EVE General Discussion

Don't wanna derail much, but deep safes were fun as hell. I remember jumping with a fleet to a spot like250 au out from the star, it was a race to see what would happen 1st, would we load grid or would the enemy land and slaughter us. And i remember FCs ordering cyno pilots to light 2 deep cynos at once making the enemy choose what to do etc.

While I'm not in favor of bugs and exploits, I kinds miss that "storming the beachhead" feeling lol.

I like the idea of revamping the exploration system. So really looking forward to that and hope its implementation will be successful and create an interesting new playground for both PvPers and explorers.

I also hope that CCP doesn't listen too much to some of these carebears in here and will decide to balance the "mini-game" as well as the whole hacking process, around the thought that people have to heavily multitask in order to stay safe.

With the removal of NPCs from the sites, it will be possible to fly around a cloaky exploration frigate in low and null, meaning the only "risk" element for exploration, would be pirates fielding probes themselves, as well as the usual SB and instalocking gate camps (but decent pilots will know how to avoid these). The current "risk" element in low/null sec exploration mainly derives from that fact that the NPCs are strong enough to be able to whelp your ship if not careful.

If it is too easy for people too just run from the pirates trying to probe you down in the site, then eventually pirates will stop trying to fit a probe launcher in order to hunt these targets down (because we will just fit our usual fits and go hunt for targets in asteroids instead :D), effectively removing the "risk" element from the low and nullsec sites.

I feel the balancing of the risk <-> reward aspect of the exploration will be intersting to follow. On one hand you might create a great new way for low/nullsec pilots to hunt for targets and as well as encouraging pure exploration pilots to be active in order to stay safe and be successful. On the other hand, you might just create another system with too lenient barriers of entry, that have too little risk, compared to the amount of reward (Yes, I'm looking at you FW plexing).

I agree with the OP.

This new 'Mini' hacking game is a waste of time. The jettison of loot cans in a 'free 4 all' race is definitely wrong.



DMC

Myself, for what it is worth (not much, I'm sure) I welcome CCP trying to innovate and make the game of exploration something more than 'activate the module, grab the stuff.' I don't know if I particularly like this concept but I'm more than willing to give it a try. We're going to get it whether we like it or not, so hey, might as well see how it turns out right?

The one thing that I find interesting is that there will not be any combat in these sites. This implies that a covert ops is all that is needed to farm items from these exploration sites. Is there any benefit at all to bringing an exploration fit battlecruiser or T3? Is there anything in the system that will benefit players that are more experienced, have better equipment, or have better skill at the hacking minigame?

I'm not concerned about "only being able to grab a portion of the canisters." I'm sure that it will be balanced in a way that a solo explorer - which is the vast, vast majority of explorers - won't see their income drop in a significant way. Bringing along a friend seems to bring zero monetary benefit to an explorer, but it could be helpful to have someone watch local for you while you do the little hacking game.

I do hope that the hacking game is complex enough, and that the results matter enough, that someone who is good at the game will get better drops than someone who is terrible at it - skills being a totally separate issue. Please make the hacking minigame something that requires a brain, some skill, and some practice to do well.

I think that's why this idea you are presenting is pissing alot of people off, quite frankly.

I personally don't like the idea of a mini-game to begin with, think it has no place in EVE, but let's ignore that. Let's get to the point of what I highlighted that you guys are doing wrong: too much focus on cooperation.

You know this game has always catered for solo- as well as groups. And the rewards has always been with the groups. Corporations, and later on Alliances when you added that. The benefit of strength in numbers. Before we had player built Outposts, people could dare to venture in small scale to null, now it's nearly impossible (some of us do, I'm one of them, but we're almost extinct). Small scale PvP is about dead. Old belt-ratting that was such a great way of finding small scale PvP opportunities have been killed off and been replaced by group-centered activities (Incursions, sov-upgrade blob hubs, etc). Even the Black Ops that was quite useful in small scale has now been another tool in the hands of the blobs.

Wormholes is one of the few bastions in EVE that caters for smaller scale PvP, but its PvE is still very group centered, unfortunately. The only option left for small scale PvE has been lv4, or Exploration.

Adding incentitives for people to group-PvE is not bad. Making it worse for soloers, is. I can only speak for myself, but after playing this game for near a decade, and at points having had 10-20 accounts running same time, the only things that been interesting to me in last few years has been WH and Exploration. Thanks to you killing off small scale PvP and completely boosting the blobs to infinity, there really hasn't been much else left of the "old EVE". And frankly, this mini-game, while it disgust me completely, is made even worse with that pick-up mechanic.

I really hope you re-think. And I really wish your bosses would stop making this game for blobs alone. I know you don't care about old customers, and just want new ones (as long as they're more in number than the old ones), but one might hope you at least would show some respect to those who loved this game, spent alot of time/money on it, and pulled in new customers to CCP.

Countdown to you guys ruining WH's as well.

Edit; That being said, it's nice that some of the staff at CCP taken their time to reply in this thread.
Edit2; Oh, and you'll have to reduce the size of loot in Radar sites significantly, as in the present state you often have to micro-manage it by dropping cans with loot behind. It takes alot of cargo space.

Small gang PVP isn't dead at all. Just because there are lots of blobs doesn't mean you can't PVP in small groups as well, or even solo. I've done it many times.


I guess it's a good thing they're not making anything worse for soloers.

That's really the only gripe I have about this entire thing, and I don't even play in WH space.
Not sure how CCP expects ice miners in WH space to prevent being blown up by cloaked ships all the time.

Again I'd like to bring up bad internet connections. Try living in rural areas where substantial packet-loss occurs like all the time. Oh the fun that'll be had watching 90% of the loot drift into the void, because half your clicks were swallowed by the net demon.

I hate to agree with this, because some allowance for lag is necessary in game design. But really, it's like 4 seconds. You've got time to react even if it lags. just click 2-3 times instead of once every 4 seconds. Seriously, depending on how a game is coded, packet loss is like the one thing in computing where clicking more actually *does* make it go faster. Well, sort of.

At the moment, we know very little about the changes.

The only thing the said was an introduction of the minigame and the vanishing loot.

What the minigame will be or how it will inpact the game is at this point unknown.

The vanishing loot looks not only stupid from a game perspective but is also quite silly seen from the 'simulation' aspect of the game. I hack a mainframe and when succesfull it ejects cans with computerparts into space! I just don't think it is plausible.
The clicking afterwards is said to be for encouraging more group exploration but as far as we know now it will mostly benefit players doing it solo with their multipel alts standby to collect the cans.

But all this is actually more of a side issue. The fundamental changes to exploration skills and the new modules raise more questions.

- Will every site be detectible with just a sisters probe and some extra mid slots? Will there be very difficult to find sites requiring high skills and dedicated scanning ships? (please say yes to the latter)

-Given the new mid slot modules, is there a plan to increase the mid slots on the scanning ships? We already need two for an analyser and codebreaker.

- Do you get rid of the unknown category?

- Do the mag sites still require an analyser and a salvager or will one module be enough. If a salvager is stilll necessary, can we also use salvage drones?

- Are there plans for a new catagory of sites, since apparently we lose gravimetric. (lost moons, brown dwarfs or other deep space stuff look re,..)


Thanks