Levarr Burton
B0rthole
   |
Posted - 2011.01.17 20:08:00 -
[1]
Removing jump bridges would actually just exacerbate the stagnant state of much of Sovereign 0.0.
Here's my take on what would actually happen if CCP removed jump bridges:
1) The Sovereign Nulsec economies would go ****-up. These economies depend on both imported minerals, but also tech 2 blueprint copies (for those of us without BPOs), or the datacores required to invent t2 blueprints, those datacores only being seeded (through research agents) in NPC space.
2) The price of minerals in Sovereign Nulsec would skyrocket. Increased difficulty importing high-compression goods would vastly restrict the mineral supply, unless a major redistribution of resource potential was undertaken as well.
3) The price of ships, ammunition and fittings in Sovereign Nulsec would skyrocket. Expect to see prices 50-100% higher than non-hub empire as standard on most items, thanks to #2. Despite this price increase, the profit:effort ratio of production in Sovereign Nulsec would likely decrease, discouraging more people from entering the marketplace.
4) Small-scale PVP would be reduced. Due to increased costs, pilots will have to spend more time earning isk than looking for fights. (time:fun ratio takes a beating here). Pilots in their home regions would also no longer be able to use jump bridges to reach an advantageous point (skipping part of a pipe to get ahead of a gang), making it much easier for fights to be avoided, simply have ships that align faster.
5) Large-scale PVP would shrivel. Between the increased ship costs and the logistical difficulty of shifting large numbers of pilots, only brushfires on the borders of alliance space would be fought, not large-scale invasions. No more having two massive fleets crash into each other, disengage and then wheel about to clash in another part of a region an hour later. Fewer blockbuster, region-defining battles.
6) Power blocks will become more entrenched, not less. The increased cost of conflict will only encourage alliances to be on good behaviour with their immediate neighbours, to protect their (now even more important) isk-making apparatus. Furthermore, and more relevant, is that the current sovereignty mechanics require massive fleets. Hindering the mobility of said fleets would make it near impossible to flip sovereignty in a system, unless your enemy alliance didn't log in for a week or two.
7) Many of the people who reside in Sovereign Nulsec will lose their passion for the game. For these people, the joy of the game isn't in the awful game mechanics, or the sub-par performance of the client, or grinding away enough missions to get a shiny implant from an LP store. For these people, the fun of the game is conflict on a massive scale. The ability to craft a narrative through player actions, and to see that narrative play out through hundreds or thousands of actors. Having a shrewd political decision switch the side of hundreds of pilots, or having a Titan-bridge welp leave an entire fleet hideously out of position. For tens of thousands of EVE players, THAT is the game. Massive conflict. Without the ability to project power on a grandiose scale, you end up with a handful of small, petty wars with no grand goals, no grand scale, and most importantly, with no grand story.
Finally, EVE is already a very time consuming game. The current state of Nulsec logistics, while not perfect, allows the people who enjoy logistics to do what they love, while also allowing the people who don't want to throw away their spare time dragging items around in a computer world to get on with their part of the game.
It seems, from reading this thread, that most of the people supporting the potential removal of jump bridges have little, if any, experience doing large-scale nulsec logistics.
In ur engineering, fixin' ur warp core. |