Hacked online games er 2.0

Hi there.
My name is Michael Wilmore. I’ve been in Higher Than Everest [P3AK] for 2 years, and before that Horde Vanguard. [TRYHD]. I like to smellgong and touch nodes, and write big long essays about what I think. This is one of those. In this paragraph orgy, I want to do a couple of things:

• outline in brief the high-level changes I think CCP need to make in the next 6-12 months
• go into detail about what those changes would enable and the various synergies between them
• talk briefly about the Drifter event, and why it’s the wrong path even if CCP’s heart is in the right place

That’s as much as you’re going to get by way of a tl;dr.
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Section 1: Fix Structure and Sov grind IMMEDIATELY
Upwell 2.0 and the first (!) iteration on aegis sov were both almost a year and a half ago. Whilst the iteration on entosis nodes and remote reps were broadly well-received, they were still relatively particular changes and didn’t address the timer system that has existed since 2015 (!). On the other hand, Upwell 2.0 was widely panned on arrival and viewed as a step backwards, and to date nothing has been done to address those concerns. In the meantime, we’ve had yet more feature creep in the form of buffed jammers and fatigueless jump gates. The result has been a null (and wider) landscape that’s simultaneously more static, grindy, and blobby than ever before.
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I honestly think that before doing any other balance or development work, CCP needs to address sov and structure mechanics, especially the latter as it affects all of New Eden. To that end I’ve created a simple one-pager document of the changes I think need to be made in the immediate future: Defibrillator: A Three Part Plan for Eve Online
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I’ll go into more detail on this in the next section, but in short they are a set of suggestions that involve minor changes to existing attributes/code or the return of some small amount of previously existing attributes/code. In other words, it’s just numbers - none of this should be hard to do in terms of workload. It just requires CCP to commit to a more risky vision of New Eden. I put it in a simple, one-pager format because I wanted to make it easy to digest. But the format doesn’t really get across the many implications of these changes. That’s what I want to go into next.
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Section 2: Big Things Have Small Beginnings (warning: many words)
Here I want to go into detail about why I think the changes in the above document would be good, and what kind of synergistic results might follow:
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1) Upwell 3.0

• i. Reinforcement timers reduced; 2 for high power, and single (kill) timer for low-power, across all upwell structures in lowsec and nullsec. Hisec should retain an armor timer 24h after the initial reinforcement, and otherwise function identically.

Pretty obvious: the actual structure grind, irrespective of any other changes, would be reduced by a 33-50% outside of hisec. I can understand why CCP might want empire space to be more forgiving and require 3 timers, but there is no reason to do so in nullsec or lowsec, which are supposed to be high-risk, high-reward environments. Low-power structures in particular need to be 1-shot jobs, just like unstronted POSs. If you’re in nullsec or lowsec or a wormhole, and your stuff isn’t fueled, it should be maximally vulnerable. Maybe in hisec you might want it to be 2 timers rather than one (and down from 3), but in ‘risky’ space structure negligence should have dramatic costs.
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• ii. Defender chooses the timezone of the exit, but the day is determined by the attacker. The specific timer is determined by the time of attack; if within the timezone window then the timers will be at that exact time. If the initial reinforcement takes place outside that window, the final timer will be at the limit of the exit window closest to the time the initial attack took place.

The most important point here is that by putting the day of the timer in the attacker’s control, you permit cross-timezone pvp interaction. The attackers can hit the astra in their own TZ during the week, creating a weekend timer in the defender’s TZ. They can then get up early or stay up late to meet their foe at a time of their enemy’s choosing. There’s nothing wrong with 4am timers if that’s when the structure owners actually play the game, but driven pvp entities should at least have the option of going hardcore at the weekend and alarm-clocking.
There are other benefits too - for one thing, progress in your war isn’t limited to a single day a week. There is nothing worse than defeating an enemy completely, and then being unable to make rapid progress because all their structures exit at the same time, on the same day, once a week. Increasing the influence attackers have over timers will allow for wars to proceed at a much more interesting pace than currently (e.g. see a near-uncontested Imperium struggling to get through tribute in a month, or PL and TAPI’s back to back grinds through Provi).
Finally, a word on controlling the exit time: random roll timers are stupid. It’s extremely frustrating to hit a structure at one end of it’s vulnerability window only to have it exit at the other. Why have this luck-based timer roll nonsense? Let the time of the attack influence the position of the timer within the vulnerability window. A 4-hour variance in the timer is MASSIVE, it’s silly to have it depend on chance.
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• iii. The distance between the initial reinforcement and the final timer will depend on the structure size. 1 day for FLEX structures, 2 days for medium structures (same as POSs), 3 days for large structures, and 5 days for XL structures.

I’ve never really understood why Upwell structures have no size distinctions with respect to their timers. Keepstars and Fortizars are obviously of greater functional, financial and strategic interest than an Astrahus. Even in nullsec or lowsec, I can see why you might want a few days to rally allies in defence of your 250b supercapital staging structure. But Astrahus and Fortizar timers should really be local, short-term content, not something you batphone the whole world for 6 days ahead of the hull timer. A 2 day ref-to-kill cycle for an astra is no different to what we had with outposts or POSs, and ⅗ days for forts and keeps respectively still represents a significant buff on what existed previously. The current 9-day (!) cycles are just ridiculous.
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• iv. Damage cap increased so that all timers take a maximum of 15 minutes at cap (same as the repair timer, equivalent to 3 siege cycles).

Remember back when we just had POSs, and dreads were the weapon of choice, and you’d spend 6 siege cycles on every timer? Yeah, me neither, because 6 siege cycles meant you hadn’t brought enough dreads. It would simply be too long to hang around risking your stuff. But now, that’s the mandatory amount of time you have to spend on grid. I can understand where CCP were coming from with damage caps, and I can see how removing them and going back to reps etc would be difficult and more problematic than people admit. But I don’t see why everything has to take so much longer on average. This spring, me and a handful of other guys reinforced a low-power Sotiyo in about 15 minutes with some supers. Nobody was complaining about damage cap because it was just fundamentally a reasonable amount of time. At damage cap, a low-power engineering complex currently takes just 8 minutes to reinforce. Does anyone really hate damage cap on those timers? The biggest issue with damage caps isn’t that they exist, but that they are generally set far too low. It shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes to finish a timer at cap.
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• v. Standup armor plates removed from the game.

Ahahaha, speak of the fucking devil. Whoever thought these were a good idea, that an option to INCREASE the amount of time it takes to kill citadels at damage cap was needed, obviously does not play that part of the game. We need fewer timers, not longer ones - delete these shitty things.
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• vi. Upwell structures will only be able to use their weapons once in armor or a deep % of shield on the initial reinforcement, and during the final timer.

Yeah yeah yeah, POS guns were on all the time, muh feature parity! POSs didn’t have all the functionality of the completely defenceless outposts that people used to actually live in. Citadels do need to be able to defend themselves, but not all the time - they are already far safer than outposts by virtue of tether. We know this is possible because they had weapons limitations outside of their vulnerability windows in Upwell 1.0, so it’s definitely possible to code it. A lot more roaming and spontaneous content would be possible if you could exist on the same grid as a citadel without getting annihilated by it. This is especially true of the doomsday on Keepstars - perhaps relevant and balanced in a giant supercapital fight, but not as a 24/7 instakill weapon.
One concern would be the defence of FLEX structures. Perhaps it would be possible to link the availability of citadel defences to the status of other Upwell structures within 500km or so; then again a lot of people think the current state of jammers on citadels is borderline broken. Perhaps a compromise is needed where only ewar is available day-round. At any rate I think it’d be a lot more fun if spaceships could fight each other on Upwell grids, rather than all kinds of content being de facto reduced to whether or not you can tank a citadel (and yeah, lol @ keepstar doomsdays).
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• vii. Entosis of station/citadel services to return as a mechanic.

During WWB, I was in Pandemic Horde. After we captured O1Y-ED station and began staging there, Goons (and Boat in particular) would CONSTANTLY harass our undock and station services. They would come in a fleet, entosis the clone bay, and if it got turned off all the beans would end up back in hisec if they got podded. In reality the stakes were pretty limited, but it was a massive inconvenience, and as a result a massive incentive to undock and fight them. There were big dunks and big feeds, but it was a near-guaranteed way to provoke a response from us.
Later when I had joined P3AK in The-Culture, we had great fun provoking fights from the locals through this mechanic. We would poke the services, they would undock, and there would be a fight. Sometimes they’d just gank our entosis, sometimes we’d gank theirs when they tried to re-online the cloning. It was a great mechanic that provided good back-and-forth skirmishing. Contrast with what happened once Horde onlined our fort in O1Y. This video is pretty funny in a way, but it only happened because Boat didn’t understand the range and power of the Fortizar. Now that everyone does, this kind of content is basically dead. I think that’s a tremendous shame, and would love to see Upwell structure services linked to the entosis module again.
One thing to note is that this is only possible or worth doing if Upwell structures cannot use their defences all the time. Otherwise the structure would simply force the entosis ship off. By removing the weapons, and creating a point of interaction, you allow spontaneous, low-stakes fights to occur. It would give people an actual reason to roam to someone else’s staging beyond hoping that they’ll undock. And because low-power structures are kill shots and full-power structures only have 2 timers, you don’t have to link it to an active service module. Fuel in the bay? It’s full power. No fuel? It’s low power. Service modules are a point of interaction instead of an abstract cost. And how about moon goo? How much easier do you think it would be to get a response if entosising the drill service on an athanor could pause the chunk? Likewise for builds in engineering complexes. I actually think this was a huge missed opportunity with Upwell structures, and a form of content they could have provided that was never possible with POSs.
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• viii. Introduction of a less profitable passive rig for refineries.

I think that modest passive income should be possible via Refineries, so that small-scale pvp playstyles can be supported. I realise that there is some concern about this devaluing the isk/hour of active moon-mining, but I think it should be pretty easy to come up with a ratio that won’t glut the market into oblivion. You could also limit what ores the passive and active rigs can extract, so that some ores are produced exclusively by one or the other. In any event, there needs to be some kind of compromise here, because the current price of moon goo is mostly a symptom of not a lot of people wanting to actively mine moons.
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• ix. Jump fatigue added back to jump gates.

Another example of outrageous feature creep. Was anyone actually asking for this? Removing fatigue means removing geography, and as a result almost every significant fight is a blobfest. When P3AK was in skill urself (rip), we used to jaunt from MTO on the border with Venal to Detorid on the border with Immensea, in the space of about 15-20 minutes. Barra would just laugh about how broken it was; it was apparent to every one of us that we shouldn’t be able to regularly and reliably traverse a quarter of the map in 15 minutes. The combination of fatigueless jump gates and their ACLs means that the position of your staging matters less and less the more people you blue or NIP. It also means that harrassment and guerilla stagings by small groups are basically a dead playstyle. There’s no point deploying a small group to the far side of your enemy’s forward staging when it’s just 3 fatigueless jumpgates away. Instead of risky, behind-the-lines logistics being rewarded with opportunities, it’s just hard for you and never for the person living there.
Oh, and can we please have tackle prevent jumping like it used to? They’re not regular star gates - they have access lists. Jumping through one blind should have consequences, rather than being able to crash gate knowing the baddies can’t follow you through. Stop with the feature creep.
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• x. Putting it all Together: An Example

It’s Tuesday evening, and you and the boys are bored. So you get in a few smallgang ships with an alt in a toaster, and head over to the staging system of the nearby blob’s local pet alliance. These clowns are a good bit bigger than you, but it’s off-tz for them and they don’t have a very big pvpness either. They do have a fort though, so you put the toaster on it and start winding up on the clone services. They undock ewar ships to annoy you, but the griffins die easily enough before the local Standing Fleet Hero feeds his Falcon. This seems to get him mad, because a few minutes later he undocks a section of Caracals to force you off. The toaster dies, but you kite your way to 4 or 5 kills and a 500m pod, ecks dee made you form isk positive. The kind of half-assed response gets you thinking though. You ping for a fleet the following evening at the same time.
This time you bring a small Leshak fleet with remote reps and plenty of Guardians. You’re not quite at the new damage cap but it still only takes you 20 minutes; halfway through shield the fort guns come online, but you can tank it no problem and they don’t have the numbers at this time of day to force you off. As you hit it a good 6 hours before their vuln window it comes out at 2am on Saturday for you, early Sunday evening for them. Not ideal, but you have nothing to do on Sunday so time to old-school it!
The nearby blob are currently staged on the other side of their space, and they have a biggish timer the same evening so they can’t afford to stack fatigue. The locals still outnumber you though, but there are some matching-tz npc nullsec dudes you’re on good terms with who don’t like them either. It’s their staging fort so you know you’ll get a fight, even if they can’t rustle up any big batphones. Their cap fleet has evacc’d to a different fort, but they’re unlikely to use caps due to the ranges into NPC space.
On the night you bring a girthy Ishtar fleet and your allies are in some weird sniper BC boosh comp. The locals have a Ferox fleet and a tackle-wing from a batphone who didn’t want to come all that way in anything bigger. The fight is really fun, the feroxes feed a lot despite being bigger, but the tackle wing is very persistent in hounding the boosh fleet, and in the end the fort repairs despite the attackers pretty much winning the field. Nobody really cares though, it was a nice 300 man fight on a Saturday night, and everyone got some low-scale, high-stakes content.
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I don’t want this example to sound overly patronising, my intention is just to show how these tweaks taken together would change the pace, scale, and scope of citadel warfare dramatically. Travel times/accessibility are inextricably linked with the scale of fights, as is the time between reinforcement and final timer. The longer the build-up, the easier it is to get there, the more people will come. The argument often goes that with a declining player base, the game needs to be easier to travel. What this ignores is that player numbers are affected as much by available playstyles as anything else. When you turn all structure-warfare into giant blobtastic fights, people who aren’t interested in that stop playing. Very few people actually enjoy these 2000-4000 character tidi fests, yet 9-day timers and fatigueless jump gates encourage exactly that. Meanwhile, if you want to have small-scale fights there is very little way to provoke it at the moment. Even the potential for identifying possible targets is barely there, because roaming and poking in off timezones is basically impossible. You can just be ignored until the armor timer. The fact that even having discovered their vulnerability window, you are rolling the dice on the actual timer (with a 4 hour potential spread) is even more discouraging. All of which means these timers just never get made in the first place because at the end of the day, who can be bothered? I am firmly of the opinion that ALL of these changes need to take place if Upwell structures are to become an interesting or engaging content driver. Right now they are just a great big obstacle you have to grind through.
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2) Aegis 3.0

• i. Advantages conferred by ADMs to be reduced: an ihub at ADM 6 should take 30 minutes to reinforce uninterrupted. The minimum time should remain the same. The minimum vulnerability window should also be extended to allow for cross-tz fights.

The fact that 4 years on it still takes an hour to reinforce an ADM 6 ihub uncontested blows my mind. Does anyone actually think this is a reasonable minimum amount of time to just create a timer??? This is perhaps the epitome of grind as defence - your enemy gets 45 minutes to form and arrive in their own space, which you have already travelled to. 30 minutes is plenty of time for what is ultimately just creating a timer.
The current vulnerability windows are also too short - why do citadels have a 4 hour vulnerability window, but ADM 6 ihubs only have a 3 hour window? This number feels picked at random, but I think the minimum window should be at least 4 hours long, and probably 6. Cross-TZ interaction is a GOOD thing, the edges of your timezone should be dangerous and interesting.
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• ii. Attacker determines the exact timer within the vuln window as with upwell structures.

I’ve already been through this with regard to Upwell structures: random timers suck. What is the point of low ADMs producing wide vulnerability windows if the timer is completely random? An ADM 1 ihub has an 18 hour spread. The timer should come out from when you started reffing. This is easily one of the most infuriating and pointless mechanics in Aegis sov.
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• iii. TCU functionality rolled into the ihub and the structure removed from the game.

Speaking of pointless mechanics, can we get rid of TCUs please? They do almost nothing at the moment, and there is no reason for them to exist. It’s just the duplication of sov grind for no reason.
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• iv. Continued nerfs to the respawn time and number of anoms provided by ihub upgrades.

I think it’s kind of wild that CCP was so willing to go full bananas with the Drifter event, but has been so conservative with ihub upgrades and anom numbers/respawn time. If you want people to spread out, the carrot works better than the stick. High-end sov still supports way too many people. Keep or buff the bonused ticks and loot drops if you want, but reduce the actual number of anoms as well as the respawn time. Fully upgraded sov should not have like, 5 sanctums and a gorillion havens and hubs. Nerf ihubs by half and you will pretty much solve the oppressiveness of supercap umbrellas overnight.
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4) Umbrella Mechanics
Having said that, there are some little tweaks to the projection meta that would help in combination with the above:

• i. Buff resists and range of cyno inhibs - should be survivable and affect the entire grid.

I really don’t think this deployable is anywhere near as powerful as it should be. Getting one of these things down should be a triumph or disaster depending on your point of view. Making them tougher and more powerful would dramatically change how tackling caps can play out.
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• ii. Give Black ops battleships a small SMB similar to the Nestor. Maybe a covops cloak.

At this stage it’s pretty safe to say that the capital genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not going back in. One of the biggest losers of capital proliferation has been the Black Ops battleship. Once a fearsome means of force projection, they’re now capital fodder and largely eclipsed by the far more versatile and survivable covert T3Cs. I’ve heard a lot of suggestions for blops, some of which seem a little wacky, some of which seem broken. But I think some small, obvious changes could make them a lot more relevant. Giving them a Ship Maintenance Bay would allow them to really augment the projection and power of T3Cs. Switching between travel fits and combat fits when and where appropriate would allow for much more forceful fleet use of covert bridges, without adding anything game-breaking or oppressive. On the other end of the scale, in the current landscape it seems ridiculous that the high-sp, high-cost blops cannot use a covert ops cloak. That simple, obvious change would make black ops way more viable for roaming, wormhole combat, and just generally worth using, without making them overpowered in a fleet context.
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• iii. Do NOT nerf the loki; if anything buff the other 3 T3Cs.

When you read the CSM minutes, they often seem to raise the issue of the Loki being much better than the other T3Cs. This usually elicits a response from CCP Fozzie to the effect that they need to nerf its fitting. Perhaps I am wrong, but that seems to completely miss the point: the problem isn’t that the Loki is too strong, it’s that the other T3Cs are now kind of garbage outside of some very niche situations.
It’s not as though all anybody is flying are Lokis, like Ishtars or Svipuls online. The meta is decidedly HACs, with battleships the main counter (other than, you know, other HACs). People do use Loki fleets sometimes, but the reason they don’t use the other T3Cs is because they are rubbish. The Tengu is like a Loki but with a worse turret type and a less relevant ewar bonus. The Legion is good for blops ganks but is otherwise very ordinary, and the Proteus is really good at being slow and having crap fitting room.
With the exception of the Tengu (which has other niches by way of compensation), they all make decent solo cloaky hunters, or with the exception of the Proteus (uhhhh, Guristas 10/10s I guess???), smallgang ships. But the fact that there are some viable fleet fits for the Loki is simply not a problem. What sucks is that there aren’t for any of the others.
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• iv. More, stronger tackle in anoms - e.g. infinite point ‘hic’ towers etc.

Maybe I’m missing something, but isn’t this the single most obvious way to nerf botting? Rather than gimping local, making people play captcha online, or bread-and-circuses from CCP San Pellegrino, couldn’t CCP just make anoms have stronger tackle? So bots can’t just warp out? It doesn’t have to be hard to kill or tackle them all the time, just often and long enough that they can get caught without multi-account gymnastics and the patience of Job. Might this have blow-back effects and downsides for hunters and roamers? Sure, but they can plan around that. You can’t plan around never being able to catch anything because they’re in warp before you load system.
These are the short-term changes CCP need to make to pull this game out of its death spiral. They will make offensive war more enjoyable, more accessible, and more rewarding, and they can all be done without reworking any of the game’s core structure or sovereignty systems. The only obstacle is CCP; to save Eve Online, they need to commit to a more dangerous, emergent future for nullsec, lowsec, and wormholes.
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Section 3: A Game Adrift(ers lol)
I want to write a few words on the Drifter event; so much has been said already, and it’s clear that among the player base the sentiment boils down to either ‘mandatory pve is shit’ or ‘finally some chaos in nullsec’. The reason both sentiments have such broad support is because they are both right. Mandatory PVE is shit, but so is the current structure spam and feature creep that defines the stagnancy of nullsec and lowsec. What CCP needs to do is make killing structures more enjoyable, feasible, and rewarding for players, not compensate for people opting out of boring grind by creating more boring grind. Eve is supposed to be about us writing our own stories, fighting our own wars, dying by each others’ hands. The universe should be the backdrop for our choices, the sand in the box. What we don’t need is CCP blasting sand at us until it buries the playerbase.
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This post is already pretty long, so I’m going to end it here - sorry for any spelling or formatting errors, I did my best but I'm going outside now so fuck it.
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In my second post, I’m going to outline some ideas I have for events and dynamic gameplay that CCP could implement using existing code, but which would provoke emergent, player-drive content and liven up nullsec, lowsec, and wormholes simultaneously. Look forward to it (or not) in the next couple of days; like and subscribe, favstar in the bio.

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