CCP Greyscale has just released a new dev blog detailing proposed changes to EVE's various "jumping" mechanics, which allow players to instantly teleport themselves and/or other ships to any star within a "light-year" range set by the game. Typically interstellar movement in EVE is restricted to adjacent star systems. To give a brief overview of how jumping works now:
A ship with the appropriate module "lights" a cynosural field ("cyno") in a target system for a fuel cost.
Capital ships (minus freighters, which can only use stargates) have a jump drive that can "lock onto" cynos belonging to fleet members within up to 15 light-years with maximum skills. They can then spend more fuel to teleport to the cyno's location.
Titans can fit special modules that allow them to generate Jump Portals (sometimes known as jump bridges, which is often confusing as a starbase module uses that name, officially), which can teleport nearby sub-capital ships in their fleet (but not capital ships as far as I know) to a cyno within the same range as they themselves can jump to.
Black Ops (BLOPS) battleships can create Covert Jump Portals, which perform the same effect as Jump Portals, but can only link to special Covert Cynos, which can only be generated by a small list of stealth-oriented ships, which are also the only ships capable of jumping through the bridge. All of these ships are sub-capitals.
An alliance with sovereign space can use a series of starbase arrays also confusingly called Jump Bridges, which function much like Titan Jump Portals except they have a range of only 5 LY and can only link to other Jump Bridges. However, based on my knowledge, capital ships can use them (albeit with a large fuel cost, which is incurred to some degree by any ship using them) as well as anyone in the owning alliance or who has a high-enough standing with the alliance.
The proposed changes by CCP are as follows (read the dev blog for the nitty-gritty details). Important to note that Greyscale and the rest of his team have not carved these into stone yet, they are very much interested in the players' feedback, so what's below may not be exactly what CCP releases in Phoebe come November:
All jumping, minus BLOPS bridging, will have a 5 LY maximum range, just as Jump Bridges do now.
A new metric called Jump Fatigue will now increase with every jump you make, corresponding to the LY distance you traveled, and decrease slowly over time
The basic formula is IF n = 1, F = (1 + distance); IF n > 1, F = (Fn-1 - 0.1t) * (1 + distance), where n is the number of jumps you've performed since having a fatigue of 0 (n = 1 being your first jump), t is minutes since your last jump, distance is in light-years, and F is Fatigue, with Fn-1 being the fatigue you had immediately after your previous jump.
After you jump, you'll experience a cooldown period equal to your Fatigue value before the jump in minutes. There's a minimum cooldown of (1 + distance) So your first jump, if it's at 5 LY, will earn you a 6-minute cooldown.
The net result is that beginning with the third jump, if each jump is done right at the end of the cooldown timer, each subsequent jump will cost you more and more time in cooldowns.
Jump freighters and Rorquals will receive a 90% role deduction (that is, unaffected by skills) to the distance value the game uses to calculate fatigue. Or in simpler terms, these ships will treat a jump like it's one-tenth the distance from a fatigue standpoint.
In addition, to compensate for the reduced teleportation ability, all capitals will now be able to use stargates in low- and zero-security space. (Capitals are already barred from entering high-security space)
Medical clones will no longer be able to be transferred to a remote station, eliminating the technique known as "suicide jumping" or "pod-jumping," by which a player moves their medical clone (their respawned body) to their destination station, then undocks from a station to self-destruct their pod, which houses their body, allowing a player to move across the galaxy in less than 4 minutes.
Sovereignty structures will have hitpoints and damage resistances lowered by some as-yet-unspecified degree to make up for the drop in damage output fleets will be able to field, at least at the start of a fight.
There will also be in Phoebe "a rebalance of starbase weapons, a rebalance of stealth bombers and heavy interdictors, enabling of lowsec doomsdays, and changes to interdictor bubble mechanics."
The response on the EVE forums has been slightly mixed, but most of what I've seen has been negative. Ironically, it was not so long ago when many players were up in arms over the ability for players to move their capitals across the galaxy in minutes using chains of cynosural fields. The remainder of this post is going to be a slightly edited version of a post I made on that thread:
I'll freely admit I'm no expert on null-sec, but based on my reading of this column by the Mittani and my own research into the current mechanics of jumping, here's my take on the proposed changes:
Teleportation, as the Mittani points out, is only half the problem with the current doctrine of 100% capitals and supercapitals. The core issue is the capabilities of cap/supercap fleets to withstand assaults by everything except a larger cap/supercap fleet without needing a subcap support fleet.
Slowing down the travel times of combat capitals is a good way to reduce the number of big fights that drain CCP's server hardware, but only in the short term. It still doesn't change the need for fleet doctrines of caps and supercaps. Reducing the HP on sovereignty structures will help make assaulting with battleships more viable in the early stages of an attack, but once the capitals finally arrive it's back to Clash of the Titans.
The better solution long-term is to alter the characteristics of capitals and supercapitals to make them more dependent on subcapitals for support (the Mittani uses dreadnoughts as a good example of how [super]carriers and Titans should behave.
The new jumping mechanics, whether they'll just be temporary while CCP works on implementing Point 3 or whether they become the new normal from now until the end of time, shouldn't be so penalizing that long-distance logistics becomes an extremely long, aggravating process within a few jumps. I think the jump drive range reduction is too much. In CCP Greyscale's example in the dev blog, the theoretical capital pilot took the same number of jumps (4) along the same route, but post-Phoebe, he only traveled 1/3 of the way and had a 2-hour cooldown timer. That's going to create a ton of problems, especially if at some point null-security space becomes a more politically diverse place, as many players want it to be. If an enemy is sitting in the middle of two areas of your space or an ally's, you could end up stuck in their camp, and your other option of getting around--stargates--isn't going to be much of a saving grace there, either.
The jumping changes shouldn't penalize projecting subcapitals. To that end:
Jump Bridges (the starbase kind) should be restricted to subcapitals, just like their Titan counterparts.
Subcapitals should be immune from the new jump fatigue/cooldown mechanics. This makes sense as unlike capitals they can't jump to a cyno on their own. Sure, this allows you to set up a Titan chain much like fleets today have cyno chains for rapid capital deployment, but once the subcaps are on the battlefield they'll have to wait for a friendly Titan to arrive if they want to turn tail quickly. Plus with the new jumping restrictions, that chain will take longer to set up. Ideally, once the "Occupancy Sov" system comes into being, preventing alliances from controlling vast swathes of vacant space, alliances wouldn't have enough sovereign space to safely set up a chain in.
Off of the subject of jumping itself, I disagree with the reasoning behind the medical clone changes. Suicide jumping offers little reward (you can't take any implants, ships, or cargo with you) for a bit of risk (loosing any current implants and the fees of having to set up a new medical clone. Not to mention that if you forgot to update your clone before you suicide-jumped, you'll lose a percentage of the difference in skill-point capacity).
Some people on the forum thread have mentioned that the clone changes will make it hard for certain groups in deep null-sec, far from high-security space, to move their new members in, because they'll have to manually fly to the alliance's base, to which others have said, "Set up convoys." While a freighter convoy might be useful for newbies with lots of stuff to carry, requiring convoys for everyone would just be a headache. You'd either have to schedule a group of newbies to move in together (good luck with that) or give everyone a private escort. I'm pretty sure the null-sec alliances are there to fight for space, not act as bodyguards for rookies. If CCP seriously wants to limit the use of pod-jumping to circumvent the jump clone cooldown (a mechanic allowing pilots to safely transfer control to another body without destroying the original), they can further shorten the cooldown (like many people wanted them to when they did it last time) or limit changing the medical station to the current station or the corp offices or HQ, as one person suggested. It would restrict the versatility of the technique without punishing deep null groups.