Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Yesterday i wrote a post filled with some rants and venom, glad I didn't post it.

Most of us agree that WH space needs more love. It has become more stagnant than ever, especially in higher class holes.
Proposed change might be one of dozens steps needed to make wspace content generating environment again.

For small scale engagements this data was close to useless. I haven't witnessed anyone getting a fight based on NPC/player kills data in a system down the chain. It's outdated.
The only use it has as many have already said is for logoff traps. Their fairness factor is not mine to judge, as they fit within game mechanics and as such are valid gameplay.

But!

Recent odyssey changes made ganks much more harder, as long as your "opponent" was paying a little bit of attention to their scanners. Instant sigs showing up on scan work like an alarm, usually by the time you pinpoint the enemy in an anomaly he's already in warp or fully aligned to safety. Smaller stuff also received micro jump drives, which further increased survivalability in wormholes, which were supposed to be high-risk - high reward environment.
They're neither high-risk or high-reward anymore due to the amount of people running PvE in them (money ain't great anymore, exceptions are ofc escalations and small group marauder fleets).

Will the proposed change do anything to revitalise WH? No.
Is it a bad change? I don't think so. Maybe people will feel safer and run more sites? Good, more content.
Will I have to spend more time scouting enemy holes? Probably. I do it anyway if I'm interested in the entity.

What I'd like tho is CCP making their mind and sticking to it. So far I've seen lots of double standards, hypocrisy in decisionmaking and very underwhelming response to "wormhole problems".

Crossposting from FHC where the opinion mirror these pretty hard. Gaze at my comprehensive post about the subject where I explain Why people whine, Why they SHOULD whine, and why they SHOULDN'T whine.



It's effort mate.

No but really, with the new odyssey scanner people don't have to spam scan anymore, so let's say you're in a site, someone is in their home rolling holes to try and find PVP.

They collapse the static, it reappears in system but doesn't actually spawn until you initiate warp. they find it, and initiate warp to it. At that moment, you as a farmer sees it appearing on the odyssey scanner right away.

T=0

Now being an intelligent human being, you hit siege/triage red, and refit to warp core stabs and a cloak. at the worst of times, you've just hit siege or triage and you have 5 minutes to wait. As soon as you drop, you warp off and cloak.

From the attacking side, they have 20s-1min to warp the fleet to the hole, then they jump in a scout who (currently) yell the J signature and drop probes while another bloke put the signature in your tool of choice, that's another 10-30s, then the signature dude screams on comms that there is activity in system as the scout is D-scanning and/or fiddling with probes to find you. (that is given a lucky shot where the tools have updated just now or the PVE side his in a longer session).

Best case for you, your anom is either a scannable signature (mag or radar site) or out of D-scan range, you can add an extra probe round or 20-30s of warping around before they land on your ass.

T+1min30-2min30

The scout gets a bead on you, and initiate warp to your site, he has 10-40s of warp time, they jump a HIC in, he has 30s-1min of warp time

T+ 3min-5min

They land on you, tackle t3 first most of the time, either you're really unlucky and had just started another siege cycle, but most likely they arrive too late or you slip point as the hic land.

Now on average you should be in the middle of your siege cycle, so even with good circumstances and a on-the-ball crew you should only catch people 25-50% of the time, in real life, maybe what? 10-30% depending on how incompetent people are at looking at the odyssey scanner.

Now this change does not change this dynamic very much, you might increase your average time to target by a couple seconds at most since tools are delayed anyway, what it really fucks up is the loggonski traps, you use the tool to quickly and faultlessly assess the farming pattern of a group to figure out if seeding caps in is worth the hassle.

People are bummed because the only "reliable" way of ganking people right now is seeding considering the time table I just wrote down, rolling into someone actively farming is rare considering TZ coverage, 650 or so different holes with X amount of people in them and the average farming session probably lasting between 30mins and 2h at most. On the bigger time zones like med EU to med US you might need to roll 10-20 holes before you get lucky. We had a meta-tool that scraped the sleeper kills of all c5/c6 and gave us a % of hole in current use back in the days, I would expect people to use that kinda stuff right now. We where happy with a 8-12% activity index in our med to late EU TZ back then and I would be surprised if it was much lower nowadays.

Now the fact that logonski traps are the "best" way of getting action is telling about the state of the meta, people vehemently defending it as a valid game strategy are forgetting that CCP stated a couple of times against that type of gameplay. We should not fall back on broken game mechanics to alleviate other broken game mechanisms.

Now in a vaccum this change is good, you shouldn't be able to defer gaming schedule, TZ coverage, activity and rough player count from outside a system in any shape or form. You can basically scout a full chain without having a single character logged in. In the current meta though, it pushes alot of power in the hands of the PVE crowd since assessing the worthiness of seeding a given system becomes a really tricky affair. You need to strike gold and roll into someone has they are farming, and manage to sneak caps without them noticing on D-scan, and then you need them to farm the following day without a care in the world.

This does not mean that we should stop the devs from implementing that change, it simply means that we should clamor for a better playing field where catching already elusive targets is better than 15% on a good day. Asking for this not to go through is extremely short sighted and partisan however, it means you want to have those free kills no matter what, and in an MMO the health of the game should always pass before player comfort.

all of these cries of "those changes will kill w-space" sound exactly like "CCP, if you change industry LITERALLY EVERYONE in highsec will unsubscribe"

if they were irrelevant, people wouldn't have been bitching and moaning about the change for 22 pages

Hell, if you want to get technical, a new sig should emit *radiation* only at the speed of light. There's actually no way for a ship multiple AUs out to have it pop up immediately unless there's some sort of detection grid deployed.

It's a good change and should have happened ages ago.

To CCP FoxFour - yes, please take a note that its not about "logoffs only" at all.

Sir Corbex right, and let me illustrate it a bit.

We all have open killboards.
http://eve-kill.net/?a=alliance_detail&all_id=7341
http://eve-kill.net/?a=alliance_detail&all_id=9923
http://eve-kill.net/?a=alliance_detail&all_id=8903
http://eve-kill.net/?a=alliance_detail&all_id=8407
http://eve-kill.net/?a=corp_detail&crp_id=400626
http://eve-kill.net/?a=pilot_detail&plt_id=914141
http://eve-kill.net/?a=alliance_detail&all_id=5676
http://eve-kill.net/?a=alliance_detail&all_id=9250
http://eve-kill.net/?a=alliance_detail&all_id=6165

(and i'm sure I did not mentioned all)

Lets make an estimate of the average sum of kills using delayed API data (logoff traps that can't be done while rolling, more attention to some chains, etc) Lets say is it is about 1000B per month. I'm sure its a lot more, but it is a safe to assume number. (there is about 500B+ just from BU/QEX).

If left intact, each of this carebear groups farm about 5x times the cost of the capitals in lazy scenario, or 10x-15x with intensive farming, so they all produce about 5000-15000B per month. Lets say more safe enviroment doubles this number in the first month since more people start farming, and doubles later. The resulting number of ISKs added to the economy would be equialent to 20-60 Trillions extra isks per month in the nearest months. 10-30 Trillions isks in most simple short scenario.

Insane titan clashing, most epic battle in EVE - battle in B-R5RB destroyed 11 Trillions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodbath_of_B-R5RB

and had impressive results on market:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=332231

So, even if you dont care about PVP content and people who make it,
before making a final decision, please estimate in your team how an extra of 10-20-30-60 Trillions ISKs per month will affect EVE and its citizens, if you decide to "just disable API data".

And thats NOT inluding results from more safe enviroment in low-grade WHs on one side, and drop in T3 prices on the other, and need to farm more when inflation rages on.

We dont need a real time data, API never was realtime to beging with. We just need sleepers to keep us notified who and when did harm them a bit in the past.

:DDDD

So you are actually claiming that removal of the NPC API data will double the total isk influx of whole EVE and that only your valiant efforts to combat the rampant farming has saved us from hyperinflation?

i have skimmed through the thread. in this post i will try to summarize the arguments from both parties and provide my opinion/commentary on them.

- "this change is good because wormholes should be the great unknown." not buying it. we know how many wormholes there are, what celestial bodies each one of them contains, how their (npc) inhabitants behave, how and when and where the wormholes themselves tend to connect and how to manipulate them to our benefit. the only things we do not know are the arbitrary specifics at any given point. the removal of the npc api call will not change anything in the big picture, as it is part of the mundane, arbitrary specifics that have little to do with the "great unknown".

- "you should not have tools out of game that are not available in the game client." not buying it. there are plenty out of game tools that make playing eve bearable in the first place. for instance, you can quickly check the prices of items beyond the current region only with third party tools. yes, you could put an alt into every region to check prices, but then again, you could also have a scout in EVERY wormhole.

- "without using the npc kill stats to set up login traps, we cannot get proper pvp." not buying it. if having to use an out of game tool to exploit a grey area game mechanic is the only way to produce pvp situations, there is a design flaw in the game, which should be handled at the core. keeping shady workarounds alive instead of fixing the core issue is not the right way to go.

- "farmers will go rampant, nanoribbon prices will drop, THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN!" again, not buying it. more farmers will lead to more hunters. if hunting farmers requires so many warm bodies that you can only do it in prime time, then maybe there should be a fix that allows hunting in smaller groups. for example, you could take a look at the mechanics and the practice of rolling statics.

Holly crap... finally made it to the end of the thread... you guys made a few posts while I was gone... now to go back and have some more conversations.