Missions & Complexes

I think you're overblowing things. I haven't seen or heard any rumblings about L4s changing for better or for worse. High sec already has the theoretical worst ores, though low is actually worse off. Ice belts already saw their change years ago. And NPC corps are already silly things with restrictions on them.

High second life is alive and well and appeals to a major segment of the paying populace of Eve. I can't see that changing even if it were made somewhat less appealing.

HOLY ****!!! The sky! It's falling!

So much paranoia regarding high sec, so little common sense.

The devs know the purpose of high sec, or they wouldn't have put it into the game and continued to support it over the years. They aren't loons, they understand that forum whining should be taken with a rather large grain of salt, and to focus on the the core issue that players trouble with and not what they think is the issue.

I'll use an example. I know that for whatever reason much of the community hates WoW, but the game has struggled with this community divide over risk vs rewards and prestige vs accessibility since inception, and given that the developers can sometimes put on a display of Big Brass Balls (tm) from time to time and make sweeeping changes to some things that some players think are core gameplay experience.

In the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, raid mechanics such as raid size, progression , difficulty and lockouts were changed. Also the dungeon finder was introduced which drasticly lowered the amount of work and frustration players had to put into playing the content. WotLK saw explosive growth in subscriptions as a result, and also saw a much larger percentage of players completing raid content which was previously considered largely for the "elite" players only.

There was push back though, and the developers did sympathize a bit and thought maybe things had gotten too easy. In the next expansion, Cataclysm, the developers decided to make the dungeons much harder, so that preorganized groups would be the preferable option, they also bumped up the entry level difficulty for the first tier of raids. It is unclear if that was just bugs or purposeful, but the result was more difficult content initially.

What happened as a result is a mass exodus from the game. And while the game is still going strong, you can't lose millions of subscribers without learning a lesson. And hopefully the right one. In Mist, dungeons will be tuned more like the last batch of dungeons that were released in Cata, and they will continue to offer the new raid finder difficulty for very casual players or guilds to run.

I think they learned their lesson. You have to have both types of content. You have to have content that is easy and players can just log in and have a little bit of fun or work incementally towards a goal. And you need those hard challenges. The people running exclusively the hardest content are always going to comlain about not enough content or that the easier content is too rewarding. It is both a presige/epeen thing, or a simple lack of understanding that not everyone plays the way they do, and they deserve to have rewarding content to do as well.

Those hardcore elite are quick to point out that easy content is more rewarding, yet they forget that they too enjoy the benefits usually either personally or a result of having a larger community of players to play with...players that may one day become "hardcore" too.

In single players games, difficulty is a game option, so for MMos to provide similar functionality does mean explicitly that some players will be rewarded for doing less risky/difficult challenges. And thats ok, because not every player is the same, but you do what everyone the chance to play together because that is the whole point of MMOs.

CCP has some very smart people. They know what their core gameplay is, and it has nothing to do with difficulty, its spaceships, politics, and technobabble. Its scifi, and everything scifi that they can fit in, not who can make x isk/hr doing y activity. They do enough to make sure that the economy doesn't explode, try to provide as many different ways to make the game system interact across multiple domains and weave a tight core of experience based on lasers, robots, wormholes and whatever else they can squeeze in.

Haters gonna hate, no matter way. Your happy players are largely too busy playing the game than making passionate conclusive arguements about how high security or whatever else is the new hotness is destroying the game..

do you understand what the word 'if' means? in case you don't, i'll gladly explain it to you.

i was speaking in hypotheticals; this means i assumed a fictional premise and mused on its implications and consequences as though it were real. if anything, my post would be an argument for the claim that hisec will never be removed (and people who demand this are either trolling or just incredibly stupid).

OP says that hisec is for casual players. I would like to know what is preventing people to play casually in lowsec for example? There are missions with better rewards, exploration has better sites, belts have better rocks, even belt rats are better as bounties are concerned. So you have basically everything casual hisec inhabitants has for better ISK (not way much better but still better). Player corp, NPC corp - doesn't matter, you can be casual as much as you want it. Log in, undock, do your thing, dock, logout.

But of course there is no CONCORD so beside parking your shiny PVE ship at mission pocket and watching tv you have to click that damn d-scan button every few seconds if you are not alone in system. Or by 'casual' you simply mean AFK?

Since when 'casual' means 'completely safe'? Here are some synonyms of the word: accidental, adventitious, by chance, contingent, erratic, extemporaneous, extempore, fluky, fortuitous, impromptu, improvised, impulsive, incidental, infrequent, irregular, occasional, odd, offhand, serendipitous, spontaneous, uncertain, unexpected, unforeseen, unintentional, unplanned, unpremeditated

See? Nothing about being safe, with infinite life expectancy.

Someone missed incarna.

CCP Soundwave has said a nerf to all income is coming this winter (he spoke about 10% across the board). This will hurt highsec as people tend to make less per hour there then the carebears in 0.0.

CCP "knows" that without highsec, EvE will die. EvE is an economic simulation, and without a stable place to trade, the markets collapse. Forget the fact that newer players would simple stop playing if they couldn't leave station w/o being attacked.

The real problem isn't that CCP will "nerf" or remove highsec, it's that CCP and the CSM are primarily 0.0 players, and primarily large alliance players. As such it is quite easy for a change to have unexpected consequences, as that playstyle simply isn't considered. A perfect example is CCP's push to remove POS's. The Wh group is very upset over having these "changes" rammed down their throats, however I have yet to see it mentioned whether the new "modules" will be allowed to be built in highsec (as current POS's are). If they aren't, just think of how many research slots the highsec population just lost (for those that say "use losec" waiting times there aren't that much better, so most already do).



How about "casual" meaning when I only have an hour to play after work (and after the kids are in bed), I don't want to spend it trying to get a fleet up and traveling 30j through 0.0 to actually find someone who wants to fight.

Believe it or not losing implants is quite hard in low since all you have to do is spam 'warp to' button when your ship is evidently going down. In null of course you have bubbles that will prohibit you with quick way out but other than that your pod is quite safe as long as you are not completely unable to recognize fight is lost for you and it's time to get out.

And ships are for getting exploded, what other purpose they have? They are heaps of pixels bought with a pixel money and shot by other pixels. Losing a ship is not like losing a car in RL, you can always get a new one in a matter of seconds/minutes/hours/days.

As for cost of lowsec casual play - whatever you mean by that because clearly my definition of the word is not hisec compatible - I buy PLEX every three or four months and it is enough for me having fun. Weekend spent on grinding L4s probably would be enough too but sometimes I just cannot be bothered with undocking my alt in mael.

Yes, I have hisec alt - it is easy, safe and casual money making way of funding my casual lowsec pvp.

The myth that all highseccers want to play AFK may be widespread, but it's still just a myth. I'll grant that a lot of mining may be semi-AFK, but the reward is suitably low.

Didn't play EQ but I was playing quite a lot text based MUDs and yes, I remember those merry travels to your corpse :) Good old times when games were more about fun, less about grind.

But I have to say that only time I experienced station camps it was when Eve Uni decided to bring their lantern of knowledge into our neck of the woods in Heild. What we did? Some of us went to summer vacation in Placid, while some of us returned to join wardec which allowed us and other Molden Heath inhabitants to shoot those shiny positive sec status having unistas at gates and stations they were camping. Effect? They moved away and nobody camps us anymore.

But even perma camp can be beaten easily - set your clone to other station and let them pod you. Bye bye camp.



Never said anything about removing it, I just stated that casual gameplay is possible not only in hisec and in my opinion it is not what is keeping people in there. Real reason is to have shiny ships bought for piles of ISK earned in PVE grind in absolutely safety. And to be completely honest most probably nullbears are even worse with this attitude because who ever heard about hisec people crying about 1 AFK cloaky on local? :)

Regarding casual as a chillout and relaxing - I have never have any kind of stressful moment in low or null. Thrills, shakes, "oh fu*k" moments - yes, but no stress, all fun.