I'm not exactly jumping for joy over the suggestions here simply because I don't seriously believe PL would just dump the current rental empire model for the sake of the health of Eve.

Where were these radical ideas after the moon goo nerf? Where were these ideas after the Halloween War? I understand you are all so terribly bored you drop Supers on cruisers but honestly? I doubt you could convince people to give up easy income.

Rental income is the easiest thing in existence. Basically CFC/Nc./PL have become landlords nothing more. And due to botlord agreements for both sides to abstain from hurting each others rental space these ideas make even less sense.

Can you seriously convince these people to unclutch their pearls long enough to see there's more to Eve than a blinking walllet? I doubt it.

And what of PL's super cap force? There's just too many unanswered questions and even though the ideas are radical and refreshing, I doubt they will ever come to fruition.

CCP depends upon these once a year proxy wars to advertise 2000 man space battles to draw more people in. What these people don't understand is the 10% tidi, the billions of isk needed to field huge behemoths let alone the years to train such ships too.

So it's a catch 22. You either revert Eve back to an even more niche game and lose half the subscribers or you let the coalitions become so bloated and fat that the line members eventually bleed off and you lose those people anyway.

These are fresh ideas but hardly practical and certainly laughable when leaders of entities like yours scoff at anything that would hurt their easy income.

CCP depends upon these once a year proxy wars to advertise 2000 man space battles to draw more people in. What these people don't understand is the 10% tidi, the billions of isk needed to field huge behemoths let alone the years to train such ships too.

My analogy of Supers being Eve's ICBM was correct then. They seem to be more of a deterrent than anything else. If you could get seriously backing in PL for Manfreds ideas there would be some weight to it. Not that Manfred himself isn't weight enough behind them.

You just sound as if youre making excuses because you dont want the current meta to change. I don't really care about your opinion, youre wrong. It's clear its pointless tryingto reason with you.

Changing things doesn't mean they have to be hard it could mean you arrive to same endstate via a new or different means.

My analogy of Supers being Eve's ICBM was correct then. They seem to be more of a deterrent than anything else. If you could get seriously backing in PL for Manfreds ideas there would be some weight to it. Not that Manfred himself isn't weight enough behind them.

You got my support on this. Gate camping shipping lanes? Holy **** it's almost like Piracy would be profitable again!

Please link something where I have said the current sov system is fine. Or you could continue making up more stuff about me I suppose.

I'm going to try again....

What I was trying to suggest, and my fault that I failed, is that one solution might be to make null logistics less important. If "stuff" is sourced locally more than bought in bulk in empire and then jumped out to null then logistics becomes less of a thing.

Right now, and even with the various changes to industry, making things in null is not going to be much of a thing except for various high end commodities. For example, making JFs in null might become a big thing. Making cruiser hulls, probably not.

I agree with much of Manny's goals (more people mining in null, more people manufacturing in null, systems being more intensely used, I'm not even against seeing the current null empires contract in size and opening up huge swaths of space for potential new comers). I'm just not sure making things inconvenient is the way to go. Trying to force people into an outcome is not as easy or healthy as providing incentives where people willingly move towards that outcome.

Most people focus on "force". Change the rules so people can't do something anymore instead of changing the rules so they don't want to do what they are currently doing and do something else, that also could have positive long term "health" benefits for the game.

Yes, the latter is probably quite a bit harder, but at the same time it is more consistent with the notion of the sandbox game. The former, however, is less consistent with a sandbox game. It really comes down to: you aren't sandboxing like I think you should, so I'm going to stop you from sandboxing that way.

Let me first just say I am but one man. I do not encompass the decision making for PL or CCP. I can tell you PL has weathered many changes in the game and been fine. I am sure we can weather more. We play as a team and strive for excellence. Ultimately I would like to think that EVERYONE wants a healthier Eve. One that continues to grow and is around for a very long time. I personally and willing to unclutch these so called "pearls" for that endstate. I think it would be exciting to see a more vibrant nullsec one where new groups can come out and carve themselves out a piece. I still think we would still see massive headline making fights. But I also think that not every fight will be a %10 Tidifest that we have now. I think the blocks will break up and the ones that refuse will atrophy from lack of content. There members will become disengaged. Groups like PL would have to change drastically we would either have to live in our sov to protect the rental space around it ( this limits us from being the boogeyman elsewhere) or we become the nomadic mercenary ( which means we can be the boogeyman anywhere but not at the same time).

You saying im Fat bro ? Thats it Fite me now!

I think supers and capitals are cool and exciting. They make cool headlines and we need them for the hitpoints of structures. The problem has always has been power projection. Hell we have so many of the things because its easy as hell for 1 guy to move the minerals to build one to nullsec in a single day.

No cyno's at top belt? Fine : P And no you aren't fat. I'm the fat American riding a power scooter lol.

I agree with the spirit of what you are saying. My changes just do change the way people do things and offer new ways to do things that arrive at the same destination just differently. Ultimately we make these changes for the oveall welfare of nullsec and by extension of Eve something I think we can all get behind.

I'm also worried they might be a bit too much to introduce in one update. Do you have any kind of phased in plan?

I don't I just hope this discussion helps CCP in some way that in part or parcel. Honestly I think this all can be implemented at once just plenty of advance warning and testing for bugs and etc.

Quick technical question:

What exactly do you mean by adjacent?

Connected by gate--i.e. a JB would be a "safish" way to get from one system to the next and avoid gate camps.

Or some other definition? The reason I as is that on a 2-d map systems that are "adjacent" can be rather far away and involve a number of gates.

Sorry if this were answered somewhere else in the thread....15 pages is a bit of slog to read.

I think supers and capitals are cool and exciting. They make cool headlines and we need them for the hitpoints of structures. The problem has always has been power projection. Hell we have so many of the things because its easy as hell for 1 guy to move the minerals to build one to nullsec in a single day.

We shouldn't, though. Grinding EHP sucks. Grinding EHP is also the only way to take sov right now. Those can't go together when the only thing that lets you grind EHP without suicide involves 300b+ in supercaps and a batphone to your friendly neighborhood CFC/PL/N3 supercap FC who will show up to save your bacon if your unfriendly neighborhood PL/N3/CFC supercap FC shows up to blow you up for giggles.

They are cool and exciting because they're the only thing left where losses are significant - back in the day wiping a dread fleet was a horrific disaster, while today we could have the HED turkey shoot and have the CFC show up next week with a brand new dreadfleet. But you risk mudflation by just saying well now supercaps must be a thing because we must have a more expensive thing.

And we have so many of the things because for years you needed supercaps to be anyone. Moving minerals to 0.0 might be an easy day's work, but getting them compressed, and getting them uncompressed and into the tower...not so much (you're looking at 50 round trip freighter runs on the 0.0 side - you can outsource the highsec ones if you can afford to risk your build station being overloaded when they arrive). People would have built nearly as many if they were five times as hard to build because you simply had to have them to be anyone in the AOE/Tracking titan era. Now, less so, but you're building as fast as you can con people into flying them and so are we because we can'r risk the other side getting a definitive supercap edge.

If it were just supers that were the problem, nerfing them would be the solution. Supers still need to be nerfed - make them twice as good as a dread and cost 5 times the price, but its not the only thing that needs fixing.

As a result, even if you have resisted joining a coalition, any war you get into can rapidly escalate to one with a coalition on the other side and you simply must be friendly with their enemy to survive. Most stupid responses to bipolar eve just tell people to have less blues. Idiots who follow this advice end up like TEST. You may not like coalitions, but you'll learn to live with them or you'll learn to live in highsec in the current system.

Ironically the highest posts objecting to Manfreds ideas are members of the CFC. Which really should come at no surprise. TEST may have died but for all their blathering at least they broke away and did things away from the HBC.
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When BL logged your members raged including Blarf. How dare we deny your 1000 people content? You don't get it do you? There's too many fish in this ever shrinking blue sea.

Basically the idea that you can just nerf specific things and solve power projection is a fantasy. It's garbage and while you can slap on individual bandaids to prolong the time people will suffer through the current model the best you can do is manage the symptoms.

The complaints about power projection really add up to complaints about one thing and its side effects: bipolar eve. Bipolar eve is the creation of tons of factors that make it so that the only viable way to survive is to be able to count on about half the universe being blue to you if things really go down. That is the child of tons of factors, most poorly understood by the Marlonas of the world. Manny - though I disagree with him a lot on the changes you need to make - gets that you need really fundamental changes that rework core aspects of the game.

The main driving forces behind bipolar eve are:

1) Survival. It is possible for any war to become a galactic war. Just being bigger than your neighbor doesn't mean you can beat them, because your neighbor can beg admission to a coalition and suddenly call in a lot more support. This support can come from anywhere. Many people focus too much on rapid movement - that PL can be anywhere on the map in 10 minutes. That's a thing, yes, but not a big one. If PL takes two days to deploy, they still can deploy and suddenly shift the tide. As a result, even if you have resisted joining a coalition, any war you get into can rapidly escalate to one with a coalition on the other side and you simply must be friendly with their enemy to survive. Most stupid responses to bipolar eve just tell people to have less blues. Idiots who follow this advice end up like TEST. You may not like coalitions, but you'll learn to live with them or you'll learn to live in highsec in the current system. There are countless things that feed into this. That you can cyno capitals from one end of the map to another, and fight on two fronts at once. That modern doctrines use small ships (HACs, T3s, etc) that can often be imported much more easily than battleship fleets. That alliances are rich enough to stock markets themselves and not rely on motivating their members to do it. That alliances can import battleships en masse anyway when they're not using small ships. Jump clones. Podding. Dominion sov. All of these feed into it and you can't just hit one and expect the problem to go away.

2) Lack of serious inhibitions in controlling space. It is trivial to have bills automatically paid and maintain sov over an entire region without any serious effort. As a result there's nothing that really disincentivizes sprawling as far as you can. Keeping sov only requires effort when you face an attack. With pos warfare, you'd have to fuel a tower in each system you wanted to keep - but having only a single tower meant it was easy for a surprise attack to overwhelm you as your attacker got up more POS by surprise because you were lazy about the region. Now, any attacker hitting some renter system that no goon has been to in a year faces nearly the same obstacles as if they choose to invade Deklein itself. Sprawl does not strain an organization. Many people try to say that cost should go up exponentially. That's just not workable: cost does not balance things well in EVE, especially in 0.0 where the old guard will always be richer than the upstarts. Plus, you just evade the exponential costs through one of many obvious and unpatchable ways around it. Maintaining an empire needs to cost effort. We can always find more isk. We can't always find more people to run towers, in space we don't live in.

3) Dominion Sov: Nobody likes this. The fundamental problems with it however are generally not comprehensively understood: people see individual things wrong with it but rarely assemble them into a coherent whole because Dominion Sov is bad both for the attacker AND the defender, something people often miss.

Why dominion sov is bad for the attacker is generally understood: that all your progress resets entirely if you lose a single fight, fights are based on gigantic bricks of EHP, and that when facing an enemy who has given up you still have to grind every bit of that EHP anyway.

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Dominion sov, by reducing everything to timer fights over EHP, screws everyone.

4) Supercaps. Death to supercaps. It is one of the great things about B-R that now that there is rough supercap parity, everyone can finally agree on death to supercaps in theory without it being nearly as political. Supercaps make it essentially impossible for anyone to field any supercaps or capitals without being able to batphone 51% of the galaxy's supercaps. Their speed and their invulnerability to anything but more supercaps make them utter death to new alliances in EVE. Nobody can build a capital fleet or a supercap fleet without being on good terms with their local supercap lords - and with Dominion sov, you need those.

Long and very good post.

TEST died because they're morons. They got the full backing of the N3 coalition despite their idioticy - they just had to cede an entire region to get it. They just lost anyway because they were irredeemable morons. You've got to love that every offensive N3 managed while Goonswarm was cocking up the initial phases of the war ground to a halt without us lifting a finger because TEST didn't notice the altcorp we had in their alliance despite months of SBUs vanishing, and that was just one of the many hilarious TEST cockups. As to the second thing, I don't know what nonsense you're referring to but it assuredly didn't happen.

More to the point, your entire post is emblematic of the biggest mistake people make discussing the survival issue. EVE's gameplay forces coalitions. You cannot solve it by whining about hostile coalition lords: they're coalition lords because that's the only way to win. People who won't play the game get thrown out by people who will. You can't solve the problem by bitching about the bad people who are winning the current game because if you take them out they'll just be replaced by new people willing to play the game as it is instead of how you want it to be. Evolution is a ***** when it's selecting for something you don't want.

This is not a meaningful restriction, as I can just own multiple hulls and/or pilots (depending on implementation) and use them Pony Express style to achieve the same gameplay as today. These types of restrictions just gate gameplay out for pilots with less money or time (typically, but not always newer players) with no real meaningful restriction for the time or money richer players.