Zenshift
Down In My Plums
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Posted - 2014.07.14 06:28:00 -
[1] - Quote
It's nice to see all these ideas being tossed around. Talking about this will hopefully lead to some forward movement on the stagnation issue that really has a strangle hold on the game. I think one thing people tend to forget is that good and bad ideas all come from the same place. This is hopefully a place to paint with a broad brush on potential solutions and fixes. Even a bad idea can lead to more critical thinking on the subject.
CCP seems to have painted themselves into a corner and the decay of the game is accelerating as a result. I'm not a fan of the term "power projection". It's a buzz term that gets the point across but I tend to think about the issue as stemming from all the ways mobility is achieved in EVE. So many mechanics to shorten travel times have created a situation where it is not hard to see why the game map feels so small. Mix that with a sov system that encourages organizations to be as big as possible because whoever wins the arms race of warm bodies in fleets or caps wins.
Remember how big eve felt as a new player? Before you had the skills for fast ships, jump drives and clones? I don't think the importance of Infomorph Psychology and the ability to set jump clones can be understated for how game changing it is for a player. And once it happens, there is no going back. Even for a solo player in high sec, it opens so many doors. Instead of adding skills to reduce the cooldown, it might be time to look at this mechanic as a factor in many of the core problems in the game right now.
Jump cloning in its current form allows for a ridiculous amount of mobility (ie power projection) on an individual level, not to mention when done as part of a coordinated staging with thousands of players. It's already been pointed out multiple times in this thread how this one game mechanic completely circumnavigates most changes to the game that would attempt to limit mobility of alliances/coalitions. The level of organization the average null entity has, as well as the size the coalitions, are well past the point where this one mechanic allows them to continually beat down the proverbial "little guy" trying to stake a claim in 0.0. This problem would remain if you deleted every jump capable ship in the game and needs to be addressed directly.
Speaking of jump capable ships, not much more needs to be said on how wrong it is that the largest, most powerful and most necessary ships (based on the current sov system) are the easiest to move quickly around the map en masse. I personally think changing structures to be less of an HP grind and make moving capitals more of a chore through a change to jump drive distances would do a lot to help. Capital doctrines have their place, but it has gotten to the point that they are too much firepower to be allowed to move so quickly around the map.
And logistics isn't hard... but it isn't fun or engaging either. It's able to be done in such a way to minimize the amount of people (but not accounts) involved and is almost impossible to interdict. I don't advocate anything as draconian as deleting jump freighters to fix this but something does need to be done. It's hard to come up with a solution because nobody who has joined the game post 2005?...2006? can really picture anything different. In my own experience I know of small groups of players who have moved out to NPC null and what two ships did they rely on...? JFs and carriers. The issue is I don't think some of my in game experiences would have happened without jump capable ships so it is hard to completely villainize them for their role in "easy" logistics. I don't think rolling back to the days of freighter escorts (way before my time so I have to plead ignorance) will do much for the simple reason that the rest of the game is very different. The days are gone where fleets of 100 were god-like, organizations were small and everyone was new to the game and low on SP. You'd have to roll back cap proliferation, blops and I don't know what all else just to make that old school style of logistics feasible. |