EVE Blog Banter #9: Remove a Game Mechanic
Tuesday, June 30, 2009 at 11:58AM
Well it's time for the latest of CrazyKinux's EVE Blog Banters and this time I think it's quite an interesting question. So straight from this month's blog banter page here's the question. The EVE Blog Banter Contest!
Welcome to the ninth installment of the EVE Blog Banter and its first contest, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created byCrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
"Last month Ga'len asked us which game mechanic we would most like to see added to EVE. This month Keith "WebMandrill" Nielson proposes to reverse the question and ask what may be a controversial question: Which game mechanic would you most like to see removed completely from EVE and why? I can see this getting quite heated so lets keep it civil eh?"
So what did I choose to remove. Well read along and find out.
For this month’s Blog Banter I’m proposing that as a game mechanic gate guns should be removed completely or at a minimum from lowsec. Gate and station guns are a fact of life in lowsec away from the reaches of CONCORD. For those that have never ventured into lowsec I’ll briefly tell you about what they are for and then I’ll outline my reasoning for why I think that they should be removed from the landscape of EVE.
Gate and station guns exist on every station and gate in empire space. In high sec they really don’t do much as any aggression that gives a player a Global Criminal Countdown (GCC) will call CONCORD to that player following shortly thereafter with a new wreck in the system. If the aggression occurs within 150km of a station or gate the stationary guns position around will also throw in their two cents but by that time the aggressor is scrammed, webbed and ECM’d to impotency anyway.
In lowsec however CONCORD don’t respond to the aggression so the gate guns become the only way your naughty GCC is punished. It is possible though to tank the gate guns just like it was possible to tank CONCORD in days gone by. This means that more experienced players can sit in their battleships waiting for their juicy prey to come by and as long as they aren’t outlaws they are almost immune from any sub-battleship aggression.
So what we have currently is a mechanic that is pointless in highsec due to super CONCORD and decreases small gang PVP in lowsec by making anything smaller that a battleship near useless for more than a couple of seconds. So my proposal is simply to remove all gate and station guns from the highsec and lowsec. This would remove the superfluous highsec guns and encourage small cruiser and frig PVP in lowsec by letting them survive for longer than a few seconds. This won’t however turn lowsec into 0.0 as all other lowsec restrictions remain in place; no sov, doomsdays, bubbles, etc. This proposal also keeps the sec hit that aggression causes which means that pirates will still become flashy after too much fun. Add on the GCC means that for fifteen minutes after aggressing you can’t go back to highsec unless you want to face CONCORD and you stop people from jumping in and out of fights. I would even suggest upping the time to thirty minutes to keep people in lowsec and offer the chance to get back at them.
What the removal of gate guns is likely to do on the other hand is encourage the use of frigates and cruisers for pirates with the faster locking times that these smaller ships provide. I feel that this is a fair tradeoff as the lack of gate guns should encourage the use of small ship gangs for opponents. Also many pirates use the smaller ships already to catch other players in belts and deadspace.
To summarize, the aim of removing gate and station guns is to encourage the smaller gang PVP and entice the younger players into the not so wild regions of lowsec while still maintaining the differences that lowsec has in between highsec and 0.0. This can help bring more players into the direct ship to ship side of PVP by reducing the bar to entry with the use of frigates and cruisers. And I think we can all agree that more PVP is always good.
Edit: Well Crazy has asked us all to add these bits and the beginning and end so that's why they've been added.
Blog Banter, Gate guns, MMORPG, game in Eve 
Reader Comments (8)
I agree with this so completely but it is a shame it will never happen :(
Getting rid of the gate guns in low sec. Hmm....it's an interesting thought. Being a pirate, I would love sentries to be no more. They would add so many more uses for ships in low sec, such as the interceptor tackler.
Would be nice....
If you get rid of the security in lowsec it will be... oh yeah: nullsec.
Back to the drawing board with you.
Apathy,
It won't become nullsec because you can't lay bubbles, claim sov, use doomsdays, attack without losing sec status and all the nullsec players would probably prefer nullsec anyway. That or lowsec becomes more enjoyable for small gangs.
Forgive my ignorance, but is it not just the case in lowsec that after some random aggression you can sit out at a safe spot until the GCC is gone? So all this would do is allow pirating at stations and gates in lowsec to be sentry gun free? Which would lead to many more gatecamps and much more griefing of random players.
Whilst i do agree with the idea of getting more frigates and cruisers involved in lowsec pvp, I think I'd actually like to see the gate guns act like heavy weapons, and have a much harder time tracking small vessels than big ones. Then beef up their damage so that BS size ships have a hard time tanking them, and I think that you are onto more of a winner. Your inty tackler is massively useful cos high transversal means not getting shot, and your BS uber-gunboat is much less useful. At the same time, neutrals are slightly safer cos the pirates can only get away with small gangs and a decent tank will give the poor victim a slightly better chance.
Good food for thought, this one, tho.
So as not to sound repetitive.....What chaintrap said x2 :)
At the moment, it's possible to go through low sec solo in a frigate, either for PvP, PvE or whatever. This change would remove that aspect, reducing people to only really being able to move through lowsec when in a roaming fleet. And it makes it hard to live somewhere, let alone visit it, if you can only go there with bodyguards.
So that's a big no from me.
Wow enjoyed reading this post. I added your feed to my blogreader.