EVE General Discussion

Are you saying that no effort should be made to bring the soloers into the fold, or to make the game more survivable by new players?

i doubt it will ever happen (it makes too much sense), but +1 anyway.

I started a thread in features and ideas about this.

I've come to the conclusion that if this was a few years ago, it simply wouldn't have been possible. The nodes wouldn't have been able to handle it, and CCP would literally be working full time just reinforcing nodes in high sec to keep them from exploding.

Today though, with TiDi and the work they've done making the nodes capable of supporting a large number of fights, and CCP not needing to reinforce a node everytime a few hundred people start fighting, I feel there's zero reason for CCP to not do this now.

Most of the stuff is already in the game, it wouldn't require massive overhauls or the creation of entirely new mechanics and assets.

Not to mention the last decades worth of learning how we utilize the tools they give us.

If each ship costs you "hours of effort" you suck at EVE.

I have billions upon billions of isk I could spend on ships, and I put in very little effort to get it, without having to buy any plex to do so.

If you don't have to put any time or effort into your ships, I can understand why you are so eager to throw them away. But not everyone is like that. It's not all about you.

As long as that corp has an NPC station to fall back to, it doesn't solve anything.

IF that NPC station wasn't an NPC station, but was controlled by a high sec player run corp, not undocking means you're not fighting for whats yours, and someone else can take it.

I don't advocate high levels of control in high sec. Small levels of control that allow groups of people to feel like they have ownership of something important.

PoS's without the compolete revamp wont do it, and CCP has pretty much said they're not likely going to do it.
And even if they do, that NPC station is still there, allowing you to do everything you would be doing in your PoS and not at any significant cost increase.

High sec needs to be run by the player corporatins there, not a static NPC state.


Edit: There's this strange situation that happens in EVE. People are more willing to abandon a PoS then they are to undock and get a few ships blown up. It makes no sense.

There's no reason to decrease solo players.

I agree that NPC stations staying the way they are would make any POS revamp, even a hugely thorough one, irrelevant to this particular discussion. However, in an ideal situation I'd like such a pos revamp to also include balances to npc stations, a big, obvious one would be shift the majority of manufacturing out of stations and onto pos. If they were to go all in with a pos revamp, along the "floating cities built by player corps" type route (which will either never happen or take a million years) I see it as something that could - or would inherently need to in order to work - devalue npc stations a crap load, to the point where yeah, you can sit in one and ship spin whenever a nasty person appears, but you'd suffer a lot more by doing that.

The thread is about someone taking a CCP comment and trying to construe to say something that it doesn't say to justify thier "feelings".

EVE is neither a grouping game, nor is it a solo game.

It's a sandbox, and sandboxes revolve around player interaction, not group or solo content.

Edit: Besides, you can already do damn near everything in EVE "solo". The hell do they need more solo content for?
We need more content that brings large numbers of players together to interact in space, whehter they do that solo or in a group is irrelevent to the point of getting them in the same space, playing, and interacting in ways that will lead to emergent gameplay and more player driven dynamics.

I begin saying you are right.

But...

... there is a but.

What you are picturing (ways to drive out players out of XYZ) has been a recurring issue in most PvP MMOs and even in WoW, for many years.

This is a phenomenon that in other MMOs terms would be called "spawn camping".

We have to step back a second and look at why people want to drive out other players and why those other players don't want to be driven out of somewhere "safe".

The reasons are usually psychological: you have somebody winning very hard and someone losing very hard, to the point of not daring to poke their nose out of the MMO specific "safe zone".

It has been proven again and again and again - with raw subscription numbers - that those who don't poke the nose out are already weakened - dis-heartened (I am probably making tons of typos, my self taught English sucks I know) and ready to give up.

There's no "whys" or "whats" or "it's right", they just DO NOT WANT TO FIGHT.

This has posed a very hard challenge to MMO designers of all eras, because it's clear that those who are winning want to deal the "final blow" and possibly humiliate the losers. It's something against my personal beliefs but I acknowledge that those with a "Conan" approach want to go all out and make scorched earth.

But the "but" is this: those who lose or are losers or are weak or are bad are still paying subscribers.

Regardless how you feel about them, THEY (notice, I am reporting other people's beliefs not mine) feel entitled to have a chance to either get back to battle or to surrender or to "stop" the fight before their ego is crushed.
All the MMO makers who took away the ability to refuge behind some immortal NPCs / walls / unclimbable cliffs have lost sizable amounts of players.
This because the weak / bad / loser players are always, always, A L W A Y S the hugest majority. MMOs by their nature also attract the many with a losing attitude that believe playing a game is an entitled ticket to some joy.
Remove these safe spots and those stop playing the battleground / scenario / PvP lake (name varies by MMO) and do something else, leaving the victors stare at their toes as the PvP feature population takes a steep dive down.

It's not something nice or good, it's just what happens since at least 7 years.

To bring in a personal example: among many other PvP games I have also played Warhammer Online, a potentially awesome game that failed hard due to many broken features, the prominent one being the fact that who won a round could keep bashing at the losers forever.

You can look at my own PvP videos to see how that game was (and still is) awesome in its own now super small niche.

It prized winners (seems logic!), it prized those who grouped (see my videos), it prized those who got best prepared and on voice comms (still in my videos). It penalized who lost, in case of RvR (PvP in large zones) it made them unavailable the ability to run the top PvE, it made them spawn-camp-able and humiliable.

Result: on top of other great MMO company fuk ups, this kind of ability to severely humiliate losers made the scenarios (sort of battlegrounds) totally deserted. Those who still played there were absolutely low level who needed the "loser token".

They'd get killed even inside their spawn point and they'd just stay... dead till the end of the scenario. Result: the winners got bored because they were left alone on the field, everybody else dead and not respawning.

The ONLY scenarios (there was a vast choice, some were quite awesome) that survived were those where who was in the minority, or were randoms etc. etc. could leave a permanently protected spawn camp. Not only that but they all selectively picked scenarios with multiple exits so that it was very hard to camp all of them.
This gave the best of the losers the ability to leave their camp and go try some solo / opportunistic kill.

Until people will pay a sub to play, they will behave like this. This includes F2P games too and pay once to play (GW2) games, where the "pay a sub" consists in the very fact of bothering to play that MMO instead of another.


So, to recap, you want *legitimately* ways to drive out those mice out of their burrows, be it with station camping, be it by making them war-deccable and whatever.
But it's not going to happen, EVER.

What WILL happen FOR SURE is that once you remove their "fall back" burrow they'll just log off and ultimately quit, and neither you nor CCP can do anything about that.

Making them have to fight for something valuable? It will work for a small minority of them, the others will just say "bah, fk off this game" and stop.
Now, on paper this is just a matter of "well, they were not suited for EvE anyway". But - once again - losers and weaklings ARE the majority of any MMO and EvE makes no exception.
Therefore you put CCP in a position to have either to give you - tiny minority - your legitimate right to win and humiliate OR give them - wast majority - ways to escape and eventually stand up again.

Guess what is going to happen?