EVE General Discussion

There are many creative ways in which they could have dealt with this issue.

For example, they could make all weapons (guns and missiles) projectiles have a travel time. And give smaller ships (frigs, cruisers) an ability to do a barrel roll and avoid all damage. That's what they did in Guild Wars 2. No matter if you're having a sword swung at you, or a bullet fired or a spell cast, if you time your roll right, you avoid its damage. But you can only do so many rolls before you need to recover. Worked just fine for that game.

They could add modules that grant temporary invulnerability. As in, you activate it, and for the next X seconds, you are immune to all damage. MMOs like WoW, GW2, AoC, etc., have these mechanics. Easily counters focus fire. You see a bunch of fire coming your way, and you have that module fit? Pop it. Now artillery needs 16 seconds to reload, and you can move away.

Another thing they could try is very basic collision detection. Which is to say, if there's an object or a ship between you and target, you don't hit the target, you hit whatever is in the way. More load on CPU? Yes. But so worth it in terms of immersion. This is what they did in Pirates of the Burning Sea. If you took too much damage, you could always duck behind a friendly or a hostile, and try to recover while the enemy tried to get line of sight back.

Another possibility would be to allow people to choose shield position. I believe X-Wing and Tie Fighter games had that. Wind Commander too? Can't honestly remember. AoC definitely had that as well. If you knew the bulk of damage was coming from the front, you could realign your shields to the front. In AoC, if you knew the big attack was from the left, you stacked all 3 shields left, and mitigated most of it. Or you could choose to maintain one shield on each of the three sides (there's no shielding at the back, ever) and "omni-tank" it. Something similar could be done in EVE. That way, if you are ambushed by another group from the rear, you would crumble fast. But if it was a line battle, it would last considerably longer as you'd present your most armored side to the enemy (and thus be difficult to alpha down). I believe in AoC each shield reduced damage 25%? So if you hit a triple-shielded side, you lost 75% of your damage.

There's quite a few other things they could do. Because if you think about it, actual combat mechanics in EVE are incredibly weak and outdated. Look at "newer" games, like PotBS and AoC (both 2008), GW2 (2012), etc. Combat there is actually heavily skill-based and interesting. In EVE, it's rather bland.

Why add more low skill point people when there's already a too many high skill point doing absolutely nothing with their stuff other than amassing more stuff.?

Can't we just motivate the existing players to pvp?

This is me turning my head at 90degrees to look at you funny

Why add more low skill point people when there's already a too many high skill point doing absolutely nothing with their stuff other than amassing more stuff.?

CCP sold out all realistic expansion of Eve years ago by encouraging more per-subscriber subscription ie extremely protracted content unlock and excessive skill requirements for 'core' content in a fundamentally anti-social environment necessitating multiple accounts per individual to effectively participate. They then tried to make Eve 'free to play' by making everyone a billionaire within a month or two of signing up, without any realistic long term plan to siphon off all that isk. Instead allowing it to accumulate in all the wrong things. On top of that they have completely ignored the one truly emergent part of the game and allowed it to fester for years resulting in a no-incentive, no-change, no-interest malaise further compounded by limitless isk faucets and associated tyranny of spreadsheet warriors and the boring, risk-free, repetitive, interaction-free inconsequential 'pve' gameplay they demand.

If CCP really wanted to grow Eve they'd have made the game far more accessible to new players and new player groups. Instead its the opposite: an unreasonably high bar of entry, ever more pointless skills, extremely tedious and uninspiring end game content too long in the coming and alts for alts for alts. They do everything they can to discourage character training and actively force 'normal' people in to character trading and plex purchase (but only really encouraging rmt) and rampant automation in all areas.

Eve isn't going to grow, its going to endure slow lingering death of interest from the 20, 000 or so people paying for 2.5-5 accounts each. Many of whom have in recent years, started to become steadily more disillusioned and disappear since CCP slapped this game in maintenance mode circa 2009.

It has now become a too expensive and too time consuming parody of that second job you have to pay for.

You live in this strange fantasy land where hi sec dwellers are noobs (they are actually mostly carebears who have been sitting in hi sec vegetating for years) and null sec dwellers are vets (large numbers of them are new players brought in by oog recruitment drives).

New players leave because they are scared into staying in hi sec by the bearvets (seriously make a noob and spend some time in those school channels) and obviously dedicating your game time to hi sec requires a special mindset (similar to being in a coma) so they get bored.