New dev-blog about sov

[Mangala]

Wonderful world of supposition and guesswork, where else

[Mangala]

Hello thread! Okay, the calls for a bit more detail have been heeded and I can open the doors a bit further now. I expect some of this will result in more questions and I will answer them as best I can.

Many questions are focused on what will happen to the stuff you have now and how it will continue to function in the new system.

We are looking at the upgrades in player built outposts. We are considering a few new offerings but will have to see how they balance against the rest of the Infrastructure system. Of more immediate import is we will likely be reducing the cost of the Level 2 and Level 3 outpost upgrades to something sane enough to discourage players from simply dropping another outpost because it's cheaper. This is also important because some Infrastructure upgrades will require you to have an outpost upgraded to a certain level as well.

The new Infrastructure system will revolve around a new structure in space we are calling the Infrastructure Hub. This will be a new shiny that serves as one of the centerpieces of your star system's development. Depending on your level of investment in certain areas, your Hub may change visually and can eventually become quite impressive. Defending / attacking / capturing an Infrastructure Hub is just one more thing players will have to consider in their Dominion plans.

The Infrastructure upgrades themselves were left intentionally vague in my Dev Blog because listing every potential upgrade we are considering would require another blog by themselves. The beauty of this system is that even after Dominion launches we can literally 'plug in' new concepts, balance them against current upgrades and then assign them a proper value in terms of required investment. When Dominion launches, you will have what we consider the best candidates to promote the concepts outlined in the blog and will continue to iterate in future expansions.

Next, while we are moving starbases away from the actual claiming mechanic, we are not taking away their basic functionality in day to day operations. Things like Jump Bridges, Cyno Jammers, Cyno Beacons and Capital Ship Assembly Arrays will continue to require the use of starbases to operate. Just as with the current mechanic, there will be prerequisites to meet as each of these structures will be part of the new Infrastructure system.

We are not allowing 'standings' to allow you to determine who uses your gates.

While we are still looking at allowing 'capital' systems and them having some extra benefit(s), the day of invulnerable starbases is over in Dominion.

The following are balancing changes we are seriously considering:

We may open the doors to allowing more than one outpost to be anchored/built in a sovereign system. We are still investigating the technical limitations and a few gameplay issues associated with this and will make a final decision in the coming weeks.

Cyno Jammers will be one of the more expensive Infrastructure upgrades and may only be anchorable in systems where you have sov and own a station.

Jump Bridges may no longer allow ships with a jump drive to use them. There has been some debate about just flinging them to a random Class 6 wormhole system but I lost that argument with Greyscale (who is decidedly more sane than I). Note - if implemented, Jump Freighters may escape this rule.

Approaching character limit. BTW, apparently I liked using the word SPACE in my blog.

[Warcold]

So in stead of shooting POSes, taking space will not take shooting another structure. Nice 

[Mangala]

Another devblog on this is up:

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.

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=695

[Mangala]

TL;DR is:

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


I'll givee it a read thru properly after breakfast and see if there is anything I have issues with or like the sound of

[peo]

Sounds nice.
They want more "carebears" in 0.0 and that developing space is the key.
However it seems it might be "big military alliance takes all space and then rents it out via built in system of rents".

[Mangala]

Sounds nice.
They want more "carebears" in 0.0 and that developing space is the key.
However it seems it might be "big military alliance takes all space and then rents it out via built in system of rents".

Havent finished reading it yet, but jesus do they understand the issues with the current system and what it means to the smaller guy:

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?

[peo]

Yup, I think we will also see a significant nerf to r64 incomes.
Hopefully by two actions:
1. rebalance needs, there should be at most +/- 20% difference between the best and worst r64 and the rarity should mean something. R8<R16<R32<R64 and not R8<all, R16=R32 apart from Cad/Chrom, neo/thul<Cad/Chrom and dysp/prom>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>all.

2. Increase supply, the theoretical supply being fixed is idiotic with a growing population. It only works with a stagnate or decreaseing population and serves as even more barrier to entry.
I doubt that CCP had intended the large t2 ships to be pve high sec luxuries, command ships should be used as command ships rather than mission runners for example. As it is right now it seems that ceptors, interdictors and hacs are the only t2 ships commonly used in pvp and that the marauders, logistics and command ships are basically ignored. So lets hope this changes, no more 1bn isk marauders but perhaps a few hundred million so they can be used

[Warcold]

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...

The concern that alliances will just form sub-alliances to still get laaarge stretches of space will not actively be tackled. Instead they hope that social dynamics will downtune this behaviour. I think it will certainly be interesting to see how existing space-holding alliances will react/deal with all these changes. Interesting times ahead!


Re: moon-minerals: another solution will be to lower the amount of materials needed to build T2 stuff.

[peo]

Sure they could lower the demands but that wouldn't change the effect of r64s in the end, just the amount of ships that can be built. If they wanted to have an effect by doing that they would have to lower it so much that supply of ships vastly outstrips demand so that the demand for moon goo collapses.

[Mangala]

Viper Shizzle, saying he likes the idea - but still with a reservation on how it will encourage people into 0.0:

http://www.scrapheap-challenge.com/viewtopic.php?p=973342#973342

[Mangala]

Greyscale answers some questions from the comments thread:

As a general extra comment before I start answering stuff, there are some things here that are still mostly unknowns for us. We've got predictions for most of them, but not at a level where we're confident enough to commit to specific design directions based on them. This is mostly because in certain respects nullsec today is just too far from the area we'd like to move it towards to get a good gauge on how things will pan out when we get closer to the target.

Evelgrivion wrote:
Quote:
A reduction in the value of moon minerals


How is this going to be achieved? Is it tied to the resource density improvements mentioned in the blog?


Details not finalized yet, but for me at least it's one of the two biggest problems with nullsec today (the other being doomsdays), so I'm pushing hard for a good resolution.

ArmyOfMe wrote:
what makes you think that the current owners of dysp/prom moons will actually ever manage to loose their current isk in the first place?
they already have so much isk that they can replace cap fleets the same way smaller alliances could replace a cruiser fleet


This is a "not 100% sure" area. The two extremes - they spend so much money they run out, or they spend so little it doesn't have an impact - solve themselves, but the middle ground where they spend a lot but have enough to keep that expenditure up, well, that's something we're going to have to watch and react to. It's a reasonably similar situation to the "old T2 BPO money" situation, so it's not a totally new phenomena - just on a bigger scale, obviously.

Haradgrim wrote:
The first question that popped into my head was, well what does this mean for curse and syndicate?

I'm very curious about this resource density improvement concept, but my mind keeps coming back to the question of; how are they going to devalue moon minerals and will it break the t2 economy?


For the first iteration, NPC space will not be involved. I don't know if this will change down the road, but it's out of scope for now.

Soleil Fournier wrote:
So CCP....pleeeease....can we get a blog or someone post some tidbits on the capital combat and super capital changes (moar mothership info!)?


Yes.

Daan Sai wrote:
OK, exacly how do you think this is going to lead us away from the pervasive NBSI culture, that will still effectively lock out smaller groups? Will you put in place mechanisms that make NRDS a more advantageous option for space holding alliances??



Initially there's no mechanics to support that, no. Again, it's something where to some degree we need to see what players do before we act ourselves.

That said, one of the things that we've had to accommodate throughout the design is that, unless you give defenders a game-breakingly overwhelming advantage, the nature of "sandbox" means that if someone significantly bigger than you decides that they want you specifically gone, and you have no friends, there's not a whole lot we can do mechanically to change that outcome. Initially at least, and in I'd expect at least a majority of cases, the key to getting settled in nullsec will likely be, as it always has been, diplomacy - talking to people. The nullsec political landscape owes as much to diplomacy and personal interactions as it does to military power, and while land-grants or outright renting are not where most people want to end up, they're a very common first step. That I know of, for example, Atlas got their first proper nullsec foothold from a drone region land grant, Goonswarm obviously owe at least some of their current circumstances to their deal with RA, and Razor and Morsus Mihi both moved into their current space after supporting a G/Iron campaign in that area.

Typhado3 wrote:
so how bout giving some tools to help defend so it's not all on the attackers side.


More defensive tools of various natures are things that we're investigating as part of the infrastructure system (but not to the degree that they tip the balance significantly), but the cloaking situation specifically is something that really needs its own fix, IMO (ties into local and directional scanner and probing and map views and all that jazz).

Cpt Constantinus wrote:
So instead of station pingpong, which will be thankfully avoided, we probably get system pingpong?


That's very much not the intention. The plan is that the sov system is descriptive but still timezone-proof. Any sort of ping-pong* is not something we want to reoccur.

*In the strict definition where it's talking purely about overnight changes as opposed to 2-3 day ones

Vyktor Abyss wrote:
I can honestly (unbiasedly) say it restores my faith in the long term ambition of Eve/CCP to see you do something like this. I will however point out and add that for several years in my opinion the only true "creators" of an emergent 0.0 environment have been CVA in Providence.


Obviously we can't, won't and plain don't want to play favorites or give special treatment/consideration of any kind. I will however say that CVA's apparent success in Providence was a big boost for us early on in this process as it showed that something like what we're aiming for could actually be done, even in the current environment.

Smyrk wrote:
I get the impression that it's more the latter; that you hope to motivate large alliances to include smaller groups in their activities, but that the smaller groups would not be independent (or even mostly independent) nullsec operators. But I'd like to be wrong.


For now, at least, yes, that's how it's probably going to have to pan out. As previous post though, independence is something that alliances work towards, but not necessarily something they achieve straight away.

Kersh Marelor wrote:
Secondly you say that player's decissions are waht matters. What if the alliances made the decission NOT to want any people form other parts of New Eden live in their space? What if the do NOT want to interact with the small groups you are so concerned about? That probably doesn't matter to CCP, which sort of contradicts the idea of player's decission being important.


We're not stopping anyone from doing that, it just may end up being very expensive. If all decisions lead down equally easy paths they become less meaningful.

[peo]

I just hope they don't go by the common misconception that military power is what builds empires.
When in reality it is the economy that builds empires and all "empires" built on military conquest has fallen apart very fast (heck China still exists...)

[Jeremiah]

I think they have a good point about the alt-corp workaround.  For example suppose Goonswarm split into several smaller "swarms" I can see it wouldn't be long before financing would decentralise ie. no taxation without rep - why should one swarm fund another that gets its arse kicked, natural competitiveness and the inbuilt apartheid of human groupings (no matter how random the basis for difference is, ie. "you know those Fountain Goons are such lazy bastards, they even smell funny imho") would kick in.  So my fear of the big and rich staying that way has reduced.

[peo]

I think they have a good point about the alt-corp workaround.  For example suppose Goonswarm split into several smaller "swarms" I can see it wouldn't be long before financing would decentralise ie. no taxation without rep - why should one swarm fund another that gets its arse kicked, natural competitiveness and the inbuilt apartheid of human groupings (no matter how random the basis for difference is, ie. "you know those Fountain Goons are such lazy bastards, they even smell funny imho") would kick in.  So my fear of the big and rich staying that way has reduced.

True.
While I think the goons will survive that better than most having their "unique" culture.
Have a feeling that for example most NC alliances (mostly harmless etc) will have a much harder time.