EVE Information Portal

Let's talk about this.

First: The anomaly change from earlier in the year was made with little or no communication at FanFest which immediately preceded the change. People, rightly, felt like you purposefully hid this change so that there was no opportunity to provide legitimate feedback (more likely an uprising and riot in Iceland).

Second: With only two weeks notice, the change negated billions in ISK invested into Outposts, IHubs, System Upgrades, etc. After 15 months of Dominion mechanics, you opted to give people very short notice that their investments were ****. While I understand that CCP considers that ISK as money in the bank (ISK sunk into the game and forever removed from player use), you managed to make *many* customers angry at your company. Pure speculation on my part, but this may not have been helpful when IncarnaGate rolled around a few months later.

Third: You gave purely speculative reasons for the change with zero follow-through. Ignoring a problem does not make it go away. If you truly believed in the stated reasons for the change, then provide data that either support or disprove the rationale behind the changes.

Fourth: There is no indication that you learned from your mistakes. 'Stuff was out of my control' isn't good enough. If Hilmar pipes up and states that we put Greyscale into a bad position and would not allow him to properly do his job, then that is another thing altogether.

Fifth: That you did not (and still do not?) see the significance and impact of those March '11 changes on smaller entities is why you still have much to learn. Take a real life, hypothetical scenario for example where a person moves house and country to take a new job in an expensive new locale. Housing is expensive. Education is expensive, etc., but the compensation plan is good and the work outlook looks good'n'steady. Then think about the impact on that person and their family when the new employer says a month or so into the engagement: "You have two weeks and then you are without a job with only a meager severance," resulting in a drastic income change for the family. THIS is what the March '11 change did for many small-to-medium sized entities. It was as "****" move that was completely arbitrary and severely impacted customer good-will towards CCP. That you did not understand the change is indicative that you are out-of-touch with your customers.

How have you changed? And how are you held accountable?

So let me get this right:

- one cannot mine belts in high sec because of detroyer ganks
- one cannot use any industrial ship in high sec during Hulkageddon (or however it is spelled) because they get popped
- one cannot mine ice in high sec because of ganks
- one cannot take too long finishing a lvl 4 mish in high sec because of ninja looters
- one cannot take one's eye off the screen for a minute in high sec incursions because of griefers and gankers
- one cannot fly a marauder in high sec because of ganks
- one cannot fly a pimped up battleship in high sec because of griefers and ganks
- one cannot fly caps or supercaps in high sec because they are only allowed in low, null and wormhole space
- one cannot fly a freighter or industrial on autopilot from one corner of high sec EVE to another because of gate camps
- one cannot set up a pos in highsec because of wardecs

...and to top it off the very best content is in nullsec where high sec carebears have no interest in playing eventhough there are more carebears with a gazillion skillpoints than pvpers. Now CCP is buffing EVEN MORE those sections of EVE where carebears do not fly.

CCP please tell me why I should spend my hard earned money playing your game when my playstyle, high sec carebear, obviously is not to your liking?

loldronespace

Sadly, I think that this change came a bit too late. A lot of political and demographic changes happened in the game since the nerf that simply nullified this fix.

- Many players left to highsec because of the nerf. DED complexes were too infrequent and often bugged so they mainly got done shortly after downtime and didn't re-spawn until the next downtime. If you are working well after the downtime and have time to log on a couple of hours after it, you won't have a chance to find a valuable complex to do (speaking from personal and experience of all my corp mates). The only thing that provided some sort of income were removed, not nerfed.

Result: many of those players are in highsec doing missions. I don't have to be a market expert to see that ISK per LP ratio has dropped considerably after the nerf. It would require much more than a fix to anomalies to get those players back, because one by one they are leaving the game (taking a "break" never to be heard from again) after being bored in highsec. There are other things that influence this unwillingness to get back to 0.0 and those things must be fixed if we want to kep the players in the game.

- Many players (a half of my crew back before the nerf) simply disappeared from the game never to come back. I haven't been able to talk them into re-subbing again. They are simply disappointed for instantly losing everything that we invested in. It's too late to get those players back.

- Since 0.0 industry is still non-existent on a personal level and you still don't have a chance to do anything industry related whatsoever without messing with the corporate bureaucracy, the single most viable ISK income for a 0.0 player were anomalies. We needed that ISK in order to PvP. It's a 0.0 space... a free-for-all PvP zone... and we got kicked out of the game by not having enough ISK to play.

In the mean time, one block of players formed a single fleet of overpowered and unbalanced ships and took multiple regions of space. Any attempt to attack their systems will result in the same response as we've seen before. I used to roam through those regions before the conquest - lots of players, lots of activity, lots of targets. Now? Those systems were taken because of a single (also unbalanced) moon resource and left empty. Whole regions of space became ghost towns.

And who is willing to fight them? Well, no one at this moment. There's no reason why should anyone want to dedicate their time, resources and morale to try to fight that monster for a pitty increase in anomaly values.
- Not when you can't even pick up a fight against 200-strong supercarriers + titans
- Not when server behavior is still unpredictable since we don't yet have time dilation on TQ
- Not when industry in 0.0 space is still neglected and practically don't exist outside of corporate bureaucracy (and judging by the Customs office devblog, that isn't going to change any time soon)



There is still hope, however, and this should be only the first step of getting players back into the most interesting part of the game and the game itself:
- Supercapital nerf must actually work. Without that nerf, there is no fight.
- Time dilation must actually work. Without it, there's no fun or possibility of winning because of something that your fleet did.
- Industry must be redone to be available to the masses in 0.0 space. This idea, for example, tacles that problem quite effectively: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1560795&page=9#258

Without those things and without player's will or possibility to fight for 0.0 space, this anomaly buff will only serve those who are already established in 0.0 space:
- invulnerable blobs with strong supercapital core
- bots that are still very active in all regions of space including 0.0
and we all know that both of those things not good for player morale.




TL;DR

It's a step forward that is made a little too late to be effective and productive by itself. Many things have happened in the game because of the nerf that drastically changed the landscape of the whole game. Many players left right away and many are still leaving nullsec and the game because of the lack of achievable goals, because the balance of the game got heavily broken. In order to have hope and goals again and keep players in the game, anomalies had to be fixed, supercapitals must be nerfed properly, time dilation and server load balancing better work, and corporate monopoly over industry in nullsec must be minimized. Only then you will completely fix what got broken with the nerf. Without all those elements, the impact on the playerbase might be completely opposite of what you are expecting.

How to prove you are sorry and will do better: 1) Admit your mistake. 2) Take steps to correct the mistake. 3) Take steps to avoid making the same mistake again.

Time will always tell for number 3 (though it looks promising right now) but you have 1 and 2 covered so far.

I can feel the pain of negative feed back, I work in IT, 5 of us in department doing service for about 200 people or so in 4 different locations (soon to add a 5th with another 20 people). Everyone only sees their own point of view oh so often that it becomes tough to make a decision that most people can accept.

I think you have formulated a plan of action that will generate some (maybe lots of) positive results. Keep up the work.
(Yeah, almost zero constructive feedback, just being a pep rally leader here...)

First off: Guaranteed isk would be bounties which is not what the drone regions provide. There is still risk in transporting and storing alloys, especially when you are multiple jumps away from an outpost.

Secondly: They are not harder, they just take longer since you have to wait for every last frigate drone to die before going onto the next spawn. I would actually prefer if they were harder and provided more isk with more risk.

Third: They are saying, "More money! More loot!" But in actuality it will be more time, same reward. -> Less isk/hour.

If they truly are trying to increase ISK/hour or ISK/EHP than this change does the opposite of what they are intending.

I would say the exact opposite of what you are saying being a 0.0 citizen.

Why should carebears have the best ISK per hour(incursion) that is LOW RISK when we the 0.0 who fight for our space only get sanctums worth after buff 75% per hour with HIGH risk or getting ganked?

edit : double post

You people over in the drone regions have enough money as it is. Your Super Cap hordes are proof of that!

So no buff for you.

Edit: BTW, this is the answer for both low-sec and null-sec risk reward curve

Once implemented, all CCP needs to do is keep drops and bounties in line with the the type of space they spawn in. Lower the sec status of space the better and more frequent the spawns. Fixed

in 0.0 use Ihub to augment the purposed sec system.
in low-sec, they do not have Ihubs so reward will be caped! (so to say)

The question is what player actions do we use to manipulate the tru sec with??
Also, does space slowly regain sec status if no player action is done within a system?

OK well I aplaud the desired goal but you've cocked up some of the sights just slightly.

If your goal was to increase the isk/hour of sites you should not have made them soo much harder/slower to complete that we will now actually be making less isk per hour.

Nice attempt but the current Sisi anoms are a total screw up.



And while you're working on fixing/the distribution of isk are you ever going to fix the biggest financial mistake you made in the game when you made Technetium the moon material that is in shortest supply.

Not that CCP will like the outcome of that briliant idea but you made a small number of people wery wealthy in the real world.