EVE General Discussion

Frequent player activities(and active players) is the lifeline of a MMO game.These days I noticed that too many people on the forum are very enthusiastic about improving(rebalancing or nerfing, whatever) the pve part of EVE, that's not bad. But you may like to realize that there is a fair portion of people that only engage in very little PVE features. PVE to them is similar to how mining to many PVEers: "knowing how to do, but never go for that".

On the recent FW changes and its result, I see CCP did a great job that successfully stimulated people's interest to seek fights/engage opposites.

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There are these factors that contributes to the success of FW, I group them according to the duration of action and period of reward:

Small/Short term goal/reward is what can be achieved by one cycle of an activity .
Mid-term goal/reward will takes several ops and days to accomplish.
Long term goal/reward is a fairly big project in a field, such as pushing Amarr militia to T4(or Minmatar to T5) etc.

- Small/Short term goals: Increase/decrease the capture progress of a system; invade/expel opposites from a system.
Reward: instant FW site and killing rewards
- Mid-term goal: Capturing a system and have it upgraded, increase the global military point.
Reward: Right to dock; Station service discount
- Big/Long term goals: Get/retake more territories from opposite militia, get advantages or neutralize the disadvantages on militia level.
Reward: Better reward rate

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Then let's see what's in null(sov):
- Sov fights: Taking/defending a system(Mid-term goal/reward),
Reward will be whatever in the system.

- Pos bashing: Taking/defending a moon, strategic position, CSAA etc (Mid-term goal)
Reward is the moon material, safer system, or the accomplishment of causing a great lose to opposite.

- Campaigns: Taking/defending a region(s), **** an enemy off (Long-term goal)
The long-term reward is generous you know.

These above looks good, but how about the others??
- Attacking customs office: Looks like a mid-term goal, that taking a customs office down.
Reward: Grief? Money lose to opposite? tbh it sounds stupid and people don't do it until they totally controlled the system, and then they have to. So this is an activity I will mark as "broken".

- Entrance gate camping: prevent some newbies/soloers from wandering into the territory, alert people about any roaming fleets (short term goal??!? but maybe we should not call something that can never be accomplished a 'goal' here, it is confusing)
Reward: happy corpmates(blues)? (lol) griefs? good fights(rare)? (it is actually not a 'reward' I'm talking about)
So this may be something actually broken as well.

- Normal roamings : Short-term goal: catching inexperienced player who's doing pve or traveling carelessly, hope the opposite to bring a fight-able fleet but often fail.
Short-term reward: I don't want to put something like "fun" here, because people can get fun by doing anything they like,but except it there is nothing left.

- AFK cloaking : Gay Term, gay reward. People love it, hate it, whatever, I have decided to leave it alone in this post.

Comparing with what happen in null, we can see there are a lot of mid/long term goals and rewards, but few(or just no) working short term goals/rewards. And this is what going to limit the frequency of pvp activities in null, and consequently cause people to afk, un-sub or at least feel "null is boring". Because the mid or long term activities can not happen very often, and people are from different time-zones.

In short, we need more reasonable short-term goals and rewards to keep null people alive.
I wish CCP can work out some funny ideas, and the community people can give some feasible suggestions rather than rework the whole game
Edit: the rewards may not necessary be "NPC generated", but CCP may want to help entities to distribute the reward with efficiency.

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Here is one solution comes from my unimaginative brain:
Encourage roaming by extortable customs office

Customs office, which is wired in sov null, I would like to make some use of it:
By taking down the office shield to x% level, 80% for example, the office will launch and eject Y% of PI product from all the launch pads on that planet (because people on that planet are being extorted). And so on for 65% HP, first reinforcement etc.
This will be the short-term reward. And the short-term goal will be decreasing the custom's HP and migrate into the mid-term goal, that eventually destroy the office.
Hauling the booties could be a problem but something worth to consider, or maybe the volume of PI stuff can be decreased a bit (or make a ship that can greatly compress stuff at a great refine loss).

As a balance to people doing PI, there could be a boost (the reduction of volume can be a great boost on both side) to PI), such as increasing the productivity in null and WH.

Will it boost the greater power?
It will boost the alliance/corporation with more active fleets and live numbers, while not causing too much lose to the side that being pillaged (comparing with an insta lose of a carrier or golem)
The side being pillaged often will losing more "face" than actual properties, therefore they will have reason and power to fight back, and eventually bring more life and fights to the null.

tl;dr
Roaming should have a short-term goal and reasonable reward that important to keep people in null active and alive.
An idea could be making the customs office eject unlaunched PI product by every 15% HP drop.
This idea is not the motivation that I write this OP,
a short term goal with instant reward(other than "fun") for null pvp is.

I don't know how could you link my post to those pve argements like "too high the income in high-sec" etc. Maybe you have been argued with too many people that automatically migrate everything into "rebalance of high/low/null-sec". And for me, that post is just full of PVE/mining ***** that I don't want to talk about.

Double checked the tittle. Should be precise enough



I'm not going to issule multiple problems(or suspected problems) in one null-sec-pvp post, which could precisely work on it own.

Your title is misleading.

What you are talkiing about is sov null.

There's plenty of life in npc null and pretty much everyone is there for PvP.

Sov null is dead because there is zero reason to go there unless you are in/a pet of/renting from (delete as applicable) a major alliance/corp.

You can't dock anywhere; your chances of finding a fight which isn't instantly hotdropped by dozens of bored sov null "pvprs" are exceptionally limited these days; most of the people in local won't be remotely interested in a fight (you know the ones I mean, they dock up and go silent on comms soon as a decent size fleet is reported). The list goes on and on.

If you actually like PvP then I don't understand what you're doing in a sov null alliance.

I'm serious because you won't find decent PvP there except in very unusual circumstances. What you will find (and this is true of every sov alliance I've been in) is a leadership who think the only PvP worth engaging in is sov warfare; a membership that are largely sheep waiting to be told what to do; and a very very small group of people who can act independently in PvP (ie they understand what is happening NOW).

I didn't find that fun, much as I didn't find sitting in massive fleets waiting for hours to bridge/jump into another massive fleet fun.

I think you're bored because sov null is intrinsically boring and it will remain so while it is effectively "off-limits" to small corps who don't want to be another alliance slave. You wouldn't need artificial nonsense to keep "people in null active and alive" if anyone could dock at sov null outposts/stations the way they can in npc null. Doesn't have to be all the outposts but some.

Anyway change the title as lots of us don't think all of null is sov space as you obviously do

I have much more experience in NPC null than what in sov, so I can understand how the npc null is actually more boring than sov. If you honestly try to match the short/mid/long term goals to NPC null, you will see the goals there are void or hopeless to achieve, due to the nature of NPC spaces, and I suspect this is one reason that CCP changed something about docking in FW.

NPC null, actually needs more efforts to fix comparing with the sov, but due to its low population, I think CCP would pay more attention to the place with better "investment/reward" ratio

Having done Sov null, NPC null and FW extensively....the FW method is the best. By far. By lightyears.

Completely agree with the OP, null sec needs goals for small gangs and medium sized gangs. I remember CCPs response to this years ago was....destructible services with 20-50m hp.

In my opinion if CCP modified the current FW system and merged it with some updated streamlined POS mechanics then they'd have a winner that would lead to a massive surge in null sec population and subscriber count.

We may get another post to solve the pver's problem if there is, as the PVE features have no direct link to short term goal in pvp.

Also I'm not sure how did estimated the "10%", personally I will increase it to "30%" at least.


How often do you get faction loots? and how much you get from that?
Also you can't separate reward from goal, and assign a reward that can be obtained from every other pvp activity to a single instance, saying "it's the reward of roaming"

It is, thanks to the cries of people like... yes...

Profit sharing. Your comparison is FW versus soverign space? Why not the differences between sleeper sites and gate camps?

The "reward" system is different because of Sov space is accomplishing their goals with a different business "model" than FW does.

It's really hard to see how you compare something that takes an entire coalition to accompolish versus what a soloer can do because well, FW doesn't have player created rewards in place that sov null does (ship replacement, CTA's etc).

I'd think that people join larger coalitions/alliances because of the community of being in a like-minded organization that decides and presents interaction in the form of pvp to take over those systems for the good of everyone, not because people want to shoot a POS for hours.

FW is for instant gratification even though there are long term goals, those long terms are also supplemented by the short terms.

I guess what I'm trying to say here, is if you want npc generated stuff, go do npc based activities.

After rereading the OP, I just realized something...

This is in no way a slight, but a lot of the things empire born pilots have is character creation. I don't mean sculpting your pilot, but actually testing and trying various different things with the entire game ahead of us.

I know with Goons especially, and this might be relevant because of the OP, but when you're bathed and baptized in blood of Sov warfare, you not only miss out on the baby steps of Eve and the fun of trying and finding all these new fascinated things, you also become de sensitized to it because let's face it, you will have a jaded approach to the normal "highsec carebear".

Because of that, your outlook and approach to different things have an entire different meaning. I know some pilots must have had created alts for this very same reason, but twinks/alts aren't the same as learning new things for the first time. You will still approach things with the same frame of mind you've been applying your pvp skills with regardless.

That in itself might be the problem.

Counter-example:
FW sites: NPC generated LP, pvp based(mostly) avtivities.

And actually there is no way to assume that the "reward" should be "npc generated stuff", but even for player-driven rewards, there better to have assistance from CCP to reduce the workload to avoid the burnout of management people or fleet fc.

Another one of these threads? *sigh*