Warning: Sovereignty suggestion by a non sovholder incoming.

So, this is one of the things that just came to mind.

If sovereignty is based upon who holds the system and the idea is that you actually have to live in your system in order to hold onto it. Why aren't we using the system indexes themselves to claim sovereignty?

Instead of this random "Capture the flag" game of chasing random crap around. Why not base it entirely off of the indexes. Whoever literally uses the space by mining, ratting, and whatever the hell the strategic index is, the most owns the system. I think that the industrial index would need to be expanded, just mining being counted is silly (But I'm pretty sure CCP has plans for that anyways, especially with Citadels incoming). But other than that? Meh.

You take sov by actually using the space. Your warriors are still needed to protect your borders and keep people from messing with your carebears. It gives null alliances a reason to have an industrial wing still, it gives them a reason to keep around people to defend that wing. It rewards them for the ratting they're already doing. It rewards alliances for having a well rounded timezone coverage instead of punishing anyone not in your primary timezone.

Current sovholder is capable of building up a certain amount of points that require the attacker to overcome before their sovereignty is actually threatened. Those points DON'T respawn, so if you're not there and you're only repping up your borders every few weeks, it's possible for smaller entities to nibble a little at a time. It avoids the organizational requirements of having to manage thousands of timers. The N+1 Blob will always reign supreme but a smaller entity would have the ability to possibly strategically bottleneck systems.

Most of all it removes trolling as a way to harass sov holders. Someone CFC sized could absolutely kick your teeth in no matter what you do if you decide you want a piece of branch or Deklein, but they aren't just going to be able to go sit on Provi and fuck shit up without committing a pretty sizable amount of assets. Roaming gangs can either be dealt with militarily or carebears can safe up and wait them out. A random roaming gang that has no interest in holding sov won't have the ability to significantly impact sovereignty holders.

Defender has the advantage, as an attacker must literally seed in every industrial ship and ratting ship and must put bodies IN those ships that can't be committed to defense. You start playing the game of whether or not to try to blitz the system as fast as possible at the risk of losing a lot of ships or to do it slower and steadily with more people waiting to defend. It becomes very much an asset and personnel management issue.

No more chasing around uncatchable things, no more watching a laser do stuff. People either fight for their space or they don't. If CCP wants to keep trolling around as a legitimate playstyle, they can make it so Entosis links still shut off station services and maybe offline system upgrades. Same vulnerability requirements, same bonuses for indexes and such. You could make someone's space pretty damn annoying to live in but you'd have to harass them for a very, very long time in order to make them move out just because you turned off their clone bay.