Jita Park Speakers Corner

I would like to hear more on your opinion about that tack, since most of that response was CCP's opinion and you didn't follow up on the ellipsis. I do remember a rant from Garth when Sanctums and Havens were removed to the lowest truesec null systems though.

From where I'm sitting, unequal space seems to be contributing to the Blue Donut problem rather than solving it - for the sov holders themselves you can argue that they're compelled by greed and want to hold onto that space, wring as much ISK as they can out of it and avoid any conflict that could threaten it, or you can argue that they are forced into a position of zugzwang by all the other powers in EVE eying up their space hungrily - committing to a fight with any one of them could harm their own power sufficiently to open them up to another would-be usurper. Either way, owning "the best space" seems to disincentivise seeking further combat. For the people who don't own the best space the income disparity also serves to disincentivise waging war with the owner and encourages working with them.

On the flip side, the Drone Regions are some of if not the worst space in terms of income and yet they're the one area currently with an active sov war, driven largely by old grudges rather than greed or desire to be king of the hill. The fact they're the least politically connected bit of the donut probably doesn't help, but again that's nothing to do with the quality of the space involved.

Do we really need economic incentives to encourage conflict in nullsec, and if so are the current ones working or are they actually harming what they should help?

I'm holding you to this Ripard/Garth - if you don't make those posts you lose all my votes.

Where's the risky part for the AFK cloaker? They're invincible until they decloak and as you yourself are suggesting they're able to affect the gameplay of a potentially large number of players without taking any risks themselves. That doesn't sound balanced to me.

Personally I don't want cloaky camping to be nerfed, I just want something I can use as a counter to doing it AFK. A cloaky camper should be able to camp cloaked and safe while actively at their keyboard, I'm just not OK with them having an ongoing effect on other people in perfect safety while they're at work/school etc. Something like a new type of scan probe that could find cloaked ships but had a horrible scan strength that would require even the best probing player/ship combo make multiple repositions with their probes and drop down to a very short range to find a ship would work fine IMO - an active camper could stay safe by bouncing between anomalies, celestials, safespots etc but one who wanted to camp while away from the keyboard would be fairly quickly hunted down and killed.

I've answered this question as much as I'm going to, for now. I understand what the Order is doing and I'm philosophically sympathetic to the idea. But there's no evidence that's been presented to me that what the Order is doing comprises all ganking, or even the majority of ganking. Hell, the entire history of the alliance is only... what... three months? That's why I'm trying to learn more about this topic.

Yep, James 315 is the "Father of the New Order" and speaks for them as a group. His "platform" isn't "here are the ideals I want to see EVE move towards, which I will advocate for if elected", it's "here is what I will tell CCP to do with their game."



Wow, that's... a lot of assumptions you've made about me purely from me suggesting that if Nullsec should be risky maybe some of that risk should also apply to the guy going AFK for hours in hostile space. For starters, I don't even play Tanks!

For the record, back when I was in Scalding Pass I did run anomalies with AFK cloakers in the system. Other things I've done in Null include mining ice for POS fuel from an icebelt that was the closest celestial to a gate on a route used by many raiders; the distance was short enough to be measured in KM rather than AU. I am OK with the concept of managing risk rather than avoiding it completely.

Frankly, EVE players being EVE players I would expect the system in your example to be gamed from before it left SiSi - I'd expect something like a shared google doc for each system recording names in local and in particular the appearance of any 6th+ names, tactics like only running sites when there were 5+ players in the system (not necessarily working together, just there to push out names) and/or groups of 5 alts being sent around systems to check their local by displacing NPCs and seeing who remained. Being a rational person I would take advantage of those systems, but in their absence I would still run sites or mine; again, managing risk rather than avoiding it completely.

My problem with AFK cloaking is that they are avoiding risk completely themselves, while still having a demonstrable effect on their targets. Whether or not they get kills or affect players' gameplay directly, their presence - an untouchable hostile permanently there in what should be our space - has an affect on player morale; this is human nature. Seeding AFK cloakers through popular hostile systems is a good way to make the target alliance/coalition feel more pressured than they actually are - given that one of the objectives of any sov campaign is to demoralise the enemy to the point they stop fighting, that's a significant tactical benefit. I don't have any problem with this as a tactic, the part I object to is that with current mechanics it is a tactic that can be done in perfect safety in the middle of hostile space. The safety is so perfect in fact that the players are free to go AFK, or indeed only show up straight after downtime to log in and activate their cloaking device and ignore the account for the next 24 hours, and not only expect to be fine but actually be certain that they will be unharmed when they come back.

As it stands now, AFK cloaking is a mechanic that offers reward with NO risk at all. How is that any better game balance than making it easy to run anomalies in perfect safety would be?

I don't think that there's anything wrong with the level of power that cloaky campers can exercise at the moment; they should be able to affect the gameplay in an entire system with their presence, and running anomalies, mining or hauling in Null should not be completely without risk. At the same time, affecting the gameplay of an entire system in Nullsec should also not be something that can be done without risk to the person who's affecting it; that's the side of the equation that currently seems unbalanced to me. On either side, a competent player or group of players should be able to take actions to reduce the risks - flying in a fleet or staying in motion respectively, as examples, but the risks should dramatically increase if you start going AFK.

LOL OK, fair enough. I apologize.

But see, in a very real way, you are objecting to real life. During the WW1 and WW2, northern European and/or and/or American and/or Japanese merchant shipping was threatened by submarines lying in wait just outside ports and there was nothing that could be done about it. During the 80s, Russia and the U.S. had massive nuclear arsenals poitned at each other on hair triggers and there was nothing that could be done about it. During the run-up to any war, you had spies and saboteurs hiding among your people waiting to dynamite things and there was nothing that could be done about it.

Nothing to be done, that is, except live your life and keep doing your own thing. "Keep calm and carry on," I believe the saying goes. High-sec players have to deal with this all the time, with war-decs that are declared and go on for weeks with no sign of the war-dec'ing corp. And null-sec players have to deal with AFK cloakers. In real life, you can either leave your ships at home, hide in your fallout shelter, and never leave your house for fear of getting blown up if you step out your front door, or you can live your life. In EVE, you can either let your game be ruined by it, or you can say "bring it", take reasonable precautions, and keep playing the game.

All that said, this is probably a temporary problem. If and when moons go away and alliance income goes bottoms up, and alliances have to rely exclusively on ratters, missioners, PLEXers, miners, and incursioners for their income, there will be concerted efforts by alliance leadership to form home defense fleets. They'll have to. That will put an end to or make irrelevant AFK cloaking.

But you've taken the analogy too far, here. The AFK cloakers are not receiving much if any reward for their activities unless you give them a reward by bitching at them in Local. Hint: don't.

Well, the TMC post is just propaganda, so I'll confine myself to the platform post. I'll do it this week sometime.

Part 2

I have also called in question your statement of 'gankers have many more ISK and SP than their targets, by and large' and the example of the T1 hauler driven by a newbie player with all his possessions inside being ganked by a ganking Thrasher and making the new pilot quit EVE. To be more precise I wrote:



My objection was that what that you propose is ISK tanking which favors rich, old players much more then new ones. Since what you wave said so far, in my eyes, appears as effectively a proposal for ISK tanking, I would like your direct and non mercurial statement as a CSM candidate: are you advocating that equal amounts of ISK spent should be a prerequisite of combat (ISK tanking) and should different rules with regards to the concept of diminishing returns apply in highsec, lowsec and nullsec?

I believe my questions are fair. They are directly related to your CSM candidate platform and what you have stated so far during your campaign. If I say that I want direct and non mercurial answers, I hope you will not take it as an insult, for it was not meant as such. I merely think that you have not given clear answers to these questions and I feel that as a CSM candidate you should answer these questions in order to clarify your stance with regards to it, for both your benefit and the benefit of the voters. Therefore I would reiterate my request to have these questions answered now, during the CSM campaign, and not later, after the elections.

If I thought real life was so perfect that it should be used as the design document for everything, do you really think I'd be arguing about the mechanics in an internet spaceship game? Alternately, aren't we all objecting to real life to some extent by devoting this much time and attention to an internet spaceship game?

Setting aside that last I checked real life isn't actually designed to correlate risk/reward, it's worth noting that actually there was something to be done for all your examples; anti-submarine technology was in development even before WW1 and in fact nearly 50% of WW1 U-boats ended up as casualties (a higher casualty rate than the shipping they preyed on, even at their peak), primarily to specific anti-submarine weapons systems (not unlike what I would like to see for AFK cloakers, in fact). For nuclear arsenals, the counter was to build more nuclear weapons and better deployment systems to dissuade the other side from firing first, but also to develop launch detection and interception technology as well. In the case of spies and saboteurs I recall that America actually rounded up any citizens with Japanese ties during WW2 as a preventative measure. More generally there are also things like border controls and deep background checks for anyone needing access to vital infrastructure.

Leaving my pedantry be, I'd also like to point out that the examples you've provided require active effort and attention in order to reach any level of untouchable status. Not merely to threaten their opposition, but to be safe from retaliation. WW1 and WW2 submarines would have had an even higher casualty rate if it was SOP for them to sit perfectly still ignoring anything on periscope or (for WW2 subs) SONAR all day, nuclear deterrents only escape attack because the would-be attackers know that an attack would be detected and provoke retaliation (in fact, nuclear attack detection being an active, manned process may be the only reason any of us are here) and spies and saboteurs need to ensure that they are keeping to their cover and not giving away warning signs, such as traceable purchases of bomb making ingredients.

Getting back to the internet-spaceship-relevant topic at hand, I fully agree that cloaky camping should be capable of economic impact similar to WW1/2 submarine tactics, using precision strikes to hit vulnerable economic vessels to cripple the ability to support and field military ones. However, like those same submarine tactics (but not because of them; I'm just making a comparison, not suggesting something in internet spaceship land should be a particular way because of 90+ year old naval tactics) they should also require action on the part of the camper in order to remain undetected and failiure or inability to take action should put them at significant risk of destruction themselves, not merely prevent them from engaging targets. At least, that's my opinion on the matter. If you disagree then that's your opinion, but if you want to argue which opinion is correct then please don't base your argument about an internet spaceship game on things IRL.



I'm pretty sure "If Nullsec should be risky for players living there, it should also be risky for players who want to camp them" isn't an analogy. 23/7 AFK cloaking is usually done by members of large sov-holding alliances and the rewards are to the sov-holding alliance itself (and its members, via trickle-down) as its main effect is disrupting economic activity and hurting morale in hostile sov-holding alliances, contributing to failcascade and weakening military resistance. More to the point, any reward that involves zero risk and zero player effort to bring about that zero risk should be anathema to EVE, especially when it happens in Nullsec.

As I stated in the Xander interview, I think the balance between ganker and gankee is juuuuust about right right now, particularly in terms of the mining barges and exhumers. I would like to see the T1 haulers rebalanced so that there is (among others) a low-cargo, high-tank T1 hauler. I think that would close the remaining gap that I see.

No, not all combat. I'm say that this concept should apply to ganking. You should not be able to gank a 200m ISK ship with a 5m ISK ship. A group of 5m ISK ships fine; one such ship, no. The risk-reward is slanted much too far in favor of the ganker otherwise, because the ganker can try ten times, fail nine of them, succeed on the tenth and still come out ahead. Until the mining barges were buffed, ganking miners was a risk-free endeavor with a guaranteed profit.

I was pretty sure that gankers themselves were against risk-free endeavors, but perhaps I was mistaken.

You are dancing around my main point without acknowledging it or responding to it. I have responded to you several times now. Your turn. Do you or do you not have the option of responding to an AFK cloaker by fleeting up with other members of your alliance and in so doing defeating his tactics?

Good questions!

#1: Mixture of both, with a strong lean toward CCP. The game needs to be much less complex and much less expensive in the early game, something I've written about on my blog on numerous occasions. The game does its level best to strangle new players in their cribs both in terms of the learning curve and in terms of the amount of ISK a new player has to make in their first year in order to be successful. It's CCP's job to address these problems, something that they've been trying to do but haven't gone nearly far enough with, IMO. In particular, early-game concepts like ship fitting that make the game too complex for a new player to understand simply must be addressed. As an example, if I am an industrialist, I should be given by CCP an easy way to sell fully-fit standardized newbie-friendly ships right off the market. Let new players learn ship-fitting complexities at their own pace. The same applies to other complexities.

On the player side, CCP has done a fairly good job of driving new players into the arms of new-player-friendly corps, but you're absolutely right that more has to be done to help them once they're there. GSF's success in this regard isn't just financial. It's cultural and organizational as well. "National" alliances and other groups that come into EVE with a strong outside-of-game affiliation have just as high a retention rate as GSF does, something Mittens has written about in the past. On the organizational side, GSF has done a fantastic job of equipping its newbies with all of the stuff in the first paragraph: skill books and a skill training regimen, pre-fit ships, et cetera. More corps need to be stepping up to bat here.

#2: I would dispute your premise that low- and null-sec can't support a larger population of players. The vast majority of null-sec is entirely empty, and low-sec isn't much better. For those null-sec systems that are occupied, a lot of them are being farmed by tiny groups of players that regard each system as their own personal piggy bank. I think there should be a bit more competition. Further, the majority of null-sec is unimproved space held as buffers by the mega-alliances; their value is low because the alliances choose for their value to be low. GSF is one of the few mega-alliances that does a good job of actually utilizing the space they own. Virtually none of the others do, and there's lots of room for improvement and expansion. Low-sec missions and to a lesser extent low-sec sites and null-sec sites are a very renewable resource and as I've said already on this topic, as player population increases, spawn rates for some of these sites can be adjusted upward to handle the demand.

Heh, I'm dancing? You're the one who got philosophical with that "you're objecting to real life" stuff.

To answer the question, no you don't. No matter how big your fleet is or who/what is in it, you can't do anything to stop a person sitting in a safespot 23/7 cloaked - the game does not give players the tools for this job. You can fleet up with other members of your alliance to prepare for them leaving that safespot, decloaking and attacking or hotdropping, but you can't respond to or defeat the tactic of sitting in a safespot cloaked 23/7 while AFK itself.

My perspective on this is that there are 2 different activities that are being lumped together here due to similarity and crossover. First, there is cloaky camping - using a cloaky ship inserted into an enemy system to find miners or ratters and either attack them with the cloaky ship or use it to cyno in a hotdrop to kill them. The rewards are kills for the cloaky and their friends and hopefully tears in local plus loot from the kill - some null anom runners use very shiny ships. I think this is working fine - it contributes to risk in Nullsec, provides content for the players and it can be countered by smart gameplay and social tactics like hitting anoms in a fleet, fast response home defence etc.

Second, there is AFK cloaking - a cloaky ship inserted into an enemy system that just sits there in local, usually at a safespot in the system. The rewards are primarily psychological; it makes the target alliance/corps feel more vulnerable and less effective and their enemies seem more powerful and in control. I dislike this activity because unlike active camping to drop on players there is no risk to the player doing it - they never need to break their cloak to achieve their goal - and I dislike it because there's no corresponding counter that players can use against it, meaning it can be done in complete safety even while AFK the whole time.

Edit: Having answered your question, allow me to pose one of my own, because you've been evading every time I bring up the lack of risk to the AFK cloaker: As an intruder in an owned and occupied sov Null system, full of players who would like nothing better than to shoot me, should I ever be safe enough to leave my character in space completely unattended for hours on end?

Since a 5M ISK frigate can still easily kill an exhumer in 0.0, a better question might be to ask why this ISK ratio argument should only apply in hisec. Why should hi-sec miners be privileged to require expensive ships to kill them, when lo-sec and 0.0 miners get no such protection.

Lord knows it's not because of the quality of the ore...

I don't think that's what malcanis is referring to when he says "nullsec ore quality". he means that even mining high-ends in null doesn't provide the isk/hour to justify putting that hundred million barge in danger. He means there should be "super veldspar" that refines into like 5 times as much ore or something of the sort, which also helps solve the tritanium problem and having to build large guns to move minerals to null.

See the thing about tanking barges in highsec is that they act like home security systems. You can not make a home robber proof unless you sacrifice the aspects that make your house a home (build a bomb shelter basement with titanium walls, etc). What a home security system does is make it more inconvenient for the robber, so he turns to your neighbor's home instead. There is no way to tank a barge to be ungankable in highsec for it's equal cost in catalysts (unless you are flying the procurer, and the skiff is a maybe), but what a tank really does is make the gankers look for a softer target in the same belt/system, realizing they can cause more damage and tears for their cost.

The best way to fight miner gankers is not to "fight back", or organize a resistance, or worst of all cry on the forums or in local, the best thing to do is fly a skiff.