Dominion has succeeded
I got a lot of really interesting feedback and conversation when I suggested on Twitter that Dominion has experienced wild success. We’ve seen major shake-ups, lots of fights, and an evolving sovereignty map. Okay, I’ll admit it hasn’t seen unalloyed success, but the problems we’ve seen are natural in system performance tuning.
Essentially, when you want to improve the performance of a system, you find the major bottleneck and remove it. This only means that the system performance improves up to the next bottleneck. (Note here that the actual method of bottlenecks will vary, so that a given problem could actually crash the system rather than slow it down.) You keep iterating through this process until the effort needed for the next iteration is larger than what you’ll gain from the performance increase. That is, when you reach the point of diminishing returns in cost and benefit, you stop.
Prior to Dominion, the bottlenecks largely came from design. POS spam, area-of-effect doomsday weapons, relative ease of maintaining Sov 4 (and thus cynojammers) everywhere, all that jazz. Once that went away, we started seeing even more massive fleet fights and all the shakeups. Plus, some alliances either couldn’t afford the sov bills or couldn’t manage their wallets appropriately. As far as I’m concerned, that amounts to the inability to properly direct your alliance.
After that, though, we found out that node capacity is the next bottleneck. While CCP does deserve some criticism for their initial handling of the problem (right after I commended them for riding the Cluetrain, sigh), they’ve finally made substantial improvements so that these fights can actually occur. They still need to do more, of course, but even once they’ve done that, we’ll just run into the next bottleneck. Unfortunately — actually, not — such is our voracious love for this world that fights and struggles will just expand to fill available capacity up to the next bottleneck.
But we’ll have lots of fun in the meantime.