Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Nope, we're just shuffling the carrots around.

I know you hate this concept, but risk vs reward should be fundamental to highsec too.

People in player corps accept more risk in the form of wars(at least once wars are fixed), and in doing so they should receive greater reward. Rather than bluntly increasing their income by a set percentage, the variety of content they have access to would expand into more lucrative thing than would be possible in an NPC corp.




And like I said to the other two carebears, that strawman is getting tiresome. Either you're so doggedly determined to hold onto the unfair advantage you've had for all this time, or you're so blind that you can't see the forest for the trees.

That or you've just never heard of comparative buying power.




Those two things are synonyms. NPC corps have too many advantages, and player corps not enough. You don't just net buff one, you have to take things away from the other.



Hilariously ironic, coming from someone with a post history like yours. All you do is defend the toxic status quo of highsec, you rarely post otherwise.

No, you pretty much just cry about anyone who wants to increase conflict, and whine about how industrial ships should be invulnerable bastions of armor and guns alongside being able to mine asteroids.

That's all you do.





The first part is pretty funny, considering just how hard you're steaming to try and ignore the recent player retention stats.

Yes, highsec is toxic. It's current design smothers conflict and player interaction, which as we now know is poison to player retention.

Yes, NPC corps have too many advantages. They get the enormous benefit of being immune to wars, and their only substaintial negative is the dubious loss of not being able to use the pos system, the most broken mechanic in the history of gaming.

Some negative.



It's both. And it will happen, too. CCP will take a look at your sacred cow sooner or later, hopefully sooner. And it will not be a net positive for you.

Good! That's the whole point of the Rise post I linked to you earlier.

Your way of thinking is contrary to the health of the game. "griefing" does not cost them subs, try as they might to validate that particular myth.

Myth.

I'll say it again.

Myth.




And creating a system where people are encouraged to band together into player corps that are worth a damn, instead of toxic newbie tax farms, means that people will be equipped to fight back.

Conflict is fun. Whether you think so or not. That's what keeps people playing this game, your own personal anecdotes aside. You are the outlier here, not me, despite the decade long lie claiming the opposite.

Alright, let's get down to the bottom of this argument about player retention and griefing. The claim often made is that ganking and wardecs cause players to quit. I do not actually dispute this. I've seen it for myself. What I dispute is that these players would have stuck around and been a benefit to the game.

It's story time, children... gather around for a tale about Grandpa Mayo's adventures as a young capsuleer.

When I was a new player I joined a highsec corporation that did a lot of PVE. We lived in an area with a lot of ganking and it was only getting worse.
Once I learned what was happening I wanted to help. I went through the killboard and marked red every single ganker in the area from the past 6 months. I posted fits that could counter gankers. I also setup a second account for scouting.
I wasn't even a miner. I did it to help my corp members stay safe. That was me as a new player. Some players helped or took the advice including a few corpmates we'll call John, Tim and Allen.
What did the rest of the corp do? They cried about their losses, they petitioned the gankers, and they logged off in a rage for days or weeks on end.

Our biggest challenge was when a scary mercenary alliance wardecced us for over a month. They were always around. Our miners and mission runners were furious! They could barely get through a pocket without dying or having to warp off. A few us (including John, Tim, Allen and myself) didn't let it stop us. We didn't want to drop corp so for the next little while we would roam through WHs on day trips doing sites and bringing the loot back into highsec. We made more ISK during those wardecs than we ever did before.
What did the rest of the corp do? They cried about their losses, they petitioned the gankers, and they logged off in a rage for days or weeks on end.

The wardecs eventually ended and the corp carried on, eventually disbanding months later. Most of the members have now quit. Some quit during the ganking phase. Some quit during the wardec phase. Some quit later out of boredom or lack of motivation. There are only four of us still around from that original corp of 16-20 active players. Want to guess who they are?

John, Tim, Allen and myself.

There are players that are built for EVE and there are players that are not built for EVE. If someone is going to quit over ganking or wardecs they are playing the wrong game. It was really only a matter of time until they packed their bags and left.

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On a different matter entirely, I must confess to being against wardecs following a player who leaves corp. It comes off as a proposal focused around giving the attacker more easy targets. If you want easy targets go to Catch.

It wouldn't provide any balance to the risk/reward model. If a player leaves corp they have already foregone the benefits ("rewards") they receive from that corp. Where is the justification in their increased risk? There are already consequences to leaving the corp and I've advocated for more consequences but on the economic side.

Like it or not CONCORD is part of highsec. A war is against a corporation not a player. If a player relinquishes the benefits of the corporation he isn't under wardec and he gains CONCORD protection. As long as there is a price to pay for that decision it's working as intended.

I agree that if a player drops to an NPC corp they should not have a killright follow them. However, the problem is then if they immediately jump to another corp completely shedding the dec. There needs to be some mechanism to limit the continual dodging of wardecs while still earning the benefit of being in a player corp.

I think a cooldown from joining another corp (which is one option) is bad for the social aspect of the game and hurts a player genuinely wanting to move to a new corp. However, there could be a mechanism where you can join a new corp, but have a 7-day timer where you do not benefit from the corp benefits if you have recently dropped from a corp.

Perhaps even better, have a killright be generated, but only if you join a new player corp during the remainder of the initial war. If you just drop to an NPC corp you are fine, but if you join a new corp during the remainder of that 7-day of the initial war, a limited, non-transferable killright is generated for the original deccing corporation which just lasts until the initial war expires (the balance of the 7 days). Have a nice big pop-up from CONCORD telling this to the player when tries to join a new corp that this limited killright will be activated.

I like that last option as it doesn't penalize players retreating to the safety of a NPC corp, allows a player that is tired of their leadership to immediately hop to a new corp but still be at risk, and still makes it impossible to completely shed the dec for players trying to abuse the mechanics for unintended safety while in a player corp.

Players still could hop to a shell corporation and deploy a new POS though even if they all individually have killrights so there still might need to be some additional mechanism to prevent abuse. I am thinking though that CCP's recent re-focusing on making all things destroyable and disrupt-able means they will likely make the new POS designs more like POCOs and difficult or impossible to take down after a war has been declared (at least the most lucrative ones) so perhaps this won't be a problem after all.

One is in scare quotes. Incorrect use of scare quotes does not maketh the argument. Especially not when he was deliberately misquoting me.

Close. It's griefing if CCP says it is, it's "griefing" when you (and I mean you, specifically, with your post history) use it to try and whip up some paranoia conspiracy about the exploding of internet spaceships.

I agree. It will also be much easier for CCP to reverse the damage years of access to this safety loophole has done to some player's mindsets if they do it while introducing a new system than if they just straight up closed this loophole. If these new shinies are demonstrably better than the status quo, then no one can claim that they should not come with increased responsibility and vulnerability to wardecs like the POCOs have. There can be a whole set of structures that have increasing bonuses with increasing risks to wardecs and other attack so players can tune their level of risk to their tolerance level. If the only structures that can be torn down are the same ones available to those in a NPC corp, then there is no more loophole.

Besides, I think most of us agree that fighting over structures and their bonuses would make for better game play anyways. I don't think CCP will venture into wardecs mechanics again before the new structures are out in any case.

Wait, forgive my ignorance of this, but is that the case now? Can you drop corp and go about your missioning, and then rejoin the next day before say a counter-attack?

If so that is even a worse exploit than reforming a corp for safety as you could use it tactically to surprise the other side. The GMs must currently enforce that as an exploit.

So yes, a cooldown on rejoining, perhaps even a 7-day ban (or until the war is over, whichever comes first) on rejoining a corp you left during wartime. I can't see any legitimate reason to leave a corp, only to rejoin it 24 hours later.

The other option which I am not sure how easy it is to code, would be to have that proposed "probationary" status where you don't have the benefits of being in a corp full apply to you for 7 days if you dropped corp during a war to also include an inability to join actively in any wars. That would discourage dropping and rejoining, but if you did you just wouldn't be able to participate in the war (at least as an attacker).

Kinda. It can be done, and often is. But it's sort of petitionable under the "you can't join a corp with an active dec with a target in system rule". Never seen it punished though.

I still favor killrights. As someone mentioned above, they can be tailored to generate only if the flagged person joins another player corp, or whatever. They are a tool that can be adjusted a variety of ways to make sure it's still fair.