Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Eve + eve = Super eve?

One of those things I have long thought of is how to make eve a better, specifically, larger, place.  Essentially, barring K-Space, Drone regions, and Black Rise, eve's about the same size now as when I joined.  Okay I guess looking at those spaces makes me think it is indeed much bigger, BUT the problem still stands that more % wise players have joined the game than those expanses of system additions can make up for.  To reflect this, when I joined the PCU record was 11k users, and perhaps 60k total subscribers.  Now it's somewhere to the tune of 4-5 times that amount, somewhere near 64k concurrent and who knows how many active accounts!

To me this plays into a lot of the problems I have with eve.  Now maybe this isn't the most fully thought out idea, but eve needs to be at least two times bigger.  two times is a pretty arbitrary number so let me clarify a bit.

High sec could likely be kept about the same size, perhaps each race could get one more Lonetrek sized region complete with highsec, stations, level 1-5 agents, ore, etc.  Spread out the massive clumps of similar quality L4 agents out a bit and drive separation of missioners to other area's.  This would help to spread out the majority of clumps of people in highsec, and let's face it, the industrialists new and old, would love to get the chance to find new places, markets and people to profit from.  The simple re-distribution of players from highsec alone would make tremendous sense.  

Extend this expansion to Lowsec as well, and especially Lowsec.  Right now risk is high because most of the well-known lowsec area's are quite honestly over-hunted, this doesn't mean there aren't fights to be had, but more fights between pirates than between people interested in defeating the pirates, there isn't any area for them to expand either.  Too many Hyena's and not enough calfs.  Doubling (or more) the space available to expand into and with less hunters the calfs could have a chance to multiply and perhaps dig in, providing more viable infrastructure and combat against pirates.

Nullsec suffers from similar problems.  Large alliance conglomerates hold at least 80% (that's an official Logan guesstimate) of the current 0.0 sov space, and there are really only 5 NPC controlled area's fo people who want to fight in 0.0 without being in sov space, (Curse, Syndicate, Parts of Venal, Great Wildlands, and Stain?)  Anyways, adding more space would allow alliances currently hanging onto the coat-tails of the NC or the Russians to expand out and find new space, and settle it.  Sure they would need to fight for it but make this space outside of jump range for Titans or supercaps and force them to build their own infrastructure for a bit before connecting it back into that type of warfare.  Anyways, this would make new power-blocks, and expand the eve shard.

As for WH Space, damn if I know CRAP about that.  Every time I have been there it's been to kill something or other, so double the space there would be pretty sexy too (amirite?).

The bottom line here is that even though Eve as a game has expanded by leaps and bounds; it has been outdone by the expansion of the player base.  Keeping the galaxy so, well to put it in easy to understand but inaccurate terms, small, is contributing to the criminal over-crowding in comparison to the sparse, bleak expanse it used to be(and should be).

TLDR;


Eve
+ More eve
_________________________________________
Super Eve (Well okay, it's Eve Laurence, but we needed something sexy here)
 



3 comments:

  1. Nice post, and I didn't just mean the picture of Eve Laurence at the bottom honest!

    I'm not sure how an expanded Eve fits into CCP's long term plans. The move to Incarna wouldn't work very well if there are only 2 or 3 people in a station, if you spread everyone out more then this becomes a possibility. The other indicator that CCP favours increased density is the system upgrades available in 0.0.

    I do think that there is room for expansion though, I think I'd favour adding more 0.0 at the edges and then have the various Empires expand into the existing space. So some lowsec would become high-sec and some 0.0 would become lowsec. This would be Eve evolved.

    If you combined this will new routes from the existing systems into 0.0 and lowsec, removing some of the choke points, you might see an opening up of space.

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  2. OK I need to stop reading your posts bottom up. Super EVE sure has some nice moons. I have no clue what you wrote now....

    J/K

    I've spent a good deal of my time (and still do) avoiding the crowds. I'd welcome more EVE to explore and play in.

    Highsec has kind of become a race for the orca\hulk fleets to the belts. Lowsec is blog or lonly. I was just in 0.0 and was VERY disapointed that I could fly my pod out of provi via the R3 pipe and not see a single bubble and only one camp.

    Cheers

    EVE SOB

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  3. Yeah, she makes the post a bit distracting and NSFW!

    For Incarna I can understand the desire to have more than 2-3 people in each station, but the truth is that simply, there are already hundreds of stations that have little or no traffic in them, and Incarna won't really change that. There will still be those stations with almost nobody in them and then stations like Jita 4-4 with more people than any other single place.

    I like your idea of expanding but then I wonder about what it would do to the current nullsec empires. what we need are 0.0 area's that move off in entirely different directions from the current standard. Even if it means having to completely do away with the current map and coming up with something new, or at least the 2-d functionality of the current map. Really we need new nullsec that is isolated a bit from current nullsec to allow the spread of new alliances into that space without needing or being able to use the supercap backbone of current alliances.

    I agree that 0.0 is sparse population wise, but force wise, it is the most powerful area of the game thanks to supercarriers and titans, not to mention POS and jump bridges. More space out there is to dilute the powerbase across much more space and force apart some of the conglomerates of power to some extent.

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