So, I have an idea for PvP that will actually entertain the notion of sporadic PvP. I'm not really interested in the prospect of roaming betas to kill pilots that are typically only going to be miners or farmers. It's highly unlikely that you'll go out looking for a fight and find someone at the same time wanting to do the same thing in the same places you're going. Sure, if you go squat on someone’s island they'll likely send out the bees and you'll get stomped for being in someone’s backyard. So I figure we need a neutral point, a battlefield, a warfront. Some place PvP'ers can go when they're looking to fight others with the same intent. Where no one has the homefield advantage. Where you're not going to bump in to pvp flag traps. Where you know your enemies will all be out there to fight you and not some npcs. 

The Layout:

A single island with an access point from alpha. There will be no outposts to hide in or stash goods. No minerals to mine. Minimal NPC's that purely roam and have no static spawn to provide an extra dynamic. ( to provide some opposition when no enemies are on the island ) Topography setup to provide choke points, LoS issues and other strategic values.

The Reason To Go: ( aside PvP )

The island will be saturated in random energy field spawns. This will pertain to the new energy credit system. The ways of collecting this could be through a mod/collector fitted in the typical gun slots on a bot. The amount collected could be minimal in comparison to what is normally going to be collected ( obviously to be determined once we know more of the energy system) but will provide enough to be lucrative and outweigh the costs of accessing the island. ( see balancing factors ) The mods will only be allowed to be fitted on combat bots and only 1 per bot. This is not a place for miners, it's for PvP'ers.

The reason to pop your adversaries? Whatever they collected, can be dropped in their loot as per standard looting rules. Eventually they will have to go drop their goodies off, so people won't just be humping fields and staying stationary. The fields can also move around randomly to provide a nice dynamic to the island.

The Balancing Factors:

Only Assaults and smaller may enter the TP that takes you to this island. It could be explained that the island is far away so the TP's aren't strong enough to move anything bigger or some other RP nonsense. This will actually allow the island to stay competitive between small and large corps, rich or poor. Granted T4 will always be an advantage for the rich, but that likely shouldn't be restricted.

To get access to the island, a corp has to create an agreement with the syndicate for how many pilots that can access the island. The costs will scale in relation to how many pilots a corp wants on the island. Again, an RP reason can be because the island is so far off, logistics to get out there are expensive so the syndicate will charge an access fee that revolves around their expense of getting you there. These agreements will be charged per week. I originally thought that a corp could pay per individual pilot and add them to a roster but that would be clunky. With agreements having a set number, that would be the amount of pilots allowed on the island at any given time. This would allow anyone from a given corp access to the island through the corps agreement, but the syndicate won’t ever allow more than what a corp setup and paid for.

The fee for the agreement will be a scaling system, the more pilots a corp wants to have access to the island, the more the fee is per week. This will reduce the amount of large scale combat and allow smaller corps to enter with lesser fees. I was thinking that maybe an initial 1 pilot would cost 100k nic to access the island, per week. Adding another pilot would double the cost of the roster to 200k nic a week, 3 pilots would be 400k a week and so on.

As an example, a corp fielding a 5 pilot access agreement would be paying 1.5m a week

A corp fielding 10 pilots would be paying 51.1m a week

These prices would obviously have to scale with the rewards received on the island, but you get the premise. The more pilots you want out there the more it will cost your corp which will typically keep combat on smaller scale.

I'm sure there's plenty of things that can be tweaked and balanced, as with anything. But I think this would provide a good start for more active PvP and in a way that's balanced to corps of all sizes. We're really hurting for things to do in terms of PvP and it's hard to really call roams fun when you're typically only ganking players not even out to PvP. I don't expect this exact idea ever be used, but I would expect something on the same premise be used at one point. We need a centralized PvP area to fight over, or rather some place where we can go to compete more actively. Right now PvP lacks scalability and purpose  and we need something more modular that will cater to quick, fun PvP and relegate us from the standard you blob me, I blob you back.