Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Yes, this is fun. But arenas turn that into no fun because these targets will be even farther and wider in between as PVPers are rather stuck in your hours long arenas than in their systems ready for a fight.

Needing ISK means indeed ratting, but that does not mean being a target to any roamers after arenas. Simply because people are not willing to fight any more in unfair, unpredictabe fights and they are stuck in the arenas, remember. Their ratters will just warp off if they are half-way competent.

No, I understood that right away, which is why I brought it up. Setting up an entire region of low sec space just so that such an arena.
You mean the GMs that are already overworked and unmotivated to work on tickets of low priority and still have long processing time on higher priority tickets? The same limited number of GMs that need to monitor the forums, mission screw ups, industry screw ups, market screw ups and so on and so forth now also need to monitor thousands of arena fights daily?

Arenas sound better and better, the more I think about them.

Farming people mindlessly warping into a tackled target is fun. Farming people running home headlessly to "form" is fun, too.

Yes, I mean stuck in arenas and thus taken out of the game for any roamer to engage/intercept/farm/destroy. Yes, stuck in arenas not defending their ratters, which means they will dock up/tether up and are unavailable for a fight. Even Rorqs can be quickly un-cored and tethered up since intel semi-bots provide the necessary info way in advance. Yes, stuck in arenas and deserting the already existing arenas (called star systems, anomalies, missions, signatures, etc) because they are unfair and unpredictable.

CCP's profit margins say that. And that such a feature attracts more players is highly questionable. If we take the Free to Play mode as example, it is already clearly visible that this does not yield sustainable increase in active characters per day. According to http://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility TQ is almost back to pre-Alpha numbers in terms of active characters per day. I fail to see how a feature that guarantees you getting farmed by more experienced players (that is an undeniable fact, considering how many people post ideas for PVE safe zones, PVP safe zones and so on in this forum) in a setting that gives you the illusion of a "fair fight" because of tighter rules. That sounds very entertaining and results in the same failing sustainable player growth and retention.
Not to mention that you do not need a paying account for arenas. You can now just have alpha account after alpha account to get free PVP chars.

I only partially implied active monitoring of the arenas themselves. However, they need to monitor an increased amount of tickets requiring immediate action as the arena fights are "short lived". So, more work for the same number or potentially more GMs but not necessarily more money and players for CCP. Not to mention that griefing in PVP is quite difficult to determine. How is a guy running circles around you griefing in arenas when it is not in the open world? How long is too long for protracting a fight? Not to mention that banning does not really mean anything with alpha accounts.

I may or may not go too much into detail with finding issues, as always, but I do not see arenas as a viable and valuable addition to a game that lives from making someone's day a bit more miserable. I only outlined a couple of exampled of the bucket of worms how players will exploit the rules to their advantage and make the "fun PVP" arena experience a lot less fun for many people.

First: Arenas are not more content. They take content out of the game by focusing the majority of PVP to these arenas and not where it belongs: in the open world. If people want more content, they can set out and look for it and by that create it. That is what EVE is about. Players create their own content.

Real PVP experience in alpha ships can win against any alpha or omega pilot that does not have the same insights. ... Unless, of course, if you pit say 3 T1 frigates against 3 T2 cruisers. Unless your fight setups are not inherently unfair, a pilot or group of pilots with proper experience can easily win against a pilot/group in the same ships with less experience. I am also not talking about an alpha alpha pilot; I am talking about alpha alts of experienced omega pilots, setup into tricking the system and opponents. You cannot have a fair fight most of the time because you cannot exclude experience from a fight. As countless of videos from experienced PVPers show: experience can dismantle even larger counter forces unless they unpack the capital hammer. And even that does not guarantee a victory over the more experienced group as I have recently found out in a fight against a WH group. 10 of them ridiculed our 30 BS/capitals with ease. The very same thing is unavoidable in arenas and is very detrimental to "fun" when you expect fair fights.

To a person who is not good at PVP, arenas are just as good as missions teaching them about PVP: they learn things in an artificial environment with a limited rule set and scenarios. The open world, however, does not work by these rules, as your remarks about getting blobbed by bigger groups all the time show. In an arena, you do not learn about reading the unpredictability of a battlefield because nothing unpredictable can happen. You do not learn about paying attention to changing conditions on a battlefield, about people leaving and coming in or warping around.
You teach players some crude basics, which will be dismantled the first or second time they try PVP outside arenas -- granted that they find anything to PVP against in the first place --, which will in turn drive them back to arenas and remove even more content from the actual game.

You know that this is a very time intensive approach, right? Especially arguing about the fine details of PVP. Keeping at range from someone is a basic principle in PVP. Determining if someone's griefing just by the fact that they simply ran around and occasionally or continuously kept dampening or jamming the opponent, while other people of their team regularly run small attacks. Regardless of what the GM finds, it's time consuming and unsustainable if this happens hundreds of times per day (CFC or PL or other big bored groups will do that repeatedly, that is guaranteed). And then the problem with inconsequential bans on alpha accounts removes any significance from that tool, too.

Given the choice between hunting for pvp or pressing an instant gratification button that launches them into content (not even always pvp), many people, maybe even the majority of people, choose the latter.

Players in eve will rat because they don't have the time or patience to find pvp. Fw sites are popular pvp spots becuase pvp is quick and frequent. In other games i have observed waits for pvp matches become a lot longer because an 'instant play' button was introduced. Even though the instant play button rarely goes to a pvp match. Everything i have seen indicates that many players would leave the sandbox for instant gratification.


Unfair fights are not easier. Fair fights are low risk because the variables are reduced, but in a sandbox your enemy can blob you or have a cloaky alt or you can have third parties crash the party.

You are missing a really important point. The player is limited. Every single person in an arena is not also in the game world so it has an impact even on non participant. The benefit of arenas (instant content) are not good enough to cripple the sandbox by removing some players from it.

Getting blue balled sucks but anyone who though it would not happen in a negative sum PvP game is an idiot. Absolutely no exception.

All of it.

The more people that go to the arena the less there are in the open world which leads to more hunting which means more people will take the easy option which means fewer targets in the open world so more go to the arenas to get the PvP.

Arenas suck the life out the the wider game, it has happened in every single case of an arena being added to an MMO.

• If it's not shiny it's not a good ship.
• Having paid more for a ship entitles the pilot to a win.
• T1 frigates are not real ships.

Alert, alert! Carebear mentality detected!
Shinier =/= better and ISK should never compensate for skillful piloting. Yes, your super-purple AT ship can too die to a slicer if you do not have a clue how to fly.
Investing in more expensive stuff to cover skill lack isn't the way to improve either.
T1 frigates are absolutely valid in PvP. Have you seen a Punisher swarm?

How?

Name examples.

The number of players you could entice into pvp which were not originally interested and participating in pvp with an arena would be very small, and catering a feature like this to try and draw them in would provide no noticeable impact on the eve economy.