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Entries in Blog Banter (2)

Tuesday
Jun302009

EVE Blog Banter #9: Remove a Game Mechanic

 

 

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.

  1. Diary of a Space Jockey, Blog Banter: BE GONE!
  2. EVE Newb, (EVE) Remove You
  3. Miner With Fangs, Blog Banter - It's the Scotch
  4. The Eden Explorer, Blog Banter: The Map! The Map!
  5. The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, "Beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, mushroom, MUSHROOM!!!"
  6. Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, Kill the Rats
  7. Mercspector @ EVE, Scotty
  8. EVE's Weekend Warrior, EVE Blog Banter #9
  9. Miner with Fangs, Blog Banter - It's the Scotch
  10. A Merry Life and a Short One, Eve Blog Banter #9: Why Won't You Die?
  11. Into the unknown with gun and camera, Blog Banter – The Hokey Cokey
  12. The Flightless Geek, EVE Blog Banter #9: Remove a Game Mechanic
  13. Sweet Little Bad Girl, Blog Banter 9: Who is Nibbling at My House?
  14. One Man and His Spaceship, Blog Banter 9: What could you do without?
  15. Life in Low Sec, EVE Blog Banter #9: Stop Tarnishing My Halo
  16. Cle Demaari: Citizen, Blog Banter #9: Training for all my men!
  17. A Mule in EVE, He who giveth, also taketh away?
  18. Dense Veldspar, Blog Banter 9
  19. Morphisat’s Blog, Blog Banter #9 – Randomness Be Gone !
  20. Facepalm's Blog, EVE Blog Banter #9: What a new pilot could do without
  21. Memoires of New Eden, You're Fired
  22. Kyle Langdon's Journeys in EVE, EVE Blog Banter #9 Titans? What's a Titan?
  23. Achernar, The gates! The gates are down!
  24. Speed Fairy, EVE Blog Banter #9: Down with Downtime!
  25. I am Keith Neilson, EVE Blog Banter #9-F**K Da Police
  26. Ripe Lacunae, The UI... Where do I begin... (Eve Blog Banter #9)
  27. Clown Punchers, EvE Blogs: What game mechanic would you get rid of?
  28. More articles as they are posted!
  29. Estel Arador Corp Services, You've got mail
  30. Epic Slant, Let Mom and Pop Play: EVE Blog Banter #9
  31. Deaf Plasma's EVE Musings, Blog Banter #9 - Removal of Anchoring Delay of POS modules
  32. Podded Once Again, Blog Banter #9 - Do we really need to go AFK?
  33. Postcards from EVE, 2009.07.02.00.29.06
  34. Harbinger Zero, Blog Banter #9 – War Declarations & Sec Status
  35. Warp Scrammed, Blog Banter 9 – Never Too Fast
  36. Mike Azariah, I don't put much stock in it...
  37. Rettic's Log, Blog Banter: Overview Overload
  38. A Sebiestor Scholar, [OOC] EVE Blog Banter #9: Slaves
  39. Diary of a pod pilot, [OOC] EVE blog banter #9: Because of Falcon
  40. Roc's Ramblings, Blog Banter #9 – Taking Things Slow
  41. The Gaming-Griefer, EVE Sucks, But I Love It: The Memoir of a Masochist
  42. Letrange's EVE Blog, Blog Banter #9: Bye Bye Learning Skills
  43. Lyietfinvar, Remove that monopoly
  44. Sceadugenga, Blog Banter #9
  45. Industrialist with Teeth, EVE Blog Banter #9
 

 

Saturday
May302009

EVE Blog Banter #8

Welcome to the eighth installment of the EVE Blog Banter , the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. 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 otherEVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
This month's topic comes to us from me, Ga'len at The Wandering Druid of Tranquility. He asks: "What new game mechanic or mechanics would you like to see created and brought into the EVE Online universe and how would this be incorporated into the current game universe? Be specific and give details, this is not meant to be a 'nerf this, boost my game play' post like we see on the EVE forums."

 

Even though this isn't an EVE blog I'm a long time player and fan of it so I thought I'd jump into the blog banter and offer up my view. My first thought was that I'd like to see something like a dueling system where two players or groups of players could agree to a fight without being Concordokkend. But then I remembered an older thought that I've seen put up elsewhere:

"Claimable Low-Sec"

Now the quotes are important. I don't want to see 0.0 style Sovereignty in lowsec. That's what 0.0 is for. What I'm thinking of is something a bit more casual in a sense. And giving pirates and other lowsec corps something fun about lowsec.

The way I see that it could work is by giving corps or alliances the ability to 'register' claims with the Empire that claims a lowsec region. In exchange for a small payment of some sort (ISK, towers around moons, etc.) the Empire give the corporation free reign to destroy ships of corporations with Headquarters or Offices in enemy Empire affiliated stations.

Now to balance it out and to stop the pira... I mean corporations and alliances from having life to easy anyone is allowed to engage the ships of claiming corporations without sentry gun aggro.

Also multiple corporations and alliances can claim a Region of lowsec so they would also be able to shoot each other just to make life more interesting.

Now this would need more work but I think it could make life in lowsec more interesting by reducing the amount of GCC and the consequent sentry aggro.