Burn Down For What?

It's been a long time since I've blogged, and a lot of things have been happening with CCP and Eve Online, and lots of new features are visible over the horizon, including a long overdue rewrite of the Sovereignty System, and with it, destructible stations along with a large, open question:

What should happen to player assets in ruined stations?

The ideal design should minimize gimmicks, create opportunities for meaningful emergent gameplay, and create as little hassle for any players returning to Eve Online as possible. To that end, I propose that destructible stations take the form of no-services free-ports; a ruined hulk that anyone can dock with, but contains no station services, no market, and no offices.

For players returning to Eve Online after an extended away period, the freeport model holds significant appeal, without implementing a free ride to highsec for player assets. It would be worthwhile to give players an incentive to go out and recover anything that was previously locked up and inaccessible; I suspect that there's no shortage of former players who are staying away from the game because of what they lost access to. It seems likely that a massive, scorched-earth purge would begin when this mechanic was introduced. Tying in an invitation to return, along with a noted incentive to recover what's rightfully theirs, could be an excellent marketing point for the game.

Even without services, a station serves one other function that is not provided by any other thing in Eve: a secure staging and rallying point for friends, allies, and acquaintances to form up and undock from. This is something that should remain available beyond NPC facilities, and is a valuable part of the strategic landscape. By leaving the ability to dock, it'll be possible for players to eke out a new type of living in the wastelands of ruined stations.

A ruined station is an opportunity to rebuild. Giving players the power to rebuild a ruined station gives an objective to the transients who make use of the facility.

I've never been the most imaginative player of Eve Online. I imagine that the more creative sorts could think of all sorts of innovative and exciting ways to take advantage of these proposed mechanics. Free-form game mechanics have always been a great way to tell unique and exciting stories. Who wouldn't love to see a few more?

The Post Where I Complain About Brawling

<Kaeda> CCP want us to only brawl it seems!

In this day and age, it's an assessment that's pretty hard to disagree with; there aren't that many ways to kite inside 150 kilometers in the current meta. If someone brings a lot of interceptors in a response fleet, you're probably going to get caught, and you're probably going to die. If the other guy brings neutralizers, you can't stick around without becoming cap dead. If anyone brings an overheating tech 1 cruiser, you're probably going to get slingshotted and hard tackled. As soon as the Ishtars show up, you'd better leave, or sentry drones are going to turn your ship into a jagged pile of scrap. If you're in a fast ship, there's no such thing as "out of sentry range."

The metagame is an always evolving thing, but the small group's comeuppance to superior numbers, the ease of coordinating a smaller force when you need to escape, has been eroding especially hard as of late. After the various changes to cruisers and battlecruisers, it stopped being practical or cost effective to fly a roaming gang of Hurricanes or Drakes, while none of the other battlecruisers had a comparably respectable mix of solid damage projection, health, and maneuverability to begin with. Then came the Battleship revision, which dramatically increased the cost of fielding the ships, and put long ranged energy neutralizers into every battleship fleet's tool-chest. The addition of Microjumpdrives made hard scrambling an absolute necessity for keeping any battleship pinned down, forcing engagements to be ever closer. Then came the warp drive changes, which, combined with the bubble immunity and enormous warp acceleration and deceleration capabilities of interceptors, crippled the relative mobility of any ship bigger than a blowfly.

In a lot of respects, I think this sucks.

Some of my favorite memories in Eve were the flights of opportunity between battleships, battlecruisers, and kiting fights against numerically superior adversaries where your wits and your carefully executed warps were the tightrope between victory and disaster. All of these changes have made the game even more sensitive to superior numbers, and has generally served to kick anyone who can't bring a comparable number of ships to the fight in the face. ISK, pilot skill, and skill points can't buy your way out of hard tackle if you don't have enough pilots for a good mix of support and damage boats, and nothing larger than a cruiser has a chance of disengaging if you're facing a superior force without three system's advanced notice. When walking into another alliance's home field advantage, when just about every group has access to a Titan, insurmountable ambush can happen with alarming regularity.

The classic response is to adapt or die, and as always, that's what will happen. Still, do the margins need to be this tight?

How Many Dominixes?

It's no secret to any diligent miners that the values of each ore per cubic meter has become a little bit screwy over the past few months.

Who expected Hedbergite to become the most valuable standard rock in the game?
Chart source: http://bp.kiwi.frubar.net/ores.php from December 21, 2013

Despite CCP Rise's intentions to restore the value of mining in nullsec, success seems to have eluded him; nullsec ores are less valuable than ever before. What might be driving such a curious development? Lets take a look at what the Dominix, and what goes into building one.

Material efficiency level 100

Thanks to the potency of sentry drones, the addition of Micro Jump Drives, and their relatively low cost, the Dominix has become a major doctrine ship for many alliances, and a reasonably effective choice for mission runners. At a mineral cost of approximately 167 million ISK, it is affordable, and expendable. The Dominix is an easy and solid choice for a comparison baseline.

Battleships have long since lost their status as the mainline benchmark for conflict in null security space. The proliferation of super capitals, the evolution of ship capabilities, and the development of new strategies have made Archons one of the most adaptable, capable, and viable tools in an alliance's arsenal. As a capital ship, it's also much less affordable than a Battleship.

ME 100 on components and ship blueprints

A quick glance will tell you that an Archon's material cost is approximately five times that of a Dominix. Looking closer, the actual consumption ratios contain some interesting variations.

Rounded to three decimal places

The numbers are most interesting indeed. Each Archon contains 4.951 Dominixes worth of Tritanium, 5.173 Dominixes worth of Pyerite, a whopping 6.568 Dominixes worth of Mexallon, a comparatively meager 4.514 Dominixes worth of Isogen, 5.134 Dominixes worth of Nocxium, a paltry 4.028 Dominixes worth of Zydrine, and 4.734 Dominixes worth of Megacyte.

The value of mineral bearing ores reflects these disparities to some degree. Nocxium, Mexallon, Pyerite, and even Tritanium bearing ores have enjoyed growing value over the years, while rocks particularly heavy in Isogen and Zydrine at the expense of others have plummeted.

Capitals aren't the end of the story; let's consider the Aeon.

Though far from a complete analysis, these numbers are certainly suggestive; if we want to see an increase in the value of ores in null security space, some significant changes may be in order across a potentially broad spectrum of the game. The balance of battleships, capitals, and super capitals, the distribution of ores in space, the abundance of minerals within each cubic meter of ore, the capabilities of capital ships, the capabilities of battleships; all of these and more could have an influence on the miner's preferred finds and the builder's bottom line.

Where do we go from here? That's up to CCP's designers.

Shouldn't we be able to read this?

After ten years and a Little Things initiative, you'd think this particular user interface issue would have been fixed by now. Oh well, as the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago; the second best time is today.

The Attention Problem

A matter of long contention between PVE and PVP pilots has been the matter of highsec suicide ganking. Between justifications and opinions sit a series of facts. Some of these facts are well known and paid attention to by many participants in the ongoing discussion; others receive less attention than they perhaps deserve. The pertinent data is as follows:

• The amount of firepower needed to destroy any vessel can be measured in multiples of Catalysts
• The EHP of a mining ship is hard pressed to exceed 15 Catalyst Equivalent
• The window of time needed for Catalyst Pilots to successfully perform a suicide gank is less than a minute
• Mining is an activity whose rewards do not scale for looking at the screen more than once every 15 to 30 minutes.

The latter point is, I think, the largest source of problems. Suicide ganking, taken on its own, remains fundamentally sound as, in a majority of cases, it is easily mitigated by paying attention to one's surroundings. Conversely, mining is designed in such a way that it is very difficult to hold the players attention for an extended period of time. However, all players are vulnerable if they look away for even a brief period of time. It is very easy to look away from your computer for 5 minutes and find yourself looking at 5 minutes worth of ore, or to find yourself waking up in a new clone, never realizing you were in danger until the threat has already come and gone.

Never a fun entry for the log book.

The problem is not one of people who want to fight and people who don’t, it’s one of rewards for vigilance; it takes much more effort to be vigilant than it does to pay attention to the task of mining. The easiest solution to this problem is to create a reward for paying more attention to the ore you're harvesting.

There is no hard and fast rule about which form an increased reward for mining should take. It could involve a constant set of adjustments to compensate for yield, or it could be a mini-game where you pick your way through various rocks to extract the more valuable ores hidden within an asteroid’s bulk composition. Whatever design might be settled on, it simply needs to reward players for paying attention without overwhelming them.

If miners are given a good incentive to pay attention to the contents of their screen, they will be much more likely to see when hostiles are on the prowl and to make it to safety, bringing a semblance of balance back to a game whose debates and focus have become centralized on suicide ganks and ever rising hitpoint buffers.

A New Spin on Ship's Crew

An average ship's compliment of Crew.
Click for full size.

A ship’s crew is a precious commodity, and it’s never truly made

sense to me that they should be a free asset when you assemble a ship. While it makes sense that there are countless qualified (or cheaply qualified) personnel floating around in Empire Space to satisfy the insatiable demand for new crew, the comparatively undeveloped and savage wilds of null security space make this seem less reasonable. Fortunately, we already have Planetary Interaction, which can quickly satisfy the body problem from a lore standpoint, while creating a target for DUST bunnies.

I propose adding a spacecraft crew qualification academy mechanic for habitable (or colonized) planets in null security space, accessed through planetary interaction, located in outpost constellations, to be fought over by DUST 514’s mercenaries. Without academies, there won’t be enough qualified personnel to assemble spaceships that are packaged, forcing players to assemble their ships in NPC stations, or capture and/or construct additional training facilities in their outpost constellations.

What do you think?

A Proposal for a Game of Outposts

I’d like to transform the rules of outpost ownership from their current state: with the exception of one Castle Constellation in each region, I propose changing an outpost owner’s abilities from full access control, to setting docking fees, service fees, and tax rates. In the majority of cases, it would no longer be possible to deny docking rights in null security space.

Wait, back up; you want to do what? Why!? 

 

In broad strokes, Eve Online is a game of creation and destruction; on an individual level, a majority of players prefer as little overlap between these two states as possible. Players prefer to make their money in safe places, either in high-sec where attackers can’t get away with it, or in secluded places, where there isn’t anyone to attack them. When players aren’t in the clear to make money, there is tension. When there’s tension, there’s desertion and instability. When there’s desertion and instability, there’s the possibility of failure cascade, and in the vast majority of cases, it is not in a corporation’s or alliance’s interests to implode on itself. There is a great deal of incentive for an alliance to possess a large buffer zone of sparsely populated space.

Players living in null security space go where they aren’t likely to be found; the best defense against hostility is to give hostile entities nothing to shoot. Players mitigate risks further by fitting cloaks, staying near starbases, and staying in station systems. When you’re on the prowl in nullsec, and the targets of opportunity make themselves safe, there’s very little incentive to stick around; it’s a long trip home, and would-be targets have all the time in the world to make a bigger fleet or to ignore the threat entirely. In highsec and lowsec, there is always the option to dock, no matter who you are. It’s no coincidence that you find a lot more people in most low security systems than null security systems; when you’re looking for targets and the targets decide to ignore you, the docking managers in lowsec aren’t going to say “no.”

I want to see null security space become more like low security space. 

The burden of maintaining territory should fall on the shoulders of those who would make use of that space. The average null security system should be filled with players fighting or working to make a living, not a vacuous expanse controlled by a blob of supercapitals, thrown at anyone eyeing the multitude of vacant bastions. In lowsec, you are only ever truly in control of a situation when you’re there to control it. Low Security Space is a vibrant and dynamic place, so long as there is someone able and willing to fight; all you need is proximity and permission. I want null security space to work more in the same way. Players living around each other will fight each other; Empire building and warfare are the purposes of 0.0 space, but there does not seem to be enough battle to satisfy its denizens.

Nullsec power blocks, such as Pandemic Legion, Goonswarm and Northern Coalition., have been dropping their capital fleets on small groups in low security space because that’s where they can find action. This is not the place where this kind of activity should be taking place; low security space, which does not allow interdiction spheres, anchored bubbles, doomsdays, or bombing runs, was not designed as an arena for super capital slugfests. Yet, lowsec boasts the record for the largest capital engagement in history because there, there is action; a commodity that’s hard to find in large swathes of null security space.

 

Full control isn’t always a bad thing. 

 

Giving players full control of docking and service access isn’t always a bad thing; players like to own castles. Area denial is a potent power, but it’s the type of control that is better as the exception, rather than the rule. Each region in 0.0 space should have a capacity for one “Castle Constellation,” where one alliance can exercise full control over it. Full control of the assembly lines, refineries, and offices is an excellent reward for holding a seat of power, and that seat of power is a worthy reason to war with another alliance.

 

Farms and Fields? We already have Outposts. 

 

Much as Planetary Customs Offices supply a means for bottom up income, the Outpost is the perfect tool for supplying bottom up income for alliances. With their low construction bill, Outposts are common and capable of fulfilling that role; the one caveat is the excessive ownership costs for that role, but that’s not hard to change. Through control of rental rates, refining taxes, and docking fees, there’s a great deal of opportunity to make a buck from the daily activities of people living in your stations. The dynamics of the relationship an occupant has with the owner could be friendly, with low rates, low taxes, or devoid of fees entirely, or perhaps hostile, with maxed out taxes and docking fees that make it prohibitively expensive to harass someone for an extended period of time without taking the station from them.

When players have the right to dock, even when the owners are hostile to them, new opportunities are presented for industrious players to make a buck. A player can supply goods and services to alliances without having to negotiate in advance (while having the opportunity to do so for preferable rates). Perhaps the most intriguing outcome, a player could afford to subside entirely out of an outpost, unbound from NPC controlled territories. For the threat of denied access, and a potential lack of outbound transportation, it’s unwise to leave anything in an outpost that you can’t afford to lose. Changing these rules of the game will rewrite the storage policies of corporations, alliances, and individuals everywhere – for the better.

 

In conclusion 

 

It’s past time to give players the proximity and long term station access they need to turn null security space, and the sovereignty game therein, into a battleground for all sizes of organizations, rather than relying on super-coalitions to create conflict. Null security space needs the liveliness of multiple hostile groups living under one roof. Right now, the game’s incentives are so backwards that many PVPers would rather live in low security space for the action, than fight for the limited ground available to make a name for one’s self in null security space; it’s too easy for someone bigger to simply give someone the boot. Likewise, null security space is often so empty that it’s safer to make a living there than in lowsec. Denying control of docking services could transform, null security space into the environment I think it should be; target rich, busy, and eternally at war within each region’s borders.

Discuss this post on the Eve Online forums

Proposal: The Cycle Marker

Anyone who has flown a mining barge probably knows the pain of spending a full three minute cycle on an asteroid bearing just a fraction of ore. Asteroid scanners are useful tools for avoiding this problem, giving you a precise count of the amount of material remaining in each asteroid. However, it's not easy to translate the remaining ore counts in an asteroid scanner table into an optimal cycle cutoff time.

To solve this problem, I propose adding a new midslot module, the asteroid cycle marker. When activated, this module will mark the moment when an asteroid will be depleted in the current mining cycle. The cycle marker would only work on asteroids being actively harvested, and would not leave a marker if the asteroid will not be depleted within the current activation cycle.


The already run Cycle Marker showing the cutoff point for a pair of Kernite asteroids.

Occupying a mid-slot and ideally using a significant amount of capacitor, players making use of this module would have to choose how to configure their ships to achieve an ideal balance of tank and yield. This should help keep the module balanced, without displacing the asteroid belt scanner.

By providing the ideal moment to deactivate a module, miners everywhere will be able to enjoy increased yields when paying attention to their activities, but simultaneously making themselves more vulnerable to attack; a module to the benefit of everyone, in my book! What do you think?

The Soft Station Flip

Conflict in nullsec is a stagnant affair. Between the constant claiming and reclaiming of territories that have been fought over, time and time again, for no real purpose other than the battle itself, and the binary outcomes of player conflicts, the situation is dismal. An evolving combat environment, one that is less reliant on the binary have and have not state of outpost ownership, would be an effective partial solution to revitalizing null security space.

The best fix I have yet seen for breeding new interest is to modify station ownership mechanics. Rather than a hard flip of ownership and access rights occurring once an outpost has been conquered by its new owners, stations would maintain their old docking rights, alongside the new ones, for a period of three days after the station is captured.

To create a beachhead from which an offensive can advance, and to help mitigate the possibility of prolonged guerilla actions comprising the totality of activities for the involved parties, a station should not be able to be contested for a period of one week after it has been captured. This will permit the conflict to expand beyond the recently captured outpost system, while simultaneously providing an environment of continuous localized conflict. For the group that lost the station, all docking fees would be waived (or perhaps go to the new owners of the outpost), and only the market would be available for use.

These changes to the mechanics would afford the previous owners of the station new opportunities and tactical possibilities that were previously impossible, such as utilizing the limited outpost access to prepare for a counter-offensive, or to evacuate assets after the station is captured. Best of all, these new opportunities for conflict would not come at any additional structure grind expense. Regardless of the decisions made by any one group, the prolonged scenario means more opportunities for players to interact on an individual and strategic level, long after station ownership has been decided.

While this feature does not address issues involving the economics of 0.0 space, it should serve to make the battles for control of nullsec more interesting, more dynamic, and less reliant on the moment of capture for creating interest and intrigue in conquest and conflict. A dynamic nullsec environment is a healthy nullsec environment; I can’t wait to read the stories that could come from these mechanics adjustments.

I’d like to give credit to Vanderie for the idea upon which this proposal is based.

The suggested timers do not hold any particular significance.

Inverse Risk and Reward: The Safer Play Pays More

EVE Online's Player Versus Environment content can be broadly broken down into three tiers of accessibility; content located at celestials and other in space locations, content that can be found with any ship's scanner, and content that needs to be found with scanner probes. Generally speaking, these content categories scale in reward directly with the amount of time it takes to find them, and this is where a major problem lies: an increase access time directly contributes towards safety when engaging in money making; potential predators have to go through just as much effort to find the content as the potential prey did.

There are two ways for a predator to get around this conundrum; they can either stake out the location in advance, or gamble on their target's failure to pay attention. Generally speaking, it's nearly impossible, or at least very difficult, to catch someone lurking in a hidden piece of space. The inverse scale of accessibility and reward does not, at this time, feel adequately offset by Eve's design and game mechanics. Other than making it easier to access most PVE content, I do not have many ideas on how this could be changed. However, I think this is something that is worth looking into.

Before EVE's preferred PVE content largely moved towards scanner-sites, before Warp to Zero made point to point travel a high speed endeavor without the aid of bookmarks, and before local provided instant knowledge of standings, players in nullsec (and to a lesser extent, lowsec,) would have to work together in the face of predators stalking their space. With today's buried content, rapid movement and perfect intelligence, it is the preferred state of affairs to perform one's money making alone as possible and flee from detected threats until the danger has passed. When afforded large opportunities for escape, there is little dependence on one's fellow pilots for personal safety. There is a missing sense of community in potentially unfriendly space.

Today's Eve Online encourages a great wasteland of sprawl for money making and territorial buffering purposes. I'd like to see players return to group efforts to fend off solo attackers; group responses to individual threats are a fantastic dynamic, and reintroducing community with new design would be a breath of fresh air. For want of a smaller scale, more intimate 0.0 experience, a restored balance of risk versus reward, and increased amounts of daily interaction among the residents of 0.0 space, any efforts guiding Eve Online in such a direction would be welcome additions indeed.

Imagine The Possibilities

Imagine the crater encrusted battlefields of DUST 514, its players building, buying, and destroying combat gear whose properties and appearance were decided by EVE Online's players. Imagine if pod pilots could invest their energies into concocting new and devious combinations of machinery in a deep, complex development system to give rise to new war machinery for purchase by the mercenaries fighting across New Eden's worlds.

I've always wanted a hardcore engineering mode for the creation of new ships in Eve Online, but implementing the dynamic in DUST 514 is a fantastic proposition to me. If Eve players could offer equipment for the DUST bunnies to purchase, using a variant of the game engine technology that lets you make Tech 3 ships for player designed ground equipment, the interaction of the two games could become even more interesting, creating a whole new level of interplay, while creating a great incentive for more DUST players to begin playing EVE Online.

It would probably be hard as hell to actually make happen, but damn if it wouldn't be sweet.

Modular Starbase Planner Mockup

After many years of waiting, modular starbases will soon™ be coming to Eve Online. What should it be like to use a new starbase? Today I’m going to look at a user case for setting up a corporation operated refinery. Make sure you click the links for the full sized images!

It all begins with the starbase planner. From the planning window, the starbase can be designed for its intended role and have its services configured for their intended use. The full scope of this feature goes well beyond the scope of just the module positioning planner, so for now we’ll be focusing on just this feature. Once a player has fired up the starbase module planner, they can begin by choosing the size of the starbase they want to create. For today’s use case, the starbase in question is a medium sized installation.



The purpose of this new installation is to provide refining capacity for their corporation in a system with no refinery. To get the ball rolling, storage capacity will be added with storage silos. To do this, the desired module can be dragged from the module selection menu into its desired location on the module placement grid. This task can also be performed by click selection and placement.



Once placed, the relevant statistics of the starbase, as well as its capabilities, are updated to accommodate the changes made by placing the new equipment.



Since 50,000 cubic meters wouldn’t provide very much net storage space to the players who would be making use of this starbase, lets add in a few more storage silos. 100,000 Cubic Meters is a much better amount of space to work with!



This drag and drop (or click and place) process is repeated as needed to provide the capabilities desired by the starbase’s users. For this user, several refinery modules, and a few module connectors to fill the empty space, are the next items to be installed.



We’re obviously running out of room here, so it’s time to take advantage of the camera controls. The camera menu provides zoom, pan, and rotation in increments of 90 degrees. In the event the user gets lost, the panning icon can be double-clicked to re-center the starbase planner on the control tower. A home button might be a good addition to provide this functionality. Let’s zoom out to a more appropriate size for the installation being made.



Perfect! With the screen zoomed out to an appropriate level, the rest of the modules are an easy addition. With one last turret hardpoint module, the refinery starbase’s components will be fully in place.



And there you have it; a fully assembled starbase. While this refinery would not be ready to go right out the gate, as none of the available services have been configured yet, that is outside the scope of this mockup. Please comment and tell me what you think!



Full Image Album

Crimewatch, Remote Repair and Small Gangs

Looking at the new crime watch proposals, something caught my eye. It is currently proposed that the act of remote repairing a target will create chain inheritance of aggression timers, preventing the logistics ship from docking in stations or jumping through stargates.

There are immense implications to consider for small gang warfare, but the long and the short of it is that any force utilizing remote repair tactics which finds itself over-escalated, be it from jumping into a much larger enemy force, being at the wrong end of a log-on trap, being hot-dropped by capitals and black ops or bridged on by Titans, will be hard pressed to de-escalate without losing every single logistics ship brought onto the field.

In the current state of game balance, it is simply not possible for a logistics ship to rely on a local tank; by design, they are meant to rely on their fellow logistics ships for tanking. However, inherited aggression timers will remove any ability for logistics ships to perform their function without constantly renewing their aggression timers. As a member of a small pirate organization, it is very, very common for me and my corpmates to find ourselves jumped upon by a numerically and tactically superior force once an engagement has begun; being able to accomplish anything with that small gang is completely dependent on the ability of a logistics gang to disengage. This change to mechanics will turn any escalation by one side into a turkey shoot against the smaller group of players.

The currently proposed Crimewatch mechanics would devastate the ability for smaller organizations to engage in PVP while adding further incentives for blobbing. Forcing logistics pilots to be the most committed of all the pilots in a fleet is not a good change for the game. While station games are terrible, removing the ability of small gangs to skirmish with larger fleets would be far worse.

Less Prime Money Maker, more Pod-killing Encourager

My recent proposal to modify the bounty system was met with some opposition that I had not expected.

"Problem is does even this fixed bounty system make bounty hunting viable? Or will it just be "Ooooo that guy I just podded had a bounty!". Is it possible to make bounty hunting as a profession viable, or will it always just be a way to give someone who just popped someone you don't like a small reward? As soon as you offer rewards that are worth doing something to get, the alt/corp mate collection becomes very viable."

Drackarn's comment, as well as a couple of posts in F&I (where game ideas go to die™), pointed out something that I missed; the desire of players to perform player vs player bounty hunting as their primary means of making money.

I do not think that making one's primary earnings from collecting pod bounties is a viable goal; there is an inherent problem with trying to make a living from PVP bounties in that any PVP mechanic will be competing with EVE's long standing PVE mechanics; PVE bounty hunting provides an extraordinary amount of ISK while being highly predictable, and thus relatively safe. PVP, conversely, can be extraordinarily dangerous and is considerably less predictable than PVE. Without turning PVP into an extraordinarily cash flow positive activity, I perceive this to be an irreconcilable problem.

PVP in Eve Online is already great fun in and of itself. While it would be very neat to make one's living solely off of PVP activity, it is not a viable design goal without performing considerable, massive overhauls to the nature of Eve Online's economy and PVE systems. To me, bounty hunting mechanics would better serve as a secondary money maker in Eve Online. To that end, modifying the bounty system and allowing it to serve its originally intended function, albeit while not being the chief breadwinner, looks like the best solution available to this long standing design issue.

Fixing the Bounty system

It occurred to me the other day that everything that is wrong with the bounty system can be expressed in a single sentence:

"Bounties don't work because the payouts are worth more than the clones."

Now that implants are included in pod-mails, the market value of a destroyed clone is public knowledge; this has created an opportunity to implement a new bounty system. As the nature of the current problem is that a friend or an alt can claim an outstanding bounty, the fix is actually relatively straightforward; change the mechanics of bounty payment to only supply a portion of the value of each clone and treat the total bounty on a pilot's head as a payout pool.

With a proportional payout pool, pilots will no longer be able to take a bounty for themselves without suffering more in losses than payouts. By supplying small payments rather than a lump sum, a new incentive is created to keep podding a given pilot as long as there's money in the bounty pool.

Voila! The eternally broken bounty system is fixed!

A Corollary To The Mid-Game Problem

In the latest entry of Jester's Trek, RipardTeg refers to one of the big problems facing Eve Online; pilots finding themselves limited by what they can't do, with many people quitting when they're faced with the issue of what they aren't capable of.

My opinion is that part of the problem is the sheer versatility afforded to pilots who have sufficient skill points to fly ships equipped with full racks of Tech 2 modules. The reality of Eve Online's balance system is that Tech 2 is a linear upgrade over Tech 1 and meta level modules; very few popular ships are significantly limited in what Tech 2 gear they are able to equip.

When all the good ships come with the expectation of the pilots maxing them out with tech 2 modules, pilots are hitting the utility wall much sooner than they could if less skill intensive modules were more viable in combat than they are today. The right direction to tweak ship balance is, in my opinion, downwards; it should be harder to pack a ship full of tech 2 modules than it is today.

When a player doesn't have to train as many skills to fly a ship of interest, the problem of situational flexibility can become much less significant than it is today. If I'm right, nerfs might just be what the doctor ordered for improving the mid game appeal of Eve Online.

What Do You Mean, Jesus Is Dead?

In his most recent blog, CSM Member Trebor Daehdoow (Robert Woodhead) made special note of Hilmar's declaration that "The era of the Jesus feature is over.” Since the minutes aren’t out yet, I'll speculate for a bit; what CCP learned lesson is encompassed by Hilmar’s statement?

What counts as a Jesus Feature? I think we can call the self-referenced Incursions, alongside Apocrypha’s Wormholes, to be examples of Jesus Features, and relatively successful ones at that; they are, and have been, generally enjoyed by most player participants. On the other side of the coin, Tyrannis’ Planetary Interaction and Incarna’s Walking in Stations flopped for, among other reasons, being dull, tedious and devoid of entertainment value.

If these four features are examples of Jesus Features, I don’t see anything inherently wrong with making a big "Jesus Feature" the focus for an expansion. However, a big feature focus only really works if other components of the game that players like, or have, to use are not broken and not in need of work; unusable, unenjoyable or unworkable content seriously damages the appeal of the game. When big problems are neglected in favor of shiny new things, what might have been a good feature is immediately tarnished by what its introduction took the place of repairing. If the big feature just plain sucks, the results can be, and have been, absolutely devastating.

If CCP learned that big features have to be good features - for the game and for the player alike - and can’t take the place of fixing what’s currently broken, we should be in good shape for the future. If CCP has learned to not try to make big features, we’re probably in for some rough spots ahead. Time will tell what lies further down the road.

Painful but Necessary

The changes to PI taxation haven't been particularly popular; it's now substantially more expensive than it once was to import and export PI goods, dramatically increasing the overhead costs of maintaining a PI installation.

The increased pain is a good thing; there are not nearly enough ISK sinks in Eve Online. After PI was introduced, the biggest ISK sinks in the game after skills and blueprints - POS fuel, starbase structures and new outposts - no longer existed in this role. Since then, the amount of ISK entering the game has increased substantially.

Inflation is never good for the long term health of a game economy. Adding more sinks, including the 10% market rate surcharge on P.I. goods, will help the game in the long run.

Now Comes The Hard Part

Crucible is a monster of an expansion. With new ships, the desire for new tools to blow other people to smithereens has been filled for the first time since Apocrypha. With engine trails and nebula, everything old is new again. Combined with V3, the game is beginning to genuinely resemble the rosiest of nostalgia tinted glasses. With dozens of interface tweaks and minor gameplay changes, Eve Online is gaining the most client functionality in ages. When the new balance factors are thrown into the mix, the dreaded era of Super Capital Ships Online might finally be coming to a close. Meanwhile, Dreadnoughts are returning to viability through more DPS and shorter siege timers. All told, Crucible is one of, if not the most, welcome, feature packed expansions in years and it's just days from being deployed. Congratulations on creating such a wonderful expansion, CCP; this is the first time I've felt excited for an expansion in years!

However, with the low hanging fruit out of the way, now comes the hard part.

While Crucible packs an amazing quantity of new features that improve the experience of playing Eve Online, it does not, nor was it ever capable of, dealing with some of the deep, underlying flaws of current game mechanics; there simply was not enough time to do so. The task that lies ahead for the task masters and game designers is to address the underlying causes of Eve's economic woes, the non-existence of Risk vs Reward, the ease of force projection, the doldrums of daily life in null security space, the limitations of modern player made infrastructure, the proliferation of outposts, and the difficulties in finding meaningful PVP across much of New Eden, among other problems.

These are not easy problems to solve. The community has been wrestling with most of these issues, in some form or another, for several years. Many potential solutions have been discussed ad-nausea, but there has not been an environment conducive towards putting new ideas for revised game mechanics into production at CCP for many years. Fortunately after the fallout of Monoclegate and the related dramas, the main stumbling blocks appear to have been pushed aside, allowing the designers a shot at delivering what they, and players alike, have all wanted to see done to make Eve Online the best game it can be. I'm looking forward to, and sincerely hope everyone's up to the challenge of, seeing CCP addressing the hard parts.

Good luck and God speed in this endeavor; it's not going to be easy!

A Counter-Argument To A Case For Keeping High-Sec

This particular blog entry is a response to Black Arturus' latest blog entry, which you can read here:
My Case For Keeping High-Sec, by Black Arcturus

In a sense, Black Arcturs' blog post is somewhere along the right track; forcing anyone into nullsec is a moot point and a pointless endeavor; it always has been and always will be, as what attracts a player to high security space is the general safety it provides. The problem with high security space is the various things that discourage a player from venturing further. Level 4 missions and Incursions provide a safety blanket of easy, low risk ISK. It's a universal human trait to fear losing what you have.

The argument has been made that the solution to encouraging people to enter 0.0 space is to increase the rewards it offers rather than reduce the rewards in High Security space. You can’t rely on power scaling 0.0 to attempt to attract more people to 0.0 space; ISK is rarely the reward, in and of itself, but income is a necessity to living in null security space, much like anywhere else. I don’t think it’s possible to generate more currency than with Incursion farming. This is a fundamental flaw with the current state of Eve Game Design, as Incursions and Level 4 missions are utterly skewing the risk/reward ratio in favor of high security space. Balancing upwards is not a valid method to balance out this equation due to the already persistent and massive problems mudflation has introduced to Eve Online.

Ultimately, I disagree with the assessment that high security space is fine as it is; it is not. The current state of High Security Space introduces far too much currency into the economy and invalidates one of the major motivators for prospective pilots to go out and explore the deep end of the game through its safe, easy, ludicrous quantities of money minted each day.

Highsec doesn’t generate the stories that draw players to Eve Online. High security Space does not create the deep social connections that hold people in game for the long term. The only thing High Security Space provides is a safety net which, by all established player accounts, is only getting safer and more lucrative with each expansion. While safe cash and easy access to replacement toys are what every player wants in the short term, all that catering to these desires accomplishes is the degradation of the long term viability of Eve Online's sandbox and ever more rapid churn of players that burn through the limited content Eve Online has at its disposal.

Eve Online is at it’s best when players interact with other players. It’s far past time that players stop lobbying CCP for even more barriers between themselves and the player vs player experience.