EVE General Discussion

I have been following various forum threads closely, and some posts almost make me want to go on a ranting spree, but I will try to keep it civilised so there can be more of a discussion. :p

Use of links, sovereignty discussions, how hard it is to 'solo' these days, complaints about getting blobbed, etc, etc.

They are all old complaints about eve that have been raised over and over again, and some are very relevant today (such as null sec sovereignty feedback threads).

I won't go into specifics on each topic, as that would require WoT for each of them, but I'm just talking about the general principle.

I do understand that every player wants to feel that they have a 'chance', albeit small, vs. something bigger. It could be a low-sp character vs. 10 years old vet, it could be a solo player wanting a fighting chance vs. another player with OGB, it could be a small gang vs. blob, it could be a small alliance wanting taste of null sec home, etc, etc.

Yes, for a healthy competition and longevity of the game, it is right that everybody has a varying degree of chance to 'win' in a situation, and don't get stomped all over by someone who has a bigger gang, more SP, more isk, etc, etc.

However, sometimes I feel like some people feel way too entitled. Many people like seeing the underdog achieve something, but we should also appreciate the planning and effort that some players have put in to put themselves in the position of advantage in the first place, and the trade offs they had to make along the way.

As someone who has played in a same small corp that survived 7 years, with the total member size never reaching beyond 40 and sometimes we had been down to 5 members or so, I'm used to being the underdog and appreciate the challenges and difficulties vs. bigger entity. In all parts of our eve activities, whether it's straight out pvp or market pvp or industrial competition, we are used to seeing a bigger corp come along with more ships, deeper pockets, and un-matchable production capacity for us.

But we found our niche, enjoyed our game and still do what we want to do in this game.

The bigger corps made their own choice and trade offs and put in the effort to grow their size to be where they are. The current sov. holders in null went through years of development and countless fights to establish themselves as where they are now.

In PvP, the opposition blob is putting more bodies in space, i.e. putting more at risk and having to deal with more complex task of organising and committing themselves.

Without having the skills or having made the effort that these entities have, I don't feel that I deserve kind of advantage they have.

I made a choice to stick with a small group and we know our boundaries. Of course it is fun to test & push these boundaries, sometimes with very satisfying success and sometimes with lol-fail.

But at the end of the day, despite the amount of times me and my corpies have been stomped by larger entity, eve has always been fair. In hindsight, there was almost always something we could have done differently to get better result out of the situation, maybe not out right 'win', but accomplish something within our limited resources to the degree that we can be satisfied with.

And we came out on top on certain occasions too against all the odd. And it was hugely satisfying. And it is this process of figuring out how to overcome the odds that is the fun part of the game (although we've bullied even weaker corps and players too before, and that too was fun).

I feel that nowadays there are many more tools and options for smaller groups to achieve something and enjoy themselves.

Crius expansion vastly increased production capacity of small industrial corp, Orca boosts that made mining boosts available in hi-sec, the much complained about links actually can be seen as empowering smaller gang to match a larger gang, frigates and cruiser buffs that turned a relatively cheap T1 gangs into a viable force, wormholes that opened up new space free of sov mechanics, incursions that help dedicated PvE players to generate more isk income than ever before, etc, etc, etc.

Yet people are still complaining and saying that small guys have no chance. And yes, I'm complaining that people are complaining. :p

What do you guys think?

After reading your post I'm under the impression you are enjoying yourself.

I'd be so bold to say you're winning

The question might be, if Null can be ruled by 40,000 people, does EVE really need 400K Subs? Or are the other 360K supposed to just run missions and do Incursions forever?

I think you didn't put much thought into this before banging out a mindless wall of text. Here's why:

Links favor larger gangs. If you have five pilots and one is a command ship, 20% of your force is tied up providing warfare boost. A larger opposing gang, say twenty pilots, sacrifices only 5% of their force for links. This should be extremely obvious to you.


Mega-alliances are at risk from only other mega-alliances. There are two of them. On the Chinese Eve server, there is now essentially one mega-alliance and no one else can contest them. That is a bad situation but it's the again obvious result of mechanics that favor blobbing above all else.

Have trouble believing that mega-alliances aren't at risk? PL can afford to jump supers within spitting distance of Rens to participate in gate camps. That is ridiculous, but guess what, they both 1) are very unlikely to lose their fleet; and 2) have so many resources, they literally have nothing better to do with the ships and fuel.


Smaller groups shouldn't be given advantages because they "deserve" them. They should be given advantages (or rather, game mechanics adjusted to remove some advantages that come from mega-blobs) to promote competition and fun game-play for a larger group of customers.


Wormholes are not an alternative to nullsec, by the way. There are no moon products, no ice, no Local, no sov upgrades, no constant stream of profitable rats. The unfortunate thing is, wormholes are also not a great place for smaller groups, post-Hyperion. I suggest you read the Wormhole Forum if you think otherwise.

Without you being specific I don't know what to think other than you seem to be enjoying your small part of the game and you don't enjoy reading GD much.

Generalisation isn't really the best way to start a thread, probably been better off not bothering.

Ok, I will give a specific example. Fleet booster (links)

I will be very specific and talk about my own personal case.

Back when I started eve, I thought it's cool to have high charisma attribute. Because, you know, it's cool to be charismatic, whatever. :p

So I had max attribute for charisma, and remember, back then there was no remap. I was stuck with charisma attribute for years.

I slow-trained other necessary ship skills, and once I had the very basic I invested my training time into Leadership skills, to make full use of my charisma attribute. After a while, I finally achieved max leadership skills.

Not having skills to fly command ships yet, I flew BCs with links although it was unbonused. Because It was something I invested my training time for, and because I thought every little bit helps. Later then I jumped into command ship, and in our small gang I've always been the fleet booster - on-grid, because when you are in 3~5 men gang every DPS helps.

When T3s came out, and my charisma character was cooling off pvp, I still had my character logged on to give boost as an off-grid booster when possible.

The point of this stupid little story of mine is that, every leadership character is an investment of someone. For me, I invested a lot of time on my first and then main toon to train up these skills, and suffered consequence of slow-training for other skills because I was charisma mapped. For others, they invested ISK to buy a ready-made leadership character, and god knows how they earned their isk, but they've earned it, one way or other.

And even when you are fielding an off-grid booster, after the changes to sensor strength and probe mechanic your off-grid booster can be probed down and tackled. If you bounce warp around the system, you are losing links in mean time, rendering your booster character totally useless.

When I have invested this training time and made this sacrifice and bearing this risk, I damn well expect to have an advantage over someone who didn't invest, didn't make sacrifice and is not risking.

So even when I'm 'strictly solo' and come up against what I thought was another solo pilot, but get stomped because of his OGB, I see it as a fair game.

Is that specific enough?

Seeing as this is not a flight sim and thus individual pilot skill pretty much doesn't come into play in fleet fights, what else is there besides numbers as an appropriate primary force multiplier?

Pricetag? **** no thank you.

Nullblobs made a choice to become blobs. Small gang players made a choice to become small gang players. They want to achieve different things at different scales and CCP has a framework to support both. Wanting to achieve the same thing with a blob and small scale warfare is not something you should be asking for, even gevlon goblin crowd-sources a blob to do his bidding because small scale doesn't work for him.

OP, teh ssabat finds himself in agreement with you. +1

That said, I do often wish there were more opportunities for solo PVP. There's nothing like testing your fit and tactics against someone who's gunning solely for you. Just you, your fit, your idea of the tactics to use with that fit, and the perfect "feedback by fire" that lets you know what needs to changed. Lately I've taken to dueling alliance mates, but last time I didnt pull my drones off in time and I actually killed his Ashimmu.

\m/ O.o \m/

Yes and no.

Whilst players do have to shoulder some responsibility, so do CCP but more so.

Sov Mechanics dedicate that you need Capital ships to destroy structures in a reasonable amount of time.

You would know this if you have ever gone on a structure shoot with just subcaps... damn its painful to say the least. Its bad enough when using Capitals.

The only real counter to Capitals is more Capitals so on and so forth and over time you end up where we are today.

I am pretty sure it was CCP Soundwave who admitted that Capitals were a big mistake, perhaps the biggest mistake CCP ever made but the genie is out of the bottle so to speak.

You have to remember that CCP have only ever nerfed Capital Ships, there are no were near as powerful as they used to be but I don't think they can nerf them any more otherwise they will face the very real risk of losing thousand of subscriptions.