EVE General Discussion

Do you really think CCP has gone carebear happy all of a sudden? I think it is more that miners have seen ore nerfed non-stop (remember when it made sense to mine in low sec because the ore was so much better than in high sec?), expansion after expansion that ignored them making the recent attention they are finally getting seem like flood?

Eve isn't getting easier, PvP is doing fine, and I don't see the fundamental nature of Eve changing much at all.

Issler

I like it because it reduces gate/station games a lot and removes the smart bomb gate camps that are unavoidable for someone jumping into it.

There can still be war decs if you want your station/gate games that much but anywhere else you can still die in a fire, missions, belts, outside a POS or at a planet, safespot, etc.

I think we are still one step away from making this all work. Get the ore in low sec SUBSTANTIALLY better than high sec and make it worth organizing 10 barge fleet op WITH proper combat support. There was a time in Eve where that was the only way I mined. Sadly, I can't make the case to anyone these days that doing that is anything other than crazy because I will make as much in high sec with out any of the logistics hassle and risk. Until the reward it there, you are right, not much will change.

The secret will be to make the rewards enough when spread across the GROUP to make folks want to take it on. And remember, rewards can be a fun experience every bit as much as the isks.

Issler

There have been, and still are people that do stuff like that, but those people are usually our alts. Carebears never go to low (except by accident), and will continue not to go there, because it is scary and they don't want to lose their ships. They will continue to not go there until it is as safe as it is where they are right now.

Even if CCP increases low-sec, rewards, it would have to be an exponential increase. Carebear mentality works in such a manner that even a ten-to-one reward:risk ratio isn't good enough. In their eyes, risking nothing to make X is a much more suitable option than risking X to make 10X. No, I'm not pulling this out of my ass; I constantly talk to people (especially those I kill), and try to find out what motivates them, and what makes them tick. They significantly prefer a small reward with no risk than a huge reward with a small or even moderate amount of risk. Bumping low-sec income to be even twice that of high-sec simply won't cut it.

You can't plan game changes solely based around the psychology of a small group of players. Low-sec needs boosted, but it's never going to get boosted to the point that you see carebears coming out in droves.

So you like it currently how it is? Low-sec completely dead except for the occasional noob that wanders in by mistake and gets instantly blasted and probably will never want to return again, being that the majority of their 5 second experience of low-sec was a loading screen.

God forbid you actually go and hunt them down. That might be... New and Exciting!

So you're saying that killing them at gates prevents them from coming back, but killing them in mission sites doesn't? Whether they die via gate camp, or I hunt them down and kill them, the end result is the same: they won't come back. The only way to make them come back is to not kill them at all.

It's starting to look to me like CCP is recognizing that gate camping is not PVP in an of itself.


Getting rid of, or reducing gate camps, could open things up a bit.


Back in the days of yor, when people who camped gates did not kill everything that moved "for the lulz" or the killboard, lowsec did have more people in it - and this was BEFORE WTZ.


Because the noob in the rookie ship or cheapie frig was not worth the trouble. Heck I was such a nooblet once i was sitting outside of a station in a velator and asking some -10 guy why he was flashing red on my overview.

And I didn't get popped and told to go back to WOW/High.


But things have changed.

And so killing everything that moved for no apparent reason prevailed. Now I can hear the tears "it's a sandbox!!!1! Marsha Marsha Marsha!!!!" but who wants to play in a sandbox where there are kids whose only goal is to hit you with the pale and shovel and then point and laugh?

Now imagine that sandbox where the only way to get around in it is to pass those kids on a set trail within pail and shovel range.


The majory of "avoid the gate camp" measures will work against most campers most of the time, because campers are campers and camping is dumb. But there are smart campers out there, and someone who is really thinking and not surfing FB/4CH or playing an FPS on the side while "waiting for the word to go up" (meaning "someone jumped in!!!1!!! kill kill killl!!!!") can come up with neat ways to catch people zipping about without even having to concentrate on a gate.


The writing is on the wall and has been since apocrypha. The combat probe is how you are going to get kills, not sitting on a gate being just as semi-afk as a high-sec carebearing miner.

Often the idea of playing this game semi-AFK is considered a mortal sin by the uber leet PVP crowd, but admit it: nobody is sitting on that gate for hours on end with a laser beam focus of attention on the EvE client. Find someone who is and let me know so I can call the mental hospital.

The game will eventually change for the better, but still, the removal of gates to travel or the reliance on them should go entirely. Let ships dial in system to system warps - and even target a specific area. That's the bloody end of camps, and the entire space opens up to sheer chaos.