EVE General Discussion

Who made this law again? Players or devs?

Because if it's the players, its the players who dictate content. So if 1 million WoW players descend to EvE, they can dictate the rules. PvP itself could disappear in the process.

Or devs, who'll start being more "hands on" about game content because the players made their own rules???

Pff. Afk miners bad/good irrelevant. James etc gank, get new ship. Easy. All Eve is economics, ISK +/- wrapped in pretty console spaceship game. Reaction to ganking simple: assign ganking cost over time as cost item, along with price of skills, ships, RL sub, hot pockets, redbull, vodka etc. Wallet Total = X. Carry On Mining comedy classic style, no watch forum or local for decent data period. Check Wallet total: Y. If Y>X, profit, move along nothing to see here.

Eve not so cold, not so hard. Running marathon hard. Second divorce hard. Eve easypeasy game.

Btw, suggestions for hardass sig welcome.

I like the cut of your jib

This is an interesting thought experiment, for sure. If 1m WoW players were possessed by aliens and all subbed to Eve next week for a month, and zerged the forums with 'we love eve and we'll stay if hisec is made safer for carebears pla', I wonder if CCP would cave lol.

Miners should just go on strike for a while and then we can see how attitudes change when PvPers and pirates start having to pay ridiculous amounts for their ships and isk.

Eve should actually have more semi-AFK activities, not fewer. More easy targets and more things to do for people who want to play the game while multitasking to be productive IRL too.

You're assuming that the people doing the ganking and supporting the gankers aren't capable of mining themselves.

You're not making money being an afk cloaker. You are literally paying CCP $15 a month to sit in a system cloaked up.

There is every bit of difference.

I disagree, you are playing Eve AFK whichever way you look at it. If you want to be able to disrupt enemy income AFK then by the same code you should be alowed to make isk AFK.

I dont care either way. Play Eve however you want to play Eve. I know I will.

To be fair, AFK resource harvesting and income generation plainly is not "bad" and is even encouraged, because lab monkeying and planetary interaction are viable and explicitly allowed modes of game play. If you do those activities while AFK (or even while logged out), then you face very little risk of loss, and this is all by design.

Of course, the reward in terms of ISK/hr is rather low if you spend all the wall clock time needed for these activities logged in and "watching the paint dry" on your research or PI jobs. But if you only log in as needed to keep them running, then the ISK/hr of actual /played time is quite good (at least once you have made the up front investment in training time, faction grinding, and other capital costs like high value BPOs).

If you want to go AFK while mining, you can do that. The risk is a bit higher, since players can butt in and nerf your income stream by bumping you or inflict direct losses by ganking you. But even the people bumping miners don't actually think that AFK mining is "bad"; that's just the storyline they run to explain their fun. If there were no AFK mining, there would be no miner bumping, and this little world would be all the lesser for it.

AFK mining is just symptomatic of the actual problem. That problem being mining is terribly, horribly uninteresting.

From a design standpoint you can't make any fundamental changed to mining because the cycle times for mining necessarily need to be long enough to attach a modicum of risk to an activity where you literally shoot a laser at a rock and get paid for it. Mining is so integral to the economic and risk/reward meta that making any sort of effort to increase or validate more active playstyles would fundamentally change the game at a very basic level.

Mining is profitable, but boring, is it any wonder people click on and AFK? What, you expect people to sit with rapt attention for an entire cycle in hisec, white knuckles clutching their overpriced gaming peripherals, enthralled at the breathtaking spectacle of lasering inanimate objects and occasionally watching drones blow up a belt rat?

If EVE were developed today, I'd wager mining as an activity would be very different. It's a relic of an era where it was acceptable to make people do boring stuff in games. There'd be some sort of interactive actual game attached to it, and someone would have attempted to design some fun in to it.

HOWEVER we can't just graft more fun on to hisec mining at this point. The act and ability to afk or semi-afk mine is the backbone of the EVE economy, and why a large portion of things every player buys are actually affordable to purchase or produce.

AFK mining IS bad, but it's not abhorrent from a player standpoint. CCP made mining boring, so its no wonder people will AFK it. That ability created an entire casual miner subculture that you can't just crap all over because it's a large part of your community.

I mine in a little side window at work, clicking over to drop stuff off every once in a while. As a supplement to my actual job it's kind of enjoyable. every once in a while drones blow up belt rats, the scenery is nice, and it gets a little passive income for when I got home and do actual gameplay. I wouldn't want to give that up at this point because it's such a big part of how I play EVE. I can only imagine how it feels for people who's primary activity IS mining.