A week after the initial launch of Aegis and a month and a half of the Activity Defense Multiplier, the first day of the heavily reworked sovereignty mechanics spearheaded by CCP Fozzie has come and gone. The exact mechanics of Fozzie Sov have been announced for a while now, most recently featured in Worldshatter’s review of the summer Devblogs. While downtime and patching went exactly to plan on CCP’s part, the deployment hasn’t been without a few previously unannounced side effects in addition to the turmoil CCP hoped to achieve with Sov 2.0.
Most notable among the side effects is the change to automatic sov bill payments. CCP Falcon released an urgent memo on the Eve News channel urging sovereignty owning alliances to venture into the corporate wallet’s Bills tab to re-enable automatic payments. Alliances must check the Infrastructure Hub Bill box or manually pay their bill by the 21st in order to prevent the self-destruction of their Infrastructure Hubs. According to Goonswarm Finance mogul Mynnna, Goonswarm has ticked the appropriate checkbox but won’t tempt fate by asserting the I-Hubs will stay intact. The real proof will be on the 21st when it is expected a few alliances will lose their I-Hubs.
The reaction to this change has been mostly negative. Most players seem confused as to why the new checkbox wouldn’t be enabled by default. At best, it would serve to punish alliances that are not paying attention. At worst, it is a tedious requirement to maintain sov that was overlooked after months of development. Still, as long as the autopay boxes do not become unchecked during the patching of another bug, like outstanding TCU bills that will be patched next, CCP could come out of this with only a few grumbles from a select minority of players.
Regional Conflict
With the new mechanics, the intended consequence of these changes was a tumultuous and dynamic sovereignty system. It is certainly far to early to assess if this has worked, but we can certainly see what has been done so far. The first day of fighting over Sov has been pretty anti-climatic in generating killmails. That is not to say there hasn’t been activity: at the time of writing, each sov region had an average of seven contested timers running. Only seven regions at the time of publishing have escaped timers: Tribute, Deklein, Branch, Fade, Cache, Tenal, and Vale of the Silent.
The most active regions have been Scalding Pass, Catch, and Cobalt Edge, with a combined total of 81 reinforcement timers running. Curiously, however, these regions are not the most violent according to Dotlan; Catch takes second place in this category to Delve, which only has nine reinforced systems. There are a few other factors as to why these particular areas are seeing the most action. While Scalding Pass and Catch are relatively close to each other, they do not share a border and are in fact separated by NPC Curse. This is certainly allowing hostile parties to effectively engage both areas well, explaining their top two spots on the reinforcement chart.
Moreover, these regions already had a large number of different alliances living there, meaning there are more hostile entities to attack and be attacked. Alliances like Pandemic Horde and Gorgon Empire who occupy systems in the regions have been hit, the former having every one of their occupied system currently reinforced, though they are not the only ones in similar situations.
In stark contrast, however, stands Cobalt Edge which has a still hefty 21 reinforcement timers despite being very separated from any NPC space. In this particular region, there are only two real entities involved in the battle: Legion of xXDeathXx by way of their renter alliance Shadow of xXDeathXx and Spears of Destiny. Spears of Destiny are about a third the size of Legion of xXDeathXx and Shadow of xxDeathXx member-wise, and only hold about a tenth of the Sov. However, -SOD- have been steadily gaining systems since they burst onto the sov scene earlier this year, while X.I.X and X.W.X have only managed to lose systems. That isn’t to say that xXDeathXx have not fought for it, as is evident by the mutual timers that exist in Cobalt Edge right now. X.I.X has their work cut out for them, as they also have structures hit in the Geminate region and stand to be one of the most hit on this first day.
It will be interesting to see how the reinforcement timers change these stats over the next week, especially if some of the current entities do not checkbox properly. Some groups will be unable or unwilling to fight for what they have, while still others are hoping to find their corner. Expect the political landscape to be regularly changing in the meantime.
