EVE General Discussion

Our GLORIOUS welfare land, where you can enjoy the fruits of NPC-provided services and even protection.

hard to compare the two, since "risk" is actually a quantity outside of highsec

O ho ho. You make it sound like we've managed to squeeze that last bit of risk out of highsec.

Not yet.

Im not opposed to such a change so long as it comes right after the SOV change.

so basically you mean that nullsec needs to be changed, and in order to facilitate this highsec might need to be rebalanced too

it's pretty much the exact same thing that we're saying, welcome aboard

Gentlemen, it's obvious that the solution is just to make highsec less absurdly safe.

I'm going to ignore your later follow-up of calling nullsec sov "welfare gameplay" for the time being, because if the responses you've received do nothing to change your perception I don't think you can be reached.

EDIT: the TLDR is "No, we're not blaming highsec except that sometimes the economics and risk vs. reward aspect of the game require tweaking so that an activity is worth doing in nullsec and not just in highsec." If that's not enough for you, have this whale of a post to wear out your eyes on!

There have been very few suggested direct nerfs to highsec save for people getting angry and getting into troll territory.

For sov changes which involve bottom-up income being generated to keep alliance ship replacement programs and sov bills in place while making way for moon mining to be nerfed or changed...

There is the issue that:

1. With NPC (not just highsec) outposts, anything greater than say, a 2% refinery tax makes it more profitable for someone to compress their minerals and jump freight them to a NPC outpost to refine for free. So unless we want to force people to refine in our stations and invasively track their mining to ensure they don't cheat (ironically becoming the "slave drivers" that some percentage of highseccers call us) game mechanics need to change.

One way is making NPC outposts refine less is a simple solution that unfortunately involves nerfing NPC outposts, and highsec by extension. You can't just buff null refine rates because highsecs are already at 100% and exceeding that for nullsec outposts is bad for a lot of reasons.

A way that uses more development time is inventing some sort of automatic mining tax that is applied while you mine in sov space. Has some potential for abuse and needs to be implemented carefully, but as a pro doesn't directly nerf highsec.

2. Nullsec industry is currently a lot more tedious than highsec, and since highsec logistics is safe and can be done AFK as long as you know how to doublewrap freighters and use an NPC corp alt. There are even more issues (such as mineral availability and the fact that all the nullsec outposts in an entire region can't match a single highsec industrial hub system's stations), but the conclusion we've come is that the only way to address this difference is by making the nullsec facilities more efficient, as well as how an alliance can make bottom-up income from said facilities when their competition in highsec are charging close to nothing.

Since you can't get cheaper than essentially free and since Eve needs more ISK sinks, increasing the costs of NPC station slot usage is another nerf to highsec. If coupled with a PoS revamp and these PoS became the preferred way to build things, it would be less a nerf than a change of gameplay, since both null and high would be using PoS and on generally equal footing.

3. There's also the not very often mentioned anymore argument of "nerf L4s to fix risk/reward" which was in response to the then newly-made dominion anomalies in 0.0 being heavily nerfed to prevent inflation. Watching as the numbers of ratters in 0.0 sharply declined as they left for greener pastures, people asked for L4 and incursion nerfs to be put in place since obviously ratter income couldn't be buffed to bring a return to that state. Recently there's been a slight anom buff that has changed things, it hasn't been entirely successful but it seems at this state that further buffs will just have to involve increasing the loot dropped since everyone seems happy with L4s and incursions and buffing the bounties will increase inflation drastically. I dunno, null anomalies seem pretty okay in the grand scheme of things compared to industry and sov mechanics in my opinion.


NOTE: If you (yes, you) are about to respond to one of these points with a criticism of one of the specifics (how-tos) of the changes above, please don't, not because it's necessarily an illegitimate criticism but because I intentionally didn't discuss all the issues and implications of them in order to make this ever so slightly more readable (which isn't saying much, unfortunately). Go to the de facto null industry change thread or perhaps even go to themittani.com and read some of weaselior and mynnna's articles on sov and industry. If you still have a legitimate criticism then maybe post in the thread linked above or the comments section of one of those articles.

If you are going to criticize the reasons why the changes were suggested, well, I guess go ahead, but if you don't understand where I'm coming from you're not going to be very effective and will probably look very dumb, so you still might want to read more until you get that, and then constructively point out where you disagree and why. Completely unsupported accusations of bias will be especially hilarious.

Zergs: Same ole problem, in every single mmo that makes it possible.

Let the nullbears cry till their pointless little empire breaks up from the inside. If they cared for anything besides their passive ISK/hour they'd break up their blue crapcake into a thousand pieces themselves.

The problem isn't SOV or Highsec, the problem is the Zerg and the F1 monkeys that participate. In the meanwhile, I'm looking forward to the Wargames. 10% TiDi in meaningless fights should be sooo exciting for everyone participating.

we don't give a flying **** what's "good for the game" in our politics; our continued existence takes priority over all else

nullsec isn't a spectator sport, if you want a war, shut off your ice mining bot and actually make some effort to form a group to fight us

otherwise, stop moaning

That wouldn't make a difference really as everything on the market would just increase by at least that much if not more to make up the difference. I'd also wager that you would see a large number of subscriptions lapse.