EVE General Discussion

Then I will simply bow out of this discussion and you can all talk amongst yourselves about this. After all, yours is the only opinion that matters and everyone else, including the developer of the game, is wrong.

and here was me thinking the 'infinite wisdom' bit was irony

With this I'm not sure I've been reading the same forums over the last 3 years that others have.

I don't think the Jedi mind trick works on humans.

Yessum ... especially if you have SC at V and are doing a 0.5 agent. Even more so if its a SOE mission because the ISK/LP ratio is better.

SOE 0.5 security agents with security connections at V will pay just under 10K LP per mission which translates to 20-30 million ISK per mission from LP. You make way more by blitzing them.

There are people like some friends of mine who roam through losec picking fights with anyone that wants to take them on and doing crazy nonsense like fitting 5 warp stabs to a cruiser and wandering through null stirring up the locals. Then there are professional suicide gankers who make a lot of ISK from taking out shiney mission/incursion boats and freighters. Then there are the people that are too gutless to leave hisec but want to believe they are "leet PvPers" so they gank small stuff and if they get bored enough will gank anything :D

Oddly its the last lot that are the most dangerous.

One of the fun things about EVE is that even if you have been away from playing for a year or year and a half or what have you, when you come back, there is always this thread to welcome you ... (not this specific one, of course, but a virtual replica of it).

This argument is old as the game. Since the very beginning in 2003/2004, people were complaining about risk/reward empire v. null. I think it's fairly obvious from all of the changes that the game has undergone in the last ten years that CCP does not look at this strictly, or even primarily, through that lens. Rather, it seems to focus on providing different kinds of playstyles to suit different kinds of players.

In other words, some players prefer very high risk situations -- regardless of the rewards. Other players will take risks if the rewards are commensurate in their eyes with the risk. Still other players are very risk-averse and will avoid risk no matter what the reward is of taking the risk in question. These are different kinds of players, and players who feel rewarded in terms of gameplay very differently.

In these discussions it has always struck me that the second type of player -- the risk/reward type who specifically designs their gameplay around calculated risks -- is the primary driver of this complaint. There are many other players who just f.lat-out enjoy risk and find Empire boring, while there are others who hate risk and couldn't be dragged into low or null even if gating gave them a billion ISK instantly. It's the risk/reward player, though, who feels "forced" to go to Empire to do the "most efficient ISK/hr" to support their null sec PvP play that is the most disaffected by the fundamental game design.

The design has its merits. Historically speaking, the "frontier" is generally always a place that may be rich in resources (and null is), but which is also more hardscrabble and lawless (which null also is). The frontier is pretty much never a core center of actual industrial manufacturing activity because of its relative remoteness to population centers, and relative lawlessness -- it's primarily a place for resources. Those resources are brought back to "civilization" and then manufactured into goods which are sold in the main world markets -- which are also never in the lawless frontier. EVE was initially designed with this in mind. Null for resources and sovereignty in a lawless environment, Empire for markets and manufacturing, using resources taken from null. Of course, this design does imply a system of distribution of the resources, as well as some commuting, or the use of alts, to realize the value in Empire (by sale or by using them to manufacture goods for sale at high prices and nice margins). And this implies player cooperation -- I think the initial idea was that player corps would include empire and null "arms", which would be cooperating with each other in this overall scheme of null for resources and Empire for markets and industry.

Things got derailed as more features came into the game. These were introduced to provide a broader scope of different kinds of gameplay, but the design started to get away from the null for resources Empire for markets/industry model. The introduction of these kinds of play, with the ISK that they brought (particularly the expansion of the missions system, initially, and then exploration later on), skewed things away from the original model. Now these kinds of play were introduced precisely because a lot of players, from the very beginning, loathed mining, hauling, distribution, industry and market play -- the initial core "backbone" of the game around which the PvP was to take place. So CCP introduced more forms of non-PvP gameplay that players were more interested in doing to earn ISK (PvP was always intended as an ISK sink, not an ISK source in any meaningful way, even taking into account fairly well organized piracy) to support their PvPing. The missions tended to be skewed towards Empire, while exploration was more evenly distributed later on. This created a bit of an imbalance, because the risk/reward players felt "compelled" to run missions in Empire for purposes of efficiency, and disliked this due to the commuting -- some players got around this by using multiple accounts with one alt as the ISK maker in Empire and the other as the nullsec PvPer (and people did this for industry, trade and other Empire-type things as well, not just mission running -- it's just that more players seem to be able to tolerate and/or are interested in shooting stuff for their PvE than they are in industry or trade).

As a result what we are left with is a situation where Empire has more ISK-generating activity (largely due to the missions and their popularity as an ISK source) relative to null than it did under the initial design of Empire for markets/industry and null for resources. This could be alleviated somewhat by placing the more lucrative missions in low sec (which is by far the most underutilized space in the game), and even some in null sec, while leaving the rest of Empire alone (i.e., leave industry, trade, markets where they are), because it seems that the mission system is the main source of the imbalance. Perhaps some similar tweaks could be made to exploration in Empire as well.

I see this more as a tweak than a nerf, though. The fundamental design of the game with null as the risky frontier with resources, sov and wars over resources, and not very much else is not something that needs to be ditched. What would make sense is for the additional elements that came in after the core design -- missions in particular, incursions, exploration -- to be tweaked a bit to address the issues of the risk/reward type of player. Done intelligently, this could also serve to invigorate lowsec a bit, although I'm not holding my breath on that one.

I don't even know where to begin with this post, it's like a train derailed.

I agree.

Their should be a new mobile structure that when deployed in highsec would disable concord in a 30km-50km range (1 hour duration, very expensive isk cost and couldn't be deployed near stations, gates, etc).