EVE General Discussion

Soon, though, the dark side of the character of the post-Asakai generation began to show. When their leaders were contacted by the New Order of Highsec to welcome them to our game and make arrangements for their mining permits, they scoffed and refused outright. BNI initially seemed baffled by the New Order, but soon their prevailing collective opinion of the legitimate and democratically elected government of highsec became negative, even accusatory. James 315, of course, anticipated this and took a dim view of the Brave Newbies from the beginning, but many of his followers (including myself) were more naive and made efforts to reach out to them in friendship. Legendary "griefer" Psychotic Monk joined the Newbies and made efforts to help them find their place in the EVE community, but vocal elements opposed his right to even be in their corp. Other infamous AWOXers tried to join and help them, but were rejected. BNI had abandoned their philosophy of "all are welcome," and changed it to "all who share our weird values are welcome". It became clear that as the BNI generation grew up, they were becoming aware that other people also played this game - people who cared nothing for the giant fleet battles that they had come here from WoW for, people who had other interests altogether, and had started playing when CCP was advertising things like AWOXing and corp thefts to lure new players to the game. And the BNI kids did not like or approve of this. Not one bit.

Soon forum posts began popping up in which prominent BNI members condemned time-honored EVE play styles like wardeccing, ganking, and corp infiltration. At one time these things were advertised features of the game. Remember "EVE Online - Where your dreams can be someone else's nightmares..."? Remember "HTFU?" But the children of Asakai did not transfer over from WoW for these things. They came to fight battles in nullsec, and nothing else. Any aspect of the game which did not appear to lead to that end was perceived as flawed mechanics or senseless griefing.

Matias Otero and several other BNI candidates ran for CSM9 largely on an anti-wardec platform. They wanted to nerf this great playstyle into the ground, simply because it wasn't their own and had inconvenienced them at one time or other. During the campaign I confronted Matias (my old friend) about this. "What happened to your 'come at me bro' attitude?" I asked him,"What happened to accepting EVE as it is and going at it with courage and style?" He replied to me with a sad story of how wardeccers drove BNI out of highsec with their relentless griefing. It was a revisionist fabrication - BNI left highsec because their sights were always on low and null, not because of anything anyone did to them. Matias had fallen - he had begun to believe the poisonous narrative of his generation.

The atmosphere of Brave Newbies Inc has only gotten worse since then. Two weeks ago, a normal and happy thread popped up on reddit. A corp thief had robbed a highsec mining corp to the tune of 20 billion isk by posing as a jump freighter pilot and had come to brag about it. A great EVE story - one that any true EVE player would congratulate. The top comment on that thread, with over 800 upvotes, declared hatred of the OP and said in no uncertain terms that anyone who would deceive another player to scam them of their isk was a sociopath and a terrible person in the real world. There were rumors, which I believe, that the leadership of BNI had treated upvoting that comment (which any sensible person would regard as pure crackpottery) as a CTA. It was an organized effort to disparage a playstyle that did not fit into the narrative of EVE as a game of pure nullsec fleet battles.

But is BNI the sole problem with EVE's community? No. Brave Newbies Inc is the softball-sized malignant tumor lodged in the brain of EVE Online, but sadly the cancer is well advanced and has spread throughout the body of this game's community. The disease that threatens the game we love, gentlemen, is the entire generation of players who started this game since the battle of Asakai.

The generation of entitlement

People who know me know that my newbro-friendliness credentials are absolutely impeccable. I got my start in EVE University, where I stayed for roughly my first year. I created the Solitude Rifter Team there, and thereby helped a lot of brand new players to get their first taste of small gang PvP. I was a founding member of their Nullsec Campus in Syndicate, and it's first resident FC. After the Uni I started a successful new-player oriented pirate corporation. I've posted hundreds of times here in NCQA, and I've published highly regarded guides for newbros to get started in pirate career paths. There is only a very short list of pilots in this game who can honestly say that they have done more to help new players than I have.

But in spite of all my efforts, I have failed to save the children of Asakai from themselves. Part of it is their own fault. They came to EVE for the wrong reasons. They took no interest in the history and culture of this game. They came from other games which pampered them and offered risk free Disneyland-style content. Part of it is our fault. We should have destroyed them when they were still weak. We should never have allowed them to infest our game without submitting to it's true nature. We were all just so excited to have a lot of new faces around and foolishly thought we could influence them to our own playstyles by being nice. We were wrong.

continued below...

Treating EVE's cancer

Cancer is generally treated, in this age of modern medicine, by some combination of radiation treatments, chemotherapy, and surgery. Unfortunately, the cancer in our community can not be cured by such straightforward methods. And yet, they offer us some compelling metaphors.

We can perform surgery to physically remove tumors. Likewise we can operate on our corporations and alliances by kicking out any members who belong to the post-Asakai generation and refuse to swear the Oaths, unless they have proven their benign nature by demonstrating a commitment to HTFU through unmistakable actions.

Chemotherapy poisons cancerous cells with toxic chemicals. We can poison the cells of our enemies by infiltrating their corporations - particularly Brave Newbies Inc and the members of the HERO coalition - and attacking them from within. Once in we can steal their stuff, or go on wanton killing sprees, or discover their valuable assets and vulnerable operations and hotdrop our friends on them.

I can't think of a great metaphor for radiation therapy right now. But anyway, we should all just make a point of attacking and destroying all the new players we can find and then trying to get them to either swear the Oaths or quit the game. This may seem harsh, but make no mistake - they are here to destroy us and all we stand for. It's kill or be killed. Only through fire and imaginary spaceship blood can we save the game that we have given years of our lives to. If you can't kill them, then scam them or steal their assets. It is your duty as a good citizen of EVE. History has shown that we cannot count on CCP to preserve our sandbox - we must shoulder that responsibility ourselves.

It is sad the direction that EVE has gone in its development over the last few years, and nobody can deny that we have lost some of the best among our fellow players along the way. It may well be that the disease afflicting this once-great MMORPG has advanced further than any of us realizes - that EVE is already dying a slow and torturous death of a thousand and one nerfs, and not even the most heroic efforts will suffice to save it. But for those of us who love this game, who truly love it, we will not go down so easily. We will go down fighting, and when the day comes that Tranquility finally goes down for the last time, we will be able to say that we were here, that this game changed us and that we changed it in turn.

And that we blapped noobs in the face.

Lots of noobs.

I'll take BNI over Code. anytime.
But I have to admit that James 315 it's the biggest troll in the history of online gaming. Tip of the hat to him. And I'm not being ironic.

Um... no?
I know what cancer is like. Eve doesn't have it, believe me.

Just cause a few things change here and there to give newbies a chance, doesn't mean that Eve has cancer.

TL;DR: The game is changing and vets don't like it. A new generation of players is coming into the game and the game is slowly but surely changing (supposedly for the worst) because of it.

Boo f*cking hoo, things change, deal with it. Any EVE vet should know the age old adage 'adapt or die'. CCP has two options when it comes to EVE. Either stubbornly keep things the way they are and were in 2003, or keep changing and adapting to what the market wants. It should come as no surprise that doing the first option will result in EVE genuinly being dead in less than 3 years.

To name an example, EVE is one of the last big MMO's I know that still uses a subscription model. Perfectly normal back in 2003, but if you were to introduce an MMO with a subscription model now, 12 years later, people would think you're insane. No investor would back a model like that anymore. It's all microtransactions and pay to win these days. And despite the hate for both of those things in the EVE community, EVE will be letting go of the subscription model at some point if it is to survive another 10 years.

As a game, EVE Online is maturing. CCP has learned valuable lessons from observing the game and its players for 12 years and things are being changed because they need to be changed. Because if they are not changed, old players will eventually leave out of boredom and new players will leave out of frustration over broken and stupid mechanics that are relics from years ago.

As a company, CCP is never going to cater to the minority. They're going to try and cater to what the majority of players (people who pay good money to play) want without sacrificing the core gameplay that defines EVE. But one is not always possible without the other. As a result, the game is slowly changing and taking on wildly different forms and core gameplay values than 12 years ago because the players playing the game wish and demand wildly different core gameplay values than 12 years ago. That's something that happens all over the gaming industry and it would have happened to EVE regardless of major battles ending up in the news.

Wait, people still pay sub every month?

Well, not me


I'm Eve rich nigaaaaa whooooooo u jelly m8



Swag

and I hope EVE is shut down before that happens.

SWG was "updated to cater to the new generation" and you know what happened? it was utterly ruined for the previous players, while at the same time being unable to hold onto the newer ones because there were already games out there doing the same thing as they were trying to make SWG do, but the others did it better. so eventually the game died after a slow diseased slump into mediocrity, a dishonorable death for what was originally a very good MMO

"PHOEBE working as intended" was all you had to say, instead of a threadnaught that kept on growing like a tumour. -1 for being a tard.

I made it to page two and then quit when I scrolled to see another 2 pages.

CODE is moronic to say the least. And as an 11 year vet I could argue the exact same points of CODE being a cancer upon Eve, your proverbial tumor, too.

nerf minmatar more pve buff tank on freighters.