EVE General Discussion

If newer (2-3 yrs old) and brand new players keep finding the game to be more and more hostile, which it is every day, they will leave. This group of young players is CCP's financial base. They typically have to pay the monthly subscription and buy PLEX just to be able to somewhat compete in-game. While the older (4+ yrs old) support their habit with PLEX and don't pay a single cent to CCP, and haven't for years.

Yes, there are the inbetweeners, the older toons who just suck and have to buy plex and newer toons who pick up the game quick and can overcome the hurdles. But I stand by my statement that the younger players pay CCP's bills. If they are driven out through an ever increasingly hostile and unfriendly environment then the PLEX will leave the game and the older players will be forced to pay RL cash to support their habit, which would natrually drive their subscriptions down as well.

HIGH SECURITY. Think about that. What the **** is it called HIGH SECURITY if it really doesn't matter. you can **** up a 300m isk ship that took 1/4 a year to train for with three 5 million ISK ships flown by trial accounts with little retribution. In the end everyone pays a higher price one way or another.

Do you know what is the current maximum theorical PCU for Sol network?

250,000 users online.

That's 4 times the current record, and more than 5 times the average PCU post-Incarna.

Now this is a theorical limit and admitedly the real maximum would be around some 170,000 users, but the point is, from a hadware POV, EVE's got ample room to keep growing. Provided how the PCU is11% of the subscriber count, probably the current EVE server would be able to deal with as much as 3 million subscribers.

So no, EVE server is not at some "optimum" spot. It is very underused, and if you think that CCP would regret to be doing 6 or 7 times the business they do now, you are pretty delusional.

Of course, EVE wiil never reach that count unless it stops driving away its demographical sweet spot: mature players with a life compatible only to a more casual gameplay style, in which long-run goals can be pursued in small cumulative steps without a fear of losing everything while they are away living their lives instead of devoting themselves to EVE.

EVE as a project is 15 years old. And I seriously doubt that the guys who thought "space hooligans online" would be fun, would find it so fun now that they got to deal with children, spouses and leaking taps.

Care bears will cry and ask for more safety no matter what you give them. The stupid thing is all the terrible care bears in this thread could have just spent the time they used to whine on the forums to learn to be good care bears.

I do exploration in null sec and low sec, I raid c3 and c4 wormholes and I trade items across various regions. (mostly I buy underpriced nanoribbons, collect them and resell in jita.) I have been doing this for years.

I have only ever lost one "pve" ship, when I autopiloted an anathema so I could have a smoke break and got suicide ganked. So please, tell me more about how this game is unfair to care bears. Because it isn't, this game is unfair to stupid care bears.

tl;dr: lrn2play and HTfU

You are wrong to assume that, as EVE lacks hisec endgame, it can't have hisec endgame at all.

Imagination is the limit.

Let's say that corporations were allowed to build up wormhole stabilizators. The WH still would be prone to collapse so any construction material should be shifted in through other wormholes on the same destination system. Then each side should build a WH stabilizator with constructor drones, building section upon section, each section taking, say, 10 minutes to be completed. A WH stabilizator could have 10,000 sections on each side, requiring 1666 man/hours to complete, then should be fueled and triggered to allow travel through the WH. In the meanhwhile, sleepers would come atracted by the construction, so defenses should be put on the "rogue" side of the WH. Remember that any ship crossing the WH could collapse it until the stabilizer is finished, fueled and started up, so probably setting up a POS and harvesting local construction materials could be of use for defense. Once finished, the entry system gate would be treated accroding to the sec level of the system, and the "rogue" system would become a 0.5 system.

Then the planets on it could be colonized, each colonist requiring 1,000 m3 of stuff just to start. Then the colonies could buy stuff, personnel, and pay taxes to the corporations undertaking the colonization. The sleeper menace would never be 100% gone, though, and WH systems still would be more dangerous than true hisec.

As more systems were colonized, new WH would be found to new, unexplored WH systems, so the colonization task could go on and on forever. Also some WH systems could not be colonized in any way and would remain"wilderness".

Now amke this effrots invulenralbe to PvP and youc an keep carebears amused, loggin in to buld up a few sections or patrol for sleepers or harvest some minerals to the construction effort... without any bloody jobless hooligan iving in mom's basement go in and collapse the WH or attack the constructors.

The rest of the game, lowsec and nullsec, are kept the same so the awesome ubercool majority of players enjoying them don't miss their fun.

One thing I don't like about EvE is it's immense, record developers effort put into a project that is not really taking off as it should.

I mean, CCP is the one company who remade the MMO graphic engine (usually a "no can do" sentence for the other MMOs, only WoW could afford some updates), creates continuous patches, content etc.

Yet they are not booming to the millions like EvE deserves to.

Why? I am not sure because it's cold or harsh. There are other games where you are thrown in PvP since day zero with no parachute, nor a potential 150-200M loss seems a good excuse enough to never undock / risk.

There's some other factor keeping EvE linearly rising (instead of an higher degree curve) and I think it's actually bits where being carebear or not don't matter at all.

Example 1: EvE PvE sucks. H A R D. Even the hardest PvP guy wants / deserves / needs respite every now and then. And he faces... lol L4? Always the same predictable and unimaginative crap.

Example 2: PvP takes too long to happen and when it happens it's too often a 10 v 1. Sure it's sweet and so much Sun Tzu flavored to do that, but in the end people get annoyed.

Example 3: 0.0 politics, 2am alliance ops vs empty structures, renters. Nuff said. Yet it's the official "big guys" end game. WHs are in fact the best invention to counter this, but it's still something that limits people in their own long time plans.

Example 4: industry: some of the most boring stuff ever created on Earth. Invention clicks anyone? POS management? Lolmining?

None of the above matter with being PRO or BEAR. It's just poor content, and it shows.

Sorry Vyl Vit you're wrong.

Risk vs reward is skewed.
Level 4s and Incursions are higher paying than any profession in null that has similar risks.

We have ganked for years because players fly around with officer mods and complex mods on ships that don't need them for high sec. They know now the risk. And choose to do it anyway.

Pirates can't come into high sec without something to slow them down. And soon will be unable to kill more than one at a time before we lose our ships.

If you want low sec pirates to stop adapting and ganking people in high sec you need to start experiencing the rest of the game. Travel to low sec and do missions.

All level 4 missions should be moved to low sec and incursions should be ended. The balance of risk vs reward needs to be fixed.

Clue: paying with PLEX IS paying CCP cash money. In fact, paying with PLEX means CCP got more money than they would have if that player would have paid for a 1 month sub. Brains, you have them, use them.

If by "give" you mean "take away" then yes, "carebears" will whine if you "give", by that I mean take away, the activities they enjoy.

The Eve economy is so ready for hyperinflation. Hopefully this is a bubble, almost everything is going nuts... cause everything needs minerals. EVERYTHING is going nuts and they haven't wrecked anything.... YET.

Missions and bounties ISK value for buying goods just received a 50% haircut OR MORE over the last few months.

Does that mean CCP will not nerf them further? Oh, I don't think so!

OP,

For what it's worth, I think you're right in general. Some "safe heaven" is indeed needed. But I would say EVE already has that. It's not 100% safe, but it's "safe enough" for most people and most purposes.

And you are spot on that casuals are the vast majority, and the vocal minority is definitely not representative of the overall population.

What's more, people often like to say things like "Well, it worked in UO", which is bunk. UO did not reach its peak 250k subs until after Trammel was introduced. For those who don't know, Trammel was a "safe" mirror of Britannia with PvP disabled except by consent. And just a year later WoW shattered that record. Though contrary to popular belief, WoW did not cater to casuals for the first 2-odd years of its existence, not until after Activision took over. Raiders had by far the best loot, the endgame raid being a 40-man 5-8 hr Molten Core runs that no casual had a snowball's chance of participating in. And PvP rewards were incredibly difficult to attain via ranks, as the rank decayed - as soon as you stopped grinding ranks, you would start losing ranks. But for all that, WoW offered so much raw content with something for everyone that it prospered. It wasn't because of casual catering, it was because it was a damn good game for its time.

And there have been developers who blindly refused to offer safety of some sort. Good example is what happened to Mortal Online. On top of usual killing and looting, they added stealing - where someone could take the loot out of your pockets without even having to kill you. Which was just brilliant if you want your game to fail. Which it did. I hear it recently reached 2,000 subs. Darkfall is another example - no safety there from anyone as soon as you move outside of a handful of protected newbie towns. Same thing - nobody but a handful of sociopaths play it now.

EVE, as far as I'm concerned, seems to have hit a happy medium. It offers plenty of opportunity to kill, crush, destroy, steal and grief. At the same time, the map layout, security ratings, CONCORD and clearly defined rules of engagement (for the most part, neutral RR has to go) make the game relatively safe. In this respect, EVE is special as both carebears and psychos can co-exist. In fact, they're mutually dependent. Which works nicely.

So, in closing, OP while I agree in with you in principle, I don't think this is the reason why EVE is not doing that great. Yes, yes! I know! EVE is growing steadily, blah blah blah. What EVE is doing is sloooowly growing in line with growing gamer population. Nothing more, nothing less. It could be a lot better off if some things changed. The new tutorials were a step in the right direction. But considering that 60% of EVE playerbase lives in hi-sec, more is needed. Better missions, better AI, more interesting mining, etc. My personal pet peeve is the skilling up system. Which is great if you have no time to play, but I feel that while you're playing, your skills should increase faster - this alone might help keep more people in-game. Because a week or two after getting into EVE, every player starts to encounter week+ long skills that need to be trained before they can advance, and these boring plateaus cost more subs than anything else.

This is such a poor argument and from history has shown to be completely false.

Two words, Trammell & Felluca!http://tobolds.blogspot.co.uk/2005/09/ultima-online-pre-trammel.html



Why would you want to play a game without challenge or without any risk? That's just telling yourself you are a loser so i won't make the effort to try and win!