Crime & Punishment

Alright C&P, it's time to get serious. Since CCP seems to be bowing to the carebears and giving them their every want and desire for the past month, I think it's important that we step back and look at the potential impact some of the recently-requested things might have.

tl;dr: PVP is good, and nerfing it hurts Eve's publicity and by extension its subscription rate.

What I've seen a lot of lately as the empowered bears ask for more and more is, the ability to not be ganked. CCP is already apparently looking to remove insurance from ships destroyed by CONCORD--a move I wouldn't object to, so long as they also remove it for self-destruction--in order to making ganking riskier. That's fine, I'm all about risk in Eve. The tension of constant risk is what attracted me to this game in the first place.

The problem is, CCP has been trending toward risk-free play recently. Some people want to be able to play Eve without any danger of other players destroying their ship, something unheard of in the history of Eve. It's feeling more and more like CCP is trending that way, and I'm beginning to feel like we're treading a slippery slope where one wrong move could result in the Eve universe becoming boring as hell.

The recent actions of the Goons should demonstrate that even highsec ganking of miners can be as a serious strategy of market manipulation, NOT just mindless violence. They've been able to drive up the price of gallente ice products substantially through their tactics and have created a compelling storyline (content!) driven completely by the players. This is what separates Eve from other MMOs: stories and campaigns and risk are created primarily by the players.

Without the risk of ganking and with the ability to scrape off wardecs as they see fit, highsec could easily become a region completely devoid of risk, where people can simply do the same PVE content over and over and over feeling completely safe. I understand that's what some people want, but are these really they people CCP needs to be listening to?

What's going to happen to those people once they've trained up to perfect skills on the battleships and pimped them out with faction mods? Do you think they're going to just keep playing the game for years on end, running the same missions? It's been my experience that people who never venture beyond PVE stay in the game for about two years before it starts getting old to them. They get tired of grinding for PLEX, they don't want to pay $15 a month for what is basically single-player content, and they are easily distracted by other games that offer something NEW and DIFFERENT.

The compelling content of Eve has always been made with PVP. Market manipulation, high-value ganks, epic alliance wars, scams, corp thefts--they are all PVP where one player profits at the expense of another. Most of you wouldn't have even heard of Eve if it weren't for the occasional article on some gaming site about how someone stole or destroyed thousands of dollars worth of in-game assets. *IF* the current trend continues in the coming months we will see a notable decline in the occurrence of such stories, to the point that it could impact subscription levels. And nobody wants that.

Before you post:

"Go out to low/nullsec you nub": I like my sec status too much to wreck it in lowsec PVP and every foray I've taken into nullsec has resulted in a "who has the biggest fleet" contest. It's hard to get squad-sized fights out there, and that's what I enjoy.

"Griefer tears": Seriously, learn wtf tears look like. I'm trying to keep Eve from turning into SpaceWoW. You might want that, but it's not what I signed up for.

"Let me play Eve my way!": Fine. I honestly don't care how you play the game. I did missions, mining, exploration, and wormholes in my first 16 months. I've been you. The difference is, I didn't cry when bad things happened to me, I learned to avoid them. Then I learned to do them to other people. Turns out, that's more fun.

You *almost* made it all the way through without claiming "omg tears". Try harder next time.

It's not a couple of small rulings. It's the revocation of the ban on dec shields and alliance hopping. It's the logi aggression patch (which I called for at the start of our griefing, but feel it didn't go far enough in that logis don't properly inherit aggression). It's the removal of insurance for concord without the removal of insurance for self-destruction. In the past month, CCP has shown a consistent preference for the carebears at the expense of the griefers and pirates and the overall PVP community.

Let me be clear: the game AS IT IS TODAY isn't that bad. I want people to stand up and take notice NOW so that we don't find ourselves six months from now wondering what happened to the game we signed up and paid for. If no one calls attention to it, then it's our own fault if CCP makes more significant changes that *do* have the impact I'm concerned about.

And if you think dec scraping and alliance hopping are "sensible tweaks", I really don't know what to say to you.

Ok if you want to talk about it sensibly:

Actually I'm happy to concede that the process of dec shielding could be detremental to the game as it avoids the need to address hostilities alltogether. I'd be more in favour of increasing costs for longevity in wars, but not the potential abolition of them altogther. However this assumes that two sides are working under valid aggression mechanics than a need for griefing per se. One possible solution here could be that you cannot rejoin an alliance within 1 week of previously joining another and increasing ongoing costs to maintain a war, with a longer cool down period for restarting one against the same party. This allows for ongoing hostilities, but is further preventative for larger fish, bashing the smaller fish for longer periods of time on the cheap.

Suicide ganking needs to be made more difficult, its a low cost alternative of griefing as stands and the advent of the loss of insurance here wont be completley preventative, so doesn't remove the ability, just makes it more of a consideration. As to self detenation, I'd think you'd also lose insurance in any realistic format.

The logi incursion issue was a loophole and again an exploit, not a change against "funsics" and sensible realities, so I wont concede there is a problem with what CCP did here.

So in short, I don't think you should favour your prefered griefing mechanics as being heavily detrimental to the game as you would like to claim them to be. And possibly not a reason to convince everyone to the death of eve about.

Dec shielding however, needs a rethink imho.

^ Spoken like a boss

I think the most sweeping, easiest fix to wardecs would be to have a wardec stick to the entity it was declared on. If you wardec a corp, they can join and drop alliances all they want, but the dec follows the CORP and isn't transferred to another entity just because they joined up.


Then we agree. I have no objection at all to insurance no paying for concord damage. I wouldn't expect State Farm to pay for my car if it was destroyed while the police were chasing me. Nor would I expect them to pay for it if I set it on fire.


Rather it's the fact that they jumped faster than I've ever seen them move before to fix THAT, but neutral RR in general still has aggression problems that people have been reporting for quite some time.


This is intended more as a warning that *continuing* down this path is dangerous. What has happened so far won't kill Eve, but six months of the same sort of decision making might be far more detrimental. I'm advocating consistency throughout the game mechanics, as opposed to the band-aid, fix-it-to-make-the-carebears-happy approach they've recently taken.

Bear in mind that I wasn't a griefer until God Squad was hired against my corp. This logi patch doesn't really affect me that much, as it simply puts me back to doing what I was doing three weeks ago. I'm not trying to protect my way of life here, I'm just trying to make sure the game stays balanced and in the original spirit of Eve.

U mads?

The complication there then is that an alliance can drop corporations into a world of pain as a result if left on their own and unable to rejoin another due to their status in order to attempt to have a more favourable position. In essence this could lead to a whole new area of explotation with rogue alliances or a black market on corp values being used to grief certain corps rather than valid war mechanics.

And whilst in reality the "strong" survive, I'm more for addressing a balance of potential bullying here on the numbers and longevity issue than simply propogating a problem with an "easier" fix.

As such your proposal has the potential to make things worse for some in the griefing stakes, not better.

What's "boring as hell" is reading this same pod smegma over and over again.

You're so silly. All this would do is just propagate the use of alts even more. Have dedicated -10 ganking characters being fed ejected ships for ganks. Now a negative 90 billion ISK wallet would be a supreme badge of honor.

Also,

"If you start minimizing PvP in high sec I will give CCP much more money."

That made me lol. Why would you purchase more accounts if you're already perfectly safe with one? More accounts are usually used for scouting/hauling for mains/bearing it up for disposable pvp income. If all you want to do is mine in your Hulk, you don't need any of these things.

Or is it because you want to run an ISK farm and RMT away the earnings to feed the kids, without having to put up with all of the office politics like all the '"casuals" in the workforce?

Your dream is playing solo in a game where no one can hurt you.

Find another ******* game.

This is the part where you should pay attention CCP...

In this amazing dream this guy has ....

I unsub three accounts...I don't buy another PLEX... I don't pay for a years worth of subscription on all of my accounts so that people too ******* stupid to protect themselves are bailed out by NPC entities.

TL;DR If you start minimizing PvP in high sec I will never give CCP more money. Feel FREE to use the above mentioned feature(s) to run your playerbase out of the game.