EVE General Discussion

My favorite rally cry for years to wake up drifting developers. Always the best example being SWG from which I came to this game full-time from. The game had a good open world PvP system, a reason most of their existing player-base, their vets, played the game. They eventually stuffed it into some WoW style battleground.

They changed the game to cater to new players they didn't even have, even deleted all our player faction bases, all to just get new players, different players. The game literally became a ghost town over night, literally, with the surprise patch called NGE. Lingered for years with few players stuffed into a couple half-full servers, then was shut down. It took the developers many years to admit they screwed up, sort of half-hearted apology. Even SOE eventually fell apart, sold off, due to their bad decisions and mismanagement of their games. Yes, if you change your game to make it a game for everyone, you only make a game for no one.

Pitting the Third Reich against Poland is hardly a fair fight and as such, doesn't meet my definition of warfare.

One wonders then if the surrender option would be used more if dec dodging weren't around.

And honestly, I view that mentality as an extension of the problems created by dec dodging. Because people have the option to just flip their corp and not have to deal with the wars, it means that groups never have to learn to actually fight. This just serves to perpetuate the disease of helplessness.

If dec dodging were not a palatable option, then a lot of the bad, unbalanced "indy" corps would disappear, yes. But in their place would rise more balanced corps that *gasp* actually have players with skillpoints put in combat ships. That can only be a good thing.

These two quotes are going into the slideshow ;)


I think who joins EvE does so for the genre, not for anything specific. I think what defines them is discovered through time while the explore everything there is to do in New Eden. That said, I think most players who stay for any length of time do so because what they enjoy here fits in well with the competitive PvP environment EvE is designed around.

If not, like Tippia said I don't think they really enjoy the game for what it is and offers.

Actually, I kind of like the idea of giving the aggressor the ability to set conditions when issuing a war declaration.
Make it something like a contract that's directly tied to the war defining terms for cessation of hostilities... ie, items/isk paid vs time aggressor may not re-dec defender if they fulfill their end of the deal.

Not suggesting making it mandatory, mind you. I just like the idea of it being an option.

The lack of meaningless structure shooting and point capturing is one of the major strengths of the war declaration system compared to things like sovereignty and faction warfare. The objectives, victory conditions are entirely subjective and player defined, which is better because it is sandboxy, a structured system with predetermined in and lose conditions based on totally arbitrary things like point capturing or structure shooting is entirely unappealing and frankly defies the point.

A way to improve the system would to make the surrender mechanic not totally ********. It should be replaced with a negotiation system that actually has some functionality and that both sides can table variable term treaties. The one issue I continuously come across is that defenders are often totally unwilling to communicate with the aggressor in any way, but are allegedly totally desperate to end the war?

I want to be able to send them something that says "This is exactly what needs to happen to make the war go away and not happen again for X amount of time, do you agree y/n" and then for them to be able to send a counter offer if they want. This should include things like transferring structure ownership between corps, isk transactions, kicking members from corps and corps from alliances. Whenever someone with appropriate roles hits the "yes, we agree" button it should all happen automatically.

The surrender mechanic being the only way for a war to end early was a bad choice in my opinion because virtually no aggressor is ever going to offer to surrender, just because it's called a surrender. Once upon a time it was entirely common for defenders to win a decisive victory early on in a war or to manage a particularly spectacular show of force and for the aggressor to retract the war as a knee jerk reaction. Now they have to surrender if they want that to happen, so rather than do that they just stick it out for a week and see how it goes.

Iterating on the existing mechanics to make them more useful to all of the involved parties is a better solution than jamming in random mechanics and seeing if they work.

Sure it does, and it's called "eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate" and is fully user defined within emergent game play by the players of the sandbox.

For instance: If a group of industrialist wish to have their own special corp just for industrialists, I don't see why they should be treated as special snowflakes compared to how anyone else deals with it. Perhaps it's just a bad idea these restricting themselves to such corps when there is nothing stopping them form working with normal corps that do a wide variety of game related activities including industry to support their needs. It only doesn't work because too many choose to leave themselves open and defenseless to such attack, then come and whine as if somehow they should be treated special within a system of consequences for ones own choices.

Don't want to be a defenseless target? Don't choose to be and just do something else. This is why I opted out of hacking after the mini-game came to New Eden. I've steered quite a few industrialists to null to escape the rage building inside of them over wardecs and ganks. Just... adapt.

You're talking about people taking responsibility for their decisions and choices, which simply doesn't fly for some people; normally those that refuse to accept the concept that their decisions and choices can and often do affect other players.

This is always a funny one because often you don't actually have to do anything to get people to totally cease their normal behavior. They don't even need to see a hostile in local before they go into total shutdown, the mere threat of someone shooting them causes such an extreme response that they totally suspend their normal activity either because they are completely unwilling to risk being engaged in PVP under any circumstance or that they believe that denying content will result in a war being shorter. This would maybe make sense if they had planned alternative activity to do during this time, but typically they don't and just either don't log in or log in and sit in station the entire time.

With there being no retract war button anymore wars are always going to last at least a week, and given that a corp that doesn't undock at all is literally zero threat corps that do this a really just shooting themselves in the foot. The aggressors almost certainly have other content and the practice becomes increasingly harmful to the defender the longer they have to maintain it.

Often times when you get a contract from some random PVE oriented group against another PVE oriented group that's the end result. The target stays docked up for so long that they suffer member loss and a subsequent failure cascade because they decided that denying their aggressor "content" was more important than providing their members with content leading to a total victory for the aggressor without them ever actually shooting anything.

Man this thread is just so sad to read.