Hello folks. I’m making this discussion thread to give you all a closer look at our design philosophy for the Entosis Link mechanics and the way we plan to balance the module.

We’ve been seeing quite a bit of concern from parts of the community that the Entosis Link mechanics will push people to pure evasion fits, the so called trollceptors. It goes without saying that we do not want the sov war meta turn into nothing but sensor boosting Interceptors, but we have plenty of time and tools to help ensure that scenario doesn’t occur.

To explain our current approach and help focus the feedback, I want to discuss some of our specific goals for the Entosis Link mechanic itself.

As much as possible, the Entosis Link capture progress should reflect which group has effective military control of the grid.

At its core, the Entosis Link mechanic is a way for the server to tell who won (or is winning) a fight in a specific location. This is a surprisingly tough thing for the server to determine. The best way to win a structure or command node with the Entosis Link should be to gain effective control of the grid.
This means that there will always be an intermediate state where the grid is “contested” and neither side is making significant progress until the fight is resolved.

The optimal strategy for fighting over a location with the Entosis Link should be to gain effective control of the grid.

This is the other side of the coin. In practice it means that we should discourage mechanics that lead to indefinite stalemates over a structure or command node. This is the reason for the “no remote reps” condition on active Links. This is also the goal that trollceptors would contradict if they were to become dominant.

The Entosis Link itself should have the minimum possible effect on what ships and tactics players can choose.

Entosis Links will always have some effect on the types of ships and tactics people find viable for Sov warfare, but we should strive to keep those effects to a minimum. As much as possible, we should work towards a meta where whatever fleet concept would win the fight and control the grid would also be viable for using the Entosis Links.
This also means that we don’t want to be using the Entosis Links to intentionally manipulate ship use. We’ve seen some people suggesting that we restrict Entosis Links to battleships, command ships or capital ships in order to buff those classes. Using the Entosis Link mechanics to artificially skew the meta in that way is not something we are interested in doing.
This goal is why we intend to use the lightest touch possible when working towards the first two goals. It would be easy to overreact to potentially unwanted uses of the Entosis Link by placing extremely harsh restrictions on the module, but we believe that by looking at the situation in a calm and measured manner we can find a good balance.

The restrictions and penalties on the Entosis Link should be as simple and understandable as possible.

This is a fairly obvious goal but I do think it’s worth stating explicitly. If we can achieve similar results with two different sets of restrictions and penalties, we’ll generally prefer to use the simpler and more understandable set. This also means that we’d generally prefer to use pre-existing mechanics that players will already be familiar with, rather than using completely new mechanics.

All in all, I want to make it very clear that we are going to make adjustments to the Entosis Link in order to get the best possible gameplay and to match these goals as well as possible. If we clearly see a situation emerging where any pure evasion tactics are going to become dominant, we will make changes to the Entosis Link to bring the gameplay back into balance. We expect that there will be many changes and tweaks to the Entosis Link module before launch, and more tweaks made after launch as needed.
We have all of the numerous tools of EVE module balance at our disposal and everything is on the table. We can use everything from module price, range, fittings, cap use, mass penalties, ship restrictions, speed limits and many many more. We intend to use as few of these dials as possible and use the lightest touch possible, but we do have the tools we need to reach these goals.

We would like this thread to become a place of discussion around the Entosis Link mechanics, the ships that you expect to use them on, and the tactics you foresee becoming popular. What issues do you foresee popping up? How do you think these goals should be adjusted or refocused? Which of the many module balance dials do you think would be the most intuitive?

Please keep discussion calm and reasonable. Remember that even though we’re not making knee-jerk reactions, we are definitely listening and working to get this balance right.

Thanks
-Fozzie