EVE General Discussion

Another way is for all toons, including biomassed ones, show up on API. Someone who deletes a lot of toons is likely to be a risk.

Please explain.

I was just reading through this recently. I'll quote the first paragraph:



As I finished reading that paragraph, I stopped. I realized something had caught my eye earlier in the day. I missed it at the time:
Psychotic Monk
Naos Autocracy [NAOS]
Member for 0 days

So I hit battle clinic and got out my popcorn. A few hours later.. well, I'll let you figure it out since this isn't C&P and I can't post links. I'll just say it involved a mission Raven.

What does it have to do with Alts?

Edit: Just noticed that story is up

Players come in wanting to get involved with the whole large-scale politics thing. They fly out into the universe looking to find someone and take their stuff, and immediately have their ship shot out from under them. They are then laughed at, called scrubs, and told to go back to WoW for being terrible.

Does that seem likely to inspire them to continue down that path?

In EVE, you need contacts in order to get into the big game. In order to get these contacts, you need...contacts. And so on.
In order to make ISK via PvP, you need ISK. Making ISK via PvE is tedious, the most vocal part of the playerbase laughs at you for doing it and actively tries to stop you, and it is very slow.

It's true that EVE should be challenging. But there's challenging, and then there's "every single person you meet will probably betray you or kill you, most of them hate you simply because they're not friends with you from somewhere else, and making enough money to go out and shoot them in the face for it is an incredible pain in the ass".

Edit: You need ISK to get better > you need to get better to make ISK > you need ISK... and all the while half the playerbase is trying to stop you making ISK, then laughing at you when you can't get better.

Anecdotal evidence ftw.

My utmost respect towards Monk for having the balls to pull stuff like that off without switching accounts all the time. (Well, i hope he doesn't anyway :))

I sincerely doubt that is the norm for awoxers/scammers, though.

You bring up a very interesting point here.

So why can I not have one character/account who is a griefer/awoxer and another who is a carebear?

Why can I not enjoy all of the various aspects of the game through role playing various characters? Why must I instead be defined as a Player and railroaded into the "lowest common denominator"?

Why is it a problem when an existing player creates a new character to try out the darker side of EvE? That character will soon be dirty as can be. If anything, linking it to an 8 year old carebear could give it undue credibility. It's only a problem when such an alt gets biomassed and recreated. Fortunately that's not a problem either, as it's a banable offense to do so.

The point is that there are a lot of people playing eve that are not well suited to it, simply because there are no alternatives to flying spaceships in any kind of decent game for the past few years. The fact that many many people have been paying thousands of pounds to play an MMO for years and never interacted with anyone should drive that point home.

That however will change this year with a number of forthcoming games that have already specifically addressed a lot of these issues, and CCP will be faced with losing a fair amount of revenue or changing the game to mitigate all the things that certain people like to do to certain people and the things that do make the unsuited people unsub. But CCP is a business and they will not be happy with only the people who are suited to eve are playing it with a 50% drop in revenue or whatever.

I would much rather this is discussed and addressed properly, rather than just flat out denying the validity of any arguments based on it, and forcing CCP into reacting with kneejerk changes so that the end result is that the game loses its core beauty and draw. I used to think that it would be unpossible for such a thing to happen, but then the nex store stuff happened.

I can think of a lot of things that are critical issues (that must be fixed in a manner pleasing both parties) in the face of competition from star citizen, elite, or the things that come after. For example the standings is much too simplistic to convey corp, personal, enemies, contacts, standings history etc. There are far more greys than just one in new eden, so please can we have some more greys and shades in our pallettes at the very least, ways to visualise corp relation history, etc etc.

Camera outside stations, ship combat simulator, various time saving functions (ship fitting options on the market, repeating market orders, macros for batch ordering and fitting for corps etc). The list goes on, loads of things are just annoying, incomplete, confusing for no really good reason. A silly example maybe, but the fact that every hi sec system does not have insurance & repair when they have space stations that can fit thousands of ships and millions of people is a good example- for me it's bad complexity, complexity for its own sake which only serves to make things more annoying, not more interesting. For low, null sec, it makes sense and can add interest to journeys etc (although I think a lot of things look too samey, losec stations could be a bit smaller or something to reflect things more intuitively)

These little annoyances do mount up for a lot of people, until that gank (that was actually quite funny in retrospect) ends up being the straw that breaks teh carebear's back.

People complain that eve is too complicated, it's not that (for most of us I guess), it's that the system of interfacing with eve is too basic or simplistic, and often wastes time/isk/life so needlessly through repetition or opaqueness that every failure and victory that stem from the pure sandbox is hugely overemphasised, along with all the tears, smack, nerfs and buffs that come after.

Eve can keep or even widen its appeal without making any griefing impossible, or even any harder for the people that are clever enough to do it well, it just needs to give players the tools to reward intelligence as well as punishing stupidity. It is too unbalanced towards the latter at the moment, mainly from the lack of options to do the former.

And yes I realise I just posted an eve is dying cliche post but there will be competition soon where there was none before.

The issue with Eve is that it is different from most MMOs. That's not a bad thing per say, however it makes no attempt to help "convert" people who might be use to a theme park environment into a Eve based mindset. The current(lack there of) NPE has more of a sink or swim mentality that will drive away most theme park based players as well as those who are actually into the sandbox idea. Not to mention that the current NPE is catered to PVE and does very little to introduce new pilots into combat oriented professions. Hence why many are afraid of adventuring outside of Highsec.

So, what you're saying is that spies and most forms of spying should be eliminated?

Along with Corp/Alliance heists perpetrated in order to aid a hostile alliance.

Being able to easily identify all characters owned by a player would not improve the game. Also, I doubt CCP can do it on the scale and with the rigor that they would need to.

For example: When I get a friend to start playing EVE, I have them sign up through a buddy program and hand them a PLEX to get started. When I start an alt, I do the same thing. In both cases, there's no credit card info, there are different E-mail addresses for each account (though my alts all have emails on the same personal domain, but they don't have to), so what can CCP use to quickly distinguish between the two instances, so that my alt can be added to my list-o-alts, and my friend not?

IP address might work, unless the friend happens to be a roommate or set up his account while over at my place.
Hardware profile might work, except that many people run EVE in a virtual machine environment (called the Mac Client).


And again, someone who doesn't know enough about the game to prevent an obvious AWOX risk (the guy had a previous history of dirty deeds AWOXing) from joining his corp is not doing the newbies any favors by "teaching" them.

CCP has stated that they do not currently link accounts to players. For example, they can't tell you how many accounts the average player has.

Even if they did link players to accounts, it would be very difficult to do so, if the person did not want CCP to be able to. Pay with PLEX or paypal. Run off your neighbor's wifi, or from the Starbucks.


Making a rule, that you can't enforce, simply splits the community into the suckers that follow the rules, and those in the "proper EVE mindset" that think if they can do it, then it is okay to do it.

Rather that failing to limit each player to one toon (which as you say, can't and won't ever happen), I think any change (SHOULD CCP decide that, and I'm not saying it does, increasing new player retention justifies de-harshing the universe to some extent) should come in the form of game mechanics changes, that CCP can more easily enforce. These are not recommendations, but some options could be as simply as making shooting corp mates a non-criminal act upto the CEO
s configuration, or modifying the safety mechanism such that you can't shoot, warp scramble, sensor damp, etc. a corp or alliance blue.


I think game mechanics are WAY more viable than attempting to limit players to one toon.

On this, we fundamentally disagree.


However, since morality is a purely subjective construct, not tangible objective truth, there can be no cogent argument made by either side.


I will simply say this.

When playing chess, yes, I'm trying to win. BUT, I'm also conscious that it is a game that should be fun for all involved. Being a prick, sitting or staring at them in an aggressive manor, and insulting the person's mother, may throw him off his game and help me win.

However, behaving in this manner I'm:

* being immoral. I'm treating a person in a way they or I would not reasonably want and expect to be treated, without them having done anything to deserve such treatment. While not strictly forbidden by the rules of the game, I'm violating the rules of civilized society.

* reducing the odds of that person wanting to play against me in the future. Before we blame the carebears and their boring play style for low new player retention rates, we should at least take into consideration the "EVE Mindset" of being a giant douche, just because you are a sociopath that enjoys making other people miserable, because you can, and because it is not technically against the rules


A game can be fun for all players, win or lose. A game does not require that you ruin someone's day, just to be fun for you, unless of course, you are a sociopath that only enjoys behaving in an anti-social way and causing pain to others.