Live Events Discussion

I recommend that Pilots with high standings to certain corporations get access to better services. Corporations with a good Lai-Dai standing could perhaps be offered rent free offices in all Lai-Dai stations, pilots with good standings get access to free repairs or other 'small things' like that that make it feel like it's worth it beyond being able to instal a jump clone.

I want the exact opposite of what the OP is asking for. I loathe NPC-centered game play and sincerely hope it will be pushed to the sidelines more and more in favour of player generated and player controlled content. FW itself and other NPC-centered content are a mistake as they encourage players to define themselves trough their relationship to soulless NPC:s and service to NPC-controlled empires.

Down with the NPC! Up with the Capsuleer! Death to the cloneless mortals!

Lore is well and good, but a game having good lore does not mean we have to keep NPC:s in story-defining roles.

tl;dr: GRR NPC

Seekers shooting back at capsuleers in highsec ...
... following them through warp ...
... even podding them.

Empire my ass, let's kill them all!


If you want them to change the global storyline ...
... you better come up with some player generated content in highsec.

Facts of the matter are that the vast majority of citizens of highsec ...
... are exactly the same sheep as they are IRL.

So it's no wonder CCP believes what it believes.

What you want is irrelevant if all you have is words.

There's a massive gameplay issue here. If you make the perfectly safe hisec have good rewards, there will be a moment where people will not compete for nullsec resources because having an NPC corp alt in hisec doing something that gives out a lot of rewards with minimal risk involved.

Less reasons to compete means less conflict, less conflicts means less content.

If there's any 'empire' driven stuff, it should focus on, as was said already, loyalist players. Not, in any way, NPCs. No "might of the NPC empire fleets" - most things that involve fighting NPCs are soul-crushingly boring until other players show up to spice things up. If you want to estabilish loyalists as a worthy playstyle, you need to look at all loyalists - not just pro-empire ones. Pirate loyalists should get a good and profitable shot at fighting empires in their regions... and for the love of all that is holy, make it not be some sort of button-orbiting mechanic for a cookie. Do you want warp stabbed cloakies? Because this is how you get warp stabbed cloakies.

That said, +1 from someone who would love to oppose the empires - lore that reflects the impact of everyone's actions would be awesome. Make the thunder of our autocannons heard! Tear down the estabilished, pave the way for the new! Break the chains, and make the new age dawn with fire and blood!

(No seriously, the "Empire research facilities" event with CONCORD/Empires etc. ended up with a failure of the empire forces. It was a big strategic failure according to the news, and an absolute slaughter. Where's the distrust over it? Where's the shaming-and-blaming?)

That sounds like people would like to be hand-held into a winning scenario.

"If the players are incapable of defeating the evil blob, consider deploying additional NPCs to shift the tide of battle. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to suggest to the players that they should take the matters in their own hands".

"The Empires" might. Or those assets may be tied in the pendulum war. Or whatever excuse fits into ensuring as much as possible relies on the players, not on NPCs railroading them to a result you predicted.

EDIT: There is a thin red line here. If you railroad the events too much into an expected outcome, many people will stop attending them - it will basically become "Hey come watch NPCs kick ass while not feeling like you are making a difference".

There were things they did wrong during that live event. Communication was one of them, underestimating congestion/TiDi another. But the players did a few things wrong themselves - they waltzed into a hostile territory without preparation. Forming a fleet, having at least a target caller and a semi-decent fleet composition will tremendously increase your chances of survival.

I'm not even talking super-awesome doctrine where you have a perfect balance of ships and everyone knows their stuff - get ships with roughly the same engagement range, decide on tank - shield/armour, get some logistics even if they're T1 and done, you have a fleet.

You don't even really need a tight-knit group of people who know each other to pull this off. A good cat herder of an FC will get you rolling - you already have an objective.

From an IC/RP standpoint, the fleet basically walked into the wrong neighbourhood thinking they own the place because they had the empires authorizing them to do that. It shows that the reach of the empires (spanning quite a large area, actually) is finite and if they want to succeed out there they need to prepare better.

Let's look at the balance of power during the Serpentis part of the event:

On the Empire side we have "One HIC" plus whatever players form up to help them. They know their staging point ahead of time, allowing them to form up and get into proper ships. If they were in gangs already, and some were, they easily had the time to sort out their ships and fittings before it's a go.

The pirate side is more numerous, and by that I mean there were something like ten Vindicators - shield tanked and without carrier support. Hell, no logi support whatsoever. Players that supported the pirates didn't get preptime, some of them dropped into the wrong system due to lack of information and their fleets had to burn.

What would happen if we weren't there? The brave empire fleet would've melted the pirates just by the virtue of raw numbers. Even without the "Lore appropriate amount of live event actors/ships" it was already rigged in the Empire's favour. If you rig it even further to go in either direction, it's basically Luminaire Titan event - predetermined outcome, player interference does not matter.

I think what they tried to do here is emulate the "no NPCs needed" feel of nullsec fights - you don't need a horde of NPCs to act as the empire fleet, you are the empire fleet. By the looks the Devs didn't really even FC... even if they did, neither stayed on the field long enough to make a difference. Aurora implants or not, I do believe the Minmatar FC got podded just as we landed on grid and made short work of the Gallente one.

It would actually be fun to see the reflection of those events in the lore though, beyond just a news snippet. First step towards a conflict between CONCORD and the Empires, with the latter seriously considering withdrawing their support and the former hell-bent on maintaining control, perhaps? Or maybe mutual blame-shifting that ends up with the current pendulum war becoming a four-way?

Perhaps even veil that as a prelude to the new sov system, with CONCORD acknowledging that the rising empires of the Outer Regions are slowly becoming a threat. Let's not forget that this isn't the only time those people crossed the suits-of-seriousness. While events such as Burn Jita were never reflected in the lore, because reasons - they still very much happened.

Or maybe they are. Maybe they're a paper tiger that couldn't spare any more backup, so they put faith in their capsuleers. Maybe they were simply overconfident in their ability.

The events aren't perfect - the hisec titan kill had issues with traffic too, resulting in some people being simply unable to participate. Should that be crossed out too, basing on the opinion of those who couldn't get in? (Then again, that event had only one outcome so it's not like they could've done much). On a side-note, I do believe it was even mentioned that all systems along the travel path of the empire fleets were reinforced ahead of time. Reinforcing however, does not stop TiDi - it merely helps mitigate it.

It's a sandbox - can't just strike out something that happened as "oh it didn't happen" while it clearly did just happen. The lore isn't just a story or two cherry-picked out of everything that happens in New Eden - it is, in fact, everything that happens there. Our adventures and mishaps, stupid mistakes and brilliant moments are the lore.

While a single event like this might not shake things up to the scale of empires actually changing, seeing their reaction to it would solidify the feeling of "Oh yeah, we made history today!". At the moment their reaction is 'meh, well, we didn't want this station kill anyway' (although, to be frank, the reaction IS genuine if you think about it. It is, after all, the staple answer to welping a strategic operation.)

It still happened. Just like every disaster out there.

I think the key is less that we need *strong* empires and more that we need *active* and *thinking* empires.

One of the problems with the live events of a the last couple years is that they were come one come all marketing fests.

This caused several issues. If we are looking at the event "realistically":
1. Why would the empires send out open calls and blow all security on a mission? Presumably the more effective way to take out those sites would be to put together a strike force of Empire aligned groups and do it quietly. But that doesn't work for a big marketing event and is not "fair."
2. Why would they allow people who were clearly hostile to the empires into their fleets?
3. Why would they put an FC in charge who was unable to even call targets when the fleet got in trouble? Speculation at the time was that CCP dev actors didn't want to be seen calling targets against a player fleet that wasn't at the event site. I don't know if this was true, precisely, but the feeling that CCP is scared to let their NPC characters actually do anything is a pretty overpowering one.

I think the key is to redefine the roles of the event actors and actually give them powers. The event actors should be able to change player standings with their empire. They should be able to actively hire players to accomplish goals. They should have goals at all. One of my favorite ideas is to give the NPC characters budgets and objectives, and then let them accomplish those however they wish.

The Empires should be actively cultivating favorites among the 0.0 factions. They should reward player factions that help them and punish factions that act against them. They should be a part of the world. If you shoot an Amarr event actor, you should get massive negative standings with Amarr. Ect.

The trick is that it would all have to be transparent out of character. There would have to be out of character mechanisms to make sure that it didn't become an insider only game. There would have to be Out of character rules as to what gives an event actor the right to act. But this is all doable! And the result would be a universe where the empires actually felt like they were part of the story.

The Empires can/should still lose, they can/should weaken over time. The narrative doesn't have to go their way. But they shouldn't feel like they are totally moribund and inactive.

When it comes to running live events more frequently, there's a certain big issue - and that's finding the people to do it.

If they're ran by devs, you need to pay them. Are live events good enough to justify the cost of a programmer's day at work, where you could put him towards actually coding features?

There's no shortage of things to be done, and the devs likely have their hands full - likely some are committed to long-running features that replace parts of the legacy code. As much of a joke as it is, legacy code is an absolutely horrible thing to work on. You are talking about redesigning a system rooted into the core game, with a number of systems largely dependent on it. The programmer responsible for making it has long since left company, and if you're very very lucky you have bit and pieces of documentation left over.

One such thing is the corporation system - it was left untouched for years. What's worse more features were just tacked on to it. Now the team unlucky enough to have it on their board has to not only rewrite it and redesign it without harming systems that depend on it, but also improve it - as currently corporation management is something really bad.

Something similar will likely await them at each step of polishing the core gameplay experience - such as tackling towers (even sov, even though it's a bit of a more recent system. A bit).

Of course, there's an answer to that - volunteer programs such as ISD. Volunteer programs though have a tendency to backfire and have already done so with the fiasco of Aurora.

Now to the question of "are the empires better" well...

...Nullsec is, contrary to popular belief much less of a wasteland than it looks. Its systems are rich with high-end ores, and moons have materials necessary for hi-tech production. Expansions like Crius actually focused on the slow rise of 0.0 as an industrial powerhouse.

It is, contrary to the myth of the blob, also a host to a variety of playstyles. Being an industrialist is not impossible - in fact, done right can be quite profitable. The only playstyle not really supported is being a total and utter carebar, as danger is ever-present and even an industry person needs to pick up a pitchfork and help others defend once in a while.

It's also worth noting that EVE is not a utopian sci-fi world. It's quite the opposite. The empires aren't made out of gleaming spires, and safe space - the reality of corporate life in Caldari space is very much dystopian (You're fired? You're done. Your life is done.) and the Minmatar Republic was described as "Corrupt and borderline third world" with the living conditions of an average Matari not being much better than they were during times of slavery.

One way is to see CONCORD as those who provide safety to the citizens of the empires. Another is to see an Orwellian monster, exerting control through technology and constant surveillance.