1:40 pm
I wanted to put all those replies into my original post. but couldnt find an edit button on my original post.
Making the game more expensive – if peope need more ALT’s to regain the movement capabilities they are used to, the game becomes more expensive to play.
February 11, 2014 at 8:11 pm
Clear statement of the problem. Interesting solution.
One question: You have 0 PPP left. You are podded 30 jumps from your medical clone. You have no jump clones. What happens?
February 12, 2014 at 7:58 am
If you are podded with no PPP, then you show up where you set your medical clone like you do now. Nothing about that changes.
February 12, 2014 at 4:51 pm
Interesting idea. Undecided on it (I’m not a sov guy); but quick suggestion would be to change “being podded” to “changing med clone location” .. sure I guess being podded is a form of teleportation, but isn’t it a generally useless one? Changing the location of your clone prior to a “blood jump” is what influences your power projection. I guess there’ll be cases of people using that “free” teleport to defend home areas, but dying is already expensive enough.
February 13, 2014 at 4:40 am
Not long ago a Goonswarm Federation Leviathan was tackled on a station in the north-west. Most of all active members of that alliance were down in the south-east. Over 300 of them immediately clone jumped or suicide podded right back up there instantly to save it. Granted it was with the help of Black Legion, but my point stands. They teleported across the map to bail out the titan.
February 11, 2014 at 11:09 pm
Some additional thoughts to go with that:
-remove the ‘bridge’ ability from all ships. Caps can still jump but sub caps MUST use either JB’s or gates.
-Remove all autonomous notifications. If you want to know when your stuff is being attacked, go watch it.
-don’t have timers be visible, make it a suprise. Maybe have it only be accessible to the owner by ‘accessing’ the structure via <5000m and a right-click function.
-you mention flat timers aren't viable because then everyone would just time it into one big push. But if they put all their eggs in one basket and lock all their forces into one system for say 2 hours, that's 2 hours that can be spent roaming around reinforcing other targets unhindered.
Just some thoughts that occurred to me.
February 12, 2014 at 7:57 am
I have been saying structure notification mails need to die for a couple years now.
February 12, 2014 at 5:59 pm
Not just structure notifications, all notifications. You shouldn’t be notified when someone SBU’s your backwater system that no one lives in. Or when your POS runs out of fuel. Things like this are easy to manage for small groups but up the maintenance and man hours for large groups, which is the trade-off that you make for having more people and space. The only notifications you should get are for war-dec’s and such since these are all declared remotely as well.
As for your article, good analysis but something about a ‘pool’ seems a little off. I’m not saying this isn’t a viable solution but it’s still definitely far from a refined control.
February 13, 2014 at 4:38 am
I consider all of those structure mails.
February 11, 2014 at 11:36 pm
“If anyone in the game can descend upon you before you are done killing a POS tower, onlining a System Blockade Unit, done invading and taking over a system; what is the only real defense against it? Numbers.”
I think your logic is backwards. People do not form coalitions to defend against random interference in their fights, they form the coalitions because that’s what the game rewards. The team with the most numbers wins every war, and given that, every sensible group has formed a dozen allies around itself. Over 5+ years the groups that failed to do this have been pushed out, until we reach a state of only two big players left. As long as numbers win we will never go back to the days of dozens of warring factions.
February 12, 2014 at 12:47 am
I would go to disagree with the idea that adding such an arbitrary, limiting mechanic as a “Power Projection Pool”, especially on the player level, is beneficial.
The whole point of Eve is having empowered players. If I so chose, I could fly a Carrier anywhere in the galaxy and drop it on top of some poor unsuspecting ratters. If you limit the instantaneous mobility of players, especially when considering that the current balancing mechanics of requiring Capacitor power and costly fuels, you’re targeting the problem at the player level, whereas your entire point is that coalition level power projection is the problem. If you treat a problem at the player level, it leads to players finding ways around at that level as well: people could keep an alt specifically for tactical combat, so as to keep the Power Projection Pool high on that one character.
Instead, the issue here is one of mechanics. In this sci-fi universe we live in, the technologies of the jump drive fit the lore. A PPP mechanic also spits on that established lore- there’s no reason to introduce an arbitrary limit of strategic movement on singular characters that would fit in with the game’s canon.
There are two solutions as I see it.
The first is simple: Jump drives and bridges, as they exist currently, are instantaneous means of teleporting players. If the issue here is the speed with which this happens, simply make the Jump drive and bridges the equivalent of an interstellar warp drive: instead of being able to jump 12 lightyears in a single moment, make that take a few minutes at most. Not only would this vastly increase the time spent in transit when compared to instantaneous jumps, but it would add a more strategic mechanic to the game. If it takes 12 minutes to bridge a force across the entire galaxy, who knows how the tactical situation may change in those 12 minutes? It would make people give more thought to committing these large strategic forces when the situation at the fight site can change more drastically in the time it takes to get those forces there. This effectively solves the problem you speak of when you lament the fact that large forces can be moved instantly, and stimulates a more tactical environment in Eve combat. At no other point in human history have commanders been able to immediately commit large forces like the ones you talk about here on a whim, and the fact that Eve allows for that means the tactical aspect of the game focuses on overwhelming numbers rather than strategic deployments (which is the reason why I like wormholes so much; when your enemy has to pick and choose what it fights you with, things are much more meaningful).
The second is to change how jump drives and bridges work, which would require a change in mechanics. Something along the lines of requiring cynosural fields to be active for a certain amount of time (under the pretext of “stabilizing” them) would make the act of lighting a cyno more difficult, much less jumping to it. At the same time, cynosural field generators could also be treated more like wormholes, only allowing a certain amount of mass through for each cycle. If that limit was exceeded, the cyno would collapse and require more fuel to be started again. The amount of mass could be much larger for larger ships (and therefore larger portals), thus getting rid of the “disposable cyno frig” niche and making a role for Recon cruisers and the like as reliable, high-mass-transit cyno ships.
Marlona, I respect you and you are wonderfully eloquent in your discussion of the problem. I just disagree with the notion that adding another artificial cap to individual player strength (*COUGH COUGH* DRONE ASSIST CAP *COUGH*) is a good thing for Eve. In a game where individual freedom is emphasized, limiting the strategic mobility of singular players is a surefire way to make it less fun. I should be able to have the freedom to jump around the galaxy if the appropriate jump bridges and cynos are provided, and there shouldn’t be a game mechanic restricting me to do so; I’m already risking a ship with the jump drive and spending the cost on fuel to do such a thing in the first place.
I hope to hear back from you. Sincerely,
Sunglasses Legacy
February 12, 2014 at 1:02 am
I was with you until the absurd and convoluted “PPP” suggestion. I agree teleporting is an issue in the game right now, but a more elegant solution is absolutely required instead of this “PPP” system. What kind of a system, I have no idea.
Also, I’m not sure if making that suggestion was such a good idea, as now instead of discussing how broken teleportation is, people are going to focus on the suggestion and its issues.
February 12, 2014 at 1:09 am
I like this article in theory… meaning I like how you came about it and your thought process, though I’m not sure I agree. It’s definitely something to mull over though. Very nice article.
A couple criticisms:
1.) While I understand you want to tie all manner of “teleportation” together in this system, I disagree with tying pod jumping to the system, due to the way pilots are organized in EVE. While players tend to use “pod jumping” in a similar fashion as clone jumping, pod deaths are directly tied to PvP. If you engage in any sort of PvP, you always risk losing your pod, but you don’t always “risk” resetting your clone jump timer.
So in your system, undocking always means you’re risking PPP, which means that the next step by organizations (Corps/Alliances/Coalitions) would be to encourage pilots not to PvP because this may cost them PPP, which I think the last thing we need is a system element discouraging PvP. This would hit newer/poorer players the hardest, since newer players are encourage to go out, fight, and die often, so that they get battle experience, but the cost of doing so would most likely disclude them from strat ops. Poorer players would also be discouraged from PPP since they most likely don’t have multiple alts to dedicate to various tasks, and so unlike rich players who have strategic alts standing by for the warhorn while doing small PvP with a dedicated alt, the Poorer players are using one alt to do everything and so will have a higher chance of getting discluded from strategic ops.
TL;DR: Decouple Pod Deaths from the PPP system because it discourages fun and overly favors people with multiple alts.
2.) I disagree with using alts being impractical about getting around this system, at least for Capitals. Many things in EVE were or are “impractical”, and yet players have time and again demonstrated that it’s not as impractical as once thought. More specifically though… I’ll make some assumptions, still assuming that pod deaths count in your system.
Let’s take a situation of a Carrier trying to jump across the galaxy. The pull cost tier, from largest pull to lowest pull, and relevant to the example, would probably be Jump Drive > Jump Clone > Pod.
So for one account, you can load 3 characters onto it, and people tend to have dedicated accounts for the Capital Pilots anyway. While your main character (battle pilot) is skilled up to be able to fight effectively in its carrier, the other two characters only need minimal training to sit in and pilot the carrier to act as mules/range extenders. For the first leg of the trip, you use your one of your mule alts to use up its PPP to teleport the carrier to on the first leg of a journey. On the second leg, you have your next Mule pod jump or Jump clone to where the carrier was dropped off, and it uses its remaining PPP to make it to the second leg of the journey. For the final trip, your main character pod jumps (implants in the Carrier cargo bay) or jump clones to the second leg, and uses its remaining PPP to make it to the battle. This assumes you needed the pooled PPP of all three characters to make it to the battle in question anyway.
And this only requires one subscription for these three characters, apart from the possible initial cost of transfering two carrier mule characters onto their Capital Pilot account.
Jump Planning tools would be developed (Especially by the folks at GARPA) just like we have now. The first rudimentary tool would calculate how many characters from the same source point it would take to calculate. The advanced tool would allow you to input the starting point where your carrier is stored, the end point, your cyno locations, the location of your battle pilot characters, the location of all your mule characters (much like you can input the location of all your cyno alts currently), and the method of travel of for the mule characters. The program would then calculate the most efficient method of travel, taking into account the travel costs of your mule characters and it would pick the battle pilot character that could most efficiently reach the battle with the least PPP cost. Players would have to tinker with their method of travel for each character until they came up with something pleasing.
The more advanced tool would just let you input the start point, end point, cyno, and all relevent characters, and would just generate the most efficient jump plan overall. And I’m pretty sure GARPA could more or less develop the likes of the second tool within a reasonable amount of time, because the equations done are fairly similar to the ones it calculates now.
While more cost and work is added for the Carrier (and by extension, Super Carrier/Titan) Pilot, I don’t think this would be too much to be adopted as an alliance/coalition policy for their Capital Pilots to work towards. There would theoretically be more risk using less skilled pilots during the earlier legs in the jump though, and I don’t think this method scales well with subcaps as much due to the cost involved.
Other than that, I liked the article. Thanks!
February 12, 2014 at 7:54 am
The reason I tied in being podded is because of how much it is used to travel. A recent example is a Leviathan was tackled off a station in the north-west of the game map. During that time the alliance and coalition that Leviathan pilot belonged to was on the opposite side of the map in the south-east. They had over 300 pilots death clone back to the area to save the Leviathan in a matter of a couple minutes, long before the titan was in danger. After they were done, death cloned back to the front on the opposite end of the game. Also during battles you would kill someone and within just a couple minutes, they are being bridged right back into the battle. Giving whole new meaning to not just being outnumbered, but no matter how many times you kill that guy, he will be right back very fast. Similar to shooting a guy in a popular first person shooter game and they respawn back in just a few seconds. If they bridge in for the fight, then lose their pod, depending on the distance of the bridge and the distance back to their clone vat bay; they will be taking gates to get back to the battle. During that trip there is chance for more combat along the way and them being delayed even more returning to the main battle.
As far as using alts to circumvent the PPP; it sounds easy until you start to really think about all the situations you will find yourself in. These alts on the same account will not be able to keep pace with each other. In an effort to not waste PPP, you will be taking gates to get to where the capital ship is stored. What happens if you are killed along the way? You lose some PPP. What happens if there is no station to dock the capital? Are you going to eject from it in space, spend time gate traveling with an alt and pray it is still there? The idea of using alts on the same accounts sounds simple at first, but it becomes very complicated fast in practice. Also this will require a significant amount of training time per alt to reach a level of real use in such a system.
And if for some reason it becomes a problem, CCP can always take the training time route. Only the current character skill training can recharge PPP. Then again, there is now the dual and triple PLEX for having more than one account training, so who knows.
February 12, 2014 at 10:35 pm
Mules – if a specific ship has been jumped by ANY character in the last X hours, it can ONLY be jumped by that character OR a maximum of Y LYs (adjust X and Y to taste) . Yes it means tracking who has jumped in which unique ship – but that’s not an impossible task.
More tricky is that ships could still be re-packaged and re-assembled to get a new ID – that would come at the cost of rigs (at least). Possibly C.C.P. could also add a cool down timer between assembling a ship, and it being jump capable – even of an hour or so… Just possibilities I’m throwing out there. The point is, with a decent debate the use of mule accounts can be largely mitigated I think.
More challenging though is the nerfing of general logistics…
C.C.P. have stated they want more stuff to happen in null sec (industry type things) and this at the moment means jumping freighters full of stuff about. The P.P.P. would seriously ruin the game for anyone who is a logistics director – even at a corp level, let alone alliance, coalition or bloc. Either we eliminate the need for Jump Freighter loads of material being bounced about OR we need a way to allow logistics to happen relatively unhindered. Even moving monthly moon goo from a few towers etc (in my corp the job of one or two guys from about 10 or 15 towers all over the place) becomes a total nightmare. And of course it all gets worse for logistics dudes if we manage to nullify mule accounts. It means that the logistics guys will need multiple accounts with multiple jump freighters – not a problem ISK wise at the alliance level – but what a ball-ache in general.
IMHO – Whatever we do to make the fighty-end of Eve more fun can’t come at the further expense of those that dwell at the grindy-end…
February 12, 2014 at 1:12 am
Oh, and if you don’t mind me asking…. why didn’t this appear on TMC? Was it not accepted? Do you no longer write for TMC? Are you branching off to try and start your own blog now?
February 12, 2014 at 7:34 am
They fired me.
February 12, 2014 at 8:23 am
I see. I’m sorry to hear that. While there’s times I didn’t always agree with your points (and i recall instances of your comments catching some of my shitposting, but hey, that’s par for the course), I really liked most of your articles. More often than not they tended to maintain a careful balance between depth, accessibility, and conciseness.
I hope you find success with your blog, so much that the comments section will be overflowing with plenty of people to shitpost upon!
February 12, 2014 at 8:28 am
I did my best to provide an unbiased view on things, although there would be times I would falter.
We will see where this blog goes. I’m new to the scene of doing a blog and trying to figure out a nice template and all that other jazz will take me some time.
February 12, 2014 at 1:58 am
Great article and I hope you become a regular blogger.
I’ve suggested using the new continent (ie beyond CCP Seagull’s player-made stargates) as a PP free sov area. Would that be an easy change to implement rather than the rather political change of nerfing the CFC and PL?
February 12, 2014 at 7:39 am
A teleportation free sov area sounds interesting, but I really would like to see the issue fixed for the whole game to enjoy instead of adding on space that skips over the problem. Then it would become the only place to go instead of enjoying the entire game. Every system should have some form of appeal that a player or even a group of players would like to fly in.
February 12, 2014 at 2:34 am
Reblogged this on Serpentine's Eve and commented:
Marlona Sky, perennial progressive-poster and founder of Flight of a Thousand Rifters, has finally pulled the trigger and started a blog to store all his big-picture posts.
His first post has already been picked up by EN24 and ~spirited discussion~ is happening on Failheap.
February 12, 2014 at 9:12 am
Excellent analysis of the problem, but I don‘t like your solution.
To solve the problem, you have to re-balance capitals first. With regards to the triple constraint, (super-)carriers have to be stripped either of their mobility, or their defensive, or their offensive abilities.
I would pledge to re-balance carriers along the line you can see in our real world: carriers are mobile platforms, which you can move deep into foreign territory. They are very hard to kill, but they don‘t have offensive power per se. Airplanes are their offensive power. Nowadays in EVE this is reflected by drones, but why not completely strip them of drones (fighters, fighter bombers), and instead re-shape them into spawn points for capsuleers?
Carriers could be mobile spawn points: other capsuleers can clone jump to them (like a rorqual), and use it as a medical clone backup facility. Also carriers could be able to carry a lot more frigates and cruisers, but no battlecruisers and battleships at all.
In order to alleviate the power projection problem, carriers could suffer from hull damage, if they jump too far, or too often. Like in Battlestar Galactica. It would have significant damage after a single jump, but could still do well in a fight. But after two jumps in a row, it would be severely damaged, and would have to be repaired in a docking facility, or easily be destroyed in combat.
February 12, 2014 at 4:18 pm
A very good read and a very interesting and realistic way to deal with the wide variation of issues that Power Projection creates. Definitely a big point that the CSM needs to bring up more to CCP.
It also is certainly quite funny that TMC kicked you out, probably wanted to prevent you from posting exactly articles like this, that would stagger goon advancement and in general give rise to more advantages for alliances and coalitons being more focused around smaller areas, in smaller groups.
Since CCP usually likes having an ingame background reasoning for many changes, I shall try to write one up that can be used to realize this change.
How about this:
The Scope Archive: Capsuleers, Jump Drives and Cloning
The structure of a capsuleer’s mind is far more complex and unstable when compared to a normal human’s, due to them essentially sacrificing their original body so that their mind can be digitalized and optimized for “quick” injection of all possible kinds of knowledge with only minimal actual training time involved.
This also enables them to transfer their consciousness into freshly prepared clone bodies again and again within incredibly short time frames, often completely voluntarily and at a rate with which clone shaping technology can only barely keep up.
Since the fairly recent invention of jump drives, jump portals, jump bridge beacons and similar fast travel technology, the empire navies and independent non-capsuleer groups capable of deploying capitals (like the pirate entities living in lawless space) have only made very sporadic use of these methods of travel.
The reasoning behind this it was publicated recently in a study funded by The Scope to be not based on economic backgrounds like capsuleers largely monopolizing the crucial fuel types created by refining interstellar ice nor by the lack of capital capable pilots or the infrastructure to support the capital fleets of the navies.
Instead, the fast movement speed across many light years within a matter of seconds that is inherent to all ships with jump drives and any ships using temporary jump portals created by Titans and Black Ops battleships have proven devastating to the majority of crew members piloting the ships involved in these fast “jumps” between far away solar system.
This has manifested in issues ranging from slight headaches and disorientation to severe mental confusion, nervous breakdowns and in a few rare cases even death.
More stationary methods like anchored starbase jump bridges are also known to create similar, although typically less severe effects after only occasional usage, though the effects are believed to be largely dependent on the movement range involved within a short time frame, since these issues tend to be fairly short lasting and completely vanish in most cases after a day or two of fairly conventional ship movement.
Intensive tests have proven that in contrast to the above problematic methods of navigation, crews using only normal star gates seem to be completely free from these symptoms, even if many star gates between different galactic regions are involved in the test routes, which is accounted to the star gate technology being far older and thus more optimized and partially even based on the technology of races that originally settled New Eden, who seem to have mastered these issues in the past.
While capsuleers and their crews are known to be more resistant to this effect, they are by no means immune, as recent questioning of capsuleers making common use of “jump clones” have confirmed. These mind transfers between multiple bodies kept in stasis until needed are apparently even more taxing on a capsuleer’s mind than dying in a capsule mid-combat or using ships that utilize jump drives or jump portals for navigation.
Death is no stranger to capsuleers and the prospect of dying is nothing unusual to them, although CONCORD reported that heavy usage of “jump” methods and cloning tends to create increasingly erratic behaviour among capsuleers and in some cases what one capsuleer described as “plain insanity”, although so far these effects have not been reported to be permanent for anyone involved.
Although this is the extent of current knowledge involving all these connected cases, some independent researchers among capsuleers mentioned that this may be connected to the so-called “Jovian Disease”, although the current issues seem to be at a far less advanced stage and far more reversible at this point.
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February 14, 2014 at 9:55 pm
Excellent article – thanks for the effort and analysis.
February 17, 2014 at 2:07 pm
Excellent analyis, I like the idea very much and would support such a change. All arugments against it are factors in a triple threat scenerio.
Need more alts to man the cap fleet, less people willing to pay for it.
Need more caps to hold system/region sov, fewer skilled players to do it.
Can’t deploy entire alliance cap fleet across vast distances without risking losing distant unprotected territory.
Reduction of size, scale and frecency of hugh alliance engagements, less time dilation on nodes.
Mid-size Alliances can make a stand or break away from Mega Alliance, more diversity in game.
As a player that prefers small to mid-size corps and alliance, I have never spent any time in Low-sec. I have been entirely focused on Wormhole space because of the protection from huge cap fleet drops. We have a few dreds and carriers to keep the POS bashers at bay as long as we keep an eye on the wormholes at all times this works pretty well.
It would be fun to take the alliance into K-space but we just don’t have the man power and isk to be a anything more than a bug in the road to a Mega Alliance. Doesn’t leave us many options, we can’t beat them so we have to join them, that is not really a choice. Leaving many newer players/corps/allaiances out of the political mix in Null Space.
How fun it would be to pick up a system because the alliance commited all it’s resources to one battle and couldn’t get back in time to defend one they emptied of tactical defense resources? Sure they would have core systems that were impenitrible, but they would always have a frontier, or have to leave something ungaurded while they defended or expanded somewhere else. That is what EVE should be, a game of hard choices with big payoffs and big risks.
Additionly, I would say that skill based and/or anniverary bonuses to add distance to this feature would be a fair way to deploy it to everyone. Example: skilled based everyone starts with 8, + 60% for lvl 5 and +2 for every year in game. So a 10 yr player at lvl 5 would have 44 cyno travel points. Just a thought.
The only players that would be really upset by this would be the ones that have the power already.
February 17, 2014 at 5:23 pm
Excellent analysis of an issue that I wasn’t really thinking about. You are right however, capitals have the movement advantage, and thus can project power more efficiently and more effectively than any other weapon system. There is a delicate balance however that needs to be addressed and I am not sure the PPP suggestion gets to the heart of the problem.
1. To be of use, the battle must somehow escalate, because I think you would rarely see a pre-set titan/capital battle otherwise. I do like the idea of a ship fatigue mechanic that would make strategic placement of the capital as important as other considerations. This would eliminate in the 5 jumps directly to a battle and would reward placement within one to two jumps as being of more importance.
2. Further the problem with Titans and other Capitals can be helped with requiring more coordination. I find it interesting that a wormhole cannot pass the mass of a titan, while a cynofield somehow finds a way to bridge two points in space with seemingly infinite mass. Adding mass limits on Cyno’s and couple them with ships specifically designed to counter some of the limitations brings more interesting game play. A cyno alt isn’t just a character with frig and cyno field theory trained, but must be a bridging ship or recon ship to bring multiple ships through the field. This allows your standard jump freighter to make the jumps through a “normal’ cyno alt, but doesn’t allow that alt to bridge the entire fleet in and out.
3. Another way to help limit power projection is to limit the number of cynos per system. For example. One cyno in system is a 100% chance to land in the correct target system. Two Cyno’s maybe a 98% chance. Three 94%. Four 86% and so on. This causes the cyno chain to spread into multiple systems during mass movements, or requires the use of serial cyno’s. Additionally there is a strategic element of the defender knowing or predicting the cyno chain is being lit and having multiple counter cynos in system to increase the chance of error. Also the prudent commander will have multiple sub caps in the area to defend the cyno chains.
4. Finally the SOV grind mechanic is good for setting up set piece encounters, but puts a ton of strain on the servers. Instead of bashing a single IHUB, the System should be taken by simultaneous closing (dismantling) of jump gates in adjacent systems.
Anyway my two cents. Eve is a game of numbers on the macro level. I wish it was more a game of coordination and skill, where everyone doing their jobs was rewarded, and where it was more difficult to accumulate numbers.
February 17, 2014 at 10:34 pm
Thanks for great summary. I’ve only very recently returned to EvE, playing last time in late … 2003. All the mechanics you outlined certainly look “cool” on paper, but damn – that implementation …
I mean, how could possibly CCP in their rights mind could limit it all basing on /light years/ (it’s like same bulllshit like with scanning PI resources across half the starmap). Limit it to neighbouring systems – so moving large stuff is actually a solid logistic step.
Damn …
February 19, 2014 at 6:00 am
I could see the return of meatshield alliances on the boarders of any powerblock placed to delay any attack for the day or so It would take to mount a defense. If on deployment the block owners could jumpclone back to defensive staging point, wait out the day cooldown and then support their meatshield a day later. Max this mechanic will do is delay a retaliation by a day and nothing can really be achieved in a single day.
I still think sov needs to be effected by player generated influence. NPC’s Killed, Belts mined, anoms run, jumps done. You know, give the sov to people that actually use the space. I know that actually living in a claimed area of space is an insane idea but then thats just me 😛
Bland
February 20, 2014 at 12:17 pm
Excellent read and well written.
I challenge this kind of timer being introduced in game. For those of us who are not sov holders, but still need to zip aorund our homes in null, our gameplay is already limited. Pod Express is a viable option for the Capital-less.
Eve has a penalty mechanic already in it: clones cost ISKies. Titans need fuel and a dedicated pilot in a pricey ship. Other caps need fuel and are vulnerable as they jump into a system via cyno. Jump chains need fuel, need sov to be maintained, etc. Everything has a cost, directly tied to ISK.
Adding a new cost or different cost across the board not only aren’t in line with the existing gameplay, but would be highly unfair to those with no other options based on their gameplay. Not everyone is sov. THe problems you demonstrate are sov issues. Perhaps the “fix” isn’t how fast things travel, but the sov holding mechanic itself: fix the mechanic, and the other problems vanish.
Of course, costs could be increased: jump ranges diminished, fuel use increased, etc. But that may have unintended consequences as well.
But for me, this proposal doesn’t work.
February 23, 2014 at 2:43 pm
The difference between what a smaller entity would use for PPP compared to an entity part of a coalition is pretty drastic. Of course the trick is finding out what is enough for the small guy who is operating in an area they control compared to the large guy who is having to zip all over the map constantly to keep super coalitions in control of half the map. The other thing to consider is the little guy having to travel so far to find action would change too due to players that are part of the block not able to go back and forth across the map.
April 3, 2014 at 4:59 pm
Excellent analysis of the problem but a terrible solution.
Maybe jump bridges and titan bridges should just disappear. Then maybe logistics (actual logistics I mean, not some silly “healer” ship) strategy and tactics would matter more than who has the most bodies.
April 18, 2014 at 7:46 pm
I agree there is an issue of the blobs and the smaller groups getting left out in SOV. However these larger groups are not going to go away, nore their influence by the suggested changes you bring up.
The fact is , it’s harder for a smaller group to take and live in sov then if they went to a WH. There is no individual ship hangers for POS towers, logistics sound like a bit of a nightmare. It’s simply too difficult. Then you have the SoV mechanics to deal with.
SOV mechanics in its current form force entities to control them even if they don’t want them. So you have large swaths of space not being used. Any small group taking sov now are kicked out because they could make an easy staging point for jump bridges ect. Then you need to deal with RF timers just to get rid of this group .
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October 1, 2014 at 6:11 pm
First. CCP seemed to have implemented this system wholesale: http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/long-distance-travel-changes-inbound/
October 1, 2014 at 7:02 pm
Congratulations.
October 2, 2014 at 2:43 am
lol
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