EVE New Citizens Q&A

I love Eve Online. My main character is two months ago, and I love Eve so much I recently purchased three more accounts to play simultaneously with my main. As much as I love the game, I have had some thoughts of the past few months that I feel are glaring inconsistencies, obvious faults and horrid game design.

1) Low Sec Gate Camps

I know why people do it, and I don't think it should be all-together taken out of the game, but some re-tooling is definitely needed. What's the point of having sentry guns at low-sec gates if they do nothing to dissuade or prevent a pirate from carrying out an attack? I was recently killed multiple times by a gate camper who never took any damage from the sentry guns, even though he was red and was the aggressor of all the conflicts (I never attacked, nor even targeted him). And yes, he was on top of the gate, not out of range of the guns. I feel a gate-camp attack should garner some sort of extreme consequence. If not, just take them out of the game, because the strength of them are currently a joke, and only serve to help long-established players, and only hurt newer, less skill-point-trained players. I mean, the pirate is already getting a free target that they didn't even have to try and track/scan down, so why should a lazy player get rewarded easy kills? Make those damn guns HURT. Make the choice to attack me at a gate a costly one, versus trying to use your superior tracking ability to kill me when there is no security around. What if you made Concord show up, eventually, but just take a little longer? Wouldn't that be the obvious course of actions in the "real world"? Cops eventually show up at an event if there was violence, even if it takes them a while to get there, depending on the seriousness of the act.

2) High-Sec Ganking

To me, high-sec ganking seems like poor game design and an obvious flaw in game mechanics. It simply should not exist. I know, bring the hate - bring the triumphant cheers for tears, but hear me out. You have the majority of the entire galaxy to kill people, high-sec should be considered sanctuary in a game full of chaos. Again, like my last point about Low Sec Gate Camps, high sec ganking is a reward for unmotivated, unskilled and lazy players who don't have the ability to hunt down a player, they just try to do as much damage as they can before Concord shows up to kill them. That's silly. Either make it impossible to attack people in high-sec, or just remove the safeguards all together.

3) Let me Rename My Characters

Dear god, after ten years why hasn't this been implemented? What if I was a huge Penn State fan and I named my character Jerry Sandusky in 2008? Shouldn't I have a chance to get rid of a newly-known stigma? I mean, this is another micro-transaction that CCP should jump on at easy money. Look, I understand why it hasn't been implemented - you want players to be held accountable for their actions, and by renaming yourself it allows you to run away and hide from your evil deeds. Then use your creativity and come up with an easy solution. How about keeping a "aliases" log under their character profile, so that person's old name won't forever be gone, it just won't be a blaring reminder of a silly name they had in the past. It's not that hard CCP, c'mon.

The Eve playerbase better know how much CCP loves them. They better know the bad business decisions that have been made to keep the game hardcore and as real as possible. Think about all of the money CCP has thrown away by keeping the "street cred" with their elite, hardcore base? You've got 30-50k rabid fans of the game who play religiously... and I'm sure CCP isn't going to bed hungry anytime soon. But man, think about all the profit that could be made if just a few small, and inconsequential steps were made to slightly mainstream the game just a little bit. You could, instead, have millions of die-hard players instead of 30,000 ones. Props to you for keeping it real.

On that note, why hasn't CCP tried to sell the casual angle? I mean, you can spend your entire career in New Eden and never once attack someone if that wasn't your cup of tea. I think that is awesome! Imagine the fan base CCP could garner if they pushed an education angle of this game on schools and governments around the world. Think of all the subsidized income they could make by marketing the game to the casual space/astronomy geeks of the world who may not have an interested in space piracy and capitalism, but really love Star Trek and the idea of space archeology and science? I really feel there could be an untapped source of revenue for CCP if they really broadened their vision and looked to service a little more mainstream of an audience than the high school angst-ridden teenagers they currently serve.

Thoughts?

1) Low sec camps were recently buffed and more content added to low sec so don't bother beating a dead horse.

2) Mining barges were buffed to make them hard to gank. Braindead people still can't cope and no one cares...dead horse.

3) I like this idea but we get to pick the name...I vote for 2moAlmost Burnt Out

Two of the core premises of EVE's design.
- Nowhere is safe.
- Anyone can ruin anyone else's day, any time, anywhere. They must just accept the consequences of that action.

Highsec should not be safe. It's not intended to be safe. It's intended to be safer, that's all. Hence highsec ganks are not a flaw in the game's design, they're an intended, deliberate part of that design.

Woah! I have read lots of things about Eve. But that it was aimmed to teenagers? That's new. But yeah, if something can be said in a forum, someone will say it. A usual teenager will go over eve when he discovers all the effort you have to take to learn the game. They have games with less serious comunities where they can be smashing things in the first hour. Lol.

Anyway. If you are angry because someone killed you it is easier to thing it has been a 15 old boy with no brain than a experienced adult player who tried to ruin your day. If you feel better, go with it.

Average player age for EVE is around 30 which last I heard is the highest of any MMO out there. I think you are the young kid on the block trying to force unwanted change on a more mature gaming audience.

I'm an 18 year old and this level of immaturity is unheard of.

It brings shame to the name of the younger generation!!!

As a highsec carebear with PI's in lowsec, I love the intense feeling of adrenalin when I narrowly escape with my precious cargo. I'm yet to reach my month birthday!

You know nothing John Snow.

Lowsec gatecamps are fine, they're not all-pervasive and relatively easy to avoid with some intel gathering and planning using the ingame map and external sites like DotLan.
Highsec is safer than everywhere else, it is however not completely safe. Ganking isn't generally carried out by unmotivated, unskilled and lazy players, it's actually quite the opposite. Gankers are motivated enough to team up with others, they're so lazy that they have their own intel networks and use real world and specialised ingame skills/knowledge to attain their goals.
Decisions have consequences in Eve, including your choice of name.
Millions of players on a single shard would be a hardware nightmare, unlike most games we all play on a single server, not several servers with no interaction between them. Longevity wise most MMOs rise and fall spectacularly within 18 months, Eve's been around for 10 years increasing its subscriptions to 500k+ while holding on to people who've been playing since beta, mostly because of its hardcore nature.

1.) Low Sec Gate camps are pretty much fine as is. The sentry guns do decent damage, so most cruisers and smaller can't tank them for long. A small boost to their dps wouldn't be a terrible thing, but they don't need to be omgwtfpwn deathrays.

2.) High-sec ganking is awesome. While I don't do it, I believe it really enhances the "bad **** can happen anytime, anywhere" motif of EvE. Really, it is easy to avoid getting ganked in highsec, as long as you are smart about how you fit and fly your ships. The idea of a "sanctuary", where you are immune to hostile actions, should NOT exist in this game!!!! If it did, every pacifist industrialist would abuse the hell out of that region to build and acquire assets risk free. No matter where you are, you can lose your ship and you can get scammed for massive amounts of isk. Safety in EvE doesn't come from enforced game mechanics... it comes from you making smart choices! And it is never absolute!

3.) Renaming your character has been brought up in F&I section quite often. Do a search, and show your support in one those threads (don't start a new one!). I personally don't care if you "rename" your character, so long as your old "character" information is transferred and retained (i.e. no plex for anonymity, only plex for a cosmetic change, where anyone doing 2 seconds of research can find you previous aliases, corp history, and the like).

This still makes me laugh.

A new player saying CCP should change the game. While EVE is 10 years old and only GREW in sub numbers.

Apparently they already do it right. CCP always said that EVE would be different. The players in EVE play the game cause they like it as it is, they don't want WoW-in-space.