GTAkito

The common trend that people are seeing is that CCP has no idea how their own game works. It's clear they made a mistake with dominion, but recent changes such as the anomaly nerf and the upcoming jump bridge nerf will only make the problem worse. Both changes affect the "average Joe" 0.0 player, making it far less appealing for new players to try and live in 0.0 space. Large coalitions will grow and smaller entities will still have no chance to survive.

It's true that Jump bridges and a good intel channel allow for people to move around select 0.0 systems in relative safety. However, it is still quite possible for jump bridges to be camped by enemies, and certain jumps require actual stargates due to distance issues. Now CCP will be effectively doubling the number of jumps needed to get around, making nullsec even more boring, more expensive, and only more dangerous to players that are new to 0.0. Everyone else will simply use an alt to scout, which again reinforces the idea that having a second account is a requirement to play the game. The only people who will be left in 0.0 after a few months are bitter veterans with multiple accounts and enough SP to fly capital ships.

As far as force projection goes, jump bridges have nothing to do with it. Deployments away from home sov space always involve using jump clones, which are basically a form of instant teleportation. Even if jump bridges were totally removed, large fleets would simply use stargates to get to their destination, also in near total safety due to scouts and sheer amount of players.

Capital and supercapital ships, such as carriers, dreads, titans, and supercarriers, are technically the fastest ships in the game, being able to move across vast distances of space easily. These ships are what has really caused issues with force projection, yet CCP has revealed no real plans to address them. What's worse is they can use cyno fields to hot drop people with impunity. Removing cynos and giving capital ships another form of travel would solve most of the issues with force projection easily and effectively, yet CCP is unlikely to see the truth that is right in front of them. Of course it may also be because having a capital ship requires having another account with at least one cyno alt in order to move around safely and effectively. Changing cynos, capital, or supercapital ships could cause a noticeable subscriber drop.

I only hope CSM 6 will be able to steer CCP back in the right direction before 0.0 become an empty wasteland.

@Brendan Drain Yes you've made me want to go test it as well. It's too bad I'm now in a corp with no POS anchoring roles. When I was in a different corp with roles in the past I was having issues with the yield on an intensive array. I of course searched the forums for information and found multiple threads claiming that it was hard capped at 75%. This made sense to me from what I was seeing, but your explanation could also match the results I was getting. Either way the yield would be significantly lower than what you'd get at an npc station with full standing or a 0.0 refining station.

I agree that the logistics of moving ore out of a wormhole or working with a rorqual would be tough compared to just running it through an array. However the the mineral loss generated by the arrays still seems far too steep to me, especially when you compare it to the isk/hour someone might get from running wormhole sites or harvesting gas. In 0.0, players can extract the exact same ores with perfect refining at conquerable and player built stations. Add to this the fact that the more they mine the more hidden belts spawn. Taking all this into account it feels like wormhole mining needs an upgrade in the form of better refining arrays. That's just my opinion anyways.

While the intensive refining array seems like the perfect option at first glance, it actually is anything but that. Intensive refining arrays have a hard cap of 75% yield while basic refining arrays have a cap of 35% yield. You might think that with refining skills you could improve this, but you would be mistaken. The hard cap takes effect after all skill calculations are done, meaning no matter if you have perfect skills or refining implants etc, you will NEVER get more than 75% yield out of an intensive array, which is ridiculously low. The only exception is when you are refining ice, which completely ignores the hard caps altogether.

Clearly CCP made something of a bad design choice with these arrays and never came back to revisit them. The rorqual's compression feature is the only way to get 100% yield (after transporting compressed goods to an actual refining station) in a smaller package. Of course even this has a downside, as it takes ice products to fuel the compression process and lots of the rorqual pilot's time.

Random relevant thread I found to back up what I'm saying:
http://www.eve-search.com/thread/1352704/page/1

"IT Alliance could not have done anything to prevent the 14 claim units activating as they were anchored at the last moment and the server was not up during their deployment. According to all the criteria by which exploits are judged, this most certainly is one."

This isn't completely accurate. IT Alliance could have easily payed the sov costs for those systems to keep them claimed. They had months of time to do so. This would have prevented any sort of ninja TCU shenanigans.

Also the example where SBUs are deployed en masse against TEST sov systems is not really a good comparison. If this really had happened then TEST would never have filed a petition. They know taking claimed systems (as opposed to unclaimed systems like the 14 they took) is not a simple matter. The attackers would have to work across days to complete the process, and would certainly have to hit lots of ihubs and stations in addition to TCUs.

The bottom line is this. Taking advantage of downtime cannot possibly be considered a way for anyone to exploit their way into stealing sov. It will allow you to take unclaimed sov totally uncontested, but as it stands now it's possible for someone to ninja place a TCU while the game is up and running and have it finish its 7 hour timer without the enemy even noticing. Also if the majority of your nearest enemy happens to be mostly asleep at a certain time, a TCU could be placed and they'd never be able to get enough force to take it out within 7 hours. Maybe now we'll see players making petitions over TCUs whenever anyone tries to be clever with the timing.

TEST alliance followed game rules to the letter here when they placed those TCUs. Nobody could have predicted that a GM would decide to make up a ridiculous new rule today that flies in the face of precedent and apply it retroactively. The systems in question were unclaimed! IT alliance (Band of Brothers) could have easily prevented them from being taken by paying some minor sovereignty bills. While this reeks of favoritism and corruption by the GM, I will give him the benefit of the doubt and say it was simply an extremely bad call that needs to be reversed during the next downtime. Give TEST back the systems they took fairly and let IT alliance remove them like any other alliance that doesn't get special treatment would.

The corporation I belong to is still fairly new to null. We currently share a pocket in providence with a few others, and too often this leads to frustration due to overcrowding. The infrastructure changes will relieve some of this tension by giving us more content to work through. With more profitable systems we might even be able to obtain a section of space we can call our own someday. Dominion will change everything and we are really looking forward to being a part of that.

Despite all the commented additions, no one has mentioned one of the most anticipated MMO's at MMORPG.COM, Hero's Journey. This is one I am really looking forward to. It is from veteran MUD producer Simutronics, who are known for games such as Gemstone IV, Dragonrealms, and Cyberstrike. This game will be their first venture into 3D MMORPG space. With a large emphasis on fun, Hero's Journey is likley to change the whole genre. Simutronics will be showing it off in Kentia Hall at E3 like last year probably. Drop by and check them out joystiq.

http://www.play.net/hj/