Blobs are a bitch. If you get caught by one you stand little chance, if your in one, it can be a lttle dull, half the time it doesn’t even matter if you fire..and the only counter..is a bigger BLOB. Trouble is blobs are effective.
There is no real downside to blobing someone and if you blob a lot of someone’s it can become very profitable, so a lot of people do it. In null sec it happens a bit, but in lowsec, home of small scale pvp it happens way to much. Personally I prefer even ish odds, 2-3 ships difference either way is about as fair as it gets.
Now I have come up with an idea to solve this problem..and maybe cut some of the fleet lag problems in 0.0, however I have less experience than some of my readers so id like opinions before I make a suggestion in the forums or to the CSM.
Introduce a penalty to fleet size. Lol.
The idea I had is to add another layer to the region map that shows fleets in the area (imagine something like the dotlan maps), for single ships or 2-3, the could move with total stealth, never seen on the map. As you move up over 3 ships in fleet, people can see there is a small fleet with in say 10 system radius, but not witch system of the 10 you ARE in. and as the fleet grows it becomes more specific.. at say 30 ships you can identify EXACTLY which system they are in.
This would change the general dynamic of fleet combat in eve from large blob fests to smaller fleets moving in unison, giving a TRUE fleet feel. Instead of a fleet of 200 ships invading a system at once you have several fleets of 20 ships moving via different routes so not to give away numbers or position until they converge on a target system. You would still be able to roll with massive war fleets, but people would see it coming (or would be able to if they were looking for it).
In lowsec this would put a stop to a lot of blob fests and take combat back to small fleets or solo action, it would be more fun for the pirates and allow mission runners or minners to enter lowsec with less risk of being blobbed straight away, there would still be risks, but hell that’s the fun of lowsec.
There are of course ways round it, like move around solo out of fleet, but in large numbers and just join fleet when a target is found but no system is perfect.
any useful comment you have would be very welcome.
Did I mention im bored at work?
I'm not sure I like the idea of a "fleet" being identified by the gate personnel (talking from a RP point of view.) How would they tell a fleet from a group of ships flying in the same direction? Warnings of ship numbers jumping through a gate might be good though; maybe a bribe system for gate personnel could get you this info?
ReplyDeleteHowever, the universe map does have a statistic for "number of pilots in space", so I wonder if this information could be presented in a better way (minimap?) and you would infer that a fleet was coming your way by the numbers of ships moving through nearby systems?
I think then most would just form 3-5 fleets.
ReplyDeleteCan't see it working, because:
ReplyDelete1) As mentioned, the blobs will just break themselves into smaller fleets.
2) The big blobs won't care - they assume already that they are being scouted and reported on anyway. Any good space holder in 0.0 has recon out and about all the time anyway, so a big blob will be seen before it arrives.
3) Even that roaming blob gets an advantage in that they can see other threats and/or targets without needing their advance scouts to go look for them.
4) How would this work in the UI? If you had 2 or 3 smaller fleets and 1 blob in adjacent systems, how would that show on the map such that you'd identify the blob? I think you could watch the map and track even a small fleet just by watching the map change. For example, as a small fleet moves system to system, the edge of the 10-system range would move and you'd know that they are in the middle of that range.
So I don't think you'd attain the goal of encouraging smaller fleets. And I think you'd take away an important aspect of the game - scouts and recon. If you could just sit in stations and watch the map you could track almost any fleet without any effort. That would be bad, IMO.