EVE Evolved: Does EVE Online need more conflict-drivers?
EVE PvP can be visceral and highly personal, not just something fun to do or a game of strategy but a way to settle old grudges and punish people for whatever the hell you want. World War Bee was a brutal mix of Machiavellian politics and massive fleets of highly motivated players coming together, not just for some fun gameplay but to try and completely annihilate the goons. So what the hell happened? Why are so many people sitting in nullsec fortresses and farming ISK, building huge capital fleets and complaining about the “lack of content” in PvP today? Does EVE‘s conflict engine need a tune-up?
In this edition of EVE Evolved, I look at some of the factors limiting real conflict in EVE today and suggest three possibly controversial changes that would drive further conflict in New Eden.
Conflict is still happening
I don’t want to over-reach with my point here and claim that all conflict in EVE is dead or meaningless; real conflicts are definitely still happening in EVE on all scales. Nullsec systems are still changing hands regularly on the official influence map, faction warfare corps are still kicking each other’s asses up and down Black Rise, pirates are still camping the hell out of chokepoints, and those dudes hanging out around Jita 4-4 with suspect timers are still bait.
Huge battles are still happening when there’s sufficient motivation for it or something to trigger it, such as with The Imperium’s battle at an FCON citadel just a few days ago. The social impetus for war is something that I think will never go away in EVE, as players are always going to want to kick each other’s heads in for a variety of reasons, but we have to accept that there are forces in play to limit the scope of conflict in EVE and perhaps not all of them are necessary. At the same time, some opportunities to introduce new conflict-drivers have been squandered and others may be just over the horizon.
Factors limiting conflict
I’ve written a lot recently about how EVE‘s current sovereignty system and the citadel warfare mechanics may actually dissuade conflict rather than enabling it. The asset safety system in citadels removes most of the financial motivation from kicking over someone’s sandcastle and excessive reinforcement timers make destroying them a lengthy chore for no good reason, but these aren’t the only factors limiting conflict. The local channel is the biggest limiter, for example, letting people instantly know when hostiles or neutrals enter the system.
Jump fatigue was introduced as a deliberate conflict-limiter to prevent alliances from projecting fleets across the map without committing them, and it also makes fielding them in any PvP scenario more complicated. Then there are smaller and more indirect conflict limiters, like the fact that players can farm endless streams of cosmic anomalies in nullsec without moving between systems and can use jump bridges and portals to travel without passing through stargates. The damage caps on citadels also limit conflict as you can reach the limit easily with a subcapital fleet and committing capitals or supercapitals to the field won’t speed up the structure grind, reducing the potential for escalation into a B-R style conflict.
Suggestion: Jump fatigue overhaul
Jump fatigue was introduced in 2014 to stop alliances from rapidly moving capital ships across the map to give someone a bloody nose and still getting home in time to defend their own space, but all it really does is slow down and complicate capital ship movement. The ideal solution would allow alliances to deploy capitals either offensively away from home or defensively at home but not both at the same time, and there are far simpler ways to achieve that with fewer side-effects. For example, CCP could introduce a new Jump Beacon structure that enables a pilot to jump to any cynosural fields within a 10 lightyear radius with no fatigue.
Each pilot would be able to synchronise to only one beacon at a time, with a 7-day cooldown before they could switch to another beacon even if the beacon is destroyed and syncronisation is lost. Alliances would be able to deploy their capitals in a given operational area with no complicated penalties and commit to any fights in that area. The current jump fatigue system could be completely removed and replaced with a long jump timer for all jumps ending outside your beacon’s operational area, and jump ranges could also easily be increased without any negative consequences. The beacon itself would also become a high-priority target for PvP, adding a new conflict-driver to nullsec warfare.
Suggestion: Remove damage caps
In the old days of sovereignty warfare, system ownership went to the alliance with the most starbases at moons in the system and players often formed large fleets to burn through the huge hitpoint pools of starbases. People sometimes fielded carriers or fleets of Ospreys to repair the shield of the starbase and draw out the length of the battle, but mostly people either turned up in force to defend the structure or abandoned it and let the enemy slowly grind it down. This was a perfectly good system for fighting over structures, the main problem being that there was a huge grind even if the defender chose not to turn up.
Upwell structures use the same hitpoint-based approach but with a strange damage mitigation mechanic that limits the maximum amount of DPS the structure can take. This feels like a dirty hack and an effort to control the duration and format of the fight. It’s supposed to neutralise the advantage of bringing a huge fleet and blobbing a structure, but in turn it’s also removed all need to ever bring high-damage ships like supercapitals if you have enough pilots to hit the cap in smaller ships. Some of the biggest conflicts in EVE‘s history have been spawned just because someone fielded a supercapital, so anything that makes fielding them pointless is a bit of a conflict-limiter.
Players have come up with some great alternatives to hard damage caps, such as logarithmic damage reduction so that any additional DPS has some effect. I’d personally like to see the return of structures being repaired using logistics ships, and maybe even some new active tanking standup modules. The structure’s resistances could be increased to magnify the effective hitpoints from all sources of repair, and raw hitpoints balanced so that the structure is easily destroyed if nobody turns up to defend it. You’d pretty much have to field remote repair ships to save your structure, and the enemy would have to kill them before moving on to the structure. If nothing else, it would create some interesting fights and remove a lot of boring time-dilated structure-bashing time when the field is already won.
Suggestion: Resource overhaul
One of the most exciting ideas to come out of the latest EVE Fanfest was the moon mining overhaul, which is due to land this winter and will add a new scheduled mining event game mechanic. This has the potential to be a fantastic driver of conflict, as moon mining corps will have to put mining ships on the field in order to gather the moon goo and will be vulnerable to a well-coordinated attack. The timing of the event can also be seen by enemies to within certain limits, as you can see the huge chunk of moon material being pulled toward the refinery in space. It’s also going to drive conflict between mining corps as multiple corps can have refineries around a moon but only one can actually mine it at a time.
I want to see more of EVE‘s resource-gathering gameplay overhauled in this manner, with scheduled events and static resources becoming the new standard. Mindless and infinite resource streams such as nullsec anomalies and ore sites that can currently be created out of thin air in any star system should be completely replaced with static resources that can be claimed and conquered. We could get a Serpentis smuggler gate that they send a convoy through every week at a certain time, or an ancient Jove sensor array that can search out DED complexes regularly, or an NPC agent who lives on a planet and offers services to one station in orbit. Every type of farming style gameplay should have some kind of timed event with big rewards that players can fight over and disrupt, or a strategic resource stream that can only be used by the alliance that claims it.
EVE Online expert Brendan ‘Nyphur’ Drain has been playing EVE for over a decade and writing the regular EVE Evolved column since 2008. The column covers everything from in-depth EVE guides and news breakdowns to game design discussions and opinion pieces. If there’s a topic you’d love to see covered, drop him a comment or send mail to brendan@massivelyop.com!
CCP envisions Eve to be the “ultimate scifi world/simulation”. and in real-life, peace is much more preferred than wars, for reasons needless to stress. Same reasoning applies to Eve.
I think the the damage cap is strange for upwell structures considering the complicated timer system it already have. To add incentives to kick over these sand castles, CCP could make the price of erecting these structures more expensive the more other structures in vicinity are already up.
Personally, I think CCP has the whole design for Upwell structures wrong, they’re all just reskinned space stations with different bonuses rather than iconic structures that serve a defined purpose. One of the big things that Starbases do well is to let you build your own little collection of structures that each has a specific function, and that let an outside observer know exactly what is happening in that starbase at a glance. That really should have been the model for Upwell structures.
Instead of being an alternative version of Citadels with different bonuses, Engineering Complexes and Refineries should have been something you have to build next to an existing citadel that provide a additional functionality to that citadel. Citadels themselves would be just storage hangars on their own, and you could see exactly what a citadel is designed to do by looking at the cluster of structures built around it. Assembly lines for modules, shipyards, repair functions, refining services, moon harvesting, system-wide mining bonuses, etc.
When observatories are added, they could provide new abilities to scan down things in system that probes can’t find, essentially spawning new PvE content kind of like how the new moon mining gameplay works. And when player-built stargates are added, people would build them next to their group of structures and link them to another cluster of structures in another star system. The reason to build large and X-large citadels would be that you could only build large and x-large engineering complexes etc next to one.
There would be added incentive to kick over these sandcastles then as you’d know you were disrupting something or depriving the enemy of capabilities, and that’s likely to provoke a defense response. Even the obscene reinforcement timers make sense in this scheme as the citadel is your main structure, and the other structures could be made attackable (or even just entosisable) at any time to disable them for 2-4 hours. Small gangs could do hit-and-run ops to take out the Observatory Arrays in enemy renter systems at peak time to hamper their ISK farming, or take down the moon harvesting array on moon mining day. Attacking outside your timezone wouldn’t even be a problem because the structures would self-repair after 2-4 hours.
“in real-life, peace is much more preferred than wars”
I don’t think this is the case with EVE, peace leads to stagnation. At least in organizations based in nullsec.
tl;dr: CSM :-(
I think a problem is the people who CCP has been listening to. I read recently re the fighter nerf “about 1/4 of the ratting was done by 1.4% of the players, using supercarriers and another 1/4 by 5% of the players using carriers.”
The people in EVE who are doing very well lose ISK when there is conflict. They have great influence over the big organizations and thus the CSM.
Less null-PvE-prints-money and more noob friendly would both benefit CCP but will never be popular at all.
And this is why PVP has no place in a stat-based RPG setting.
From what I’ve read prior to asset safety people would keep their stuff in NPC stations. If asset safety gets nerfed hard enough guess where all that stuff is going to wind up?
There’s some talk that NPC stations are going away. Pretty sure that’s limited to null. I can’t imagine CCP being dumb enough to do that to high sec. While that would certainly get people to move, subscribers moving to another game is probably not in CCP’s best interest.
No EVE needs no more conflict it needs less. It was the conflict that caused it to eventually go F2P. I have been playing EVE off and on for 13 years. You can war dec another corporation just because. Hell I was even there back in the day when innocent miners were constantly being attacked and pod killed just for some sicko’s to get their thrills even in high security space. Hell the fact is all the conflict kept people from playing, and when new players would join they wouldn’t stick around long due to the game being a gankfest so it ended up with the F2P system we have now.
While I agree that the wardec mechanic is fundamentally broken he’s not talking about hi-sec.
I actually agree about the wardec system, I wrote an article about that very topic at the end of May: http://massivelyop.com/2017/05/28/eve-evolved-war-declarations-need-revamped-for-the-citadel-era/ . Wardecs are a glorified pay-to-grief system that allow the strong to prey on the weak and don’t add much value at all to the game for all the lost accounts and similar stories to yours that we hear. That’s why I think highsec wardecs should be between two citadels rather than two corps or alliances, and corps should be able to opt out of being vulnerable to wars simply by not building a citadel.
That said, this article was more about conflict drivers for those who specifically want to engage in that conflict, in low- and null-security space (and wormholes, to a degree). There are fewer things pushing players into direct conflict today than there used to be, more factors constraining conflict and fewer valuable targets to act as flashpoints for PvP. Hopefully this does change as new gameplay such as the moon mining overhaul have definitely been designed to promote conflict.
obs. u dont need more war, u need give u money to CCP.
f off!
If CCP wants – definitely – to ruin the game, try to ‘go back’ to what it was in 2014, the capital party.
If CCP thinks, it supposes, it imagines that for a long time, to maintain players paying with real money the game and producing great expenses for the players, will be deceiving, making a serious error.
I am sorry to report, ‘little friends’, but the system crisis is general and already reaches the so-called ‘first world’.
Since the 2008 era the game transformed into a super coalition warfare state.
Fozzy sov failed hard and is already abandoned.
Citadels ? dear god they are worse then POS bashing back in the day as every coalition has an insane amount of those bunkers……
Goodluck cleaning up that cancer in space when you need to grind trough hundreds of that stuff….
The game went full retard and this is comming from a Eve player since 2006.
I really like the static ressources suggestion!
But if it’s allowed to spin that even further by a noob here: Why not make ressources way slower to replenish, but then plentiful enough, so you can mine them for a whole year? Forcing especially large alliances to not buncker down on most sought after spots forever and move on to new ressources eventually, making those big alliances more of a moving target and therefore more vulnerable if they can’t keep “all ducks in a row”.
Yes, a very slow paced target, but still moving nevertheless, just like those big wandering herds forced to cross a river every season, with crocodiles just waiting for them or other smaller predators ready to take advantage of a mistake.
Or are there not many untapped ressource locations left anymore?
If mitigation would be needed, recycling could play a bigger role, as maybe there would be recycling facilities, or ships (or modules), that depending on their researched level of efficiency could even better dismantle obsolete stuff than now possible and maybe even collect “metal particles” from space around previous battlefields. But of course the accumulated ressources in those slow civil vessels would make them desirable targets themselves, if not their supporting cargo vessels bringing the collected ressources back.
I hope, I didn’t make myself too much of a fool by these ideas! /bow
There are some really solid arguments to be made for resource depletion as a game mechanic, and I totally agree with it. Even looking back at events like the redistribution of moon goo and the addition of new materials to existing moons, that caused massive upheaval across the game and a lot of interesting conflict.
Right now, alliances can bed down in an area of space and turtle up, and they can buy infrastructure hub upgrades to give any system infinite sources of ratting ISK and ore to mine. While I’m all for the idea that alliances should be able to build up their assets in space, turtling inside a fortress doesn’t lead to much interesting conflict unless someone decides to knock it down. It’d be much more interesting for resources and even NPCs to deplete and shift around the map, an idea that’s definitely feasible for the future as CCP wants to roll out something similar in highsec in this winter’s expansion.
I already have my fair shore of conflicting drivers, I don’t need anymore…
“Um…I don’t think that’s what Mr. Drain is talking about, Uta.”
…oh! o.O
Edit/Erratum: …my fair *share…proper.