EVE General Discussion

there are literally countless tools in- and out-of-game to help you do so.

The technology of EVE Online is just providing us with a fancy sandpit in which to play. Don't complain that the sandpit isn't exciting enough when you can't figure out whether to build sandcastles, eat sand, or kick sand in someone else's face. The game is what you make it, because you are the game.

Flying a titan isn't fun unless you have something to do with it. Warping around your little fishbowl system only keeps you entertained for so many minutes. After that you'll need something to do with that ship. Form a conga line, play POS bowling, or try blowing up someone else's ships.

So you need to ask yourself, what's the fun stuff?

What do you expect? 0.0 space is the province of those with high skill point totals. But by the time someone gets to 80 or a hundred million SP's, what the heck is new to them?

How about all those Alliances take a bunch of new corps/characters under their wing and play guardian/defender while those players skill up in null or low sec? Why not drop the limitation of capitals in (most) high sec? Keep concord busy, introduce significant churn in ships and equipment from massive destruction via high-sec invasions.

**Incoming wall of text. It's more fun to post on the forums than sit in space and wait for my SP to increment while I do a few things terribly because I dont have access to the ships/equipment to do the fun stuff well.**

Yes, CCP seems to have a Plan that is heavy on the shiny. That's to be expected. They get to do interviews, make new video's, enter Best New Whatever contests, and generally show the Industry that they are anything but stagnant.

Industry. Notice that word? CCP is playing to the Industry, not us. They are developing for their ego, not us. It's about as far from sexy as you can get to tell a journalist that they just spent 6 months fixing known bugs and balancing. No gaming magazine cares if you just swept up the trash and rearranged the furniture. They want Sensational News! Shinies! And CCP is catering to them.

I join up every years or so for a month, poke around, get discouraged, and quit again. Every time I sub, I see: The learning curve is too steep, the career paths take waaaaaay too long to get into. The economy is whacked. It takes several months to get into and effectively use more than 1 ship/role. It takes at least 2 months to get into ONE ship/role and do it effectively. The corporation structure is too confusing/too many of them. Mining is boring unless you have 10+ million SP and are in a big corp. Ratting is boring. Missioning is boring. Industry is impossible unless you have 20+ million SP and are online for 18 hours a day, and are part of a large corp. Exploration is impossible unless you have 15+ million SP and are in a fleet/in a covops. Scams are encouraged by CCP leading many to ragequit (contracts especially!). Moving yourself and all you stuff (including ships) around the galaxy is impossible unless you have 20+ million SP and are in a big corp, unless you just sell everything and start over. Research/Invention is too complicated with too many barriers to entry like (realistically) requiring low-sec habitation.

And on and on. These are the things CCP should be looking at. Not WiS, as cool as I think that will be. If they have to do something new, how about they double the number of systems we have, push Faction systems apart and put low-sec between them. Null sec outside the rest. Eliminate the Market and let player/NPC corp's do ALL the selling. Get rid of half of the NPC stations in high sec. WTH are they even there for?! Do not create NPC star gates to all of the outlying regions, let powerful corporations research and construct them. And defend them! Let players warp anywhere they want, not just to a certain destination.

I am confident that there are hundreds of very cool player suggestions to be found on these and the old forums. Game forums have always been, in every MMO I've played, the destination for whiners, evangelists, deep thinkers, fanbois, egotists, manipulators, the bored, and the driven. The trick is to identify who is who, and ignore the bad's. Sadly, to game developers, game forums are a way to tell us what they are doing, pretend to listen, give out titles to employee's, identify who gets to go brag about the game to Industry members, post blogs, video's and screenies of the new shiny things for search engines to list and rank, and every once in a while... throw us a bone.

Make no mistake, WiS is only happening because CCP believes it will bring in a batch of new subscribers. They aren't doing it because lots of players over the years have been asking for it. If they cared about what players wanted, they would have given us the ability to have a larger UI font years ago. I mean, how complicated could that be?

So, time to log in and put an 10 day skill at the end of my skill Q. I have a couple more weeks till this years attempt to play runs out. At this rate I should be able to get into the fun stuff by 2020.

I don't find it fun to have to continually buy and fit ships because I dont have the SP I need to be effective at any of the above things. I don't want to or expect to be able to fly titans or motherships or carriers any time soon. But I would love to be able to fit an advanced cloaking module and play scout/spy for a fleet. DOn't have anywhere near the SP for that. I would love to play sniper with long range torpedo's or cruise missiles. No SP.

Not the supers are the problem, neither is the sov system.

It's the alliance space-reputation mentality.

I wonder why a Goon would object? U threatened maybe?

True in a way, but it's mostly super-caps that amplified the problem. 100 bored veterans in super-capitals can show up at any important Sov timer and deny progress to someone who can't match that force. Since no one can, and no force is likely to catch up with the DRF now they have masses of resources flowing into their alliances, there's no real point to doing Sov warfare.

Before hand the NC could wear down the DRF's relatively small number of pilots by endlessly throwing ships into the grinder till fatigue kicked in. Or a small but new alliance could at least get some kills. But the sov system means a timer known in advance and a super-cap blob means it's not even worth engaging. So people just give up on the whole system. This includes the defenders since the big alliance $ comes in from renters or moons and they only really need to show up to Sov challenges, of which there are none in the new north.

It is going to be extremely hard for CCP to revive null-sec. This is the point where, in most games, you just declare a winner and start again but Eve just doesn't allow that to happen.

What happened to Null-sec? Supercaps happened. Once they were a rarity, and now the so-called big boys field entire fleets of them.

Null-sec was fun when you could fly in a 20-man gang and meet other 20-man gangs, but now 20-man gangs get WTFBLOBBED by 200+ gangs.