winter patch: Dominion

[lac]

I do wonder how CCP are planning the switchover

AAA proposed to do it alphabetically.

[tazelbain]

A week of no sovereignty would be fun (to watch).

[Simond]

I love all of this. It's the final fucking nail in the coffin of BoB's tired old saw of "We're just better than you".
No. No, they were just given better toys and now that we get to play with them they suddenly become 'unbalanced'. 

These changes were proposed at a high level by me at the end of the second CSM, after a great deal of discussion with the Devs and non-goon players in the first.

http://wiki.eveonline.com/wiki/Incentivizing_0.0

I don't want to appear to be claiming complete credit or tooting my own horn or anything, but anyone complaining about the devs changing it simply because we own Delve now is off their rockers. We have been pushing these changes via the CSM for over a year. They listened. The finished product will certainly have a lot more detail than I ever mentioned but the root ideas of "FIX SOV BY REDUCING POSSES OR SOMETHING FUCK" and "INCENTIVIZE 0.0 BY LETTING US UPGRADE/DEVELOP OUR SPACE" appear to be the priorities.

I believe we also championed the supercap changes in the first and second csms, though again not in as much detail.

Aw, but I want my schadenfreude. 

A week of no sovereignty be fun (to watch).

This will probably happen, whether CCP meant it to or not. 

[Skullface]

Just turning off all the jump bridges and cyno jammers while infrastructure is built would be... eventful.

It's going to do wonders for my burgeoning hi-sec transport business. 

[MahrinSkel]

It looks to me more like the Providence model writ large, the value of space is going to be far more derived from what you've *done* with it, rather than just what it has naturally.  Taking space for it's own sake won't be that attractive, because you won't get the benefit of the development, but just raw undeveloped space that's had the vast majority of the infrastructure value-added razed in the process (much as there's no point in taking all those outposts in Providence, because the value is in the economic activity of the residents, which would not carry over for an invader).  R64 moons would be a nice bonus, and a good seed crystal to form a space empire around, but they'd be mere ornaments compared to the real value, not the singular focus of an internet-spaceships chess match only massive power blocks got to play.

"Territory" will no longer be a noun.  It will be a verb.

--Dave

[Gets]

Pirate faction ship changes announced: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1177474

The Gila will be a 400m3 drone bay 125mb/s drone bandwidth missile cruiser, making it a very nice PvE ship. The Ashimmu similarly is now a little laser god, except the loss of the web range is sad. The changes to the Nightmare, Bhaalgorn, Vindicator and most notably the Rattlesnake look similarly sweet.

They are making it very hard for me to not care about e-peen ships 

[Simond]

That Bhaalgorn looks p. tasty - effectively eight turrets, 7/5/7 slots and a nos strength/web range bonus. That'll be a p. good ratting or mission ship. Incidentally, I'm barely inside the minimum faction needed for Blood Raider missions. 

Although the new Navy Geddon would probably be even better (8/4/8 slots, extra 50m3 to the dronebay and +50% armour/shield/hull strength) as a PvE ship. The absolute best thing about the "New Navy ships" thread is that it took about three or four pages before someone mentally connected "General: all navy battleship shield recharge time has been increased to 3390s." to 'CNR w. passive tank' and went "OMG it's a nerf!". Well, yeah. That's the point.

[Goumindong]

The new Vindicator looks pretty ridiculous

8 turrets, 8/5/7, 125 cubes, 25% dmg bonus inherent... tracking/speed.

The amisshu is now pretty explicitly better than the Phantasm[8 effective vs 7.5 on the phantasm]

[bhodi]

It looks to me more like the Providence model writ large, the value of space is going to be far more derived from what you've *done* with it, rather than just what it has naturally. 

I wonder if this means the people who stockpile resources and cash before the switch will have a large advantage against the people who don't.

[Amarr HM]

Bhaalgoorn changes make me happy.

I believe we also championed the supercap changes in the first and second csms, though again not in as much detail.

That first CSM was definitely the most influential. I do remember CCP pushing you guys to really think big as the initial ideas you brought forward were quite menial, not sure if this has been the case in recent CSMs.

[Darius JOHNSON]

Bhaalgoorn changes make me happy.

I believe we also championed the supercap changes in the first and second csms, though again not in as much detail.

That first CSM was definitely the most influential. I do remember CCP pushing you guys to really think big as the initial ideas you brought forward were quite menial, not sure if this has been the case in recent CSMs.

I actually believe the second CSM had the biggest impact. We were too busy being distracted by Jade's stupid ass in the first. I think we're on the third now and from the little I've heard they seem to be doing good things.

[Fordel]

How much do those pirate ships cost? They still super duper wtf expensive?

[Teleku]

Definitely liking the changes I'm seeing.   Should be interesting.

Though I wonder how getting rid of POS warfare will effect the role of Dreds.

[Gets]

How much do those pirate ships cost? They still super duper wtf expensive?

When the announcement hit the 800mil pirate BSs were all bought and relisted for 2bil 

CSM reps and CCP is assuring everyone that Dreadnaughts will still have their use.

[Raging Turtle]

How much do those pirate ships cost? They still super duper wtf expensive?

Are the changes already in?  I'm vaguely considering resubbing and getting back into the faction ship business.

[Gets]

No, they are coming with Dominion, which should launch in November. I'm kind of looking at Factional Warfare, since that's where you can only get the new Navy ships, as well as pirate missions, of course.

[Fordel]

I always wanted to fool around with a Missile/Drone boat, but such a thing never really existed. There was that T2 Arbiter thing, but I never had the skills or the money for it.

[tmp]

No, its not. Its a retarded idea. If all space is the same then there is no economic incentive for anyone who already has 0.0 space to go and take anyone elses.

With the ability to develop owned space the end effect is likely to be similar anyway. Both the conquest and development are at the end of day resource sink, but when one of these options carries far bigger risk your resource "investment" fails to provide tangible results... welp.

[Slayerik]

So the stupid Gila i spent like 2 hours trying to come up with a halfway decent PVP fit might be worth something? For the record, I do have a kill with it old school style....but thats just cause I'm the fuckin man.

[Meester]

Only if I get loyalty points.  Oh and what are your faction ships like?

I could always stick 12 velators together with a bonus to civ electron blasters.
Can't think of a name right now, so the Thingy will have to do for now.

[eldaec]

Only if I get loyalty points.  Oh and what are your faction ships like?

I could always stick 12 velators together with a bonus to civ electron blasters.
Can't think of a name right now, so the Thingy will have to do for now.

Give me +5% civ blaster damage, +10% drone damage, and you got a deal.

That's an 840 dps frigate with 12k HP, top speed about 7k per sec (you can only fit an AB), scan res is just under 7000mm.


Sig radius is 540m though

[Skullface]

It looks to me more like the Providence model writ large, the value of space is going to be far more derived from what you've *done* with it, rather than just what it has naturally.  Taking space for it's own sake won't be that attractive, because you won't get the benefit of the development, but just raw undeveloped space that's had the vast majority of the infrastructure value-added razed in the process (much as there's no point in taking all those outposts in Providence, because the value is in the economic activity of the residents, which would not carry over for an invader).  R64 moons would be a nice bonus, and a good seed crystal to form a space empire around, but they'd be mere ornaments compared to the real value, not the singular focus of an internet-spaceships chess match only massive power blocks got to play.

"Territory" will no longer be a noun.  It will be a verb.

--Dave

I'm still a bit new to the politics at play here (still new-ish to EVE,) but shouldn't sov-holding alliances be vetting new corps to hold space for them? If most alliances are half the population of Goonswarm, wouldn't they start looking to expand to make use of more space?

[Endie]

I'll bet nobody else in eve has a Thingy. Entity will go spare when I let him know there's one in-game. I might record myself self-destructing it just to taunt him.

[Kovacs]

It looks to me more like the Providence model writ large, the value of space is going to be far more derived from what you've *done* with it, rather than just what it has naturally.  Taking space for it's own sake won't be that attractive, because you won't get the benefit of the development, but just raw undeveloped space that's had the vast majority of the infrastructure value-added razed in the process (much as there's no point in taking all those outposts in Providence, because the value is in the economic activity of the residents, which would not carry over for an invader).  R64 moons would be a nice bonus, and a good seed crystal to form a space empire around, but they'd be mere ornaments compared to the real value, not the singular focus of an internet-spaceships chess match only massive power blocks got to play.

"Territory" will no longer be a noun.  It will be a verb.

--Dave

This is what I'm worried about.  Why would CCP make the ALL of the infrastructure improvements evaporate when one alliance loses sov.?  Why remove the main reason that 0.0 alliances would go to war? I suspect CCP is going to focus far too much on the ability to improve your held systems and too little on restricting that ability and thus fail to generate the sort of drive to expand that encourages alliance warfare.

And if that's the case then the only wars are going to be generated by empire allinaces trying to get into 0.0 and dislodged 0.0 allinaces preying on weaker 0.0 alliances and that's only after the enitre of 0.0 is already claimed.  The increased importance on roaming gangs just increases the problem.  Are you really going to invest in a cap./super cap. fleet. just to shoot the jammer and sov. module when you can "make your mark on 0.0" by roaming?  Also, is the barrier to competition too high for an empire allinace in the first place?  Can any empire aliance afford the capital ships it will take to dislodge a cliaming module or will it just be a land rush then 'wulfpax'?  Will the changes to moon mining make it impossible to siphon off moon mins. and generate enough income to slowly expand into 0.0?

[Comstar]

Predictions:

Within 6 months of the changes going live, CVA becomes the richest, most powerful group in Eve.

Goonswarm invites an empire alliance to live in Querious.

The NC breaks apart with huge gaps between the current alliances but the lack of supply lines to empire mean no one can fill the gaps.

Part of the old-NC invade the Delve regions and a new political block forms hostile to both the russians and the old-old-NC.

RA increases in power but stays the same size, with some of the homeless ex-drone region Russians and renters joining them.

ATLAS gets a lot smaller and is the first large existing alliance to fall to a new one created by empire-pilots. AAA backstabs ATLAS to the surprise of no one.

ROL massively decreases in size and loses a huge amount of wealth when the 10/10 complex becomes much less profitable compared to the new found wealth of other 0.0 alliances.

AAAcitizens fractures into pro and anti- AAA forces with the losers retreating to Stain and Curse and make AAA's vast holdings untenable. Catch falls to CVA but the offensive goes no further while CVA "rebuilds" the region. Some old IAC corps go and live in the old IAC constellation.

PL tries vainly to stay in Fountain but gives up being kept at home every day defending it and dwindle away.

A group of new players from a outside-eve location form an alliance in Syndicate and are attacked by the inhabitants of Delve. Losing a war they cannot win, they swear revenge.

[Skullface]

A group of new players from a outside-eve location form an alliance in Syndicate and are attacked by the inhabitants of Delve. Losing a war they cannot win, they swear revenge.

Anonswarm?
Ebaumswarm?
HalTurnerswarm?
CollegeHumorswarm?

[IainC]

A group of new players from a outside-eve location form an alliance in Syndicate and are attacked by the inhabitants of Delve. Losing a war they cannot win, they swear revenge.

Anonswarm?
Ebaumswarm?
HalTurnerswarm?
CollegeHumorswarm?

Icanhazcheezburgerswarm

[rand]

seems like they're incentivizing having numbers and having a  lot of carebears in your alliance over being purely pvp based and milking moongold, which'll suit goonswarm fine. alliances with small numbers that are more into pvp will have to get ratters and miners to come down from empire, which could be a problem because there's really no incentive to come down to 0.0 when you can make comparable money with a lot less risk by sitting in empire. they're trying to get more people into 0.0 but this'll only work if they buff 0.0 isk generation by a lot.

espescially if they make random wolfpax have more griefing potential and sov in 0.0 a lot more volatile as opposed to the haven it currently is for ratters in sov3 fortresses, most empire pubbies won't bother and quite a few carebears in 0.0 might just hightail it back there. my prediction is that this'll empty out 0.0 even more except for alliances with a critical mass of numbers like goons and CVA

[Sir T]

Problem is that is they increas 0.0 isk generation the devalue isk in general. That's why they have been focusing on reducing the amount of isk you can generate through missions.

[MahrinSkel]

I'm still a bit new to the politics at play here (still new-ish to EVE,) but shouldn't sov-holding alliances be vetting new corps to hold space for them? If most alliances are half the population of Goonswarm, wouldn't they start looking to expand to make use of more space?

I came in during Cold War, right before Red Storm Rising (brought in POS count based sovereignty, Siege Mode, and Interdictors).  Back then, populations in 0.0 were *tiny*, not only were there few alliances in 0.0, but most of the people in those alliances rarely actually came out to 0.0, most people were mission grinding for isk and going out to 0.0 to blow it in PvP.  Tech 2 recipes had just been revamped to require a lot more Zydrine and Megacyte, and the T2 BPO lotteries were still in full swing (which was why all those people were grinding missions, even a crappy T2 BPO was worth billions and a really prime one like a HAC was a license to print money).

Fleets were comparatively tiny, capitals unheard of (the very first Dread was built by one of the factions in the Stain Civil War, it was ambushed and destroyed by the other faction while being hopped from low-sec to Stain).  The first time two fleets of 100 faced off, large chunks of 0.0 crashed.  There was no warp-to-zero, and the "Instas" (bookmarks set 15km past the gates so you could warp on top of the gate) were hard to come by, especially since Cold War had shuffled a bunch of the routes.  FIX's first 100+ fleet took 5 hours to move from Badivefi to 1 jump short of Stain via 9CG, and we gave up and turned around because the battle was 15 jumps further and we had no instas.

Ever since then, the focus of both players and developers has been on having ever larger fleet battles, with every larger weights of ships.  In 2004, a fleet of 100 might have 20 battleships in it, and the main striking arm was the Thorax squad (because of a seriously unbalanced bonus to MWD fitting and performance).  "Sniper Range" was anything over 80km, and even a speed-rigged interceptor with good implants couldn't crank much over 2kms.  Bigger, faster, more expensive has been the course of everything from ships to alliances ever since.

The result was the Great War, which proved impossible to resolve, only the Haargoth Affair and the Goon's big "burn the bridges behind us" gamble to take BoB space while their sovereignty was down allowed it to be ended.  Unless we want to let things sort themselves into two new powerblocks, who will stomp all the small fry who try to stay unaligned (what few remain), and simply have another unresolvable war to suck up all of the player's efforts, it's time for a change.

To everything there is a season.  This is going to be a time to build, to develop the economic base that will be harnessed in some future form of conflict, hopefully not one that just sees Moms and Titans replace Dreads and Carriers in the Wall of Battle, as those ships replaced Battleships.  The map has gotten too simple, even thought there are more people in almost any random region of 0.0 than there were in all of null-sec 5 years ago, there are too few real players in the 0.0 game and too few ways to play.

--Dave

[Endie]

Latest dev blog is up.  Interesting.  http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=695

We've been thinking about nullsec for quite a long time. The last big round of changes were made in Revelations II back in summer 2007, and we've been watching the results ever since. Some things worked out pretty well. Some things not so much. Some things have changed in the intervening period. And now here we are, two years on, and we've been given a mandate to re-engineer the dynamics of nullsec. Which is exciting, and challenging, and maybe a little scary. We think this stuff is kind of important, and it's not like there's anyone else in the industry who we could talk to about this stuff even if we wanted to. Nobody else does - has ever really done - what we do here: it's undiscovered country.

So anyway, here we are today. Nullsec is largely the domain of large, 2-3000 member PvP alliances, grouped up into inevitable coalitions and engaged in not-quite-impossibly large wars. Costs are mosty covered at the alliance level by a combination of old money and high-value moon minerals. The latter continue to rise in price due to ever-increasing demand from invention, and the after-effects of last year's exploit-related burp invalidating the calculations used to construct the Alchemy pressure-release valve. Most of the space that's up for grabs is owned by a clone army of ideologically-distinct but functionally-similar alliances, making the entire political landscape depressingly homogeneous. The state of the military art is not much better - sub-capital fleets are wheeled out for cyno-jammer take-downs and then packed away before they can fall victim to multiple doomsdays, leaving huge capital fleets to park themselves in front of a never-ending procession of starbases. And the smaller groups, the newer organizations hoping to gain a foothold in the Great Game, are left begging for crumbs around the edges. Who's going to let security-risk nobodies into their back yard when they'll never be able to compete pay as much as a single dysprosium moon?

We're not convinced that this is the best, most interesting, most dynamic and most emergence-friendly state of being for nullsec, so we're going to make some changes.


Why nullsec is worth working on

Nullsec is cool and different and awesome because of emergence. It's not the most populous area of the game, sure (and more on this shortly), but it provides one of EVE's most compelling and unique experiences. It does this because, by and large, we let you the players call the shots. This does have some impact in empire, but in nullsec the effect is writ large.

By giving players and player organizations tactical and strategic freedom, we allow a situation to arise where each challenge is different from the last, because every time there are different people involved making different decisions which result in different outcomes. You may have seen this effect in trailers such as The Butterfly Effect, and it usually goes by the name "emergence". And it's awesome.

The reason emergence works is that players make decisions. The more decisions that players can make, the more emergence you get, and the more interesting the experience is. Therefore, a primary development goal in nullsec is to enable players to make decisions, which can be boiled down to two directives.

First, try to give players tools. More tools give players more options, which means more decisions. Of course, to have value these decisions need to be meaningful - it's not enough to say "you can paint your shed red or blue" if the color of the shed has no impact on anything else.

Second, try to avoid telling players what to do or how to do it. The current sovereignty system, for example, mechanically prescribes a certain path to conquest, which limits the number of command decisions to be made. Obviously you need some mechanics in order to reach a definitive outcome - which lessens the number of decisions but also makes them more meaningful - but in general, the strategy is "deregulate, deregulate, deregulate".


The other thing

As mentioned above, nullsec isn't the most populated area of the game, and doesn't contain anything like the majority of EVE's characters. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for this expansion. A challenge, because we obviously have to be careful not to ruin the gameplay for everyone in empire by accident, but an opportunity because we can change the balance here and give more of our players a chance to experience nullsec gameplay.

We're aware that some players just aren't interested in the nullsec experience, and that's fine, but we're also aware that there's a lot of players who'd like to try it out but can't seem to get started - in no small part because of the problems outlined in the first few paragraphs. If we have a really compelling game experience, and we have players that want to try it out but can't, then we're doing something wrong somewhere.


Where we're going with this

Ok, so that's pretty much the top-level view. Let's drill down a bit to some of the big whats and whys.

The first big departure is the actual sovereignty system itself (which is only a small part of the whole picture). Right at the start of the project we asked "why do we even need a sovereignty system?", and the main argument for keeping it has nothing to do with shooting at things. Rather, the biggest reasons for having a mechanical system of ownership are to have something we can use to regulate who can do certain things in a system, and (more importantly) to let people stake out their territory. Being able to say "this is our space, we fought hard for it, and now everyone can see what we achieved" is important to a lot of people.

A system to do this can be fairly lightweight. It needs to handle systems changing hands, of course, but it can afford to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Currently we have a prescriptive sovereignty system: you fight over sovereignty explicitly, with the sovereignty mechanics determining who owns the system. A descriptive system says who's in charge, so it only needs to change hands after the dust has settled and one side has emerged triumphant. The actual fighting is deregulated - rather than mechanically telling you what to do (shoot sixty hardened starbases), you just need to do whatever it is you need to do so that at the end of the day the enemy goes away.

Of course, there's one class of thing that can't be left entirely free-form, and they're the things that helped bring about the current sovereignty system in the first place: stations. Outposts and conquerable stations are the river-crossings of EVE - each one lets you project power all around it, and as a result they're pivotal military objectives. Station ping-pong - waking up in the morning and finding that someone in a different timezone had taken your station, and the first thing you had to do was shoot it again to take control of it so you could re-dock - was very silly and we don't want that to come back.

There's no reason that the solution to this has to be the sovereignty system, but it does need to be timezone-proof. There's also no reason that it needs to take two weeks for an outpost to change hands - while comparatively shorter switches give the defender less time to mount a defense, they also make re-conquest easier. The combination of a lighter, descriptive sovereignty system and a separate mechanism for outpost conquest should (we think) lend itself much better to emergent outcomes.


Density and density

Sovereignty and outposts are roughly half the problem. The other half are the two related concepts of resource density and population density, and here everything ties itself into a messy knot that can be unravelled in a fairly elegant way.

Where to start? Resource density in nullsec is too low to support a high player density, which limits the number of people that could theoretically live in nullsec. Moon mineral values mean that there's no need at an alliance level to worry about other resources anyway, which limits the number of people who are actually allowed to live in nullsec. A lack of population or vulnerable resources means smaller fleets have little strategic relevance. Alliances hold vast tracts of space that they have no actual use for, simply because they can, locking out other groups from using it.

These problems are all interlinked, and solving them with a few key changes should bring a lot of good results.

Firstly, let people upgrade their space, and in particular its resource density. By increasing the resource density, you increase the potential population density, and by letting players do it rather than simply seeding more resources, you open up more decisions and more emergence.

Secondly, reduce the amount of income that can be derived from mining moons. In conjuction with the first change, this means that the best way to raise funds for an alliance will once again be to fill your space with as many people as possible, upgrade your space as much as possible and watch the money roll in.

This serves several masters. It gets more people into nullsec - one of our objectives - by making big alliances want more people in their space. It makes it much harder to be a big, rich, military alliance; rather, things should move more back towards the old dichotomy between big rich carebear alliances and smaller, poorer military alliances, because history (both in EVE and in the real world) shows that badass military organizations can't handle crop rotation without going soft and squishy. This dichotomy leads to more interesting conflicts; balanced but non-symmetric wars and political interactions between organizations with wildly differing objectives tend to be more entertaining than fights between largely identical groups. And if some alliances are relying heavily on lots of people working in their space on a regular basis in order to fund all their activities, interesting and strategically meaningful small-fleet combat materializes on its own, without resorting to "here is a structure for twenty ships to shoot": there's lots of soft targets for roaming fleets to harass, and space-holders have a pressing financial incentive to keep the residents of their space safe and fight off any incursions.

Thirdly, charge rent on systems. This allows us to scale the rent based on how well-developed a system is, which means it's less of a no-brainer to upgrade (meaningful decisions!), and also reinforces the idea that the more people are using a system, the more money it'll make you. In conjunction with a few well-placed additional penalties, it also combats alliance sprawl, leaving more space up for grabs and again letting more people experience nullsec.

Obviously, the anti-sprawl mechanics are a bit of a soft limiter, as you can always split up your alliance into multiple "alt alliances" to work around any possible mechanic in this vein. That's ok though, although to explain why needs a short digression on social structures in EVE.

The most stable social structures are almost always corporations, and they're also the ones with the most value for players. Corporations usually survive turmoil, and they represent the strongest set of social bonds. Alliances are fairly stable and represent some additional social value, but often fragment after major defeats. Finally, coalitions of alliances are pretty unstable and rarely last beyond whatever war brought them together. (It's also interesting to note that the number of real people in the average large corporation rarely exceeds Dunbar's Number, and that the average stable military alliance is almost always ~3000 players divided into 6-8 major corporations, but that's not directly relevant.)

Groupings of "alt alliances" fall somewhere between regular alliances and coalitions in terms of stability (and by reducing the number of people in alliance chat to a more manageable number, likely actually increase social utility), so even if alliances attempt to circumvent soft limits by fragmenting themselves, they're decreasing their stability and to some degree at least increasing the number of political entities present in nullsec, both of which lead to more conflict and more interesting emergent behavior. And of course in addition, by adding some non-linear cost scaling, the upkeep system will likely encourage at least some multi-region alliances to consider whether they really need all that additional space or not...


Recap that for me?

We implement the following:

• A simple, descriptive sovereignty system
• A separate mechanism for governing outpost conquest
• A way to increase the resource density of your space (as well as other cool gubbins)
• A reduction in the value of moon minerals
• An upkeep system for the space you hold and develop
 
We get (hopefully!):

• A more comprehensible, streamlined and robust way of showing who owns a particular system
• A better conquest experience
• More organic, meaningful and fun small-fleet combat
• Less territorial sprawl by major alliances
• A more diverse and interesting political landscape
• More opportunities for players to get involved in nullsec
• More awesome emergent gameplay
 
If it works out like we're hoping, we think this is a pretty good outcome.

-Greyscale


Postscript

This is actually my third stab at this blog. The first was a 3000-word rehash of some internal documents, which was interesting but too wordy and not informative enough, and the second draft I binned after getting to 1500 and realizing I was still warming up... We even discussed not doing this at all for a bit, but decided it's worth doing what's essentially a theory-dump for three reasons. For one we find this stuff really interesting for its own sake, and figured that a few of you might too, and for another we've found internally that a lot of the things we're doing make no sense until you have the "why" of it explained.

The third reason though is to show that we really have thought about this stuff. Nullsec gameplay is a big deal and a lot of you are rightly worried that there's a huge potential to screw this up badly (I know it keeps me up at night sometimes). We think though that we've got a good handle on the underlying theory for what goes on out there, and that gives us a good basis to move forward on. It should also go some way to explaining why we're being fairly comprehensive here. The current systems in nullsec are a bit like a house that's been built up piecemeal from a single small hut, and while it has a lot of rooms, the layout doesn't make a lot of sense ("why is there a toilet in the middle of the living room?" "well, three years ago..."). Most of the prior discussion we've seen, both internally and externally, has been limiting itself to knocking through a few walls and rearranging the furniture; what we're trying to do here instead is to level the entire building, and then rebuild the foundations and the ground floor according to an actual plan. The resulting structure won't (initially) have as many rooms as the current one, but it's been designed with coherent future extensibility in mind, and more importantly the toilet will actually be in the bathroom this time round.

Also, Comstr, I don't want to Woodcock, which would be the only way to address each, but while a couple of those predictions are ok, some of them are... ahem... long shots.  For example: Goonswarm, for instance, probably will invite another alliance into Querious (alongside Rebellion).  But if it is an "Empire" alliance it will be one who is only there because they've lost space, and they'll have ties of some sort to us already.  If PL fails it will be because of internal wrangling and ego conflicts.  Not because they're getting too many opportunities to slaughter people in good fights.  And do you have an inside source for why AAA Citizens would have a civil war with half going rogue?  Oh, and CVA are good guys who still have a core of good fighters in the alliance itself, but in fights where they need pet pilots to exhibit individual initiative and ability beyond "shoot the primary" and "get wing-warped in and out" they are still hugely weak, although slightly better than a few months ago.  I say that having fought them frequently on a spy account this year in small-medium fights, and never even being worried.

[Amarr HM]

That's a long anticipated and pretty amazing blog, I think most people can agree sov system needed to be completely rebuilt.

[Goumindong]

that was a hugely useless blog that contained no real information that we didn't already know without giving us anything of substance to determine whether or not the actual system will work.

[IainC]

I don't expect to see any concrete details until the systems are already up on Singularity for players to get to grips with. Anything else at this point approaching actual details rather than broad vision statements is going to get theorycrafted and doomcalled out of all proportion to a much greater degree than these deliberately vague overviews have been already.

CCP are mostly doing it right as far as information rollout is concerned. The devil, as always, will be in the details.

[rand]

  Unless we want to let things sort themselves into two new powerblocks, who will stomp all the small fry who try to stay unaligned (what few remain), and simply have another unresolvable war to suck up all of the player's efforts, it's time for a change

--Dave

*builds infrastructure*
*loses it all because of sov being easier to switch*

this isn't going to encourage more small fry in 0.0, but bigger alliances and bigger numbers who can actually hold on to the stuff they poured money into