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History: The Phoebe Expansion.
The goals of the ‘Jump Changes’ – The effects of the N+1 problem reached far across EVE to the extent that capital powerhouses could hold vast amounts of space. An example of this is my own alliance: PL ran the ‘renter’ alliance ‘Brothers of Tangra’. We were able to effectively rent out space, and live our space-famously nomadic lifestyle with very few geographical ties, simply because we could bounce a trillion isk worth of supercapitals across the map on a whim if our renter empire came under threat.
Ultimately, that meant that the ‘little guy’ barely stood a chance. The hope was that the jump drive changes would prevent large groups of players from being able to project ridiculous force across the map so easily, and with relatively little effort. The idea being that it would be viable for fights to take place without for example ‘Suddenly PL’ happening and ruining the fight for everyone else (though of course we loved it, and the resulting tears).
Jump timer – The jump timer provided a solution to stop people jumping repeatedly in quick succession, multiplying the time you would be required to wait in each waypoint dependant on your current fatigue timer before you would be able to jump again.
Jump Fatigue – Fatigue is a timer that decays over time, and would max out at 1 month, jumping with a timer of this length would result in you being unable to jump your ship for another week. The higher your fatigue, the bigger the multiplier that would be applied to your jump timer.
Jump Range – Along with the new timers, the maximum jump range of all combat class capital ships was decreased to 5LY (Carriers used to have a jump range of 13LY, Dreads and Supers were ~10, and Titans had a Jump/Bridge range of 7.85LY). This effectively meant that capital travel required a larger number of midpoints, and thus travel became both more time consuming and risky. This also had a profound effect on the geographical map of New Eden, as is explained in the following section.
Gate Jumping – With the introduction of the jump changes, capital ships were also allowed to jump through stargates for the first time. This would effectively mean that moving over large distances was possible, but would require a support fleet, and would take significantly longer than before.
Meta & Mechanics: Phoebe & Jump Fatigue.
Map Shaping Bottlenecks – One of the most significant effects of the Phoebe changes was caused by the reduction in jump range for capital ships. This meant that there are some areas of space where you have very few options when it comes to moving capitals. In some cases – there is literally only one way through, meaning that system becomes a ‘bottleneck’. It was only a matter of time before people worked this out, and sure enough capital hunting groups began to use this to their advantage, increasing their rate of successful kills significantly.
Map Shaping Region Gates – Due to the shortened jump range, fatigue and jump timers – it became a problem to jump over large distances, as fatigue would build up too quickly. Because of this, regional gates became extremely popular for moving capital fleets, simply because these regional gates tend to span great distances. Effectively allowing you to move a large distance, without accruing additional unwanted fatigue.
Route Planning in Phoebe – Prior to the Phoebe jump mechanics, anyone could load up jump-planners like EVE-ICSC.com, or Dotlan. It was pretty easy to punch in two systems and see what route you had to take. Now however route planning is far more complicated. To optimize a route over a long distance, you’d want to cyno-jump over compact areas of space where systems were incredibly close together and the distance between gates was relatively short. On the flip side, if the distance between systems was relatively large, it would be more beneficial time-wise to simply travel fit, and make use of the gates.
Increased Risk and Moving Capital Assets – It doesn’t take a genius to work out that a direct consequence of the jump changes is that capitals are far more of a hassle to move safely. This is due to a variety of factors; some are obvious, some less so. I’ll start with the obvious ones… Firstly, the necessity to gate travel on occasion – if you cyno into a system, and cloak up, you’re far less likely to wind up on grid with anyone that’s not you than if you’ve just jumped through a gate. Second, if you have to take more midpoints – there are more chances for people to spot you moving – and you’ll probably find that once you’re in range of a local group, you’ll have to take at least one more midpoint before you’re able to jump out of their range.
In this sense, whereas before being within one midpoint (2 cynos total) of a hunting group was pretty risky, being within their direct range post-patch is almost suicidal. Simply because you have less possibilities in terms of where you could possibly jump to – significantly increasing the chance a hunting group would be able to predict your next move.
A work-around by larger alliances has been to move in such large numbers that you can’t be countered easily. Though people left behind have found themselves in trouble, given that the average super-cap pilot lacks the knowledge needed to move alone safely. This has visibly resulted in a lot of negativity from the majority of nullsec power-block alliances, with them calling for some form of ‘travel’ mode. There’s no real need for a ‘get out of jail free card’ mechanic like that, though I can see why some people would consider it desirable.
Effectively, the complaint is that individuals don’t want moving their SuperCarriers to become someone else’s content without their consent. In that way it’s similar to complaints about suicide ganking, hotdrops and blob tactics. As a bitter vet, despite my choice of gameplay – honestly there’s nothing wrong with people taking advantage of your predicament – provided there is a counter. Which is what makes an unfair situation ‘balanced’ – though in the sense of balance here, we’re not talking about simple mechanics and exists only in the metagame, it’s more about being unpredictable and making smart choices about the way you move – something which most players don’t take the game seriously enough to care for. If you want to fly big ships with the big boys, you should definitely be prepared to have your pride bloodied once in awhile.
Local Superiority – For some, the Phoebe changes represented an incredible opportunity. Pre-Phoebe, alliances like PL would show up for every decent-sized capital fight, and you knew as soon as you entered grid, that you’d have a huge SuperCarrier blob on you within 20-30 minutes at most if you didn’t get out fast. That essentially put a hard cap on the scale of fights you could have and not get curbstomped by a nullsec capital superpower.
Phoebe changed that however; and very quickly we saw a rise in the use of capitals mainly in lowsec by groups such as Snuff Box, Overload Everything and Shadow Cartel and its allies. It created fierce local rivalries over moon and POCO based resources, and incredible content for lowsec capital pilots in a manner that hadn’t been seen since pre-2009 (before Dominion). There are other problems with this though; for example – you could say that Snuff Box has now become the ‘PL of lowsec’ and that the complaints of ‘PL supercap blobs’ that once stopped Snuff fielding its own supercapital fleet so regularly are now being made about Snuff Box themselves.
Phoebe ultimately created room for alliances like Snuff Box to grow to a new level, and experience unrestricted capital combat properly for the first time. Nobody can deny that the jump range changes were a huge positive, and that alliances such as Snuff Box did a fantastic job of adapting to the changing game, and finding their place in it to great effect.
HIC Changes – This was again a pretty obviously broken mechanic… Hotdrop Supers onto a gate, kill nerds.. get tackled…. de-aggress, jump gate and cyno out the other side. I won’t go too much into it, but essentially HIC points were changed shortly after Phoebe’s release so that you couldn’t jump through a gate in a capital if you were tackled by a HICs focused point.
Interaction between Jump & Fatigue timers: Balancing Direction
There’s currently a case for CCP dialing back on the jump fatigue mechanics significantly – this is supported by some very prominent names; Lazerus Telraven for example, alongside The Mittani, especially in relation to jump bridges. Admittedly, I have not put much thought into the balance of using jump bridges and fatigue, removing it could possibly give defenders too much of an advantage.
The point I want to really focus on in this section is what each timer actually does to you as a capital pilot ingame. The Jump Timer, stops you from travelling over large distances quickly. It does this by using Jump Fatigue as a multiplier index. The problem is however that rather than imposing a practical limit, fatigue is more of a deterrent than anything else; ‘If I jump to this cyno, I won’t be able to jump for another 2 days’. It’s a deterrent, because it stifles content.
So, how to fix it, but still achieve the goal of preventing 9000 Supers from travelling the length of the map? Here’s a possible spitballed solution:
“Jump Fatigue: Maxes out at three hours, If you jump whilst you have a fatigue timer, your Jump Timer will increase as it does currently, up to a maximum of one hour.”
This would mean that if you wanted to go three midpoints, you could do it, but jumping a fourth time (or more) would take you an hour every time you jumped). After 3 hours of no jumping at all, your jump timer would reset to zero. This would still impose very similar restrictions on moving capitals over long distances to go to one particular fight. BUT – it also means you could go to several different, more local fights over the course of an evening’s gameplay without accumulating crippling fatigue that would stop you being able to viably use your capitals over the following days, or even later that evening.
Activity Drop & Stagnation – Phoebe saw an increase in capital losses, factors involved in that were discussed earlier in this report. Since the Aegis sovereignty patch however, we’ve seen less supercapitals die. This can be evidenced by my own group (#REKKINGCREW) in Derelik and Lowsechnaya Scholupen in Aridia.
The reasons why are relatively simple, though are not immediately obvious. Many put this down to fluctuating activity on the part of capital hunters, though this is not really the case. As described previously, many of the lone supercapital pilots who lose their ships were travelling for some reason or another, some were buying, or selling, or rejoining their alliances. The decline in activity of late has been mainly due to the way content has been in the rest of EVE.
Over the course of the spring of this year, Catch was invaded – and HERO coalition evacuated its limited number of Supers. Then Feythabolis and Insmother were ripped from the grasp of Nulli Secunda, and they moved their supercapital fleet to its new home. Then Darkeshi got curbstomped by CFC in the south west of the map. These were all under the Dominion sovereignty system – and so Supers were used to attack the space. Supers and capitals had their role. And where they have a role, they will be used, purchased, sold, traded and moved. These all represent opportunities for them to be killed. Indeed during the spring of this year, many Supers perished – especially in regions bordering nullsec
Since the Aegis patch finally put the Dominion sovereignty system to rest, capitals have lacked a significant role in the game, this has meant there is less demand for them – and less targets for the likes of myself. This is yet another example of why the capital changes affect almost everyone, and why the role they perform in nullsec will affect everyone. A strange example maybe; but if Supers are no longer capable of running nullsec anomalies, THERABOIS or Hard Knocks won’t ever pop out of a wormhole and roam… and then randomly bubble a Nyx in a Haven again… because there simply won’t be that opportunity.
I could give examples all day. But I have to stress at this point that the focus group needs people from all walks of EVE. Not just PL/CFC/NullRUS groups. If you think the new role capitals will play doesn’t affect your game, you’re probably wrong.
Part 4 to be published tomorrow.
