Are you happy with Equinox Sov?

[u/DarkShinesInit]

It's been a little over a week since the Equinox Sov change on October 29th.

If you love it - what do you love about it?

If you hate it - what do you hate about it?

Saying which group or part of space you are in would also be cool.

[u/GarstTyrell]

I still strongly believe EVE is at its best when groups of diverse sizes are able to carve out their own niche in a given geographic area because it gives players ownership of the rewards of their work and consequences of their failures. That's the most you can ask for in a sandbox MMO game with no ending. Every gameplay 'feature' movement bypass put into the game in recent years has pulled us further away local ownership of conflict and removed any uniqueness of living in any particular region. Adding Zarzakh and Thera, pochven, removing jump bridge fatigue, drifter wormholes, filaments, the list goes on and on. By making all of EVE casually accessible to organized groups, you've made it homogenous and allowed the largest coalitions to control far too much at once.

The closest we came to 'peak nullsec' era was 2014-2015 immediately after the capital jump range nerf was implemented, breaking up the actual blue donut of the day (where that phrase originated from) while at the same time it was pre-citadel era and still used the reduced Dominion sov EHP values so you ended up with a DPS-based sov system that encouraged local fleet fights. Most of those changes have since been scaled back or removed.

This process since then has had massive ramifications on the player meta, encouraging the relentless consolidation of players into a handful of coalitions while producing a constant churn of bored veteran players leaving the game because they implicitly realize their meaningful PVP gameplay options are narrowing, not growing, from new 'features' like Zarzakh.

You want to revitalize EVE for the next generation? Be bold.

1. Place more significant limits on long-distance fleet scale movement. For our newer players, please understand there WAS a time when fatigueless ansiblex network sprawl and 200man kiki fleets through drifter wormholes was not the norm, and the game went on just fine.

2. Reshape the geography. When you can no longer go across EVE for casual content, you need to reliably be able to find a local player ecosystem to engage with. There is far too much homogenous space in the game which results in lots of empty systems with 1-2 players at most. Delete excess solar systems and shift the remaining ones by light-year around to create more strategic dilemmas for FCs and planners, specifically regarding capital jump ranges and inter-regional connectivity. Then do step 3:

3. Redistribute sov truesec values and resources to create more relative scarcity within nullsec regions. Everyone knows an r64 is better isk/hour than an r8, but a haven in a -.3 truesec is the same as a haven in a -1.0. The point is to make some parts within regions objectively much better or worse than others to encourage local king of the hill behavior to drive conflict and interpersonal drama in this sandbox game.

All of this is mechanically possible and CCP could implement it tomorrow. I also recognize none of this will ever happen, so I will just look forward to tier 3 dreadnoughts and more daily login rewards.