FozzieSov Predictions – T-Minus 14 Days

FozzieSov is due to launch on July 14, one week after the Aegis update.  With it will come a complete re-working of the way sovereignty works, focusing more on individual reinforcement actions and (hopefully) small gang capture actions.  I’ve talked about FozzieSov here and here.  I’ve expressed the concern that null-sec won’t be worth the cost of holding it.  FozzieSov is in a better place now than it was originally, but like the fleet warp changes, it still has its problems.

After doing a lot of listening and thinking, here are my predictions about changes we’re going to see directly as a result of FozzieSov (and not including other changes happening around the same time).

Prediction #1: Concurrent user counts depend on FozzieSov’s success.

This one is a bit of a no-brainer, but Eve logged-in player counts are going to be in a world of hurt if FozzieSov is seen as a giant mistake.  A huge factor affecting this perception is going to be how – and how quickly – CCP adjusts null-sec income and “worth”.  As of now, we’ve seen absolutely nothing about CCP’s strategies on how they intend on adjusting null-sec value to overcome the headaches null-sec alliances are going to have to cope with.  If they can respond quickly and effectively, this can herald the beginning of a golden age for a balkanized null-sec.  If it fails, they’ll destroy any interest in null-sec and it’ll become even less occupied than it is now.  The implications of this result would be staggering and massive.

Brave: The Failure of Democracy

So, clearly, nothing at all is happening with Brave.  Oh, except for that whole democracy thing falling through entirely.

Mind you, I’m not trying to kick them while they’re down.  Far from it.  Brave, Eve Uni, PRF, Test… these groups do good with trying to deepen new player immersion in Eve.  And that’s a very good thing.  For the longest time, Brave, however, suffered from “The Modern Sickness”, which affects nearly everything built in the 20^th century.  That sickness, of course, is the foolish belief that democracy is the solution for everything, in all cases and situations.

Uh oh, here we go…

It’s Time for an In-Game Timer Board

When FozzieSov hits in a couple weeks, each null alliance could find themselves with potentially multiple timers for each of multiple systems.  We’ll have a significant amount of contesting to do, and very quickly, we’re going to find ourselves overwhelmed with data.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that the folks who live in the space that brought you weaponized boredom are going to quickly translate sov contests into weaponized timer overload.  A 50-man fleet interested in seizing a constellation is best served by spreading those 50 pilots out across all capture points with the hope that some of them will succeed in pushing them into reinforcement.

And, more likely than not, many of them will succeed.  For a small alliance owning sov, both preventing reinforcement and contesting it will be an incredibly difficult task, as you could have 50 capture nodes spawn from 10 successful entosis reinforcements out of those 50.  That’s a lot of items coming out of reinforcement, all at different times.

Now, managing these timers is no problem for an alliance like Razor, who has a very slick op timer organized by date/time with countdowns and trackers of whether the timer is defensive or offensive.  RP (a corp, not an alliance) has one for all of our events, as well.  But both rely on out-of-game web services, which cost real dollars to maintain.  And, let’s face it, to compete, alliances NEED to have a timer board to allow line members to track what’s happening and be online at the right times.  For people to log in and participate in your fleet, they need to know a fleet is happening.

Order 66

Let me share something about Eve content enablers that ties into the fleet warp changes that have me so worked up.

Science fiction is filled with the truly exceptional.  Whether it’s the Mageborn in Melanie Rawn’s series, or the original 100 in Red/Green/Blue Mars, or mutants in X-Men, or the leroni in Darkover.  Or the Starks in ASoIaF.  And pretty generally, the key purpose of a group of outstanding individuals like this is to die.

Watching Star Wars as a kid, I remember the anxiety I felt not knowing if the Jedi were going to go extinct entirely.  I was 18 when the prequel movies came out, and it wasn’t until I was 20 or 21 that I got to see the Jedi in action in Attack of the Clones (it pains me to even write that title, so bad…).

For, you see, the Jedi were truly skilled, capable of doing amazing things, with the ability to shape worlds.  They were the best that universe had to offer, and they were a group you could get behind.  In AotC and Revenge of the Sith, you got to see the Jedi in action, leading troops and accomplishing great things.  The Clone Wars cartoon series showed more of their abilities.  It made you really like the individual Jedi, even as you lost faith that the Jedi Order was worthy to be the defender of any society.

The details of the Clone Wars in the Star Wars universe really bothered me for a long time.  You basically had droids and clones fighting it out – two of the most worthless groups of people in the universe.  For me, I couldn’t care less about all the losses I saw on the screen.  Nothing unique and valuable was being lost.  Droids were walking pieces of garbage, and clones were grown from a vat for that very purpose, and had even been genetically modified to be mentally obedient.  Death was, to me, a preferable state to a tendency towards slavish obedience.  Besides, they could always grow more.

Concurrent Users

Over the last couple days, I’ve been tossing around the fact that in USTZ prime time, I’ve noticed (what I believe to be) an alarmingly low number of logged in players.  Rob K challenged me on this, so I want to defend my concerns.  So, let’s dive in.

First of all, I’m going to use USTZ numbers as my baseline, since that’s the one that matters to me.  I don’t care if the EUTZ is strong if the USTZ consists of me flying around by myself.  If that happens, Eve becomes a EUTZ game permanently.

I’ve spoken many times about the importance of encouraging players to pursue in-game actions that generate a bunch of interactions with other players.  Like a ping-pong ball being thrown into a room full of mouse-traps, you want one spark to set off a cacophony of activity.  It’s awesome to see someone actually toss a ball in, then watch as trap after trap springs in a chaotic eruption.  Eve is that room, and the players are those mousetraps: mousetraps with a desire to be part of a big collection of interactions (ie. something bigger) and the ability to walk out if they’re not interested.

Do You Have a Space Pixel Problem?

Ed. Note: This post is written by Valeria Bovinus, my wife. I've edited for readability, but not content. You can find her other posts here.

The night I realized Tal had a problem was an evening like any other in the Dex/Bovinius household. Our dear children, were snuggly nestled in their beds after their nightly reenactment of the classic bedtime story, “Go the Fu** to Sleep.” Tal was on his computer and I was on mine when he said, “Look I bought a new Chimera.”

This immediately snapped me out of trying to buy clothes without a Disney picture on it for my children and into the world of space pixels, for I’m the wife who knows too much about Eve. Since (fortunately or unfortunately) I can recognize ship classes from their names, this comment set off warning bells.

Me: “Why do you need another carrier?”
Talvorian: “To move my stuff to a new staging system.”

He used a lot of words to explain what ships he was keeping with him, which were meant for low-sec, and a bunch of contingencies and situations.  It was exhausting to listen to.

When I countered that he had too much stuff and that moving doesn’t seem fun, he said, ‘”This is Eve.” But I have more fun organizing a sock drawer than he is having now. If everyone is doing this, no wonder subscriptions are dropping!  You folks have managed to turn space fighting into a chore.  It was at this point I realized he has a space pixel problem.

To help other players (and their wives), I’ve identified a space hoarding grading system:

Trying to Be Positive

So, I’m pretty seriously against the new fleet warp changes.  And while I don’t like them, my friend Turamarth is a big proponent of, “Don’t just complain, offer solutions!”  So here are two solutions.

To refresh everyone, CCP said that their goal with the fleet warp changes was to more deeply tie fleet success to the individual actions of all the fleet’s pilots.  In particular, their goal is to limit the effectiveness of bomber fleets.  Well, the proposal Fozzie shared is pretty much guaranteed NOT to accomplish that.  And I question whether that’s even a good idea.

But for the sake of argument, let’s assume the validity of that premise: our goal is to better entwine fleet success to the actions of individual pilots, and that changing fleet warp is the way to do it.  How should we do it to be successful?