Julius Rigel
131
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Posted - 2014.01.23 11:34:00 -
[1] - Quote
Sigras wrote:I believe that null sec should be a few large groups with a bunch of smaller groups fighting over the space they can get. I disagree with this, in a sense. Because:
Sigras wrote:Groups should not be able to or not want to hold large swaths of space that they're not using I don't think they are, as it is.
As I see it, losing sovereignty, on occasion happens because a force larger than yourself has decided that it wants your space, and all your available defensive resources are not enough to defeat all of their offensive resources, and all your available offensive resources aren't enough to defeat all the defensive resources that they invest into your ex-sov, their new sov.
But more often than not, it seems like sov changes hands mostly based on feuds or greed or some other ideological factor that has no correlation to the size and activity of either the attacker or defender.
That is to say, this hypothetical:
Alliance A has enough people to defend and farm (utilize all the space, asteroids, rats, etc. of) 25 solar systems, and alliance B has enough people to defend and farm 25 systems. If alliance A gathers all their people up and invades alliance B to take one of their systems, they now have 26 systems, but only enough people to keep an effective security schedule rotating for 25 systems.
In theory this means that at all time there should be exactly one system within alliance A's space that is completely undefended, and anywhere else you would try to attack would result in an adequate response, for instance having your subcap fleet shut down when trying to bash cyno jammers, or whatever is the first step in invading a system these days.
But in practice, alliance A is not going to take over the 26th system and just leave one of their old systems in order to move miners, ratters, probers, roamers, and such to the new system. In practice they're just going to spread out. Meaning all of their systems are mostly protected, and a fleet forming to thwart invaders will be mostly adequate, and so on.
This, I think, is what leads to the ultimate problem: One group overextends and becomes vulnerable, another group sees this and tries to take advantage of it by using ALL their available resources to attack. This in turn encourages the defending group to use ALL their available resources to defend, and that leads to hitting the physical boundaries of the limitations of software and hardware - a number of packets needing to be processed by the server that exceeds (by more than one order of magnitude (accounting for 10% tie-dye)) the maximum processing frequency of the server.
Now, that's not to say that this technical problem isn't a problem - it's a problem that something which is possible within the rules of the game (the "game mechanics") is impossible within the rules of physics (that specific rack of server blades running the node is incapable of calculating the things which are supposed to happen on that node). I'm not saying it's not a problem. All I'm saying is, while group A and group B are busy piling 97% of their players into one node, whose helping themselves to all the A and B sov hosted on all the other nodes? Whose taking advantage of all the juicy ratting and mining upgrades that nobody is around to utilize?
Certainly, there are many factors in this, and I'm not familiar with all of them, but I think that a big part of the problem is tunnel vision - players obsess over the meta-game, and put more and more effort into executing the traditional "blob" strategy without exploring other options. Perhaps I am wrong, and a competent leader is able to explain to me why alternative strategies are not viable. Why you could not create a fork or a feint over multiple systems, why it's not possible to drive out a sov holder with guerrilla tactics, why it's imperative for an alliance or coalition to hold so much space that they inevitably fail to defend it.
So to answer your question; what do I think 0.0 should be? I think 0.0 is what it should be already, and you just need to go there and stir up dust and be the "smaller groups fighting over the space they can get" like you describe. That's what I think. But I could be wrong.
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