Bang Head Here

Do we need to shoot structures to claim sovereignty?

To answer that question we need to examine how players interact with the game.  Players can harvest resources, transform resources, and destroy resources.  The primary method of harvesting resources is by shooting something at something else for a period of time and then receiving the reward for the your time spent.  Bullets, rockets, mining lasers, hacking modules, core extractors, pick your poison for the job at hand and receive your reward. Then you take your isk, pile of mins, moon goo, drone poo, or whatever else and exchange it for something else.  Now that you have your new shiny bit of flotsam off you go until it is transformed again into another bauble, or destroyed forever.  The great circle of Eve life and it all starts with a bang.

Shooting things for sovereignty then makes sense as a mechanic in Eve. 

Does it have to be that way?

No.

What would we do instead?

Good question.

Having played Eve for many a year it is hard not to notice that the only cost in Eve that truly matters is time.   Both the faction warfare system and sov system have a time component.  That time component serves a couple functions for players.  Mainly it allows defenders time to react.  The structures provide a location on where people are likely to be.  Location plus time to get there, equals space battle. Much rejoicing ensues.

So what we need is an activity that promotes conflict with a lengthy window of time to for the conflict parties to interact. I have several ideas banging through my head, not all that are relevant to this topic so I'm going to pass this off to you for now. What do you think would fulfill those requirements?

Additional reading

Faction Warfare

 https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=124940

Jester’s Trek
 http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2012/11/proposal-tug-of-war-sovereignty.html
http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2011/08/tug-of-war.html