For much of this evening I was mulling a lengthy and over-complicated post chock-full of mathematics and graphs and symbols explaining how jump fatigue should change and why the square of the hypotenuse of jump distance should equal the log base e of the distance from the starting point.

I had high hopes I could get this baby to twelve thousand words pages and finally give that wordy blowhard James 315 a run for his money. I was fresh from a double triumph on Gevlon’s blog: first slipping a lengthy quotation from Mein Kampf into a comment with the word “Goons” substituted for “The German race”, then getting him to refuse to publish a comment, which meant he couldn’t think of an answer. I knew no boundaries. I had just got my first reddit gold and I was king of the internet.

Then Aryth suggested I read this comment on the eve-o forums:

“Move-Mode for Capitals for move ops (e.g. Transforming into move mode (24 hour process) reduces combat capacity to near 0) ”

I won’t lie to you: I was rocked. Dumbfounded. This was a member of FCon – generally acknowledged to be the worst posters not to need four legs for locomotion – who was in a corporation named after condoms and was posting on a forum whose apparent goal I had always believed to be to check how long it would take infinite poop sprayed at a virtual wall to spell out the complete works of Shakespeare. But it was genius. The more I thought about it the better it seemed. I won’t lie to you*: the next thing I did was to check whether the following post started “to be or not to be…”

Fortunately, I quickly worked out that we could stand down the Goonswarm drill for “The Rapture is probably coming and Jesus will most likely arrive any minute now.” This was simple a case of the Fcon poster not knowing how quoting works on a forum. The idea belonged to Larrikin. He is a CCP dev so him having a good idea, while not exactly in line with the general expectation, is at least not an outright sign of the end times.

Imagine that your capital system, and only your capital system, cleared your jump fatigue when you jumped into it. It wouldn’t help you project power above the couple or three regions CCP said was their target in this week’s roundtable. But it would let you defend your own space well. It would let you use that blops to drop on people without worrying that you would miss that night’s capital fleet.

It’s a bonus to sov nullsec and a reason for holding it, which has been a consistent complaint. I imagine that even PL would find themselves gradually moving more and more ships into citadels and stations in a capital somewhere with a wide jump range that hit a couple of bad-player-soloing-nyxes pinch points, and we all know what the inevitable result of that would b, sooner or later: maybe Progodlegend could offer to manage their sov payments for them.

A beleaguered alliance, under attack from all sides, could jump around over a space of hours as nodes came out.

It’s not going to fix everything: doubtless ranges and fatigue caps and more will be on the table. My own advice has consistently been that if you have a thirty day subscription cycle and a thirty day cap if you mess up your jumps, then people are quickly going to work out the value of not paying you money for long periods. But it is a brilliant idea that addresses swathes of the game.

To avoid gaming of the system, you would want to make firm rules for the delay between capital moves and the time it takes them to come into effect, but that is the complicated stuff that I pay subs to people like Larrikin to go bald worrying about. At this rate, we may make an exception and let him and his family put on their hats with eir best corks hanging from them, polish up their alligator-tooth belts, and return to the mother country for a visit: let the whole sheep-stealing episode be bygones, that’s what I say.

*This was, in fact, a lie. I did not read the next post. I’m a glutton for punishment but I don’t actively self-harm.

P.S. I wish to say a hearty apology to members of Corps Diplo who will now have to deal with the fallout of me being rude about Fcon members’ ability to post through the medium of interpretative pooping.

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