Jita Park Speakers Corner

RANT ABOUT LOWSECS

Lowsec space is great in my opinion. It has easy access to highsec, the risk is somewhat lower due to limitations on bubbles and the like and there's no sovereignty, you can go anywhere and dock anywhere and so forth. But unfortunately actually spending time in lowsec causes you to lose sec status, even if you're just hoping to be a carebear you're often forced to fire first as the inty mwds at you in a site. I like lowsec a lot, I like the increased risk, I like the potential for sudden PvP, I like hunting people and I quite like being hunted. It's good, it's solid game design, but again, poor implementation. The game goes "oh, so you want to take advantage of all this amazing content in lowsec, that's fine, you can have that, hope you don't mind if I take away all the highsec content from you unless you jump through an incredibly pointless and arbitrary set of hoops". Well actually game, I do mind losing access to all highsec content just because I want to spend time in lowsec and I don't think the system used for sec status gain is in any way good.

Next comes the colossal imbalance in reward between comparable activities. Now, I'm not a space communist, I understand that different activities have different complexities, player skills required and so forth. I understand that knowing which are the high value activities and which are not often involves spreadsheeting and it's perfectly reasonable that ignorance results in a lower income. That's not what this is about. What this is about is that comparable activities which are comparable in game skills needed, risk, market awareness and all the rest of it are essentially a lottery in terms of the result because there is no consistency in the reward given when CCP introduced stuff to the game. I think part of this comes down to CCP not really playing their own game (as evidenced by Inferno and the fw problems) but it is an issue. A working knowledge of opportunity cost leads players to the conclusion that if they're in lowsec doing PvE that isn't fw missions, even if it's regular missions in the same space, then they're actually paying for the privilege of not indulging in the broken mechanic. What I would like to see is the reward for comparable activities scaled, rather than just being the result of an arbitrarily assigned number some years ago. Tiericide and t1 ship revamps are slowly dealing with the power creep that made some hulls obsolete but the exact same process of new content making old content obsolete has happened to entire parts of the game and that also needs to be addressed.

There are more examples which I'm sure other people have experienced, I raise these ones only because they're the ones nearest to my heart but what matters is the underlying principle. There is a problem of arbitrary and partial implementation of good game design in eve that creates a barrier to entry and actively disincentivises engaging in a lot of the content in the game. Entire parts of the game have become figurative pre-patch stabber with any value they ever had stripped away by new content. What I would like to see is for CCP to take a step back from pushing shiny new expansions and instead look at what they've done over the last few years and try and impose some kind of system on it to make content accessible and rational. I'm very happy to say that CCP seem to be of the same opinion with their new ship changes trying to redress the problems expansions have created over the years but the problems go beyond that.


TLDR: Give living in lowsec some love by making the stuff in the game make sense and not punish people for choosing to lowsec. I'm an angry angry man.

I would agree that much of EVE, possibly even all of EVE, is truly awful in both design and implementation. But somehow the combination of all of EVE's badly assembled facets manage to combine with the single shared harsh sandbox concept to make a game that is far better than it's component parts. I've yet to find a game that makes a better fist of what EVE does well... but it seems that the price we pay for the few gems is that everything else is truly and outrageously bad.