EVE General Discussion

Any targets that were once there have been relocated to hisec for running incursions, running missions, mining ice with only 2 seconds of interaction needed every 20 minutes or otherwise taking advantage of CCP's welfare programs for hisec.

Because no matter how boring it may be its more fun than being your toy

Running missions, mining ice is masochistic but at least its not being the plaything of other people. And they keep telling themselves "I can stop whenever I want. It doesn't control me, I control it."

This is the whole problem.

"We don't have enough to shoot at, hence we must force players out of hisec, cause its too easy to stay there"

Hello? This is a GAME, right, so people will in fact see how a particular part of a game works, and for example decide "I just want to spend my free off work relaxing time in the market or making items" or "I just want to sub for 6 months and work up to a few Incursions".

So you want more PvP'ers but there dosn't seem to be enough of them? And you're blaming a game mechanic?

The game mechanic is what divides players into categories. If you have an mmo game that's has a 10K player base with a 50/50 pve/pvp population, and remove pve completely , do people seriously think the pve players will just go "oh well, now I have no choice but to pvp" and suddenly have 10K pvp players or do you think you'll just now have maybe 6000 pvp players and empty cities?

What? Balance what? This is not a game where you have one base and I have a base and you say that your base is smaller and has less windows from where to shoot from. Everyone has access to the same base and can come and go as they please, and when shooting happens, we all do it somewhere else anyway like lowsec, and if you can't enter that hisec base because of your security status then you already know how that happened.

Ah, the old "$_SHIP isn't overpowered because anyone can fly it" argument that has been roundly mocked and solidly destroyed over and over and over but apparently this is your first time and I hope it was special for you too?

Picture this scenario:

You're a happy mission runner, happily running missions for the Minmatar Republic like a good freedom fighter should. It's your thing and you like it and you're happy. Your standing with Amarr is in the tank, of course, but hey, screw those slavers!

Then one day Greyscale posts a blog, and says that Amarr missions are going to be changed. First, they're going to get 75% more LP than everyone else's, second, the deadspaces are going to be locked so that no one else can enter them, and then lastly, 90% of the Minmatar LP store tiems (including almost all the good ones) will be in the Amarr LP store.

The Amarr missioners defend the change on the grounds that, hey, anyone can grind up Amarr standings and get the benefit of this change, and also it makes lore sense for Amarr missions to pay the most and have the best tech, and anyway, EVE isn't fair so ~deal with it~.

Your immediate response to that defence is exactly what we think of your post.

Really, is it not about time CCP started admitting to themselves that hi-sec isn't just a starter area, hasn't just been a starter area for at least 6 years, and will never be predominantly a starting area ever again, and got working on a new conception of what hi-sec should be?

Maybe. But it doesn't make much sense he refers to his alts as "targets".

I still say that the nullsec players will never be happy with highsec rewards, because it has the highest population.

Having 100 other people with you in a busy missioning system cuts down the odds that you will be the person scanned down considerably, and would even work in lowsec if that many people could be dragged out there.

It's even better protection than CONCORD in some places.

That's the thing. It's a starting area only on paper, but there is so much content there that is far from accessible to newer players. For example, if you can't fly a T3, a T2 gunned battleship or a T2 logistics with great skills, all of which take several months of dedicated skill training to fly properly, you don't get into most incursion gangs. Yet CCP chose to implement incursions in hisec, despite having a golden opportunity to introduce group PvE content exclusive to lowsec which would have definitely been beneficial to the state of the game there. However, in what seems to be a lapse of thought, they somehow believed that the very, very slim chance of a BPC for a crappy supercarrier being dropped by the final encounter would be the carrot that would draw players to run them in lowsec, which never quite worked out. The fact that they also put them in hisec, while also making them far easier to run there (no ridiculous NPC gate camps, no scramming rats, CONCORD and faction navies work perfectly, etc.) just made hisec the best place to run them considering that one could safely use high-meta modules and T3/faction ships to make up for the payout difference with increased efficiency.

There's also missions. Hundreds of players can simultaneously run missions from the same agent without a single drawback. In comparison, a fully upgraded Strat 5 system in nullsec will have maybe 6 anomalies in existence that are worth running, so it can support 6 players plus a few to run belts.

And then there's PI. Extraction is, of course, superior in wormholes and nullsec, but there is zero difference between a 0.0/WH factory planet and one next door to Jita. There is also no difference between a planet with 5 players running factories and another with 1000. Tyrannis was the ultimate carebear expansion, almost the definition of welfare in MMOs.

What I'm saying is that CCP's current vision of hisec seems to be "EVE at Very Easy difficulty."