cconeus
KarmaFleet
Goonswarm Federation
0
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Posted - 2015.03.24 12:30:23 -
[1] - Quote
Honestly CCP... What are you thinking?
Yes, structure grinding is boring. Yes, you need large ships to do so easily. But why this focus on smaller skirmish style warfare? I left the game for quite some time, and when I come back, the dreamland sandbox game I once knew has started to be boxed up like every other game on the market. You are interjecting quite harshly into what was once a free land, and not for the better.
As was stated in the post goals, "This also creates an artificial floor on the size of alliances or coalitions that can be successful in Sovereignty." There SHOULD be a floor size on the alliance or coalitions that can claim sov. It takes a lot of people working together to create and build the alliances capable of supporting such infrastructure, a lot of hours, and a lot of isk. There should be some renown with holding sov, it should not be something any 5 pilots can go do alone.
Even with this goal in mind, the entire system seems structured in a way that will ONLY allow large alliances to flourish. 5 guys for example cannot claim 10 nodes in 7 systems against 10 guys, they just don't have the numbers. That undermines your entire 'you gotta fight for it to get it' idea. Again, all of these goals so far have contradicted each other.
"Goal #6: Spread the largest Sovereignty battles over multiple star systems to take advantage of New EdenGÇÖs varied geography and to better manage server load."
Take advantage of New Eden's varied geography.... this sounds like a very thin excuse for the second part, which if your PR people were smart, wouldn't have brought our attention to in the first place. We are players, most of us do not care about your business practices or if your servers can handle it. We pay (300,000 active players x$20 a month) $6,000,000 a month to you to play your game, if after 12 years you still don't have the server capacity to support 30,000 active players at once, I'm super curious where our money is going (DUST514 *cough cough*).
As you also mentioned in the blog, "Huge clashes between empires have become one of the most iconic symbols of EVEGÇÖs uniqueness and a source of well-deserved renown both for the game itself and for the fleet commanders who lead these battles." Now you're making sense! This is one of the reasons I came back to Eve Online. After more than 3 years of being away, nothing compared to the experience I had playing this game, being in a system with 2200 people, hundreds of super caps, titans, battleships galore on the fields, fights everywhere, it was exhilarating. No other game can come close to matching the possibilities of what you guys have created here.
And now I return, and Eve seems a tired old shell of what it once was. Not entirely mind you, but it seems this little thing called Jump Fatigue seems to have killed any chance of me ever experiencing what made me fall in love with your game again. From what I hear from other players, I'm not alone on this, and its probably a subject that's been beaten to death by now. However, between the changes to jump fatigue, the changes to how sov is claimed, and to the type of fights you seem to be gearing this game towards, (that was supposed to be a open ended sandbox mind you) it seems to be moving entirely away from capital fights at all. Add in the upcoming changes to assigning fighters, and the above mentioned (and mentioned in several other places) complaints by you to us about the server lag issues, which I'm sure capitals play a large role in, it all starts to come together.
Now I don't know if this was intentional plotting against the people who pay you (because mind you, super cap pilots dont grow on trees, they grow slowly and pay you a lot of money to have their accounts long enough to fly one) or if this is a case of the left hand not knowing what the right one is doing, but it all adds up to this. You are eliminating the need for capitals entirely from the game.
If I wanted to shoot something small, I'd bring a small gun. If I want to take over a country, I bring my big guns. With these changes to sov, you will make it possible for quite some nasty things to happen. One, it seems people in high sec could easily just go reinforce systems, all the time, anywhere they felt like. These people typically play little role in nullsec sov in my very limited experience, however you are giving them a huge opportunity to start expanding. That may be good, of course it will lead to more fights for space potentially, however quite the headache for us players who have to now trek to 30 systems every day to wait for stuff to come out of reinforce, because anyone with 10 min to spare can swing by and screw something up.
So are you trying to shrink peoples holdings? Well, you may not achieve that goal. Remember, the largest alliances still do have a TON of players. On a given day, heck even in a 4 hour period during prime time, some of the largest alliances could very easily send out dozens of 5 man squads to go on a 2-3 hour rampage through space, laying waste to exposed systems, and generally causing havoc. There may end up being hundreds of systems being reinforced daily, but it may end up being done by one or two or three groups primarily. This may end up being that instead of increasing the amount of skirmish warfare you are so fond of, you instead stomp out any chance of legitimate small players holding space on their own, and forcing them to absorb into the borg.
In the end, it doesnt matter what the intentions were, or which way the cookie crumbles. It appears no matter what, its a system full of flaws, that I seriously hope you address before it is released. I hope if someone from CCP reads this, they keep just one thing in mind the rest of their career: This game is sandbox, and should be managed as hands off as possible. Let the players run free, see what happens. That was the original idea. |