With the return of Live Events such as the Battle for Caldari Prime, clearly the prime fiction of EVE is back in favour as part of this new thematic approach to expansions. However, EVE's story is very much a tale of two playstyles, with an entirely player-driven narrative unfolding daily in parallel to the reinvigorated backstory. Often, they do not mix well. How can these two disparate elements be united or at least comfortably co-exist in a single sandbox universe?

I think there's probably a temptation to overthink this issue; as far as I can see, the biggest thing that divides the player-driven narratives and the backstory-driven narratives is that neither really reacts to the other. I personally think that's stupid, honestly. The Empires might not care what goes on in nullsec as long as it stays in nullsec, but it strains suspension of disbelief that they wouldn't react to a capsuleer nullsec empire launching terror attacks on their space, like orchestrating a coordinated terror campaign across multiple systems to deny access to vital fuel and construction materials, for example, or periodically turning up to rampage en masse through the beating economic heart of New Eden, slaughtering thousands and causing billions of isk worth of damage in property damaged and lost. At the very least, one would expect the offending capsuleer organization to be banned from entering that Empire's space or docking in their stations. Declarations of war probably wouldn't be out of line either.⁽¹⁾

So, in essence, my idea for integrating the two storylines is simple: just integrate them. When player organizations do things that would logically draw the attention of NPC organizations, whether for good or ill, write their reactions into the story and into the game. CCP seems to have the part where NPCs have their own goals that players can help or hinder more or less down (at least in concept); there just needs to be some flow the other way. Let there be diplomats that can be contacted, either NPC accounts like Sansha Kuvakei, or tie it into Faction Warfare somehow, to deputize the players who've made common cause with the Empires.

(1) Not to pick on Goonswarm in particular; they're just a very visible example of players doing something that should get a reaction out of NPC.

Super Predators

I agree that there's a need for some kind of dedicated subcap ship that can act as a counter to supercaps; my own inclination would be a sort of stealth bomber writ large, possibly based on the Attack (formerly Tier 3) Battlecruisers, and armed with capital-class guns; ideally their DPS would be greater than a comparably-fit unsieged dread of the same race, but definitely no greater than half that of that same dread when in seige. In addition to serving as anti-(super)capital DPS in large battles, they might also provide some extra structure-bashing oomph to deep-penetration Black Ops raids.

Power Projection

That brings us to our next topic: supercapital jump drives, and Titan jump bridges in particular. In his post, Kirith Kodachi advocates a nerf to supercap jump range and for bridging to be removed from Titans entirely. Personally, I'm fine both with the current jump ranges and with Titans being able to bridge other ships. I do think that more ships should be able to create bridges, and that bridging should involve the ship in question arriving at the bridged-to location, not sitting safe in a POS some lightyears away. From that commonality, I have a few varying thoughts.

One thought is that, after jumping to a standard cyno, a bridging ship might light some kind of super-cyno that appears as a destination on allied jump bridge infrastructure within the bridging ship's jump range – the idea being to sharply limit short-term offensive power projection and encourage WWII Pacific Theatre-style island-hopping campaigns. Another thought is that a bridging ship might jump to a cyno and leave a temporary wormhole (of sorts) behind it, that other ships can travel through – or might open a wormhole to the cyno for those other ships, then jump itself when the cycle of the bridging module ends.

On the whole I personally prefer the mental image of a Titan or other bridging ship being the first to arrive, opening the assault by its appearance (and also exposing itself to a bit more risk, if its fleet isn't quite on the ball); it seems the sort of thing that would look good in a trailer, and promoting more excitement and more cinematic action is always a plus in my book.

And finally, speaking of other bridging ships, I think a new class of Tech 2 battleships based on the Abaddon (Khanid torp-boat, perhaps?), Rokh, Hyperion, and Maelstrom would be very welcome in make bridging tactics available to groups that don't have supercaps, and with less restrictions on the accompanying vessels than with a Black Ops.

Show of hands – how many of you will actually undock in them, rather than stick them in the back of your hangar with your Zephyr, Primae, and Echelon to collect spacedust?

That's what I thought.

Limited-availability, special edition ships are fine, as far as they go, but what's the point of having a ship if you never fly it because it can't be replaced? When I was first starting out, I stumbled across the listing for the Gold Magnate in the market, and for a brief time had an ambition to somehow find and acquire one, until I did more reading and discovered that they had all been destroyed. Likewise, how many other surviving rare ships are in the hands of collectors, locked away in their hangars, never to see the starlight again, and just as lost to the rest of the game as if they had been destroyed by enemy action?

Of course, there are exceptions to this. The tournament prize ships seem somewhat exempt from this fate, being just numerous enough and just powerful enough that you will very occasionally see them actually being flown, and the re-skinned scanning frigates handed out this past winter are very numerous, and share the same game stats as the vanilla versions, so they're equally useful even if they aren't actually better.

The pirate noobships are, it's true, slightly better than their empire counterparts, and it's also true we don't know how widely spread they'll actually end up – they may end up as widely spread as the scanning frigates, which wouldn't be so bad. But they're still noobships; there's even less reason to fly them than the scanning frigs, since they're so easily outgrown, even with their special pirate faction-themed bonus sets.

That's really the heart of my objection to the way special edition ships are handled so far. Nearly all of them are doomed from the start to be nothing more than hangar queens and comedy killmails, as they generally combine near uselessness with exorbitant replacement costs. The Zephyr and the Echelon are particularly bad; each has only a single slot, and each can fit only a single unique module in that slot. What good is a ship that Sleepers won't attack if the only thing it does is launch core scanner probes (and no better than any ship with a utility high, at that), leaving it without a reason to ever be anywhere near Sleepers in the first place? What good is a ship that has a codebreaker with a 10km reach if you can't tank it or arm it against even the wimpiest of highsec exploration rats? Instead of strengths, they have gimmicks. Instead of engaging with player creativity by allowing the possibility unorthodox fits and uses, they stifle it.

To CCP's credit, they do seem at least to be moving away from ships that are pure gimmick: the re-skinned scanning frigs, the pirate noobships, and the Gnosis have bonuses and slots and fitting space to work with. It might be nice to go back and change some of the old ones, though – give them a new lease on life.

Influence

Influence = K + O + P + M + E + I – L

Each alliance that operated in a given system would gain an Influence score for that system. Influence would be measured in ISK, with a maximum of 1 trillion and a minimum of zero. At downtime, an Influence score would be calculated according the formula above for each alliance that had been active in that system during the preceding day, and the alliance with the highest Influence score would be listed as the owner of that system for the following day. In the case of ties, if one of the tying alliances held sovereignty on the preceding day, it would retain ownership of the system; otherwise the system would revert to unclaimed status until the next downtime. The Influence score would not be cumulative over time.

• Kills: The value of all ships and structures, PC or NPC, destroyed in the system by members of an alliance. This would include the value of bounties, hull, and items destroyed, but not dropped items.
• Ore: The value of all ores, gas, and ice mined in the system by members of an alliance. Ring mining would also be included here, once implemented.
• Planetary Activity: The value of all planetary interaction products exported from any planet by members of an alliance in the system. Planets would also no longer be restricted to use only by members of the alliance holding sovereignty over that system. If a sov-holding alliance wants to gate access to planets in their space, they should have to put up POCOs and patrol their space for people who try to get by using the basic launch capacity of planetary command centers.
• Manufacturing: The value of all items (including ships) built in the system by members of an alliance.
• Economy: The value of all items sold (via contract, sell orders, or selling to buy orders) in the system by members of an alliance.
• Infrastructure: The value of all active infrastructure owned in the system by an alliance. This would consist mainly of POSes, POCOs, and system upgrade structures. Stations and outposts would be included in this value, but otherwise totally decoupled from system ownership. I-HUBs and SBUs would no longer exist; TCUs would, but in altered form (see below).
• Losses: The value of all ships and structures lost in the system by members of an alliance, whether lost to hostile players or NPCs. As with the Kills variable, this would include the value of bounties, hull, and items destroyed, but not the value of any dropped items.

The ISK value of any given item would be determined by a system similar to the one used to calculate LP payouts for FW kills; prices on the local market might have an impact, but the intent would be to incentivize local economies, not the selling back and forth of 1 exorbitantly priced unit of tritanium.

Upgrades

Unlike the present system involving development indices and installing upgrades in a system's insanely durable Infrastructure Hub, the Influence system would involve multiple, more vulnerable freestanding upgrade structures, suitable for a roaming small gang to attack and destroy. Neither sovereignty nor any threshold level of influence would be required to anchor these upgrades. The majority of these structures would not have reinforcement timers, and would send notifications only on their destruction (or when put into reinforced), not when first attacked.

• Entrapment Array: Only up to 5 of these would benefit a given system at any one time. Each Entrapment Array would increase the chance of DED complexes spawning in the system, and the more there are, the higher the chance of spawning a higher-level complex.
• Fire Control Node: Anchored near a stargate or station, this structure would allow the anchoring of POS guns which would automatically fire on anyone at -10 security status, -10 standing, or at war with the owning alliance. Characters with the ability to control normal POS guns can also assume manual control of weapons anchored with this structure.
• Interdiction Field Jammer: Anchored near a stargate or station, this structure would project an energy field that prevents entities other than the owning alliance from anchoring Mobile Warp Disruptors on the same grid. Warp Disrupt Probes and Warp Disruption Field Generators would still function as normal.
• Ore Prospecting Array: Each Ore Prospecting Array would guarantee one Gravimetric Signature in system, which would respawn immediately on completion, up to a maximum of five guaranteed Gravimetric Signatures. The Ore Prospecting Array would also include a sizable cargo bay; when loaded with a crystal appropriate to a highsec ore type (veldspar, scordite, pyroxeres, plagioclase, omber, or kernite), it would mine the closest, largest asteroid of that type on its grid until the crystal breaks or its cargo bay is full.
• Passive Sensor Array: Only one of these would be able to be anchored in a system. Members of the owning alliance benefit from an upgraded d-scan which displays distance figures for everything within scan range.
• Pirate Detection Array: Only up to 5 of these would benefit a given system at any one time. Each Pirate Detection Array would add a guaranteed number of at least four Cosmic Anomalies to a system, each of which would re-spawn instantly upon completion.
• Quantum Flux Generator: Only up to 5 of these would benefit a given system at any one time. Each Quantum Flux Generator would increase the chance of a Wormhole spawning in the system.
• Stargate Traffic Monitor: If an alliance were to have a Stargate Traffic Monitor anchored at more than half the gates in a system, Local would function as if the system was lowsec (see part I).
• Survey Network: Only up to 5 of these would benefit a given system at any one time. Each Survey Network increases the chance of Magnetometric and Radar Signatures spawning in the system.
• Territorial Claim Units: Territorial Claim Units would no longer define who owns a system, and no longer be invulnerable to attack. Territorial Claim Units would provide no benefit other than contributing to Infrastructure and serving as a physical reminder of who is claiming the system, and more than one could be anchored in the same system.

Each of these upgrades would be able to fit in a Blockade Runner, and only one of each type would be anchorable at each valid location – for example, one could anchor an Ore Prospecting Array and a Pirate Detection Array in the same asteroid belt, but not two Ore Prospecting Arrays.

Now, I have touched on the linked topics of Local and intel gathering before, but I've been meaning to revisit the topic as part of my thoughts for a more comprehensive revamp of nullsec (with occasional touching on other areas of the game), and this provides the perfect opportunity to do so.

Finally, this post and the ones that will follow it are tagged with "terrible ideas" for a reason – not because I actually think they're terrible (I wouldn't post them if I did), but because I'm sure there are things I'm overlooking or haven't fully considered. Feel free to leave criticism in the comments.

Intel Gathering

In my experience in EVE – which includes flying in nullsec fleet ops, FCing lowsec roams, living in W-space, and general travel through all of those regions – there are three fundamental tools used to gather intel: Local, d-scan, and the starmap.

Local

Currently, local is the same across all regions of space (with the sole exception of w-space); it provides perfect information about all pilots in a system, to all pilots in a system. No-one can come or go without two entire star systems knowing about it – the one he left, and the one he entered. They can see his name, his standings, and with trivial effort, his entire employment history.

To many people, myself included, that seems a little excessive. How would I change it?

In highsec, Local would remain as is. CONCORD likes to keep tabs on everyone in their domain, and they share some of this information with the rest of us to help us remain safe.

In lowsec, Local would display the number of people in system, and sort them by standing – you would know the total number of people in system, as well as how many friendlies, how many neutrals, and how many hostiles, as well as corp-, alliance-, and fleet-mates. Basically, if it has a little icon that shows up in Local now, it would be displayed in Local after this change, but with a number attached to it rather than a character name.

In nullsec, Local would default to displaying only the number of people in system. In sov space, freestanding upgrades called Stargate Traffic Monitors would be available to make Local function as if the system were lowsec.

In w-space, Local would continue to function exactly as it does now.

D-scan

D-scan is, in my opinion, a tiny bit too good in one way: it perfectly identifies the ship type of all ships in range. I would rather see the directional scanner report the name, race, and signature radius of detected ships, along an estimated ship class based on that signature radius, according to a table such as this one:

Those numbers probably need to be adjusted, but the idea should be clear. The goals here are 1) to enable gameplay around using modules that adjust your sig radius to misrepresent the capabilities of your ship or fleet, and 2) to allow sig radius savants the chance to glean a bit more information without crippling people who aren't. Stationary objects such as anchored cans or POSes would still be recognized for what they are, rather than being mislabeled according to their sig radius.

Related to the first goal mentioned in the previous paragraph, a new module might be introduced – call it the Signature Damper, an active lowslot module that can be loaded with scripts that reduce your signature radius and your shield hp by some percentage – 10%, 25%, and 50%, perhaps – to allow larger ships to masquerade as smaller ones. An active scan system similar to that suggested by Poetic Stanziel might be able to see past the sig radius to positively identify ship classes, at the cost of alerting your targets that you've seen through their ruse.

In sov space, a freestanding upgrade called a Passive Sensor Array would be available to give members of the owning alliance the ability to detect how far away from them all the objects on their d-scan are.

Starmap

At last we come to the starmap. Overall, I think the intel provided by the starmap is in a pretty good place as it is, but there is one change I would make.

First, for any system in which you have a corp-, alliance-, or fleet-mate, or which your alliance has upgraded with Stargate Traffic Monitors, the starmap would display an accurate-to-the-second count of the number of people in system on the starmap. For highsec, lowsec, or those upgraded nullsec systems, it would also also be able to display a breakdown of the people in those systems by standings.

Once you no longer have corp, alliance, or fleet eyes in a system, the starmap would continue to display the population count they last "reported" alongside the normal 30-minute average, until 30 minutes after they left system.

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us – listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.

Welcome Yule!

A poem by Susan Cooper.

CCP might not be able to create PLEX from nothing without losing money, but they can certainly create isk from nothing. This means they could act in the market without needing to worry about the profitability of their activities – which is exactly what they should do.

Under the cover of a new in-game agency – let's call it the CONCORD Central Bank – CCP could use their stockpile of PLEX seized from botting and RMT operations⁽¹⁾ to intervene in the PLEX market in the major trade hubs, selling low (to drive the price of PLEX down) and buying high (to replenish their supplies of PLEX without losing real money). It could even be automated so that their sell orders would adjust downward again once they've been undercut by a certain amount – the goal is to influence the behavior of the market, not crowd out the other participants.

Buy orders would be a little more tricky. Automating them to periodically reset to just a bit more than the current highest buy price seems sensible, but the refresh time should be a bit slower than for sell orders, and any given buy order should only be for 5 or 6 PLEX in total.

It's been a while since I studied economics, but I believe these actions would have a downward influence on the isk price of PLEX; once it gets to a point where CCP like it, they can suspend the CONCORD Central Bank's market activities and see what happens – and have the possibility of renewed operations to hopefully help keep people from getting too exuberant immediately afterwards.

(1) They could even sell the other seized assets on the market as well, creating more of the isk sinks they want so badly.

At the same time, there is a fair bit of discussion over the fact that a two or even three week trial period may not be really enough to let people find out if they like EVE or not, despite all the effort being put in to improve the New Player Experience.

Personally, I think these issues can resolve each other, and I'll explain how.

New Players Shouldn't Be On Trial

Let's do away with the concept of Trial Accounts; instead, the distinction will be between capsuleers (subscribed accounts) and capsuleer candidates (F2P accounts).

Instead of being capsuleers from the moment they finish character creation, new characters would instead be capsuleer candidates – people with the potential to become capsuleers, and even some of the same cybernetic enhancements, but not all of them. They would learn skills and control their ships in the same way as a capsuleer, but they would not be able to plug in additional implants to accelerate their training or squeeze additional performance from a ship; nor would they be as immortal as a true capsuleer.

"Not As Immortal"

What does that phrase even mean? Well, in this context, it means that candidates wouldn't have an infinite supply of medical clones to respawn into. A candidate would start play with free, 900k-skill-point medical clones. Clones with higher SP limits could be bought with isk or AURUM, with costs escalating the more SP is retained; clones bought with isk would be one-use, whereas clones bought with AURUM would be good forever – or at least until a bigger clone is needed.

(While we're on the subject, let's change up capsuleer clones a little – full capsuleers no longer have to update medical clones to hold more skill points, but instead your medical and jump clones have recurring maintenance costs which can be modified based on your standings with the corps that own the cloning facilities.)

Candidate Skills

There are some limits I would place on what skills candidates would be allowed to learn; overall, the list of skills that can be trained on current Trial Accounts seems like a sensible thing to carry over, with only a few changes.

1. Skills related to T3 ships and subsystems, capital modules, and T2 modules⁽¹⁾ should not be learnable by default for candidate accounts.
2. The [Racial] Industrial, ORE Industrial, and Mining Barge⁽²⁾ skills should be learnable for candidate accounts.
3. Infomorph Psychology should not be learnable for candidate accounts under any circumstances.

Special candidate-allowed skillbooks might be made available for purchase with AURUM to allow candidates to circumvent some of the limitations associated with their type of account – [Racial] Battlecruiser and Battleship skills spring immediately to mind, along with skillbooks for T2 weapons and perhaps some T2 ship types.

Capsuleer Conversion

The obvious thing to offer to let candidates buy with Aurum is a conversion to a subscribed capsuleer account. This brings a little bit of complexity with it – what happens if they subsequently let their subscription lapse, but want to go back to playing in F2P mode? I don't have a certain answer; my inclination is to just let them do it – cancel their clone contracts, deny them access to any jump clones they may have, and restrict them from learning any new skills that would not be available to F2P accounts – but I have no idea how technically feasible that would be.

Buddy Invites

If there will no longer be such a thing as Trial Accounts, what happens with the Buddy Invite System? We should certainly continue to encourage players to recruit from their friends and family, and offer material benefit to those who are recruited that way, but with candidates being a F2P option without a time limit, some adjustments would obviously have to be made.

For the invitee, I think the answer is to start them off with a moderate stock of Aurum from the moment they start the game; and the inviter might receive a PLEX the first time the invitee buys more Aurum.

So, that's how I think CCP might be able to move EVE to a hybrid P2P/F2P model without ruining everything forever, while also giving new players more time to get hooked on EVE. What do you think?

(1) I'm speaking here of skills like Medium Blaster Specialization and Amarr Drone Specialization – skills that the T2 versions require on top of a high level in the skill for the T1 version.
(2) I still say that Mining Barge should be folded into ORE Industrial and based off the soon-to-be Mining Frigate skill (which would be renamed to ORE Frigate).

On The Squad Level

At the squad level, my proposal is very simple: as long as the Squad Commander can support the number of people in the squad, everyone in the squad counts as a booster, with only the best overall boosts in any one category applying.

For example, suppose you have a squad of 5. You have the Squad commander, with Leadership 3, a Damnation running 2 armor links and a Skirmish Warfare – Interdiction Maneuvers link, a Harbinger with the Armored Warfare – Passive Defense link,  and a Hurricane with no links, but Siege Warfare 5.

Under the current system, you'd assign the Damnation to be your booster and receive no benefit from the Harbinger's link or the Hurricane pilot's skills.

Under my proposal, the squad would benefit from all its pilots' boosting capabilities – the links from the Damnation and Harbinger, and the extra shield HP from the Hurricane. However, one limitation would remain: If two more pilots joined the squad, boosts would stop unless the squad commander was replaced with someone who had Leadership trained above 3.

Above The Squad Level

I don't propose that this perfect democracy of boosting continue above the squad level; at the wing level, the role of wing booster can be assigned to any of the wing's squad commanders; as long as the wing commander can control the number of squads under him, the entire wing then benefits from the boosts provided by the wing booster's squad.

At the fleet level, it works much the same – the fleet booster role is assigned to a given wing commander; assuming sufficient skills on the part of the fleet commander, the whole fleet then benefits from whatever boosts are being provided to that wing by the wing booster.

Pros and Cons

This is a bit more complex than the current system; true, if you start playing with assigning boosters separate from the squad/wing/fleet commanders, the current system can be rather confusing, but by default, you just determine whose boosts are best and stick them in squad, wing, or fleet command as your needs demand and their skills allow.

However, I think the moderate increase in complexity is worth it for the way this encourages people to actually fly boosting ships, rather than park them offgrid somewhere – if no one person has to be responsible for all the boosts, then there's less drive to fit ships for boosting and nothing else. Being able to spread links out among a squad's worth of ships increases redundancy and allows the ships and pilots running those links to contribute in other ways to the fleet.