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The totally broken nature of the EVE bugreporting system is one of my pet-peeves, and something I try to remind CCP about at every opportunity.

The last straw for me was a repeatable Mac UI bug that kept getting filtered as non-reproducible despite the bugreport containing a video!

Nope - Thought it was Jump cloning - my bad. I actually have no problem with having a POS service module or clone vat transfer on a ship for something like that. Imagine the FUN! Not only can you then pod your enemies, you can Pod their stored clones (w/implants!). That sounds like a great idea!

EDIT TO ADD: IT *MUST* BE DESTRUCTIBLE!




On that point, I think we are going to have to (respectfully) agree to disagree.

From watching the game for the last four years (and specifically the interactions between 0.0 and the rest of space for the last couple of years) 0.0 space has it's own set of unique characteristics, while WH 0.0 has others. The mass and time limits on WH's are Worm Hole space' *defining* characteristic, the single thing that sets it apart from all other space, just as SOV (the problems and advantages both) define conquerable 0.0 space in K space. Another "defining" aspect of wormholes is the random nature of where (and *who*) they connect with, and the ability to crash them.


Crashing a WH on an enemy fleet (as I'm sure your aware) is a great tactic! Either to keep people out, or to lock yourself *IN* with them. I'm sure you (Two-Step) is familiar with the tactic of getting enough mass on a wh with an enemy fleet on the far side (who apparently don't want to jump into you) and jumping your fleet into them, while crashing the hole behind you. This crashing of the hole provides a momentary confusion for the other team (they usually aren't expecting you to trap yourself *in* with them) and anyone orbiting the WH is suddenly not doing what they thought they were. This moment of doubt/confusion can swing a battle from "we're outnumbered and gonna die" into "hang on guys, we got this!".


Although, I will agree (grudgingly!) that 0.0 guys know how to fight, and make good opponents/targets. The guys who take the time to figure out WH mechanics and go into WH's looking for a fight usually make even better opponents. So on that score I will grant you are correct!


Creating additional time/mass on a WH artificially is a bad idea in my opinion. Now, there was some theories back when Sansha's first started doing their thing, that a "WH - Portal" generator was in the works. I haven't kept up on that in the RP community (many in my corp do) but I haven't seen much on the RP front lately. Stabilizing WH's to make them more static (i.e. - in place longer) just makes them act more like jump-gates. Which I'm really not in favor of... (But if it happens, I'm sure our respective corps would figure out how to use the mechanics to our own, best, advantage!).

Also, remember that people who want that kind of stalking predator gameplay can get it in highsec. Admitedly, the war system is broken and it now takes lots of lame tactics to properly hunt people. But it is far easier to bring PVP where the carebears are, than to bring the carebears where the PVP happens.

That kind of hunting is often about having a very controlled environment, where you know your targets, their capabilities, and plan accordingly. While lowsec is the opposite, you often don't know who works with who, and random people/corps come in from highsec, or from other lowsec regions, all the time.

I paid CCP 15 bucks for this comment by re-upping my account.. so.. keep in mind this is something i feel strongly enough about to not even play EvE, but just give you my opinion on it.

NPE sucks, NPE will always suck as long as what I call "The Big Gamble" exists.

The Big Gamble goes something like this:

General wisdom goes to be effective in EvE as a new player you have to specialize or you aren't on even footing with older players with a mountain range of SP under their belt.

To specialize you have to pick a career path sight unseen and hope that out of all the possible career paths that the one you choose will be one you enjoy playing because you have a month or two of training before you'll be able to find out.

You've just made The Big Gamble.

If you win The Big Gamble, congrats! You'll love EvE forever more, continue to pay CCP money, and have fun doing it.

If you lose The Big Gamble, sorry! You'll hate EvE forever more, stop paying CCP money, and tell your friends how much the game sucks.

And, the worst part about TBG, the more complex EvE gets the better the chances new players will lose.

Most of the summit meeting on NPE dealt with how to get newbies to a mentor, and that is a great idea, mentors are wonderful and can make the game more enjoyable to you by giving you hints and advice. But, you still have TBG because a mentor cannot magically divine out of all possible ways to play EvE what you specifically will find fun.

So with all that in mind...

I think CCP should bend some of its rules a bit and introduce Career Missions Archs. These should be easily findable missions that don't involve flying all over the damn place just to get to its start point. They should each come with special ships loaded with modules that have no SP requirement use at all, but come with the caveat that all those modules only work inside complexes specifically built for those ships. The goal of this is not to produce players that come out of them with a complete understanding of how a specific type of gameplay works, but instead to give players an idea of what they are getting themselves into before they take TBG. So what players get is a 4-5 mission arch of each of the major career paths they can go down. They get a Logistics Career Mission Arch, which walks them through the basics of how to monitor health of allied AI NPCs and toss reps when needed. An EWAR Career Mission Arch that allows them to figure out how successfully use it to help a group of allied AI NPCs. So on and so forth. The missions should be setup to where if they don't do it correctly, the allied NPCs get their butts handed to them, and they lose.

I don't know if this is the absolute best way to go about helping players get past TBG successfully, but make no mistake, something does need to be done about it. When I started playing back in '06 or '07, I lost TBG spectacularly. And not just once, but twice in a row. It took me 3 tries at a career path to find one I liked, the only reason I made it past that is because I had a few RL friends that started playing when I did. None of us did spectacularly in TBG the first time, we all sort of lost, but because for a few months leading up to our loss we'd been logging into EvE with each other and goofing around, we stayed out of routine. After awhile we all found something to do we enjoyed, but without that, we'd have been gone.

Oh, and one day I may come back to EvE to actually play. I love the game and still read about it whenever I see a news article on it. But after last summer they are going to have to go a lot further. There are so many broken systems that languished for years in obscurity. Then there are features like The Dead Horse that the community has been begging CCP for even longer. I want the game to get better, I want to log in and pew pew things, I want it to live up to its promise, and crucible was a nice start... I cannot set myself up for more disappointment from it though. For 5 years I said to myself, "They promised to iterate and fix broken stuff, this expansion will be different!", and for 5 years CCP failed to live up to its promises and disappointed me. Six months of actually getting it right does not pay off that debt.

100% agree. If anything, we should have a module/ship that allows us to destabilize/collapse wormholes (other than having to jump an Orca back and forth 12 times, that is).

Baaaad idea. Without JF, you gimp Low Sec even more than it already is.

I think that your interpretation of the high sec PVEers' standard complaint about low sec missions is not quite right.

They are not saying that "if the rewards were much higher, I'd run missions in low sec".

They are actually saying that "no matter how high the rewards might be, it isn't worth going to low sec 'cause my expensive PVE ship will always get blown up by low sec PVPers". Callidus Dux emphasized this point, when responding to my "expand low sec" suggestion.

Jack Dent is also correct - the only players who can consistently run low sec missions are the ones who live in low sec, and have the experience, resources and willingness to combat any intrusion in the mission, while your fleet sits there and grinds the NPC rats. If you match up a group of full-time PVPers against a larger group of occasional PVPers, who do you really think is going to win, most of the time? Keep in mind, too, that the PVEers who are running high sec missions are looking to avoid PVP fights.

Plutonian has the best suggestion, I think. Changing the nature of the low sec missions, so that you are not required to sit in one place long enough to get probed out, and so that the missions could be more realistically run with a PVP fit ship, would be a better solution than simply cranking up the rewards.

But, then again, maybe not. How popular are the FW missions, which are built somewhat along these guidelines?

Here's a message I got from a bug hunter who shall remain anonymous. This final message was sent 5 long months after the creation of the bug report, there was only 2 replies given by the BH and 4 zip files were given. The bug report WASN'T ATTACHED TO A DEFECT...


//Thanks for the quick reply, we would still like to eventually solve the audio issues completely, but for the moment we can´t do much else.
//If it gets to a point where it is really bad again try to find out what circumstances may be causing it (like the accel gates before)
//and we can see about fixing that too.
//For now I´ll close this report and hope for the best :)


I think Bug Hunter need to be CCP employees, not volunteers

People/corps/alliances who live in WH's do so because there not interested in the bullshit politics of 0.0.
WH space is a playing field of it's own just like high-sec/low-sec/null-sec.
It gives a different dynamic thus a different type of game play/player.
As i recall there is a sand box effect this means a player or group of players should have to choice.
Forcing a choice on others is ridiculous and is you're sand box effect not the sandbox effect of others.

Any WH can be taken with good tactics, humping a POS to dead with caps/super caps is more of a 0.0 feature.
So it is time for some better tactics if you want to consider to engage in WH space.
WH space allows some caps to be used anyway so why change that.
Also lower class wh's gives smaller corp's/alliance's a fighting change and have there own sand box experience.


You can move in at WH critical, you need to time you're jump correctly.
If you all go at the same time with ships allowed by mass you can jump in a large fleet without a problem.


Then you need to put a life span on all player owned structures including player owned stations.

Also something to deal with cloaking ships seems to be a bit strange cause if you want to go down that road there should be a in game feature that allows you to deface spy alts.
Cloaking is a nice feature but also has a limited use since cloaking ships are not that powerful or ships fitted with cloaks do have decreased scan res.
Cloaking is a feature that gives you a "surprise" effect, but it not a bullet proof tactic and can be countered.

Further more what is CCP/CMS is going to do about security issue's such as people having access to information that is not gained by "normal" game play
This includes passwords/fits/voice server details/chat logs etc that can only be obtained by a GM's/CCP employee(s).

V

There's some encouragement reading this thread - but nothing of it comes from the CSM minutes. A couple of players from different parts and groups of EVE have already mentioned how most of these changes are looking at the sov-holding and blobs of EVE, rather than everyone and all aspects.

The list is getting a bit long now, but it seems CCP have just given up on everything that isn't nullsec blob warfare in this game.

* Lowsec has been long abandoned, everyone knows it and the only 'love' it has gotten in 5years+ is FW and the incursion element. FW turned out to be a PvE and blobfest with sov-nullsec like warfare. Incursion in highsec turned out to be majorily profitable while low was.. well, it has the BPC I guess. One could make the comparison of lv4 in low- and high..

* Time Dilation, while being a nice addition and a 'boost' to the game in general, only really benefit and affect blob warfare, noone else. The chest-beating and all propaganda (CCP, CSM, Mittani, external pages etc) about how good this is is completely bullshit to be frank. What is it now, 5% of the playerbase live in null, and even less of them in sov null? FW and big lowsec fights will probably benefit a bit from this so let's be generous and pretend this might be nice for 10% of EVE. Might.

* Supercap balancing has been a farce from day one. Pre-buff Titans were there for AoE DD and jumpbridges. Motherships could in theory be used for logistics but their shorter jumprange, and introduction of JF, made them a bit substandard even for that. Combat wise they were lolraped by small PvE carebear corps that owned 10 dreads, they were utter **** health wise. So we got +ly on jumprange and +hp. Good, it was necessary! Titan AoE DD was changed, and their guns were made useful. Not too shabby on paper. But then CCP went on giving FB's to the moms and boom, suddenly they are doing way too much damage and blobs of them gets a massive powertool.
- The proper way to balance them would've been to remove FB completely, while keeping the +ly, +hp, and the regular dronebay. There's always been smaller entities using motherships in combat, risking them both in low- and nullsec, and they always been ganked by other groups who hunt these solo-/small scale warfare moms. By completely removing the dronebay and keeping the high damage, they are now a pure powertool for nullsec alliance and even less likely to be field and destroyed. The main reason they don't die in big blobs is a) other side has way too many so you dodge the fight or b) lag.

* And to add on that topic, making supers dockable but upgrade-only is even *more* buff to sovblobs and even *less* incentitive for them to be fielded by others. This is skewing balances even more.. They should never be dockable to begin with, and making supers better for nullsec sov holders is the completely wrong approach, it should if anything be the other way around. Blobbing and defending is the thing to promote?

* Even discussing destruction of NPC station services is just.. wow. There's no words for it. The entities that own sov already have the possibility to upgrade systems where others don't. They already have near-completely-safe ratting havings in their upgraded systems, they can cyno jam, jumpbridge etc. Again, blob boost, small-scale and attacker nerfs..

* Cloak hunters? Really? Cloaks are absolutely zero threat to this game.
- Botters should and can be countered in many other ways than to nerf cloaks completely.
- While cloaked we cannot attack people, and when we decloak we have quite a long while before we can target (unless in a stealthbomber). Almost every ship in the game can warp off before being targetted by a cloaking ship that delcloaks.
- If we remove local, suddenly AFK cloakers will be a non-issue, it's only a problem in the local window.
- Players who risk their ship by not fleeting up and/or putting thesmelves at risk when flying with hostiles in local, accept the consequences of their actions. Just like a PvE pilot in highsec accept the risks of losing his industrial/Marauder/whatever when they fly something expensive that can be ganked. Just like all of us PvP pilots risk our ships when we take it out in any combat situation.
- Blobs have an easy time getting enough people to completely shut down gates and have combat probers around, often for hours (if not days or weeks) to shut hostiles down. A solo (or few) cloakers don't. With the combat probing being so easy as it is today, the 1 min logoff timer, and the constant aggro refresh (btw, this is a good addition CCP, kudos for that at least), what are we supposed to do when in hostile space? If I'm in my cloaky-whatever, I hunt targets in hostile null, they just bring out a) blob b) submarine c) prober and I can't - cloak, or log off. I have to non-stop warp around until d/t. Possibly for hours and hours and hours. I can't go and have a bio. I can't answer my phone. I can't leave system. I can't focus on my wife for a few minutes. I can probably not even go sleep for tonight.

* WH mass stabilizer to make it easier for blobs to fight smaller/smarter entities in WH. Yay?

* Highsec war system is already bad enough where people can easily dodge war mechanics by just jumping corps back/forth. And worse is that this is legal. Wars have been around since the beginning, and hell when I started this game we could also dodge CONCORD (before it was deemed an exploit). Ganking and highsec war mechanics has always been part of EVE, and it's also a chance for smaller corps to wardec bigger alliances. This is not always griefing, in fact in many cases this is chance for them to fight outnumbered without being instalocked and camped on gates like they can be in low and null.

I could write more but ran out of space. It's just completely disgusting how a) highsec is going safe b) lowsec going blob c) nullsec going sov-blob-only. CCP must hate their game, and how it used to be PvP centered and dangerous.