Rebellion Pt 2: Let players change New Eden

We know that the goal for CCP is to let players create and destroy more, to the point of even creating stargates.  Why not let the shape the New Eden that we already have?  This post takes the ideas from Rebellion: Live Event Proposal and makes them part of the ongoing world.

Launching from the Live Event

After the Rebellion Live Event both CCP and the players will have had a chance to see what it is like to let the players change the map.  I expect it's a taste of power that players will not want to give up.  It also gives a chance for a lot of the following to be tweaked based on experience.  Players who aren't normally tuned into the Meta will also have more time to get the news before it impacts them personally.

In the following the term "Rebellion Release" indicates the release in which the new functionality needed below is delivered.

Declare your Loyalty, Part 2

In the Rebellion Release an attribute is added to all capsuleers called Loyalty.  This attribute can be equal to one of the empire or pirate faction names, or Neutral.  When this feature is rolled out all capsuleers are defaulted to Neutral unless they are in Faction War, in which case they are set to that faction.  Capsuleers can change this value on their Character Sheet, but they cannot select a faction they have negative standings towards.  If a capsuleer drops below zero standings with the faction they are listed as loyal to, they will be reset to Neutral.  A capsuleer in a militia cannot change their loyalty away from their faction.

If the Live Event is used, then many capsuleers may have their Loyalty already set via those mechanics.

A logical extension of this for a future stage is that Loyalty could also be set to a Coalition, thus allowing these mechanics or something else built on Loyalty to be used in nullsec and the promised new regions of the future.

Rebellion Sites

These are similar to Faction War plexes in that they are a warpable location which spawns in a system.  They have the same sizes and general characteristics as a FW plex, with the following additional aspects:

• The site has substantially more difficult defenders.  Novice plexes are defended by a pirate Burner NPC, Small with the Burner+Logistics NPC (coming in Oceanus), and so on scaling up.  Ideally I'd like Large sites to resemble Incursion sites, but since I'm not experienced with Incursions I'll leave that for others.
• Pirate NPCs will attack any capsuleers that isn't declared Loyal to their faction.
• The site will count down to despawning if the pirate NPC is killed.  A site that despawns by loyalist actions counts as Victory Points for the Empire.  The killer of the NPC will lose standings with that pirate faction.
• The sites will despawn on a timer (or more roughly but easier to code on downtime).  A site that despawns by timer counts as Victory Points for the Rebel faction.

Rewards:
Killing Pirate NPCs offer substantial immediate ISK and deferred LP rewards.  Small and Novice plexes would be in line win, but greater than, completing the equivalent level 4 burner mission.  Medium and Large should be scaled so that they offer even greater rewards even after divided by the expected number of fleet members needed.  This is because of the risk of having an enemy loyalist join in (or ganker, given the lack of protection).

Killing capsuleers in a Rebellion site will result in an deferred LP reward similar to FW payouts for opposing militia.

Rebellion Missions

The simple version of this would be that any mission run within a Rebellion System counts towards Empire control.  The more complicated form would be that there would be more specific missions of the opposing-player variety that have been often talked about in discussions on how to improve PVE and make it more like PVP.

This allows non-PVP oriented players to contribute towards keeping their home systems under Empire control.

A Living New Eden

When the each new release is rolled out after the Rebellion Release, the map of New Eden will change.  For systems in Rebellion Constellations where the Rebellion prevailed, the security status will drop by 0.1.  All Loyalists who earned deferred LP in that system will be paid out.  For systems where the Empire prevailed, the security status will increase by 0.1. All Loyalists who earned deferred LP in that system will be paid out.  Based on the new standings, a new set of four constellations are chosen for Rebellion.

In systems which have been won by the Pirates and are now low-sec, one or more stations switch ownership to a pirate corporation. Pirate agents and pirate missions would be set up there (see the Infiltration Agents in the previous post) as well as pirate LP stores.

Extensions: An End of Empire?

In an extreme possibility, if after multiple iterations a 0.1 system is won by the Rebels, it becomes a -0.1 NPC null sec system. Yes, this means that if the nullsec Coalitions really wanted they could grind all of empire down to NPC nullsec, though it might take years. That would logically start to drive a response which would require further mechanics. To briefly sketch, it would make sense then for a empire faction to be able to "declare war" (in some way) on the Coalition faction, which would cause the Faction Police NPCs and such to attack war targets in their space and such.

This also goes back to an idea I've posted on before (Eve Needs More Sandbox) where players would be allowed to lead from the empire side. As long as nullsec has player-run Coalitions and empire is just a fractured set of players then there will always be a power disparity.