Player Features and Ideas Discussion

When you load up the map and look at the relative sizes of high, low and null you can plainly see an inverse correlation between size and character age.

Highsec is quite large but most players in it are either young, very old or quit before they reach any advanced age.
Nullsec is massive but has a comparitively high number of younger players than the other areas.
Lowsec has a lot of much older players relative to it's system count. In my experience at least anyway.

Wormholes are a mixed bag, I think that it's something you stay with if you experienced it bright and early in your eve career.

While I don't care for most of what Feyd has written I can say with great confidence that if you take even 50% of highsec, turn it in to lowsec and expand on incursion style PVE as a content provider then the game will improve. Not just mechanically improve but also improve player counts as people will actually need to form communities to stand any real chance of progressing.

What is the common factor between null, low and WH that highsec lacks? Real, meaningful corps that put money at risk. I will point you to runescape which while now is only a shadow of its former self but at its peak it had it had more players than EVE probably ever will and most of that game was dangerous territory where getting killed or ganked was a regular affair.

EVE isn't as dangerous as people pretend but mostly if you look at it through the bottom of a beer glass - I mean there are huge number of activities to do but they all necessitate squandered time with questionable payout. Runescape was consistant at least in action=reward, while RNG in EVE will constantly **** you and burn you out.

this is f&i, i dont think devs want to click on your blog to see the changes you propose when they should be posted in here

Are there any actual statistics or data backing any of this up? As it's written it seems like a number of conclusions based on anecdotal evidence, and speculation about personal preference. It also makes the same mistake of the op in assuming that changing the rules will change behaviors in a predictable fashion and by extension assumes that killing the game as certain people play it won't just result in attrition instead.

And yes, we've all heard the "no one ever quite over changes" line, but we've also heard it from those who lack the capacity to prove it and further the ideas here are rather extreme even by the standards with which those words are typically used.

This is not a paradox. Those players are free to pursue what is advertized. The fact that other options exist does not create any sort of contradiction or detraction from the advertized save maybe income generation. Further the elimination of those alternate paths does nothing to stand against the fact that the desire to cooperate for mutual benefit and the logistical and effort hurdles to creating those wars would still exist, still work to make these events rare, and possibly become worse as potential higher populations only create more work to support these wars.

In the end, if these players are joining for those big battles the issue is with the advertizing, they still won't happen every day as it's unsustainable and those players still won't be participating in those glorified roles without working through the motions and training for extended periods of time.

We can't rely on consistent B-R's while leaving the hurdles in place and further leaving the players to decide when they happen. And you won't eliminate the hamster wheel, just rename it and change it's sec status. Actually that's not quite right. The wheels of null are already in place and being run by null hamsters constantly, we will just have more hamsters on those wheels.

And subsequent loss of that spike with no evidence that throwing more sov space at the problem is an effective solution. BR-5 contrasts nothing save the fact that the game sold on that single battle isn't and even with your proposal won't be the one we play.

Well we are going circular argument now, because I say loss of that spike is because we sell new players on big battles but then drop them on a hisec PVE hamster wheel.

F

He keeps throwing around the words like "stagnant" " as if he knows what's the cause and how to fix it. It's the player's own choice whether they want to play EvE or not. PVP may be a big draw to the game, but it's not the ONLY draw. Forcing these changes would no doubt bring forth the downfall of EvE, as it constrains player freedom. Nothing in this game short of a Dev can force a player into null, fact! Unless players spawn in Null, it doesn't mean they'll ever go back. Feyd. it's CCP's game, let them handle it. Yes, the player retention isn't the best, but that doesn't mean you know anything on the matter either. Don't wave your 10+years of "experience" because that doesn't include the marketing/technical/other out of game aspects.

I wouldn't try too hard to get through to this guy. He has a tendency to get extremely salty and block you if you're rude enough to try bringing reality into discussions of his opinions.

The thing is, no matter what you do in EVE, it's the game about doing a lot of routine that culminates with events of notice when something you were planning actually happens. Fleet battles are no different in this regard, it takes a lot of people preparing in advance in case something like that happens.

You suggest that people who come for flashy and shiny picture (let's ignore for a moment that CCP's hardware can't support your vision in the fist place) won't stay for what hides behind it. You want to remove that infrastructure as well? Here's the thing: EVE is not very good game about direct combat, despite what you seem to suggest. You point at battle reports and compare them to the dish EVE restaurant serves best but it isn't. Most people come for it being seemingly completely different parts are integrated into whole universe.

"But those spikes after BR report!". You oversimplify how media coverage works, which is no surprise to me seeing how you oversimplified EVE in your head to "pew all day". People see something outstanding happens in a MMO, they don't instantly think "I wanna be part of this!". They go read articles, they do research, they find out about EVE's nature. Some may think "I wanna be a soldier on BR frontline!", but there are others who think "I wanna build armadas like the one I've seen!", "I wanna be a pirate plundering logistics lines supplying participants of such a war while all the soldiers are there, at frontline!", "I wanna be an explorer who find things small enough to be overlooked while battle rages on, but valuable enough to attract attention of powerful ones once found!", "I wanna be mysterious raider from beyond starmap that appears out of nowhere picking off splinters of clashing war machines"...
Honestly, if that's all you have for evidence, your very premise is highly questionable at best.

I do understand that you probably want all these things to remain in place, just be moved to "real space" where everything goes and content is being generated, but you don't see forest for the trees I'm afraid. Game about complicated infrastructure that is meaningful means that wanton destruction won't happen because of consequences it brings. Softening consequences means infrastructure matters less, and so is entire game we have on our hands, null or not, PvP space or not.


...I honestly can't believe I've written all that as a reply to a person who thinks that turning EVE into space shooter (because otherwise your model won't support itself; heh, "E:D insurance" already speaks volumes for what kind of idea you have there) will actually make it popular and will totally keep existing non-HS players happy.

If only. There is so much wrong with his suggestions on so many levels I don't even think he understands what he's asking for.

Apparently:

- we don't want EVE to have complex infrastructure, economics and industry and just here to pew all day;
- we will eagerly undock and happily whelp fleets against more powerful enemy if it takes to kill us 50 times instead of 10 before we inevitably lose anyway;
- we will fight for rich space even though 90% of space is equally rich and we can happily live in it together;
- we will do so even though our needs are drastically reduced because of magical CCP-enabled SRP he suggests "to stop risk aversion". Like, I mean, it's totally risky to whelp ships you didn't invest hours into;
- CCP servers are capable of comfortably supporting daily BRs;
- we all are here for EVE Valkyrie minus VR part, we just don't know it.

And all that because apparently we need to play a game that caters to Michael Bay fans in order to accomodate them under EVE title and not play the game we like, leaving the rest to play games they like.