The sovereignty system Fozzie described in the dev blog he wrote is extremely poorly thought and half baked. CCP should just take it back to the drawing board and rethink. Meanwhile, perhaps they would also do well to review their assumptions about EVE players and how they behave and plan their actions in game. I'm going to write more about what I think are the peripheral causes as to why Fozzie and others are constantly failing later. For now, I'd like to elaborate on what I think is the central cause behind the dev team's shortsightedness.

It might be just that the faulty line of thought on the dev team's part is assuming that these poorly designed changes will result in people fighting more. I think they are expecting that they can really change bloc (and individual player) behavior solely through changing rules and mechanics and avoiding touching risk-reward balance.

They are wrong.

For instance, as Arrendis mentioned before, Encounter Surveillance Systems weren't adopted en masse by null residents. They were supposed to create fights. Because they did not see any serious adoption, not many fights were created through them.

Has any developer ever thought about why they weren't adopted by null residents?

More importantly, why is Fozzie's dev blog containing statistics makes him sound like an apologist, or worse, a distressed middle-level executive trying to defend his design through cooking up his numbers, when his plan obviously failed to achieve the intended objectives? If you look at the number carefully, Fozzie is only able to say 'hurray, my plan is doing okay and null sec pvp-related player deaths increased', because Pandemic Legion got bored and decided to farm HERO coalition. I especially laughed out loud and ended up spilling the Turkish coffee I've been sipping when I saw that Deklein region, the place I live in and the revered Goon homeland, has seen PvP related losses decrease by 20% since Phoebe and Jump Fatigue hit. Fozzie isn't just doing a terrible job at re-imagining sovereignty, he is also doing a terrible job at covering his own back so that he and his plan can look good to his immediate superiors who no doubt track his so called progress.

I have said this before when Greyscale announced plans for Phoebe before and I'll say it again;

No amount of change and skewing of sandbox mechanics towards a theme park setting will result in players fighting and causing destruction just for the sake of doing so. People also will not fight and create destruction just so that Fozzie and CCP are appeased and are able to recite statistics without good analysis.

Holding space in null is currently is not worth much for all the effort and resources it takes. Even with these changes, it will still not be worth it.

EVE players will always collaborate, cooperate to minimize risks, and the instances of fights that they do not want to take.

The structures that make up the large entities cannot and will not be dismantled through the change of game play mechanics. You cannot change human behavior and tendency to socialize, cooperate and collude to further mutual goals through introducing ~bright ideas~ like this.

We need developers that are ruthlessly pragmatic and in possesion of first-hand knowledge and experience of life in nullsec to fix nullsec, not developers moonlighting as bright idea fairies that don't know the game and the mechanics they are working on. It's the second type of developers who always end up with introducing Hail Mary plans that are destined to fail like this one.

Don't let us. Don't give us the tools to be worse than we already are. Because we will. And we'll enjoy it, for as long as CCP lets us ride that mechanic into the ground. And for every voice saying 'you'll get bored of being jackasses and start behaving rationally', I can only ask: After all these years, when exactly are we, the assembled bastards and griefers throughout nullsec, supposed to get bored of being jackasses?