Odyssey Exploration Hacking Is Broken By Design

Here's the official feedback thread for exploration hacking. This is a rare case where the players are actually better at game design than the CCP devs.

Fixing Nullsec

Ideas on the fly: What I would do to fix Nullsec

Of course when I say “fix” I might mean “spay” or “neuter”.

Ideas on the Fly

This is an idea on the fly. Please feel free to leave comments here, through EVE mail or Twitter.

Background

Nullsec is, in my mind, the place for awesome large-fleet PvP with consequences. It is supposed to be about world-shaping at the players' hands. It is supposed to be about building empires and tearing them down. There should be drivers in place to encourage neighbours to fight each other. Where do you find the most natural PvP in EVE? PvP free of the fear of the blob? The place you can go to pick fights with some certainty that the people you pick a fight with are going to be committed to the fight, and you won't be surprised with massive supercapital fleets dropping on top of your battleship fleet? That place is Unknown space or w-space. What makes w-space different to nullsec? In short it is the difficulty of access and the inability to move large fleets through cynosural travel.

From my perspective nullsec should be like w-space in some degree, but with the added risk of large fleets being moved into running fights with no limits, and the freedom of movement offered by star gates (stable wormholes which have been harnessed for the purpose of on-demand interstellar travel). The idea of massive fleet moving around via cynosural travel faster than sub-capital fleets can move using star gates just rubs the wrong way: it doesn't gel. Nullsec should also be the ultimate in player-driven content, to the point of world shaping. How much world-shaping is possible if players can't build and destroy the stuff that makes the world what it is?

So what is wrong with nullsec at the moment, and why does it need to be fixed?

First: reinforcement of a fight in progress through the use of cynosural fields is far too easy. A fight will escalate to capital ship fleets faster than it can be reinforced using sub-cap ships travelling through star gates. In short, the fight can be won simply by having more pilots online able to dog-pile a fight through a cyno bridge.

Second: far too much of the business of nullsec sovereignty involves static fights at very predictable times.

Third: for a game that purports to be a sandbox, nullsec has far too many rollercoaster rails in the form of fixed-in-stone stargates, inflexibility in player industry, and the inability to shape the world to suit player desires.

Rebalancing Cynosural Travel

Tweaking cynosural travel is necessary for two reasons: First, cyno travel is practically instantaneous; Second, cyno travel has far too great a range. These two factors combine to allow unreasonable "force projection" (at least it is unreasonable according to the forum trolls). Even without jump clones, it is possible to get ships from one side of New Eden to the other in tens of minutes (as opposed to requiring a day or two to redeploy). Thus any reinforcement timer, anywhere in nullsec, can potentially be greeted by the full force of all of nullsec's capital and supercapital fleets, regardless of where those fleets were stationed.
More about balancing cynosural travel in my article "Fixing Cynosural Travel".

Removing Sovereignty Structure Bashing

CCP has already started the process of building mechanics for claiming and challenging sovereignty that don't involve structure bashing and reinforcement timers. The occupation mechanics used for Faction Warfare have been developed with a mind to expanding the mechanics to nullsec player sovereignty.

So for the moment, I'm happy to leave it to CCP to know what they're up to here: implementing FW style offensive and defensive plexing, combined with “victory points” of some kind for blowing up other people in your space. Imagine if "treaties" of some kind could be implemented through alliance-issued charters for POSes: a renter will have to buy the treaties that the alliance members are selling.
I would like to see a removal of reinforcement timers as the underlying mechanic of sovereignty warfare. I recognise that reinforcement timers are a necessary mechanic for allowing pilots to defend critical infrastructure in this always-on game which we only participate in during our own play times. Sovereignty could be moved to an activity-dependent system rather than a structure-dependent system. But as I said, I'll wait to see what CCP is up to with Faction Warfare & "Sov Lite".

World Shaping (and Destruction)

How do we put the power of world shaping into the hands of players? Here's the core of my strategy: allow players to build and destroy stargates. On the way to that goal first, there are a few things that need to be sorted out.

First, the range of all cyno travel should be reduced. Black Ops ships are at the appropriate level: people constantly complain that their range is not enough, but black ops are still actively used. This indicates that Black Ops are balanced. After Black Ops, the next furthest range should be given to carriers and dreadnoughts. Finally, Titans (and their associated bridges) and Supercarriers should have the shortest range. See my article about cyno travel rebalancing for more thoughts about the mechanics of cyno travel.

Second, the process of building, upgrading and destroying (or subverting) star gates must be designed from the outset to allow the installation of star gates in systems where no star gates are available: the mechanism must not depend on getting ships into a star system which will not fit through any available wormholes or jump bridges.

Third, the local channel should be put under player control.

Finally, nullsec industry needs some serious love.

Remove Local

Local chat is provided to most systems through the fluidic router relay system. In nullsec, it is the sovereign of a system who installs the fluidic router relay and controls access to local chat. Note that ships jumping into system through a star gate will be registered (but not necessarily connected) to the fluidic router relay by the stargate itself (but a successful hack might prevent the stargate registering the new ship for a minute or two).

A fluidic router relay is of course hackable, so intruders can open it up to everyone or switch it off to everyone, delay the fluidic router registration process, or fake the deregistration of the hacking ship, up until the routine self audit system detects that something is wrong, alerts home base and resets the fluidic router to “last known good” configuration. Security conscious sovereigns might opt to install backups to certain features, such as a backup registration system which will be a structure (or structures) which ensure that all ships visible on grid are registered with the local fluidic router relay. Ships entering space through a wormhole may be able to delay registration with the local fluidic router relay, but only at the expense of losing all comms channels (which are accessed through the fluidic router relay).

Thus local as an intel tool is available to those who want it, but the fluidic router relay has to be installed and operational in order for Local to be available. Should this mechanism be extended to w-space too? Perhaps not: w-space is not just space-shifted but time-shifted too: how do you get a fluidic router connection to a place and time that you don't know? For the moment we have "magic" chat channels allowing pilots to communicate with each other in the absence of any communications infrastructure.

Now for Stargates

Stargates should be anchorable at certain points in a system which are determined by the intended target system. These points might require extensive surveys to be undertaken to determine gravitic contours. Subsequent to these gravitic contour surveys, the prospective stargate builders will need to identify locations of natural stable wormholes that can be utilised by the stargate infrastructure. Thus there are two distinct processes involved: a system survey which should take a coordinated group of players a week or so to perform, then the wormhole hunt which will essentially be a probe scan of the targeted area, similar to hunting down unstable wormholes.

The survey and wormhole identification needs to be performed in both systems simultaneously. The process of identifying the suitable wormhole will require teams in both systems to “knock and listen” at all the wormholes they find: there might be a dozen candidates, only one of which is connected to the target system. This “knock and listen” process will require structures to be deployed around candidate wormholes, activated, and maintained while the “knock and listen” survey is completed. When a suitable wormhole is found, a gantry can be erected over that hole. When both gantries are anchored and onlined, communication between the two gantries will be established.

Once a stargate gantry is in place in both systems, the star gates can be built. In the initial stages of modifying space, all stargates will have infinite capacity for transit, so choice of stargate will be aesthetic rather than strategic. Star gates will be upgradable, with upgrades (and downgrades) taking an appropriate amount of time during which the star gate is still usable. Later in the development of this process, different star gates will provide:

• Transit capacity
• Fuel consumption
• Hit points
• Hacking difficulty

The major decision point for stargates might be transit capacity. Each wormhole will have an innate transit capacity (for example, somewhere between 1kg/s and 100kg/s) which is then extended by the stargate hardware to levels such that a small gate on a long-distance wormhole link might handle one frigate per second, while a gate at a major staging hub might handle many battleships per second. There may be system upgrades, star gate modifications or faction stargates available which provide higher transit capacity, lower fuel consumption, or other benefits.

Some game design issues here will be the length of time that should be set aside for creating new star gates: for a rapid turn-over, perhaps the "knock and listen" survey could be done using modules fitted to ships, with the process of identifying linked wormholes intended to take in the order of an hour. For a longer turnover, perhaps a gantry would need to be erected, with certain fuel requirements to maintain the survey equipment for a week. What duration is appropriate?

Tollways and Access Rights

Star gates will also be configurable by the sovereign owner such that ships passing through the gate have to pay a toll, or may even have access restricted depending on standings. Gates will also be hackable, so that people of malicious intent might hack a gate to avoid paying tolls, or allow unauthorised ships through that gate, or even lock that stargate altogether so noone can use it.
Hacking a star gate will provide some change to that gates behaviour for a period of time (say, half an hour). At the end of that period of time the star gate's self auditing mechanism will come into play, at which point the hacking attempt will be reported.

Removal of Static Resources

Remove static moon goo. Moon goo should deplete, with that resource eventually repawning somewhere else. T2 moon harvesters should extract resources faster, and multiple harvesters should extract resources faster. There should be sufficient resources on a moon that reports a resource available to allow a T1 moon harvester to extract that resource for about 2 months. Harvesters should not openly report what they are harvesting, but it should be possible to hack into any item of a POS infrastructure to see what that structure is configured for, what it contains, or any other details that might be of interest.

Thus it should be possible to hide a highly valuable moon “in plain sight” as a CSAA POS, or perhaps even a jump staging POS. Spies will be even more valuable than before, as will black ops fleets sent out specifically to scout out enemy resources (or potentially valuable moons).
No longer will one be able to refer to a five year old moon survey and have confidence that certain POSes are harvesting particular resources.

Which brings us to nullsec industry.

DUST 514™ From a Capsuleer Perspective

Further to my review of the E3 2012 video, I have some questions about how Capsuleers will interact with Dust Bunnies. My main question is about maintenance of defences when the Capsuleer is offline.

CCP vs Mercenary Corporations

Scenario: you are a small industrial corp. You have a couple of research POSes set up in some hisec systems. You get wardecced by a small PvP corp.

Scenario: you are a small industrial corp. You have a couple of research POSes set up in some hisec systems. You get wardecced by a huge PvP corp.

In which scenario would you hire mercenaries? From an industrial corp's perspective: neither.

Industry & The CSM (the CSM Summit Minutes post)

A long post in which Mara comments on portions of the CSM Summit minutes/transcript which impact parts of the game that Mara is most involved with.

Industry - Extraction and Logistics

So we've discovered a resource: asteroids, ice, planetary resources, moon goo, intelligent livestock, etc. What do you do now?

Mara's Ideas on Industry

Further to Seleene's "Fighting For Industry" post, I expound on the Discover, Extract, Carry, Refine, Manufacture, Develop lifestyle of the industrial-focussed capsuleer.

Good Payments, Evil Payments

So, in my opinion the reward level of Incursions is fine, though hisec Incursions are a little too abundant for my liking. There is a different issue though, which returns to Tippia's topic of ISK Faucets versus Sinks. I have written about Faucets and Sinks before, go read that so you know my opinions on the matter.

So, are Incursions actually paying "too much"?

Short version: Yes. And no. It's not about the ISK, it's about the risk.

Make sure you've read my two previous posts: Tippis' Rants - Faucets and Sinks, and Incursion vs Mission Income, along with Tippia's post Faucets and Sinks which spurred all of this blathering of mine.

Incursion vs Mission Running Income

There's increasing focus on the "imbalance" of Incursion income versus L4 security mission income. People see Incursion runners making a hundred million ISK an hour and feel that this is imbalanced compared to L4 security missions. I'd like to contribute my experiences to the community, in the hope that people can actually add some evidence to their arguments instead of just winding themselves up into foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic ranting based on second- or third-hand information.

Flash Post: Tippia's Rants, ISK Faucets and Sinks

Tippia has a post up about faucets and sinks: http://blog.beyondreality.se/?q=node/3

My first response to Tippia's "average income for mission runners" is that such a figure is a little misleading: it throws people running all levels of missions into the same bucket, thus drawing an average from apples, oranges and pumpkins. In addition, it ignores a basic distinction between motivation to participate in a particular activity.

Faucets, Sinks & Pumps - Balancing the Economy pt 2

In ecology, we have the concept of the water cycle. The short version is: water evaporates from the ocean, condenses into clouds, the clouds get too heavy (or hit a mountain, etc) and fall out of the sky as rain. The rain flows downhill, starting as trickles here and there, gathering into creeks, flowing into streams, then rivers, then eventually flowing out to the ocean, where it once again evaporates.

In EVE Online we have an “ISK cycle”. There is no huge pool of ISK from which some evaporates, but we do have ISK faucets in the form of CONCORD bounties on NPCs, insurance for ships destroyed, etc: faucets are like rainfall, where the ground is the EVE economy and the rain is the ISK. There are ISK sinks in the form of sales taxes, broker fees, alliance sovereignty fees, loyalty point stores, etc: sinks are like the ocean: the fresh water flows out there and is never seen by the land again.

Making ISK - Balancing the Economy

In the virtual world of EVE Online, the economists and policy makers have the advantage of being able to manipulate the world such that the economy will work, rather than trying to manipulate the economy so the world will work.

Warning: in this post, I present a bunch of assumptions in the guise of an information dump, and then ask a question. I'm looking for some interaction with other people who are paying attention to various perceived problems in the economy.

But back to the scheduled programme…

The basic ISK cycle from an individual pilot's perspective is this: earn ISK, spend ISK. When it comes to the "earn ISK" side of the cycle, some people will look for ways to make ISK from the things that they enjoy doing. Other people will engage in the activity which returns the greatest ISK for the time spent acquiring it, in order to have ISK to spend on the activities that they enjoy doing. Except for people ganking hisec mission runners, it tends to be difficult to make ISK via PvP.

Some players have a major goal each month of earning enough ISK to pay for their PLEX, and thus the major driver to their ISK-earning activities is to find a way to make the most ISK possible for the time that they invest in the ISK-making activity. When it comes to "press button, receive ISK", the stand-out obvious candidate activity is participating in hisec incursions.

Here are the rewards for hisec incursions: participating in a group activity with a bunch of folks who just want to shoot the breeze, earning in the order of 100M ISK/hr, and being able to fly pimped out PvE ships without keeping one eye on local and the other on D-scan†. Incursions in hisec are a primarily social activity, which also happen to generate a copious volume of ISK.

Here are the rewards for null sec incursions: participating in a group activity with a bunch of folks who are keeping a paranoid eye on local, intel channels, D-scan and alliance voice comms; earning in the order of 150M ISK/hr at peak productivity, being able to fly pimped out PvE ships if they have a dozen alts watching the systems three jumps in any direction; and waiting for the inevitable CTA to drive off an enemy roaming gang.

My experience with nullsec belt ratting was that a poorly fit Drake could pull in about 60M ISK/hr in a -0.8 system while there were no reds for three systems away, no CTAs, and no alliance members competing for the spawns. The moment there are reds reported in intel, the only option is to warp to a safe (either dock in a station or warp to the safety of a POS bubble). Hanging about in a belt to kill just one more rat would result in a rat scramming you for long enough that the enemy gang will be in your belt, sending you home to your medical clone. The usual breakdown of my time in null sec was about 40% ratting, 40% safed-up due to roaming gangs bigger than any defence fleet we could muster, and 20% of the time being part of a roaming gang myself.

So for the average Jo in null sec trying to grind ISK for that PLEX or a supply of PvP ships each month, their income from incursions will end up being closer to 50M/hr on average if they stick to it. Put yourself in that position: wouldn't you be driven to find the most effective way to fund your subscription or ship supply? As a nullsec resident in this situation, what do you do? Do you hang about in null sec, spending 40% of your time parked and idle watching the minutes of your play time roll past while you're being unproductive, or do you head to hisec where you can safely and reliably make 100M ISK/hr for as long as you can keep your eyes open and mouse buttons clicking?

It turns out that a significant number of null sec residents hit the hisec incursion trail (if people like Zagdul are to be believed, and if the people I routinely fly incursions with are any indication of the general population of incursion runners).

What happens from the rest of null sec's point of view? A small percentage (significant number, we're talking hundreds of pilots, but a small percentage of all null sec) of pilots disappear from your region. Instead of having, say, a reliable 50 in local, your little section of space ends up having only 40 in local - and the ones who disappeared are the ones who were least worried about losing ships. The concentration of risk-averse null bears has increased because the people who are willing to lose ships are off restoring their ship replacement fund. So there are fewer roams, there is less motivation to intercept interlopers. Your patch just doesn't seem as interesting any more.

So you log out. And the number of online players in your home patch of null sec plummets. Nullsec goes stale. People unsubscribe. EVE dies. All this because hisec incursions are far more profitable than any ISK-making activity in null sec.

What can be done to bring those ISK-grinding folks back to null sec? Does anything need to be done?

---

† is is an accepted truth of EVE Online that living in null sec requires at least three eyes.

This issue is a little behind, I've been busy playing the game instead of being a forum warrior. Complaints may be directed to /dev/null :)

Missions & NPCs

Mission runners use playbooks to complete missions, and get terribly upset when the playbooks aren't available. People still want to fly Drakes in L4 missions.

Faction/Corp/Agent standings are math, and math is hard:

• https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=32263
• https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=32373

Wormhole rats still surprise new explorers. As far as Incursions go, the question with the OTA is: bring a bigger boat, or spend time hacking arrays?

Economy

There is usable advice out there about how to break into the world of trading. Speaking of which, Emkayu Goffish has a series of blog entries dealing with trading and raising startup capital.

Piracy

There are all manner of useful tips for wannabe pirates.

Apparently Goons have upset too many new players with their "recruitment" scam.

Rebalancing

• Some people are looking for love for EAS.
• Some people don't understand that EVE is a PVP game.
• Transferring POS ownership is a perennial question.
• Where are the Capital NPCs?
• The biggest problem with nullsec is the people that live there.
• Cerebral Accelerator lost in podding? Get it replaced! https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=32085
• More comments about ganglinks and off-grid boosters.