Okay, just a few things before I wade ass deep into this mess:
Fiction Post: Quarantined on the desktop I let my younger sister use that she quickly loaded down with 138 infections, prompting me and the fiance to seriously discuss kicking her back to my father’s place.
Most satisfying event EVER happened last night. A few weeks ago, my buddy Hefforz, CEO of my alt mining corp, hired two new guys who promptly flew in and blasted away his Orca and his alt’s Hulk, while the Orca had a Harpy, a Mack, and I believe another Hulk inside. Hefforz and Mr. Goode being the losses on this page. Hefforz then gets contacted by the CEO of The Hand That Feeds alliance doing a background check on this guy as he’s been in and out of corps and done this quite a few times. Heff told his story and that got the gears turning in this CEO’s head. He DID hire the guy, but set a trap and ganked his Proteus. They then contracted Heff 190M in faction mods the Prot dropped. Apparently the dude went apeshit in corp chat for a while until they confronted him with his own killboard that the genius was brazen enough to POST HIS CORP KILLS ON. As Heff was telling me this, I thought it was all too good to be true, but some killboard sleuthing told a very compelling tale. Had I been online at the time, I wouldn’t be nasty to this guy, I’d just say what he said to Heff when he shot his Orca. “Chill, dude, it’s just a game.” 
Okay, that’s outta the way. What are my thoughts on Dominion? Do I think it’s going to “END EVE AS WE NOES IT!!!”? Hells no, and here’s why. Morphisat previously said that the costs involved would drive CVA et al out of business, making NRDS impossible. Now, I’m going to keep the infamous devblog open on my iPhone while I type this so I have all my information on hand. I will also be arming myself with a calculator and my astonishing abilities for lateral thinking for the duration of this exercise.
I’ll use my own corp, and publicly available information for this hypothetical scenario. Imagine that due to our awesome killboard presence in Paxfed, they decide, despite us being the new kids on the bloc, (heh) they want to reward m3 with our own system. Current practices are a 10M isk per month flat charge PER TOON, so pilot activity doesn’t come into determining what the corp can do as a collective. With 50 or so toons in corp, we could pill in approximately 500M isk per month. The daily costs of maintaing a fully upgraded system are as follows: Claim unit: 20M isk; Infrastructure Hub: 10M; Supercap construction facilities: 1M; Cyno Beacon: 4M; Advanced logistics 12.5M; and Cyno Jammers: 25M. That adds up to 72.5 Million ISK per day. This is all assuming a 50 man corp would NEED all this stuff and is keeping the system locked to neutrals (which is anathema to CVA/Paxfed policy, but roll with me here, I’m eliminating variables for simplicity.) That sounds like a lot of cash just to hold a system, but let me break it down with this equation: daily costs: 72.5M x 14 days = 1.015billion. I won’t be a dumbass, that’s a lot of cash. However, broken down it’s approximately 1.6M per day per toon. Since most people operate with tax rates, that should be no problem.
Now obviously, the kink is you’ll never get all 50 people online every day to make 1.6M 24/7/365. This is where Dominion’s true intent, and what Morph said was going to kill CVA becomes their’s and PXF’s strengths. Neuts. Yes, neuts. NRDS will become NECESSARY. Following me?
Many people, it seems, have a very limited idea of what the Eve toolset lets them do. When they think neutrals in null, they think either: 1. Easy gank targets 2. Rent-paying pets, or 3. NPC regions. An therein lies Provibloc’s power. In Providence, every time a neutral docks their ship, they are charged a fee based on ship size, which goes straight into alliance coffers. Neutral pilots’ commerce and industrial activities contribute to the alliance as a whole, monthly rent is not charged, and people are free to come and go as they please provided they behave themselves (flamers, holster your weapons, mistakes are made and bluetrals ARE shot fairly regularly, often without compensation. I’m not trying to paint this as the magical happy land of rainbows and puppy dogs, however, on that note, just try EXISTING in Delve.)
Anyone think there might be some Venn diagram overlap between ”One of the few alliances to allow neutrals in” and “Has the financial resources to have more outposts than nearly anyone else?” When a neutral Hulk driver sells off his minerals in Provi, and Provibloc builds a shiny new Megathron somebody else buys, you really think they’re upset over having to shell out the pittance for the mins? Bluetrals are the lifeblood of Providence, and other Alliances, you’re going to have to shift away from NBSI or learn to become roving military gangs without defined space of their own. (However, if yours is a military organization, by not buying that industrial upgrade, you shave about 360M a month off your operating costs. A lot of systems are just going to have claim markers, running about 560M a month to maintain.) Too often 0.0 space is just a series of gates where battles are fought and Titans frolic in the sun. Providence is one of the few areas where industrial activities are ongoing, and for more than just merely building the ships that are going to get suicided by the alliance next weekend.
Dear god, that means thinking of EVE PvP in more in-depth terms than “target, web, scram, fire, pop, pod, loot, repeat.” That means… Oh noes… there’s going to be DEPTH to the nullsec experience…
Q: Why would a neutral EVER consider this outrageous gouging? I mean, gosh, paying docking fees?! Are you serious?!
A: It’s one of the few regions where you can get the nullsec experience that ISN’T getting turned to spacedustthe second you enter system and find 35 bubbles on one gate. It’s kind of the training ground for null, and with Dominion’s changes, I truly believe it is going to be the new model for 0.0 alliance operation. Right now, declaring someone red is more of a polite formality. It seems after Dominion maintaining your red lists is going to become vital.
Will this take the nullsec out of nullsec? I’ve hear those arguments about that’s why Provibloc is “bad for Eve” but for some reason when you click “ships destroyed in the past hour” Providence lights up like a christmas tree, in a nuclear weapons testing ground… On Mercury… with a $3 flashlight and little tea light candles. Pirates have targets to gank, white hats have pirates to hunt, trench-dwelling soldier types such as myself have massive fleet battles to fight to hold the line, UK RPers have terrible slave trading monsters to fight, Against All Authorities love having us as neighbors so they can get their pew on. It’s win, win, win, win out here. Contrast that to Delve, which is just as far as the average player is concerned a mythical place of legend, spoken only of in hushed whispers and occasional Scope broadcasts whenever the current holders get sick of chewing on Dyprosium moonspunk and decide to go out and break some shit.
Smaller alliances will have more AVAILABLE space, but the ability to hold it will be tougher with experienced and capable PvP organizations like Goonswarm and the older larger organizations. This I will agree will be a sticking point, and it will be interesting to see if any adjustments are needed, but since it looks like a cyno jammer will no longer be limited to Sov 5 systems if I’m reading this devblog right, it may just make it easier for small organizations to “Pull a Thermopylae” and hold a bottleneck to their system until the bigger entities concede their respect, and or get bored/drunk and head off to smack someone else around. If the cyno jammers can go up on day one, it will definitely increase a smaller alliance’s chances of holding onto their space.
I will admit this may very well start us seeing the civilizing of nullsec, but in my mind, at least, null was always supposed to be the wild frontier where YOU make the rules and enforce them, as opposed to a Mad Max nihilist’s playground. That’s what lowsec’s for.
*Edit*
I realize I left myelf wide open for flaming, so let me explain myself, since I was just going through mechanics, and not offering what my opinion is on the matter: I don’t believe CCP should get into the business of establishing the model Alliances should have to follow and dictating the way they should operate. The primary point of this was to show how visitors can be integral parts of operations in nullsec, and that I believe that neutral visitors are whoI took CCP to be talking about in “enticing people into nullsec”. Provibloc makes mad bank off our visitors in this way. I believe Goonswarm (I know I’ve been using them a lot as examples in this post, but hey, use the example everyone knows, amirite? Plus all the GS guy’s I’ve met in game have been some pretty chill cats, even if they are some backstabbity bastards. Yar! ) and everyone else should have the right to keep running their space however the hell they want. If they wanna keep the plebs out, by all means give them the tools and ability to do so without having to camp their gates 23/7 so their players can get on with doing what they do best and play the game to get done. I think expanding the rewards for nullsec to be greater than lvl IV mission running WITHOUT nerfing the hell out of lvl IV’s to keep the Empire kiddies from busting a nut, quitting, withdrawing their financial support to CCP and causing a slow implosion of the game will have to be an integral part of things, because Mercoxit mining alone will not be enough incentive for people to flock out here. I believe 0.0 should always be a hard place to live, and not fuzzy carebear land, but I don’t think the barrier to entry should be as steep as it is in some places. However, with those risks, I think some OMGWTF dis are awesomE lololoolz rewards unavailable anywhere else need to be put out there, instead of just greater quantities of what can already be had easier in Highsec. Rereading that I guess I’m arguing for Dypro Moons Mk. II… yikes…
-Fly Crazy
mobiusone