Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Most PVE occurred in belts. ISK/hour was low. That was hours I had to be in space, providing potential content for others. I had a reason to be in game for hours outside of fleets. Hours of work and effort could explode in seconds. Eve had consequences

When the emergent gameplay detracts from the core of the Eve experience, which includes the idea that losses mean something, then it is incumbent upon CCP to do something about it. The game is boring right now. That is killing Eve. Perhaps I would feel differently if the large coalitions were generating regular content, but moons and renter space have failed as content drivers.

Ship Replacement Programs (SRP) are bad for Eve. The alliance and coalition income sources that support them need to go away. In conjunction with hitting the supply side of alliance income, it should become more expensive to hold sovereignty.

I know this will produce a howl of outrage, but please, hear me out. Eve is a game about immersion and consequences. SRP detracts from both. When I first began playing Eve, over seven years ago, there was no SRP. I had to invest hours of gameplay to get ISK to purchase my ships. Most PVE occurred in belts. ISK/hour was low. That was hours I had to be in space, providing potential content for others. I had a reason to be in game for hours outside of fleets. Hours of work and effort could explode in seconds. Eve had consequences. Eve was thrilling. My hands literally shook when I warped a battleship into a brawl. The adrenalin was intoxicating and addictive. One night my alliance leader warped his Aeon to a gate against 200 hostiles. Then disconnected. I lost five battleships that night. My alliance lost several carriers saving his dumb ass. There was no SRP for that fight. I was financially devastated. It remains the most fun I have ever had in Eve.

Today, things are very different. The two major coalitions have ample moon and renter incomes to support huge areas of sovereignty and massive SRP programs. Even the Goons, who were regarded as low SP morons in Rifters seven years ago, provide alliance level subsidies for capital ship pilots. Every capable alliance has some passive income source they can trickle down to the members.

The result is that many people no longer have to play Eve. They play another game and wait for a Jabber ping, or log in once a night to see if anything is going on. Nothing ever is, because no one in null sec has a reason to play the game! Major null sec warfare is dead, because of self-imposed restrictions and the fact that grinding sovereignty sucks. Small gangs can roam for hours while finding mostly empty belts because very few people have to rat or mine. So, the small gangs stop going out and are replaced with an AFK cyno alt sitting in a ratting system just on the off chance that some poor bastard logs in to grind up a PLEX, because the game is not exciting enough to be worth $15/month. The dude controlling the alt is asleep, playing another game, or running incursions in highsec to PLEX his AFK alt. Grinding for PLEX or to get a Supercapital is the only reason most people rat or mine in null sec. Or because they are being farmed like a space peasant by a coalition.

Once I get enough ISK for a T1 cruiser, I can go join fleets and keep replacing it pretty much indefinitely just off SRP. Losing it is meaningless. Eve has gone from being a game with consequences to being more like a first person shooter with nearly instant respawn. This makes Eve a less exciting and less immersive game.

My solution: Get rid of moon mining completely. Replace it with new mining sites where people can obtain those raw materials. This puts people in space, which provides content for more than the occasional moon POS bash. It cuts out one pillar of coalition income. Players now attack players instead of structures.

That is only half the issue. In this era, most alliance income comes from renters. Most sovereignty is held by holding corporations. Make sovereignty a corporation rather than alliance thing. Limit the amount of sovereignty systems one corporation can hold. Or scale the costs dramatically above a certain threshold. Or both. Make it so that you must control the entire constellation to hold any sovereignty. One corp holding one constellation? No issues. One corp holding two constellations? More expensive or not allowed. Of course coalitions will adapt by adding more holding corporations, but one goal is to increase the hassle for the largest sovereignty holders while having a minimal impact on little guys. More holding corporations is more chances for fraud or forgotten sovereignty bills.

Coincidentally, if done properly this would also greatly affect jump bridge networks, which is part of the issue with force projection. Want to have a jump bridge network that spans Eve? Must have sovereignty in many constellations, which means greater fees for sov. Then make jump bridges only work for corp members, not based on standings. Now, if you want the jump bridge network, you cannot have a bunch of little holding corps controlling all the space.

This would not solve every issue with Eve, but it would be a step in the right direction.

This is a really well-reasoned post. You are correct that most people are essentially selfish cowards who have to be coaxed or coerced into taking action or accepting risk on behalf of a larger group. We see this in our society today, where despite the fact that the U.S. has been at war for nearly 13 years, less than 1% of the population has served. Within that 1% an even smaller percentage has been in actual combat. Those of us who have been there, however, know that it can be an exciting, terrifying, addicting feeling. There is nothing like the thrill of working alongside your brothers and putting your lives on the line, particularly if you believe in a cause. My Marines get so addicted to that feeling that many of them want to go back to horrible places like Afghanistan or Iraq. Others seek to mimic that feeling by riding motorcycles 120mph on I-5 or doing lines of coke off a hooker's ass.

To me, Eve has the potential to mimic that feeling. Eve can be about working alongside your brothers, putting your virtual assets and lives on the line, to achieve a common goal or further a cause you believe in. Will that work for everyone? Of course not. Some just want to blow **** up and cause mayhem. That's fine too, but how much mayhem are you really causing if you are not actually destroying anything? If you get your thrills from kicking over another kid's sand castle, how much would you like it if every time you did it, they instantly had a new sand castle? Eve needs valuable items at risk to appeal to the psychopaths just as much as it does to appeal to the empire builders, industrialists, explorers, and everyone else who make up Eve.

You brought up gambling, which I think is very appropriate. So, certainly that 1% of Americans who volunteered for our military represent people who are willing to make the ultimate gamble. Without getting into politics, more Americans might have been willing to make that gamble if they believed in the narrative (as in WW II). Believing in the narrative is important - we have seen how events such as the T20 scandal provided a rallying cry for the anti-BOB forces (whether it was the equivalent of "Remember the Maine!" or "Remember Pearl Harbor" depends on your perspective). Or consider the spark that Mittani's scandal at Fanfest had, for both sides.

So, one thing we could do to improve Eve is to improve the narrative. Give people a reason to care about what happens in Eve. Give them an other to hate. Both CFC and the grrr Goons crowd have been decent at this historically, but the Botlord agreement has killed that narrative. It made sense for me to hate the elitist cheaters in BOB seven years ago, just as it made sense for the other side to hate the immature emotional terrorist scammers from the Something Awful forums.

Today, the narrative has broken down, because the coalitions are basically the same. Both sides have vast wealth from moons and renters. Both sides have vast capital and supercapital fleets. Both sides AFK-cloak in each other's systems. Both sides suicide gank in highsec. Both sides practice warfare by seeking to crush the morale of the opposing side, whether by covert attacks on C2 systems, director-level spies, blue-balling, hell-camping, etc.

Eve in the current iteration is Animal Farm at the end of the book...

So, in the absence of narrative, we are left purely with gambling and cool explosions.

The loss of internet space pixels will never match the emotions from putting your life on the line for your brothers, but it does essentially require you to place a sizable bet. Why do people go to Las Vegas? Some go from the naive belief that they may strike it rich. Most, however, go to be entertained. Putting money on the table, whether it is a bet on the outcome of a game (Las Vegas's largest revenue stream is sports gambling), hoping to make black jack, or throwing dice, is exciting. Las Vegas doesn't really have a narrative, but it does have thrills for all your senses.

Eve is a game. Games are supposed to be entertaining. We are entertained by thrilling events. Putting our lives or our money at risk is thrilling.

SRP takes the thrill away from the game, especially when the ISK behind it is produced passively. That ISK represents a value only that other people are willing to attach to it - it does not represent hours of labor or any investment of time. So what value do people place on ISK? A lot less than they used to...

One could look at the current PLEX price and see that Eve is much less exciting now than it was a few years ago. People are no longer willing to invest real time and money in Eve. Where is the Russian tycoon who spent $100,000 on Eve? A few years ago $20 bought you only 250m ISK. Today, it buys you 750m ISK. Yes, it is it easier to make ISK today, but the number of people who are willing to convert real dollars into ISK to get enjoyment out of Eve is much lower than the number of people who are only willing to maintain Eve accounts as long as it does not cost them real money.

Eve needs a new narrative and it needs to give value to ISK again. Cutting out the passive income gain will help with the second part. It is also one step on the path to opening up space to the have nots of Eve, thereby enabling new narratives to begin.

As I said, it is not the whole solution, but it is part of it.

So, you see only the top part of an iceberg. Didn't you have a thought that such state of affairs has little to do with SRP policies, but much more with the fact, that PvE content in Eve is boring, stupid shite (devs forgive me), aside from very few examples, like incursions (and still they are so simple, that multiboxing fleet with isboxer can do some of them - enough said)? That approach "Simplistic PvE is fine, just wait for some PvPer to entertain your with combat probes and hotdrops" just doesn't work so well? Those people readily accept easy isk from SRP because making their own with PvE is a toruture for many, many hours. There is zero fun in locking red crosses for hours, while switching your mods on and off, and zero challenge. I remember clearly the times you are speaking of - nothing to thrill about, most of the time this was horribly boring as today. But today you at least can get a ship for CTA for free, and stay away from PvE horrors most of the time.

Losses do mean something. Each replacement ship has to come from somewhere. Some miner mines the minerals for it, some industrialist builds it, and some hauler moves it from a trade hub out to null. The more ships get lost (and thus replaced), the busier these people are. I hardly see that as killing the game. If anything, it's keeping the logistics side, and the market, very active.

Everything that I mentioned above costs the group running the SRP either ISK or time. If they are replacing a large number of ships, they have either a large amount of ISK or a large amount of time. Those losses subtract from the corp wallets, either directly or in lost opportunity costs. Is it their fault that they happen to have so much ISK or time that they want to willingly replace ships lost fighting to achieve one of their goals?

I do feel that SOV mechanics are horrible and need a total overhaul, but the flow of ISK from corps to the market back to ships for their pilots is not part of the problem.

Who are these mythical small alliances in Eve who would be crippled by removing passive moon income? Who are these small alliances in Eve who would be crippled if it was harder to hold sovereignty in multiple regions? This is a lie concocted to preserve the existing failed meta.