As with most PvP'ers I am looking forward to the presence of a new type of PvP situation. And the capital ships are just COOL.

I do take issue with one thing though. Most players who PvP have built their game around grey space, where the CTC takes place. What happens when the Cap ship suddenly appears in Deneb? well, people would have to make the decision, are they CTC'ers? or Cap ship'ers?

This could be problematic for players who would like to do both, since the journey from Sedina to Deneb isn't exactly "short". We either need a quick passenger transport across the galaxy, (little zippy transports that just take passengers and have very specific stops, they'd move at about 500 m/s with a NiCad battery, and the passengers are free to look about, but have no control over the experience)

or

we need to rethink the layout of the CTC and the new Cap ship mission, so that its done in such a way as to make both viable.

My worry is that without either of these measures, we would take an already thin player base and split it up, making battles a good deal smaller. (this wouldn't be a problem if we could get more players, but we can't rely on that)

Special warp gates that cost money to use. Fly up to it, hail it, and off you go provided you've got the cash.

Itani can have a warp gate that connects Eo and Edras. Serco's can connect Geira and Helios.

I like the idea of 2 frigate missions, Maybe the frigates should fly along the convoy routes to try and enforce the nations control over those areas of space. Then it'd give everyone the chance to attack or defend.

The warp gates is an interesting idea.

I also was thinking about the transports, what if each one left once an hour, everyone who was interested would have to get on at one of the stops. It would make doing both CTC and Cap Ship'n possible, while making it hard to abuse the ability to jump between them.

What about HUGE deliveries of CtC cargo, once or twice a week.

Carried in said frigates.

You manage to get the force together to bring one down, it drops hundreds, and then its a melee mash-up for every last crate.

Proms would have a smashing advantage though :D

The player base might grow once there are a few more things to do. I'd add in Cap Ships and Race Tracks ASAP. The PvP might be split for a little while, but I bet new player retention would go up.

I'd actually like the Cap Ship to split up PvP, forcing players to choose one or the other, but not both (at least, not without a travel break in between).

But Shape's right, we might not have enough players yet to really do both. But I think we could try it for a week or so before deciding whether it's something that needs fixing or not.

I think it would be bad to make the location of the new cap ship anywhere close to grey space, must stay near a border, since it is a border patrol style mission. Having some kind of high speed transportation across the universe would be a great way to do it. The jump gate idea to me just doesn't sit very well, if we have the capability to create a jump gate that can send us to a far away galaxy, why can't we build one to get back to earth? Worm holes are the the only way to get where we need to go right now, let's keep it that way.

I'm personally not too worried about the player base thinning, what does concern me is the lack of UIT specific missions. There are more UIT on per day then any other nation (at least when I'm on) and yet most of the upper end content is geared totally towards Serco/Itani. And if the UIT decide to participate they still don't get any kind of reward for it other then to make an enemy of one nation over the other.

Re: warp gates and special passenger transports

There are a lot of reasons to have a quick movement ability between the "ends" of the universe. (It takes around 30 minutes to get from Deneb to Edras.) One of the reasons I think a gate generator would work is that it seems like something that could be implemented easily. All it would have to be is a bot floating in space. You hail it, it takes your money, and you see the wormhole animation.

What might be interesting is if Corvus was the operator of those warp bots -- one in Eo and one in Geira -- and both of them warped to Odia. The bots are there for Corvus black market purposes, but you can hitch a ride for a price. Maybe with a minimum level of Corvus standing.

Corvos controled, INTERESTING! Now that's something I can get on board with, thought, what is the story behind why Corvos has something like this. Purely to attack the Serco Dominion? Are they trying to find earth with it? Purely for profit reasons. I still need to know why something like that would have been created. Simply because that's a powerful piece of tech and could potentially give corvos a lot more control then they do now if used right.

It doesn't have to be a powerful piece of technology. For all anyone knows, Eo and Odia could be right next to each other in normal geometry. Politically, I'm sure players more clever than me can come up with lots of reasons why a government would tolerate (or even encourage) an "unofficial" spacelane.

I'm not too concerned with why it's there or by what technology it operates. I only care about gameplay, and this seems like an easily implemented way to shuttle players between the two PvP engagements.

I disagree that throwing in some arbitrary piece of tech to make it easier for people to get to both events is good for game play. If it has no basis in the backstory then it's going to muck things up. And the point I was trying to make is that something that can act just like a worm hole is BIG tech, not the fact that the spacelane would be open. I would be all for a fast traveling transport ship that could zip though systems in half or a quarter of the time it would take to fly in a one of the current fighter varients. Part of the game is that there is travel, I don't see any reason that the devs need to cater to a few ctc'ers that want to have there cake and eat it too. Choose an event, go to where it will be and do it, then if you want to do the other one, fly there and do it. It doesn't have to be handed to you. For me, knowing why it's there IS part of the gameplay, I like being emursed in the story and the roleplay aspect of it, though the only real rolepay I see is "Yarr!"

Or just add s18 back in with a hidden wormhole in Odia that has hidden exits into Deneb and Geira Rutilus...

these jump points you want to add will be exploitable by traders who want to go from one side to the other, how would you regulate that, if at all?

Make them unmonitored. ;)

s18 was a pirate sector. If you want to use the shortcut, you better be prepared to run a gauntlet. One could even put the old s18 station back in and allow for nation special trading - trade a valk for a prom if you have the licenses and the money.

so again, if your not already buddy buddy with pirates or rather high level then your easy to get back and forth idea is moot cause you'd be slaughtered before you even got to the main event, great idea!

Well, the other reason I was suggesting the transports, is that they build onto an existing suggestion, for spectators inside ships.

The transports would be very quick/Heavily armored/escorted
craft, and would be an opportunity for people to passively get from one side of the universe to the other. Though they wouldn't be able to bring anything with them. Furthermore, it would be like a screensaver, as it passed from system to system

I really like Shapes idea, it also adds some eye candy for those flying around, all of a sudden a big ass transport ship with it's escorts pop out of the wormhole you were about to jump at and zooms by at high speed. Wouldn't that be cool to see. I know I would like to see it. And, it solves your transportation issue. You'll just have to buy a ship there or some night a week stockpile ships and take the transports back so you can be ready to do the mission when you want.

And to bring this back onto topic a bit, I still don't think this will overspread the player base simply because a lot of people resently have said they are taking breaks from CtC for whatever reasons. Probably because it gets boring like everything else when you've done it 200 times a week. There will probably be a big cap ship rush for a while and then it will thin out and things will get back to the way they were.

Yes, the the go between would be a major, and dangerous, chokepoint. This would be a gameplay device rather than a hinderance, as both Itani and Serco pilots would want to use it, and pirates can be bought. In between frigate and CTC rounds it would be less occupied, and since hidden wormholes aren't marked on the HUD (and they can be pretty big) camping them wouldn't exactly be easy. If both serco or itani pilots are trying to use the CTC routes, what happens? The same thing that would happen here. I don't see you complaining about both nations needing to use the same route to follow the convoy, so what's the difference?

Plus, if you introduce the option of simply zipping around without having to touch anything but points of interest, you might as well just cut the universe back down to 18 sectors instead of 7000 and leave it at that.