List of Sov Complaints (CSM)
Contents
Stats
- Title:
- Raised by: mazzilliu
- Submission Date: 10 September 2010
- Issue ID: ???
Summary
CCP released a new sovereignty system in the beginning of 2010. there were a lot of features that were planned and subsequently dropped, and this has caused the system not to act in the way it was designed. In short, people still don't like the sov grind. It is not common for people to say they love taking sov systems, and is the top complaint I receive from my own alliance.
Here are a list of complaints collected from a general population, intentionally kept high level and general:
- Too much HP. from what I hear, features that were intended to counteract this got dropped, so now we just get left with a ton of EHP to kill that nobody likes doing. re-balance this with the understanding that these compensatory features will probably never come into being.
- Sov relies entirely on the numbers of people participating and the EHP of structures. If that's the way it's meant to be, can we at least make the inevitable conclusion come a bit sooner?
- Station services are rarely worth taking out unless you have nothing better to do between timers- they take too long to kill.
- Capital, supercapital, station, cynojammer, jump bridge, large structure inflation. It is inevitable in any MMO that the endgame items will end up commonplace. So perhaps the balancing needs to reflect this new reality. Objects that were meant as centerpieces are now owned by a large percentage of the population. Some specific suggestions involve nerfing supercaps, and making outposts destructible. Fleets of hictors are no longer able to tackle a sizable fleet of titans due to the doomsday.
- Timers are way too long and are organized in a way that does not encourage fights. It discourages turnover of sov systems. The holding alliance needs to be practically dead or tiny in comparison with its attacker in order to lose a system. Few or no sov turnovers in recent memory have involved a defending alliance that wasn't inactive already.
- Dreads have lost their unique purpose in sov warfare and are vastly inferior to the supercap alternatives.
- Sov warfare is not fun and generally only serves as a means to an end which is the actual fun. a "necessary evil", but it is never the goal in itself.
- Absolutely no small gang objectives for sov warfare. even if a small gang runs around completely unopposed they can do no harm whatsoever to the defending alliance simply due to the EHP involved. The worst they can do is make people dock up and temporarily disrupt ratting operations only in the system they are in.
- Only a small amount of time determines the fate of sov. If you control the system for 22 hours a day and you don't for the one critical hour, you lose the system. this results in time zone battles mattering so much, and causing "alarm clock" ops that disrupt people's real lives.
- lag is mentioned as a big factor in the problems of sov warfare. The roots of the complaint are twofold- technical problems, and the fact that the current design encourages single huge battles and make everyone throw everything plus the kitchen sink into one single fight. The first cause is an unrelated issue, but the second ought to be considered in the design.
Potential Solution
Sovereignty needs another looking at by a game designer, and it needs to be re-balanced so that it actually functions. From what I understand, the original design of this feature would have functioned well if all of it were implemented, but the implementation was incomplete, critical compensatory features were dropped, and the quality suffered as a result.
Pros
- sovereignty stops being terrible
Cons
- none
Relevant Forum Threads
Meeting Minutes
TBA
Votes
TBA