Atkyaz Dreadstalker
Killer Sea Monkeys
4
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Posted - 2014.08.10 03:26:00 -
[1] - Quote
When CCP revamped SOV a while back, they had great intentions, and the ideas they had where good, and sounded like they would work well. A lot of work was put into it, and many of the improvements were really great for the game.
They changed the value of SOV space so that lower true sec space would be better, high income, and more valuable. The idea, as I understand it, was that the more powerful alliances would fight over the better space, leaving the lower value space for smaller groups to get a foot hold in null. previously all null sec was about the same in value. it was believed that having the value of systems fluctuate would drive conflict.
But that is not what happened. The larger alliances just got bigger, and the space they controlled got bigger. Why? The answer is very simple. The cost of maintaining SOV is minimal, and more importantly, holding all that extra space, whether they use it or not, requires very little additional effort. If your power projection allows you to surround yourself with a large amount of empty buffer space, making your core systems even more secure. And holding that extra buffer space requires very little effort. it only makes sense to do so, and why should they not do it? Currently most of that space is filled with renters anyway, creating even more income for the controlling alliances.
I have read a lot of idea's, in this thread, other threads, and even several sources outside of these forums. Although I can not claim any input on the idea's, the best idea I have read is that of occupancy SOV. This is a system where an alliance can not hold space they do not actively use. SOV is dependent on members of the owning alliance actually being active in the system to the point of maintaining the system indexes. The higher the indexes, the more secure and harder the system is to capture. If they do not maintain the indexes their SOV over the system will degrade and the TCU will eventually go offline. This requires members of the alliance actually ratting, mining, and manufacturing, in that system. members of the big alliances that control the higher value system are not going to want to use systems with poor true sec if they have much better systems available to them, and why should they. This would lead to those alliances losing SOV on those low value systems they do not use.
There are many different ideas of how to implement this, including a few great articles outside of the EVE forums. a good summary can be found hereArticle there are ways of doing it that only require small modifications of the existing system. This would be much different from the old system of who ever holds the most POSes in the system gets SOV, or however it used to work. But the core idea, although maybe not perfect, would be a huge improvement over the massive alliances holding hundreds of systems we have now. |