f13.net

I agree about DBRB: he can be annoying but fuck knows he has a work ethic that we need, and seeing a bunch of the usual suspects pursuing the goal of driving him out (or at least making him stop FCing) is depressing.  I think that a bunch of people are now aware of the possibility, though, so he gets vocal support that folks didn't realise would have been useful with you.

That said your csm platform was terrible.  Or was it a troll and your mind was made up by then?

I firmly believe in all that stuff I had on the CSM platform.  I think EVE would be a lot better off with it all implemented :I

For those who didn't see, my platform had a lot of mechanic changes like: Remove DDs, remove remote assigning of fighters, stacking nerf remote reps, remove POSes from Sov and make sov be determined in a manner similar to FW, same with station service disabling.  It's best not to argue about it here because there were so many changes of such controversy almost everyone hated them.

Retarded. Shooting at POS is actually a good mechanic. There are problems with its implementation only

<snip>

Edit: Yoru, you're faster than a speeding bullet ...

Already ahead of you.

I can't believe I actually just read that.  Wow.  It's just about my least favorite thing in the game.

Trevor: I don't remember it from before, but the idea of stacking penalties on remote reps is pretty interesting.  It would really increase the rate of capital ship losses.

I guess you do need a mechanic that allows the defender some advantage and allows attacker and defender to each choose the time of part of the battle. In addition they threw in a upkeep to balance the defender advantage, and an additional advantage if you can hold continously for a long time.

All of the above seems quite sensible to me, although POS shooting is still boring to actually do, it's not clear that there is an alternative. The Eve POS mechanics are in the above properties very similar to Shadowbane sieges, for instance.

Bubble dipping or whatever you call it is so shit. At least in SB you were fair game no matter where you were.

If Shadowbane proved anything to me, it's that there is no way to solve this problem without having stations with pre-designated open windows.

For example, take imaginary Zone SUX-M3.  Put 4 "stations" "points" or "tribbles".

Tribble 1 comes out in EST primetime.
Tribble 2 comes out in PST
Tribble 3 comes out in Euro Time
Tribble 4 comes out in Asia time.


No kiting bullshit or anything else.  Everyone knows when it's vulnerable and fights over it.

You don't know what "implementation" means do you?

Nope.  I am, in fact, functionally retarded.

Shooting at POS sucks completely.  I cannot imagine how anyone could think that sitting there for hours shooting at a POS is fun.  Hell, shooting at a POS for 5 minutes sucks completely. 

POS control is a tough nut to crack. On the one hand you want it easy to defend so people actually put them up and don't lose them willynilly, on the other hand you can't make it so hard to take out that no one bothers...

If they change the sovereignty mechanics, I could see POSes that are not part of the sovereignty becoming much easier to kill (vastly reduced HP from what it is today? No stront timing? Something?)

Personally, I'd love to see POSes removed from the sovereignty mechanic completely and make them much easier/cheaper to setup and run. They should be used solely for the purpose of manufacturing/research/moon mining/logistics base - their fuel costs and storage systems should be setup to reflect this - screw this claiming sov crap.

Shooting a POS should never take you an hour. Then again, you also don't know what implementation means.

I agree with some of the mechanics proposed, just think that the CSM is the wrong venue for it; my understanding was that the council was supposed to act as a filter / voice, not as game developers.

Having said that.. what ever happened to the idea of more 'fluid' sovereignty boundaries? There was an ongoing discussion of having it based on the number of pilots that were active in system (currently, last 24h, last week), as well as structures, mining and a lot of other factors which effectively would create an upper boundary on the territory of a given playersize could hold.
 

According to a certain CSM rep that we know, CCP is going to be addressing the 0.0 sov issue shortly.

Well the CSM was originally just a sop to players that wa intended to have no power at all, but had grown into something far more worthy I think.

As for sov mechanics. well I remember when shooting Poses was even more boring than it is now. Moving the modules out of the shield at least gave some degree of stratagy to the thing... only turned it into even more of a time sink with the repping, and I'm still in 2 minds of the halving of stront timers. It pretty much forces people to log in every night.

Attacking sov mechanics would mean a drastic re-ordering of the whole 0.0 thing as CCp has the whole thing revolving around Poses at this point. Also we all know that vast areas of 0.0 are completely empty of anything bar the occasional robot isk Farmer.

Putting a fortress on a planet would mean fewer things to siege, thing is though that as the number of capital ships has grown poses seem less and less powerful, so the temptation would be to make them tougher and tougher. However if you make a planet base a massive structure, you are again locking out the small poor corp that is gambling everything they have on a move into 0.0. That's the problem. Low sec sucks, and in no way gives you nearly enough income to even make a play for 0.0. The ones that are there are rich as fuck and can swat away the low sec attack and then that low sec alliance is gone for 6 months trying to recover from that defeat. This is in no way fair or fun. And a low sec alliance would never be able to generate a force powerful enough to defeat a super pos.

I don't really have a solution yet I'm just thinking out loud really nd teasing through the issues here. I thin EVERYONE can agree that pos warfare, as is, sucks.

Gou, don't be a retard if you're going to try and smack around newbies.  I've shot scores, probably over a hundred POSes thanks to following scavok and Suas around in Feyth, and thanks to being one of those who actually turned up in Geminate and in the current war, and I think I have only once been in a pos shot op that didn't take an hour (VNG) from posted time to boom/reinforced.  I have certainly been in a great many where the actual shooting of a single pos took a lot more than an hour, sometimes five, six or more.  We have to kite POSes in this war, which means there are very few fast takedowns happening.

There is far too much 0.0 space wasted due to all of the superpowers controlling the areas. CCP should really look at limiting the amount of space controlled by alliances.

One thing that came to mind was that sov should affect how difficult it is to take a pos down. (I know sov 4 does this already) however, if they made a few changes:

- A POS in a sov 1 system easier to kill than a POS in a sov 2 or sov 3 system and so on.
- Sov 3 systems (and lower) not within a constellation containing a station should be weaker than if protected by station.

It may force alliances to make strongholds in areas, rather than blobbing the maps.

Thoughts ?

I've noticed a trend with your posting.  When people don't agree with you, and they make a good arguement, you just retreat into "you don't know what this even means" territory.

Also, IRL, I work in implementation. (haha)

This really isn't possible.  Once an alliance hit the limit, they wold just form a second puppet alliance.

No, i am tired to too many fucking retards not realizing that the answer to "omg it took to long" is not "omg scrap the whole system it sucks fuck this" its "lower their god damned hit points of the things that take too long to kill"

Unfortunately, lowering their HP isn't a solution either.  It's already been mentioned in here that there has to be a balance between being killable and not being too killable if you're going to stick with POS as a sovereignty mechanic.  Lower the HP and it suddenly becomes easy to burn through more POS with a dread fleet.  Reinforced mode is also an issue when you have wars like the current one where the only way to effectively kill a tower is to kite it out of your enemy's prime time.

Whatever the shittiness around setting up, maintaining and destroying POS, at least they're focal points for some epic fights.

Nah, the answer probably is to use a different mechanic for system holding.  I'd rather see it be similar but gate based.  I'm against POSs being pvp targets to the point where they aren't serving a purpose other than as time/money sinks.  As was posted earlier they should be player structures, not corp structures.

Wealthy, well organized corps should have an advantage but not to the point were it's just spamming down billions in death stars and running hours long kiting ops to take and hold territory.  Where you need fleets of logistics people to run around refueling and repairing just to maintain status quo.  I mean, how boring is that?

That is entirely the idea. That and reduce the number of POS you have to grind through...

If this were implemented as you propose it, I would think Alliances would react by taking their dread fleets and reinforcing so many towers in so many systems that the defenders would not know where to defend.  This would defeat the purpose of reinforcing, which as I understand it, is twofold: 1) To allow the defenders to organize a defense and 2) to allow CCP to organize their servers so large fleet battles can be supported in sectors that are known ahead of time.

How?  Siege time is fixed and any big player(not to mention many little players) can single cycle towers.  Plus you always bring many dreads as possible to guard against hot drops.  Lower HP would mainly help smaller or poorer entities who have to do it all with battleships.

So, can anyone tell me what the point of the kiting mechanic is?

Why aren't the levels at which the stront bay is locked and the level at which it goes into reinforced equal?  That seems to defeat the defender's advantage.

I believe kiting is how the players reacted to a design flaw in POS warfare.

Can't adjust stront after shields are below 50%.

Kiting is still to the defender's advantage.  It gives you x more hours to defend your POS from even going IN to reinforced, presumably approaching your own prime time.  If the defender is competent he should be able to scramble a force to run off the hostiles and repair the POS thus averting a bad timer.

Do you think this is a good game mechanic?    Having a fleet sits there for hours keeping the POS between 25% and 50% doesn't seem like a fun activity.

I want to see sovereign player space made way more valuable, but the means of holding it made absolutely horrible as it scales.

In other words, make it really worthwhile to hold 0.0 space (including more worthwhile than NPC 0.0) but not worth holding hundreds of systems like GF do.  Even though we don't hold sov in it all, we have to protect it all in order to hold the good bits.

That way we might get lots and lots of new alliances holding a patchwork of space, so that thereare lots of people worth shooting within ten or so jumps.  Of course, power blocs will arise, but the political situation will be more unstable.

No, I think it's a necessary adaptation to a terrible mechanic.  I dislike nearly everything about POS immensely.  I'm very much in favor of the idea of consolidating sov-holding bases to planets or some other method of reducing the number of targets that have to be sieged in the event that CCP cannot free us permanently from the shackles of POS warfare.

Sieging POS successfully(and efficiently) depends on a number of things. One of which is disabling the POS so you do not lose capitals in the effort. If you've got a massive force its not going to make much of a difference. But you don't always have such a force and sometimes you might want to split it.

I read your thread and while I didn't agree with a lot of your proposals some of them were good, but I thought suggesting that you were the only good representative was either balllsy or misguided, considering your executor was also running  :grin:

On the note of POS warfare I always thought Titans should work like deathstars and instead of Doomsday they could use a hi powered beam to basically gank POSes. I know it's totally cliche but if it works it could take a lot of the donkey work away from the grunts and also give the Titan a truly beneficial role other than a gigantic space-penis with dodgy side effects.

So the big fight becomes about getting the titan into place and then trying to protect it for 30 mins or so while the other side tries to destroy it maybe?

Puts too much burden on the defense.  All you have to do is wait for some time when the defenders are busy elsewhere or just not very active and go to town.

Or, are you suggesting keeping the current stront timing gameplay and just replace dreads with a titan + suport fleet?

I like this idea as long as you keep the stront timing.  And get rid of POS kiting too while you're at it.

One weakness is that it leaves dreads with no role, except that of hotdropping titans.  Unless they can still be the ghetto POS killer like battleships are now.

Maybe they could introduce a new Sov.  Make Constellation sov = Sov 5 and make Sov 4 come some time after sov 3 in every system. Then create a supercap jammer that's made only to keep titans out.

I guess now I'm off in wonderland.

Yeh that would be pretty spot on, though I would say not completely replace the dread fleet just alleviate some of the time spent shooting the POS. It might take some time to power up or some mechanic that would basically help alleviate the POS warfare grind without radically changing the game. Just an example : the weapon might do 66% damage to a standard deathstar shields but it would cost a lot of cap to either run or a single shot for 100k cap meaning it would take a while to do one again and the Titan would be more vulnerable after using it.

So, what role do you give to Dreads?  What makes them worth having?

Also, I think this idea just means you Titan spam a system to take it.  Team with the most Titans willing to do silly hours wins.

Step 1 is remove DD whatever you do.  Even without doomsday it's still very useful simply because of bridges.  Maybe increase the bridge range to compensate.  The ship ultimately should have some offensive capability though.  what if a titan could do a sieged dread damage, but without needing  to be in siege (and without all the associated downsides)?

Just throwing out a shitty idea, I haven't thought through the implications.


Well one titan buys you a respectable dread fleet, so there's a cost/risk issue.  Also dreads are easier to train for.  You could ask the same question comparing cruisers and HACs.

I would rather not quibble about the details mainly cause my overall knowledge of the current POS warfare system is a little limited to be honest. I'm sure there are plenty ways you could implement it that leaves dreads with a role. Perhaps the beam would only be able to damage the tower or the towers shields so dreads would still be used to take out mods or finish it after reinforced comes out. Perhaps it's sieged while charging leaving the titan vulnerable to attack giving your support fleet a defensive role...etc. Also dreads could still be used to take out the Titans.


Sure but right now we got team with most dreads doing even more silly hours wins right? The point is to lessen the grind without radically changing the game mechanics, the reason I think it's a good idea is it does this while giving the Titan a much needed role so double whammy.

Chicken: To take space effectively, you will need at least one titan.
Egg: To build a titan, you must control space for 8+ weeks.

Expect to see a lot more Operation: Coathangers, too.

The idea that you should need an asset that requires you to own space in order to attack space is just plain retarded.

A titan wouldn't be required, though.  Same as dreads aren't required now.  They just give you an advantage.

Very true.

You also don't need tech 2 fit sniping battleship fleets to win fleet battles either...

Boil it down: Make it easier to take more space once you've already taken some space. The problem should be obvious.

Rich get richer?

In General, it should be harder, not easier, to keep your online empire together as it gets bigger.

We already have that problem.  That's not the problem I'm proposing this to solve. 


Though I do agree it's a problem.

It is, we've taken high ends (and stations for that matter) off BoB simply because they've been busy elsewhere.  That's before you even consider the pure logistics burnout hell of a big empire.

It's possible these days to buy a titan on the open market too.  So you don't even need Sov 4, just assloads of cash which can be obtained anywhere.

Another problem is that NPC space is in general better than sov space, simply as it requires no outlay to keep docking rights on the station and no-one can kick you out. That's one of the things that makes delve so nice as you have the best of both worlds.. Even id you say that you can make more money in sov space (which in general is not true) All your extra cash is burned up in fuel.

I thought the main problem with POS warfare was that it's a huge timesink, people get burned out and exploits usually define the outcome.

And it less interesting than mining, which is saying something.

I think that's an oversimplification.  We won this last round in spite of exploits.  And in any body large enough to merit holding space, there should be enough people around to avoid burnout. 

With the new logistics (JB chains, jump freighters, and Titan spacelifts) and the improved fuel bays, it's not as bad as it used to be.  Was a time that keeping a Fermionics chain going (4 large towers and 8 small) burned up 20 hours a week, most of that just moving fuel and moon goo around a single system (and trying to bring in the fuel).  After JB's and fuel bay changes, that dropped to 3 hours a week to maintain 12 large towers (and that included daily trips to refill the JB's, fuel came in monthly by freighter).

Setting up and breaking down towers is a huge PITA, but actually keeping them up, not so bad anymore.  POS based territorial warfare has a lot of flaws, but when you consider all the conflicting needs it's trying to fulfill, it's really not a bad system.  Compare it to SB's "Bane" system, or DAoC's Outpost system, the only others to try and fulfill the same kind of function (and on much smaller scales).

--Dave

Ok fair point then would one major problem be the defenders rarely turn up to defend a tower being put into reinforced?

Do you mean when they are put into reinforced the first time?  There is less incentive to do it for sure, since it's not the end of the line. Also it can be hard to raise and organize a fleet on your enemy's schedule.  That's the whole point of making them come back to shoot it a second time.  I don't see how you can avoid that with any sov holding/conquering mechanic.