Good Design or Massive Failure?

That link doesn't really tell me anything cause I'm not familiar with EVE's economy/items, but value-wise how much did that big alliance win considering their troop investment. Also, how much resources did they spend to achieve the win?

As I see it, so long as the bigger force spends more resources to siege and win a smaller node than the resources they get out of that node - the system is "balanced". And with defenders, allegedly, having advantages over the attackers, the force sizes might balance out somewhat too.

56th reference here says non-registered dudes won't be let into the siege field.

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If you have a lvl3 node with lvl 25-30 dudes and a lvl6 node with lvl 50 top gear dudes and the lvl6 node, for whatever reason, decides to siege lvl3 - lvl3 is fucked. Which is why I said that there should be a higher cost for that kind of siege on the stronger side.

Also, we don't know how the defenders will be picked if Intrepid decides to have sieges as instanced battles. Every citizen is registered as the defender, but who knows who exactly will get to fight.

I'm a bit late in, but it seems noone's gotten there quite yet.

In Alpha 1, we experienced sieges. I can't say whether castle or node sieges are different, but I can tell you what we have actually seen:

The siege signup period began before the siege. During this time, party leaders could register their party as either an attacker or defender. When the siege properly started, you would each individually talk to a NPC to enter the instanced siege battlefield. After a few minutes, the siege began, and you were able to leave the spawn area.

Each side of this siege instance did fill up, and people were not able to join beyond that point. (I don't remember if it was a limit on entering, or registration, unfortunately.)

Sieges (at least the type we experienced in Alpha 1) are instanced, and capped, and you had to register as either an attacker or defender in advance.

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I consider these things to be bad design IF two specific things are true.

1. The process of reorganizing, starting a recovery, etc, doesn't depend on the losing player's status but that of the winners or neutrals
2. The attacking winner gains a mobile form of strength or resources that can be used to generate a mobile form of strength quickly.

Basically, the winner was trying to get a result, they got it. If the losers now 'are at their mercy' on top of losing whatever it was, and are easily scattered... If anything can hit the human psychological feeling of 'this is pointless' or 'people will mock us or tell us to just accept it/get over it', I think it's bad because this is actually what makes most people give up, apparently. Sure you can be upset about a loss for a while, and a few people never let it go, but even those people will help with the rebuilding, etc, if they don't feel like the community is going to laugh at them for trying to.

There's no reason to 'require' that level of psychological fortitude from basically every player of your game (since everyone is subject to this).

Similarly, #2 technically leads into #1 in a pretty real way. If the loser has to cede control and territory, and that territory can be used to push them down further instead of TAKING more effort to maintain, then it's bad. Right now it sounds like big forces will be able to crush smaller Vassal nodes and then just leave them like that. If the crushed 'come back to rebuild' without gathering allies, it will just happen again.

If potential allies look at your situation and go 'just get over it, fighting back is pointless/stupid' even in the case where the attackers just left the Node as wilderness, I'd consider it bad design.

As much as I'd love to have L2's free sieges where everyone can come to the siege and help out either side w/o being registered - that's the most direct path to zergs being the way to go in the game.

I've had countless sieges where the defending small guild would partner up with a huge guild and get protection for the siege. Now that's obviously a cool social interaction for the game, but it's only cool when you're on the receiving side of the protection. Quite often you're not.

So depending on how they go about controlling registers for node sieges (if they even will), we might get an absolute imbalanced stomping of small nodes by bigger ones or we might get smth more balanced where maybe the leaders of both sides of the siege could choose the top 250(or 500) people from the registered list. With leaders being the mayor of the defending node and the person who threw down the siege scroll. I personally hope it's the latter.