I'm thinking that even the first one needs to have a cost of some sort. Like fuel. Or something.

I like the concept that some upgrades/bonuses/features will be corps specific and there should be more of these to prevent ownership by holding corps. Using dumb alts or holding corps is a way to bend the mechanics, hopefully in the future there will be a full featured Alliance system which extends these concepts to make it beneficial to be in a working alliance where negatives are offset by the bonuses granted...

There is a truly expandable system underneath this in which only the imagination of the community and the DEVs is the real constraint (well that and convincing Calvin to release his death grip on the other devs to implement some of our ideas ).

Upgrades and Auras sound fantastic and I hope that further 'real' POS have some way of tying in to these initial systems to again provide bonuses both for the corps that work to hold the OP and to the rest of the gaming community if some bonuses are publicly made available..

Its off topic, large land mass, but I'm skeptical it will have the effect players are thinking it will. Many many players said the 'More Islands' is what we need, then its "No, wait - we meant more land, but just 1 big one". I'm not saying that a large mass isn't going to be good to have, but it's being heralded as a way to 'Fix PVP' now.

Spreading a limited number of players over a larger area is not the way to fix the current issue of PVP; the current issue being not enough PVP players.

To tie this back to my subject, the way to get more PVP is to concentrate players around objectives; like outposts.

Personally, I think that calling for a big land mass is for pirates that want to roam around beta without running into Corporate troops patrolling 'Their Island'. And yes, more land will do that, but pirates are 'gankers', looking for weak prey not for PVP.

Defending is boring... so the roam is born.

If anything requires defense 24/7 and is valuable, Corps will burn out players forcing them to defend it. If it is valuable, corps will put adequate defense in place to secure it. They don't want a 'fair' fight when it comes to losing their outpost and risk losing access to all thier production and storage. What will happen is the same thing at launch, when beta corps still felt that 'owning' an outpost had some value, which is TP camping. And TP camping leads to bordom quitting, for both defenders and small aggressors.

As I said before, the only way to generate small combat groups is to create an intermediate zone between the valuable POS and the enemy. Some place that the OP owner can send out small groups to patrol while retaining a 'significant' force in reserve to defend if a large group is spotted by the roaming groups.

Edit: However, like in Risk, it is very difficult to defend a large area so corps will try to create an "Austrailia" scenerio by creating or controlling choke points; or by having such a large alliance that they put '100 units' at all the entry points to "Russia".

To pick on you slightly Arga.....Frankly I find roaming with no targets boring... I spent 2.5hrs of my precious gametime the other night wandering around the beta islands for squat. Even when there are targets, either i get the fast trip home or we get 5mins of excitement and the rest of the island/corps/alliance blobs us or logs, again back to no targets.

Frankly I see a lot of the more vocal people on these boards being the "i wanna gank miners where are my targets" crew who want to force everyone to play THEIR game. I dont mind hanging around an OP doing stuff, I wish there was more to do (i.e. missions, EC gaining, mining, farming) and when people want to come press on MY playstyle I'll get out the pew pew and teach em how bad of an idea it is.

I like to co-exist, I'm there are people who want to roam and I will accomodate that playstyle, my main gripe is that this will boil down to an FPS in an MMO and the real sandbox will get eroded to cater for the "I WANNA ROAM" crowd because others won't stand up for other playstyles.

I would prefer some outlier POS type structures, like was suggested above, a mining bonus generator, this gives a predictable point for miners to be, makes it more essential to have protection and therefore more viable for roamers to find targets and actually have a fight.

Rant over

Your not picking on me

There is the group of players that simply want to play for PVP, they'll do the alt mining and what not to support the corp, but really they want something to fight.

But here again lies the issue, if something is worth defending, its worth doing it with enough force to accomplish it.

If roaming gangs are about 5-6 players, defenders will field 10-12. There is a fundamental difference between the 'roamers' out looking for some PVP and defenders out to 'protect' assests. Defenders don't want to play a fair game, as they have something at stake (losing 100M worth of mining bots maybe), while roamers are only risking what their own bot.

Perpetuum needs to match up the two somehow, that is pit Roamer vs Roamer and Defender vs. Aggressor. The difference between a Roam and an agressor is they are out to specifically challange some strategic activity such as mining to cut into the enemy's supply, so they will bring a large well equipt group for that purpose. That is aggressors, like defenders, are out to 'win' not just to have some fun; although they should have some fun while fighting, its the difference in motivation and objectives.

So... There needs to be something that moves roamers into the same area. The current thought it seems is to put alpha farmers out onto beta as bait for roamers, and walla - roamers will fight each other instead of hitting the sheep? No, only if they can win will they engage, so the 'larger' roaming groups will chase the smaller ones and again, no PVP will be had. Just like nuclear material, just putting roaming groups in the same place won't cause them to explode into combat; they have to be packed together.

POS structures are the same issue is your thinking of them as "roamer" bait. If the POS is expensive, and they get destroyed too easily, then corps won't use them regardless of the benefit, so not bait. If they are cheap, corps won't bother defending them, so not very good bait. If they are expensive, and worth having, then they will be defended by enough troops that roamers won't have a chance, so not good bait. Good for agressors though.

Group 1 - Beta corps with assets to lose and defend
Group 2 - Alpha corps that raid beta for fun and ninja mining
Group 3 - Solo or small groups that raid beta for PVP only

- Which group should the gamestyle support?

In my opinion all.

Group 1 should be harassable by roamers - what a lot of the PvP junkies want is to turn up in cheap crap and blow up 100m NIC of stuff and run away, this is unbalanced. Taking my 100m POS should take 100m of bots and time - see stEVE and POS with Siege Mode (not saying we should have that here, it illustrates a point)

Group 2 should be able to supply materials to beta corps they work with and harass the enemy when they want to, they won't be taking POS but they can assist or do guerilla stuff such as concentrating on the Group 1 roaming gangs.

Group 3 is like Group 2 without the mining, they just don't want big stuff because it means having to get away from the "oh *** too many bots RUN AWAY" mentality and thus don't want Group 1 to exist as it would mean certain aspects of PvP would be effectively closed to them.

The only Group which feels out of place is Group 3, Group 1 can live with 2 and 3, its part of their gamestyle. Group 2 can be content in being part of the larger game by working with friendly Group 1 and fighting enemy Group 2 and 3.

Group 3 turns out to be the socially awkward ones because the only people they think give them 'real competition' are other Group 3 and then they whine there's no targets.

If all we get is more stuff for Group 3 and mechanics tending to that playstyle, you might as well fire up MW2 or COD and take that whole boring losing stuff and having to build stuff out of the game cos it gets in the way of Group 3's playstyle.

+1

Whats the first thing you see as a noob in this game 10 missions and sequers flying by you... Expand the PVE options and the PVP will follow easily.

hmm, missing the "INC" button for an airlift...