FT Diomedes wrote:Ship Replacement Programs (SRP) are bad for Eve. The alliance and coalition income sources that support them need to go away. In conjunction with hitting the supply side of alliance income, it should become more expensive to hold sovereignty.
I know this will produce a howl of outrage, but please, hear me out. Eve is a game about immersion and consequences. SRP detracts from both. When I first began playing Eve, over seven years ago, there was no SRP. I had to invest hours of gameplay to get ISK to purchase my ships. Most PVE occurred in belts. ISK/hour was low. That was hours I had to be in space, providing potential content for others. I had a reason to be in game for hours outside of fleets. Hours of work and effort could explode in seconds. Eve had consequences. Eve was thrilling. My hands literally shook when I warped a battleship into a brawl. The adrenalin was intoxicating and addictive. One night my alliance leader warped his Aeon to a gate against 200 hostiles. Then disconnected. I lost five battleships that night. My alliance lost several carriers saving his dumb ass. There was no SRP for that fight. I was financially devastated. It remains the most fun I have ever had in Eve.
Today, things are very different. The two major coalitions have ample moon and renter incomes to support huge areas of sovereignty and massive SRP programs. Even the Goons, who were regarded as low SP morons in Rifters seven years ago, provide alliance level subsidies for capital ship pilots. Every capable alliance has some passive income source they can trickle down to the members.
The result is that many people no longer have to play Eve. They play another game and wait for a Jabber ping, or log in once a night to see if anything is going on. Nothing ever is, because no one in null sec has a reason to play the game! Major null sec warfare is dead, because of self-imposed restrictions and the fact that grinding sovereignty sucks. Small gangs can roam for hours while finding mostly empty belts because very few people have to rat or mine. So, the small gangs stop going out and are replaced with an AFK cyno alt sitting in a ratting system just on the off chance that some poor bastard logs in to grind up a PLEX, because the game is not exciting enough to be worth $15/month. The dude controlling the alt is asleep, playing another game, or running incursions in highsec to PLEX his AFK alt. Grinding for PLEX or to get a Supercapital is the only reason most people rat or mine in null sec. Or because they are being farmed like a space peasant by a coalition.
Once I get enough ISK for a T1 cruiser, I can go join fleets and keep replacing it pretty much indefinitely just off SRP. Losing it is meaningless. Eve has gone from being a game with consequences to being more like a first person shooter with nearly instant respawn. This makes Eve a less exciting and less immersive game.
My solution: Get rid of moon mining completely. Replace it with new mining sites where people can obtain those raw materials. This puts people in space, which provides content for more than the occasional moon POS bash. It cuts out one pillar of coalition income. Players now attack players instead of structures.
That is only half the issue. In this era, most alliance income comes from renters. Most sovereignty is held by holding corporations. Make sovereignty a corporation rather than alliance thing. Limit the amount of sovereignty systems one corporation can hold. Or scale the costs dramatically above a certain threshold. Or both. Make it so that you must control the entire constellation to hold any sovereignty. One corp holding one constellation? No issues. One corp holding two constellations? More expensive or not allowed. Of course coalitions will adapt by adding more holding corporations, but one goal is to increase the hassle for the largest sovereignty holders while having a minimal impact on little guys. More holding corporations is more chances for fraud or forgotten sovereignty bills.
Coincidentally, if done properly this would also greatly affect jump bridge networks, which is part of the issue with force projection. Want to have a jump bridge network that spans Eve? Must have sovereignty in many constellations, which means greater fees for sov. Then make jump bridges only work for corp members, not based on standings. Now, if you want the jump bridge network, you cannot have a bunch of little holding corps controlling all the space.
Do something similar with cynos - the cyno pilot must be in the same corporation or alliance. Boom, all those neutral cyno alts have to unmask and show their affiliation. Coordinating coalition ops is much harder. That would tend to make people clump up into mega corps or alliances, but then they bear the increased cost of sovereignty and stand to lose corp identities if they blob up.
Now kick corporations in the teeth. Non-NPC corporations can no longer tax members directly in-game. They cannot charge any fees in stations or tax refining. They have to rely on donations for corporate sovereignty bills or other programs. More opportunities for freeloading. Less passive income for the corporation from those who actually play the game. Good, close knit corps will still function, but mega corps will suffer.
This would not solve every issue with Eve, but it would be a step in the right direction.