EVE General Discussion

Stone Cold Steve Austin,
Bret "The Hitman" Hart,
Owen Hart,
Buff Bagwell,
Edge,
CM Punk,
Hulk Hogan,
etc, etc, etc ...

... might want to have a word with you.

Eve is tough. Get used to it.

This has been the only redeeming feature of this entire thread.

NARDAC.

Here's how it is. And before you knee-jerk and counter-post this in a reactionary fashion. I want you to think about it for a day.

All of the "problems" you've listed have one single consistent factor.

YOU.

You fell in love with Eve. You fell in love with your Machariel. You undocked in a ship you couldn't afford to lose. (Emotionally) You trusted someone you shouldn't have. Because YOU didn't do a basic API check and look at his corp history or killboards. You are responsible for your game-play experience in Eve. You are responsible for your emotional reactions. This is not a "thing" that CCP should "fix". Everything is working as intended.

Now.

Go in game and open up your map to display Pod kills in the last hour. Now look at Empire. It should look like the Griswold's house from National Lampoons Christmas Vacation. Now look at low. Now look at null. Most of those systems should be dark like North Korea on a new moon. Having seen this, and using a bit of deductive logic. Where are the truly "safe" areas in New Eden? Where do you think new players should go if they're looking for a safe place where they're not going to get taken advantage of by "mean bad people"?

Eve online doesn't have player retention problems. In fact it's quite good at keeping players around and coming back. For example.

Goonswarm has a great newbro program. It's so ******* good that they own the North. They've got newbro retention down to a science. Crazy Walter Bishop meets Dr. Mengele and Megamind science. That's how good it is. And the formula is simple. Pull newbro from the cesspool that is is Empire. Throw gobs of money and cheap ships at them, and get them involved and teach them things by competent people.

Whether or not you can stand Goons corporate culture is entirely up to you. It's not for everyone and it's deliberately grating and harsh to weed out people that have no sense of humor.

But! You. NARDAC have other options available to you. And CCP doesn't have to do jack tittle for you to accomplish them!

Instead of getting all weepy-eyed over your oh-so-tragic Mach loss, and ragequitting in a hissy-fit a sugar crashing three year old would admire...

YOU can take the initiative. But first you need to learn. And to do that you must empty your cup, as it is overflowing with a sense of entitlement and copious amounts of ennui. YOU should join E-Uni. YOU should listen to Seamus Donahue and Neville Smit. YOU should fill your cup with fitting knowledge, corp management, and make connections with people.

YOU will get great satisfaction from this because YOU have empowered yourself.

And saved CCP a bunch of money fixing something that doesn't need to be "fixed" because you can just do it anyway.

Last thing hi-sec needs is more kidsafe rubber bumpers and seizure helmet safety goddamned **** nonsense buttons that gankers are just going to exploit anyway.


And if you need seed ISK to get you started again I'll ******* give you 200 mil just for joining E-Uni.

Around 155,000 people die everyday and there is no way in hell it due to natural causes. I live in a world where there are disease's, car wrecks, shooting, stabbings, military conflicts, animal attacks, suicides, and natural disasters.

Do you really feel Earth is safe? Do you expect first responders to protect you from every scary thing in life? Oh wait, the police, firefighters, and military show up AFTER something has happened. Disasters on earth worse than sandy hook happen everyday so you need to grow up. The world we live in isn't guaranteed safety.





Hate to break it to you bud but eve is about spaceships, not space stations. If you demand that all of the rookies should not learn from their mistakes then thats on you. The great thing about this game and what makes it different than life is that you can live again and continue on with the mistakes you made and learn from them.

Im sure you are one of those people that wishes you could do something over again or knew then what you know now. If people want to play spaceships games they will play the game whether you want them to or not. Eve is beautiful in the sense that there is freedom to do anything you want.

For example, you are free to lose a mach to a t1 fit t1 battleship. If thats how you get your rocks off then so be it!

Fly safe carebear o/

In EVE, rules don't belong to the one who is morally right. They belong to the one with the bigger gun. The difficult part is to break the newbie away from the stereotypes of good and bad and make him realize that he can do whatever he really wants as long as he has the means to do it.

The life of a newbie is hard. He lacks ISK. He lacks experience. Hilariously, the same Goons you mention as evil accept newbies, hand them out ships and teach them how to make a difference on the battlefield.

Killboards are pretty much silhouettes of ships painted on your hull, bragging rights, killcount - with the bonus of occasionally revealing hilariously bad fits of things you killed. A lot of people who pvp don't really worry about them as long as they get their dose of shooting and getting shot at.

What ccp said is true, eve isn't a game for people with morals or weak nerves, you should always expect anything.
However if you decide to stick for the really long run you'll find that among the many scumbags in eve there are people which you can trust and who are mature and friendly.Your best bet is to go into wormholes because many are there for the exact same reasons you stated(and cuz we hate 0.0) and wormhole corporations require more trust than your normal corp/0.0 alliance.But I've met some really nice people in whs and the fun factor is huge.

So I haven't read the rest of this thread (bar some of the usual LHA Tarawa bs. I thought you were quitting), but here's my 0.2 isk on what you have said.

Some perspective on myself so you know where I am coming from. I am a 'carebear'. I mine. I used to mission. I have a small amount of PVP experience with RvB. I don't go out of my way to get into fights. I tried 0.0 but I cannot commit to the CTA's that they require because of a combo my personal life and my timezone so I'm back in highsec. I've never scammed. I once stole a whole can of ore than someone left lying around (there was no one in system), and that's my only crime.

I also brought a friend into the game around the same time I started playing who goes by the name Mule in game. He is very much like you. A lot older than me, not interested in the scams, piracy or even PVP. He missions. Day in and day out he will be running missions in his very very bling fit faction ships. He did this for a year, buying plex to fit his ships (as he really couldn't make that much isk) until he lost a very shiny ship to Concord by shooting something he shouldn't. It was at this point he declared Eve a 'stupid game' and quit.

Mule is carebear, not because of what he does, but because he couldn't handle loss.
If you look at my characters history I recently lost a little over half a billion isk in a suicide gank. My fault, I should never have had that much stuff in my Badger Mark II. I convo'd the guy who killed me, and asked about some of the things I did wrong. Got my answer and I'll never make that mistake again. Sure it really hurt me at the time and I actually logged out of the game to stop myself doing something else stupid (my default response in a situation like that). But I learned from it and I dealt with my loss.

But why does that matter. Well one of us stayed and one didn't. And to me it's because of what drew me to Eve in the first place. I first heard about Eve it was all about the great war. That to me was amazing. To think that these players had made a war that was so large almost all of Eve was involved in it. I did some more reading, about all the things that players could do and it was this freedom that drew me to Eve. Not mining. Not missioning. Not PVP. Not scamming. Nothing that you could actually do was what attracted me on its own, it was all of them and that fact that you could do any amount of any of them. The freedom was the part that interested me.

You say that "the PvPer player base, like goons and AWOXers do FAR, FAR more to drive players away from the game than carebears do." I strongly disagree. Goonswarm were all new players who came to Eve when they were rejected by the older player base and decimated them. Even now they take a new player and make him into someone who will play Eve for a long time to come. As for Awoxers there is nothing you can do about them, but they do serve a lesson that is invaluable to an Eve player: LOSS IS INEVITABLE. I cannot stress that enough.

Retaining new players isn't about wrapping them in bubble wrap and then slowly cutting pieces away, because that just isn't Eve. Eve has always been marketed as a cold, harsh, thankless environment, where you need to work hard and against the odds to make something of yourself. Sure in highsec you have concord (the judge jury and executioner of criminals), but they are only there to punish, not to protect. We need to be educating new players about Eves true nature, not protecting them from it. Not only that but instilling a sense of community. A player who comes in solo and treats Eve like a single player game will never go as far as someone who gets involved with the community, and there is a huge Eve community out there.

Today I told a new player what the CSM was in the Youtube comments of the Video CCP put out about voting, and they couldn't believe that a game had something like this. Eve is so unique in this respect, and the further away it goes from it's core of being harsh the less unique it becomes. The less the focus is on emergent gameplay and the more focus is put onto bubble wrapping people, the more Eve dies.

I won't deny that Eve isn't for everyone, and in fact it's quite the niche game. For most people you either love Eve or you hate it, but that's nothing wrong with the game. That's a mindset issue. You need to have the mindset that you are going to succeed on your own back, not get your hand held the whole way through the game. If we can show players the feeling of success that you get when you have achieved a goal despite the fact that the deck was stacked against you, more players will come back to Eve.

And the fact is that anyone who wants to 'remove' PVP from any area of the game is kidding themselves. Eve is a PVP game in all areas, as I have said before. You PVP when you mine, by fighting to get to the rocks first. You PVP when you sell things on the market when you play the 0.01 isk game with someone selling the same stuff as you. You PVP when you undock with a hold full of goods to transport and you need to get to another system or station without dying. Learn this and new players will go far.

You will probably ignore most of this, as it seems you have already made up your mind about "PVP Players" but I encourage you to look into Eve's history and learn about what those players have done to progress the emergent gameplay of Eve. The stories of mighty empires crushed by 1000 rifters. The corps brought down by one well placed spy or thief. When you have done that, then come back and tell me that you want new players to be safer in a 'training corp', or that you want them to get involved in Eve's story, to get involved with the community that has kept Eve going for 10 years.

I am completely unconcerned with these supposed negative effects on player retention. Eve is doing fine.

Eve is one of the few games out there where having to face and overcome adversity is a constant and where being outwitted is a clear and ever-present danger (outside of freaking high sec, more so).

If you cannot deal with these premisses, this isn't the game for you. This is a tired old assessment but it's also the plain truth.

I tire of people who want to change this game to suit their personal desires. If you don't like it, just leave already.
Don't come here whining about your misfortunes and the injustices you had to suffer because this game doesn't hold your hand.

Doesn't change the fact that highsec is relative to it size massively higher populated than nullsec, let alone low.

The (maybe wrongly) perceived relative safety seems to be somewhat attractive to a major part of the playerbase, even with PVE being in the terrible state it is in.

What drives players away is simple: they are not getting what they want. Either it is not provided by this game or they can not find it.

Some people come to EvE and find the 'intrigue' something they don't like and perhaps eventually can't stand... so they leave.


I don't think this game will ever be changed to allow everyone to enjoy winning. Whether it should or not, I can't say. I just have to deal with EvE as it is. If I don't, if I try to play EvE in a style that it was never designed to be played... I won't have fun.

You don't have to be a 'force of evil' ... you just have to recognize it exists and is a major part of this game.