Blog Banter #12: Dynamic System Security

Welcome to the twelfth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s banter comes to us from CrazyKinux himself, who asks the following: First there was the MMO on the PC, and now with the recent announcement of DUST 514, EVE will soon be moving onto consoles. But what about mobile? Allow your imagination to run wild for a second and describe how you would see EVE being ported to mobile devices, whether the iPhone/iPod touch, Blackberrys or Android-based devices. Dream the impossible for us!

Cas at Ecliptic Rift completely covered almost word for word what I wanted to talk about in the blog banter, so I had to think of something else. It's interesting that Cas and I will both be guests at on this weeks Missions Collide podcast. Anyway, here is another idea that I somehow though about this evening, I hope it's a worthy idea, but honestly I can't see how this could go wrong, in fact I think it's nothing but right.

Dynamic System Security for Empire Space

Yep. Instead of the security status being static, and no matter what happens in each system the security status remains the same. Well how about when the goon squad rampages through Jita, is that still HISEC? Come on....How about all those high sec systems out at the edge of empire, the high sec islands in the middle of low sec where you see no one and the system is surrounded by systems loaded with red blinkies? So how about those LOSEC systems that you never seen any badies in, only see unmolested industrious care-bears going cheerfully about their business, is that system really lost to the depths of bedlam?

Imagine what it would be like to be a pirate, only to wake up the next morning and you have to make a mad rush to LOSEC because the SEC status of the system you slept in was bumped up a notch while you were sleeping. Imagine being a miner working at the edge of HISEC, when all of a sudden the SEC status drops a point into LOSEC. Goon squad totally rampaging through Jita, intentionally trying to cause mayhem and push the SEC status of Jita down to really low LOSEC status, and the surrounding systems too, forcing pilots far and wide to change their plans for a while. And another benefit, it could totally kill Jita lag, because the market would be forced to move around

It really shouldn't be too difficult to setup. I mean security status goes from +1.0 to -1.0, it's just a value with 0 being in the middle. There must be some balance algorthim that could be used to dynamically change the SEC status of each system at each downtime, but the SEC status can only move a max of 0.1 per night, so that seriously broad sweeping changes don't happen over night, the line of scrimage so to speak should only move forward or back a little at a time. HISEC should still be protected by COSMOS, but ganking and other security lowering activities should affect the direction of the move each downtime. The security status of the surrounding systems should add weight to the SEC status of the system being evaluated, for example, if a HISEC system has five jump gates out and four of them go to LOSEC, then that should weigh some on the security evaluation routine.

Conversely, the number of HISEC status people who travel through and populate each system should weigh toward the positive climb of SEC of a system. Successful mission running, and ratting and killing of player pirates by players should improve the security status of a system. Obviously seriously low status players (ex. -10) couldn't be in a HISEC system, but if they were dispatched in the system adjacent, it would have a positive weight to the surrounding systems.

To offset the possibility that HISEC were completely overrun by LOSEC seeking players, the Regions of each empire should have heavy weighting, to simulate each empire and COSMOS exerting their influence.

I am by no mean suggesting what the technical security status routine should be really, I am just tossing ideas into the aether of how it “could” work, but you do get the gist of it.

This could as some serious news reporting and story telling possibilities as well. Dynamic system security, I can see that being SOOO much fun.

Cloaks

Here is my take on Cloaks. You pirates who cry about crybabies need to stop crying. You are crying true Carebear tears dontcha ya know. “Boohoo, they won’t let me target them…waaahhhh.” Sounds a lot like, “Boohoo, they won’t let me mine rock in peace…waaahhhh”. Grow up and take it like the man or woman you pretend to be when you tease carebears for their tears.

You want us out there so we can be targets don’t you? Cloaks make it possible for carebear types to have a half a chance of survival in unprotected low sec/null sec. You want us to stay in high sec or you want the targets? Or are you really a closet carebear using PvP as your farming method, but want it carebear easy? “Waaahhh I want it easier to kill carebears…”
What you don’t understand is that the cloak brings more people out to low sec, and brings you more targets, maybe they aren’t sitting ducks for you, but then what are you? A pirate or a carebear in disguise?


1) Evasion is just as much a part of PvP as head to head gun blasting. I don’t mean hiding in high sec, I mean those of us industrial and trading types that flying right in your face out in low sec and null sec. We aren’t chicken, and we aren’t hiding from you, we are using the skills of evasion that we have learned the same as you are using the skills you learned to try and track us down and destroy us. It’s perfectly fair to use whatever we have in our arsenal to evade you in our non-combative ships.

2) Only special ships can use the Covert Ops Cloak, and those ships have specialized tasks and usually aren’t good for fighting, they are good at “Covert Ops”, hence the name.

3) Ships that can't fit the Covert Ops Cloak are at a severe disadvantage, their speed is reduced to 10 or 25% when cloak is active, and all you need to do is fly towards your cloaked target with drones flying to uncloak them. Plus we don’t get to warp while cloaked with normal cloaking devices. You get to see where we went off to.

4) Targeted ships cannot cloak.

5) Ships uncloaking can’t target for some time.

6) Ships cannot cloak while undocking until they get well outside the docking ring (2000 m)

7) Fitting a cloak reduces the number of High Slots available, thus reducing DPS if a combat ship, if not a combat ship, it's often a choice between weapons and cloak. So ships fitted with cloaks effective can't fight back or are severely hindered from doing so.

8) It already takes a player some practice to get good at cloaking, other than the covert ops cloak ships, which are useless for anything like fighting or carrying cargo honestly, you need to learn how to cloak successfully to make it an effective fitting, otherwise it’s just like any other tactical skills. So what if you can fit it, if you don’t know how to use it properly, it’s just going to get you killed.