Exodus The Second
Or maybe not.
The first sovereignty expansion of EVE Online was called Exodus. It was an ironic name, trying to push players into 0.0 when soon after it pushed them back into empire by introducing level 4 agents.
There has been an uproar from the null sec community in general at the cost of maintaining soverignty over their systems. Since a lot has already been addressed I won’t go into a great amount of detail about it, instead I will cover some random thoughts on the new mechanics.
When news about Dominion was first revealed, I imagined the downsizing of about 50% in all of the alliances you see on the Influence map at the moment. Territory controling would be harder because I believed that CCP would implement some kind of a fluid algorithum to determine the fees for alliances to pay. This however did not happen. Instead they added static fees to let me put it bluntly, nerf the logistics backbone of territorial alliances today.
Jump bridges and cynosural jammers are prominent in any 0.0 alliance. By increasing the price to maintain these things and keep them going, it is effectively going to limit the number of these things. This makes systems more vulnerable to being hotdropped and create logistical nightmares. As if it wasn’t hard enough getting in already.
The cost to maintain an empire needs to be scaled and not set in stone. Alliance membership sizes must be taken into account as well as including the rarity of moons and the number of moons they are harvesting from, along with number of belts are in their systems, and the amount of stations they hold.
One big quip I have with the new features such as “increased chances for this and that” is that chance based modifiers is absolutely pointless.
Think about it, if officer rats start popping up every two systems every two hours dropping their expensive crap left and right, the income made from it isn’t actually increasing, but rather being leveled out. If something sold for a billion ISK before hand and it’s only found 1 out of 100 times, post-changes it’ll be worhh around 1/4 billion being found 1 out of 25 times. Same with complex loots. If the same stuff keep dropping while there are more complexes to do, the value of items will decrease significantly. How about this, loot tables are adjusted for these changes? Then these changes are rendered completely worthless, again.
If CCP wants a single system to support 50 people, that would mean it would have to be able to generate at least 20m ISK per hour per player, about a billion ISK per hour all together, and finally about 20 billion a day fully upgraded. Theoretically most of this would be converted into taxes, 10% of 20 billion would be 2 billion ISK, enough to pay for the cost to buy upgrades and maintain them. But we all know people don’t operate like this and there is no way 0.0 can become this dense in population. Simple math tells us that when there is usually 40,000 people online during the weekend and there at least 1,000 null sec systems, it would be impossible to fill all of them with 40 people even. Half of them are probably in empire and wormholes, and a quarter in 0.0 are proabably AFK, more than half doing actual PvP, with the last little 10% sliver doing the PvE stuff.
Wait, this means out of 40,000 people, only 2,000 people would actually be doing any PvE. Does it mean each person will get 10 billion ISK in a day? Of course not! So take a look and try to tell me how without “passive incomes” can sustain these alliances.
Okay so you say we won’t do any PvP, we’ll just rat/explore/mine all day to make the money. Sure you can do that but what will you do when a gang drops in? What will you do when there’s that cloaked guy in the system? What will you do when there is a neutral? If you keep doing PvE, you’ll be killed. If you don’t, then you won’t be making enough money to pay for your systems!
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. If I feel compelled to ramble on I will in following posts, but for now I think my obligatory “I’m busy but I’m still here” blog post has been fulfilled.
Enjoy your day!
4 comments
I agree with your observations.
I’m beginning to side with the camp that doesn’t necessarily believe the costs were that bad (although I think they could scale the costs and tie in the upgrades you can do with the # of systems owned to avoid “tax shelter” alliances) but rather the big problems is the reward/incentive for players to get out there.
Not enough. I think players would bitch about the isk drain but would be live with it if there were decent rewards to be had.
But what a lot of the forum posts are about is the rewards just not being enough.
I think I agree.
I think the difficulty of maintaining cynojammers (and possibly jump bridges) should increase: every time somebody’s lost sov 4 and all the benefits that go with it, people talk for weeks about how much more fun that sort of combat is.
The costs have decreased to 6m/day for a system with a TCU and infrastructure hub. That more or less negates the original complaining, leading to the complaints about the perceived poor rewards.
I dunno, but I think 10 guaranteed anomalies at all times should generate a lot of ISK, and miners / explorers should have a lot more available to them now. What upgrades would you like to see so that PvPers can have more viability?
Maybe they should just nerf the hell out of the L4 agents and work things that way, reversing the “Exodus” from before.
I would design upgrades for null-sec that are applicable to PvP and empire control. These upgrades are carebear PvE upgrades.
There have been a number of suggestions that lay out more imaginative type of upgrades that have to do with real MILITARY benefits etc.
I don’t think just adding more anomalies or rats etc is really going to be that enticing to both null-sec and hi-sec dwellers. You got enough of that in hi-sec, why risk your ass further in null-sec for exactly the same thing? And null-sec – why would they want to do more care-bear activities?
Perhaps what really is needed is the planetary expansion where planets finally are used in Eve. Then you get something new and you can instill another type of income into the game without reusing what is already present (not to mention the impact of multiplying normal sources will have on market).
I don’t know. It’s hard to really make an adequate judgement without seeing the full picture of current and future plans.
But one things is for damn certain: there were a lot of outraged players on that forum – and the initial CCP response was I thought not good – it turned a blind and very stupid eye to what were valid points being made. I think that has changed a bit since then – but you really gotta be careful about this kind of stuff – trust is important, once CCP starts eroding the trust – you lose quite a bit of what can be gained if game company and player base are working together.
@jamenta
Your opinions are very valid and quite honestly in line with mine. A major fallout from this event will be the “the impact of multiplying normal sources will have on market” and personally I think it would be a great time to hurry and sell all the faction stuff while they still retain their value.
Thank you for your input!
@Casiella Truza
Your reply is coming soon in a blog post!
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