Farrellus Cameron
Sturmgrenadier Inc
Cosmic Anomalies
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Posted - 2008.05.04 18:43:00 -
[1]
The problem I have with the new sovereignty idea is that it seems too easy to grief the hell out of an alliance. It just seems way too easy to throw an alliance sovereignty into question so that the defending alliance will pretty much have to constantly gate camp in order to hold onto their territory. Currently, in order to threaten an alliance's sovereignty an invading alliance has to put a fair amount of effort into it. Assembling capital ships, locking down a system, putting those capital ships on the line reinforcing POSes. It takes a huge amount of logistics and a fair amount of risk to invade. If any medium sized gang can throw the sovereignty into question then it will just turn into griefing where a small alliance just constantly hammers a bigger one until they go crazy. Or a big alliance just blobs the hell out of everyone. Not to mention they will just keep doing it during the alliance's off hours so that they cannot even muster the forces to drive the attackers off. So what if the defender can adjust the timer to their primetime? It would be about the psychological warfare of throwing the sovereignty into challenge every other day and constantly forcing the defenders to turn out. It will quickly get more tedious then even POS warfare and make it equally unfun for the defenders. Stop underestimating how many alliances out there thrive on griefing others.
I never quite understand how you Devs constantly fool yourselves into thinking you've figured out a way to combat blobbing (you introduced blobs and remote ECM with ZERO effect on blobbing). If a system has five entryways and the attackers only need to control three, they'll put 100 guys on three gates. The defenders can also blob and just move from one gate to the next. So what if the invaders can just move to another gate? The defenders' blob can just move to that gate too, and the invaders will have to keep running and never be able to run up the timer. By the way, this whole "running up a timer" and "achieving objectives" sounds a bit too much like other MMOs that introduce excessively complicated mechanics in order to rigidly control how pvp and conquest mechanics are carried out. By imposing similarly complicated systems I am afraid you guys are moving beyond the sandbox principle of the game. I mean seriously, look how ridiculously complicated you are making this proposed system? Points allocated for each ship and ship type? Timers? Multi-tiered achievements? Simultaneous goals? You really want to move EVE towards the conquest systems other MMOs use, like PotBS or LOTRO monster play?
Another thing to note is that if you do completely abandon POSes claiming sovereignty you need to fix dreadnoughts too, and you need to make sure you do it AT THE SAME TIME. You will **** off a huge amount of your players if you make dreadnoughts completely obsolete. And don't give me any crap about how you can still use them to strike at an alliances logistics. MOST 0.0 alliances do not live out of POSes, they live out of stations. It may be useful to attack an enemy alliance's moon mining POSes, but that use will not be enough to satisfy the thousands of players who spent MONTHS training the skills necessary to fly dreadnoughts just to have it turned into a tool only useful for logistical warfare. Dreadnoughts will need to be combat capable so that they would have a significant roll in gate defense in order to not **** off all your older players. Throwing out POS sovereignty and then claiming that dreadnought changes will be coming soon(tm) will not pass muster either. |