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.