EVE General Discussion

I'd like to add to this. My post is based on the assumption of proper implementation of features in Crius as they were presented by devs (devblogs and forum discussions).

Crius sure adds a lot of change to industry and it has its downsides as all systems do. But those calling it a doom for highsec are not really reading what the changes will bring. Crius will not bring more difficulty and less profit. Quite the contrary. I caught myself stopping production lines of my industrial alt because I couldn't be bothered to work in the current old system in anticipation of the new one. A lot of what Crius will bring is making the life of an industrialist much easier since it brings so much opportunities.

Industrialists will not be hit by Crius - they will prosper, even individuals not belonging to any large entity. The cries of doom are coming either from those not understanding the implications of changes or by those who got space rich of the current system and are afraid to lose their cash cows (aka. methods of operation).

Pure PvP-ers, on the other hand, will get hit by higher prices. As far as I see it, the only thing that could lower the prices is abundance of base materials locally (0.0 and highsec).

Nullsec has means to secure their material extraction operations or to increase resource exploitation, since it's already a renter heaven out there. The problem will be highsec mining with the increasing number of corporations whose primary activity is suicide ganking, which is a change in demographics introduced only recently (a year or two ago.. it's "recent" since EVE is already 11 ). I'm not against suicide ganking... far from it. My observation is just that game designers and player community should find a way to guide or encourage new players or players that are not that interested in PvP to explore other options when it comes to where and how to mine/PvE relatively safely. And no, I'm not talking about what CODE. is doing by "educating" the miners, since that gets immediately discarded as pure alliance propaganda at best.

Highsec players, especially the sort of players who want to gather resources first when they get into a new game in order to be free to play it properly later, are endangered species now. Those are the players that don't interact much because they simply don't understand the community or the environment yet. Sure, they come into the game attracted by the open economy and potential for mass PvP, but having talked to many newbies during my 8 year EVE "career", they usually start the game by skilling, grinding and gathering resources before they even think to get involved in the massive multiplayer aspect. There is an increasing chance that during that "character development" phase, they get slap in the face with a suicide gank. Usually no one quits after first time, but I have noticed that the 3rd time is a breaking point to a large percentage of them.

The thing that keeps them from looking for alternatives is thinking that they couldn't possibly be safer anywhere than in high security space. What can be done? Well, for a start, I'm going to discard looking at suicide ganking altogether, because suicide ganking is only the amplifier, not a cause for the problems. Solution of my in-game friends and me, which worked in most occasions, was to literally drag them (newbies) to nullsec and W-Space and show them that the real security is not in highsec space, but in a player group.

However, there have been significant obstacles in game design that makes even this direct approach fail miserably. Industry in nullsec was (is?) dead. A player could not sustain meaningful production lines while being a simple member of a large alliance. No simple player is ever allowed to run their own POS in nullsec and station slots were always a limiting factor. Sure, there are regions of nullsec where there are free slots, but you can't even think of employing 3 account alts (30 production lines at lvl 4 skill) without mostly maxing out the capacity of the stations. This discourages industry before it even started. Another bad thing was lack of low level minerals, which was addressed some time ago with ABC ore low-end increase and will be tweaked again in Crius.

Wormholes suffers (or have suffered) from a whole range of problems. POSes being the dominant one. Then came the inability to even fit subsystems to T3 ships (which have been fixed only recently, almost 4 years after Apocrypha) and as far as I know, you still can't assemble a T3 ship on POS. Mining for local needs, mostly ammo or basic ship production, in W-space was catastrophic because of the design of refining arrays and the fact that Ice should be imported certainly doesn't help. Most of the players that left the game after they have been introduced to other areas of space than higsec have left because of the "attrition warfare" inflicted by small but crippling bad game mechanics.

Many of the problems for this direct player retention method that I've mentioned are going to be resolved in Crius, but the game design must continue in this direction if we want to keep newbies in the game. Suicide ganking doesn't help in keeping the players, but it does help significantly with amplifying the problems in seemingly unrelated areas of the game that cause players to leave whether they have been a victim of a gank or not.

I should really start my own EVE blog (would anyone read it )

No they don't. They really, really don't.

They have done an exceptionally poor job of fleshing the game out with the manpower they've been provided with and have instead spun their marketing in such a way as to make it the players responsibility to provide content and not the developer. Just another form of guilt shifting. Nearly any competent rival studio could've done more with less. The art team getting trumped so easily on the captain's quarters was very telling of that.

1st) my best wishes for the ones that have to leave CCP. I hope quickly find new jobs. Heads up, many of us have gone through this (including myself) and many of those say retrospectively that this enforced change was the best thing that ever happened to them, because otherwise they never would have left the little box they used to live in and never discovered that there is a different world out there.

2nd) the ones still working for CCP: keep up the good work ! I would assume that it is quite hard to keep faith in your employer right now, but keep doing it. During the last 3 fanfests I observed how much the business culture of software development improved. That was you and I know it was a tough process. Keep continuing it. You are on the right track

Other threads get locked. Have you not been paying attention?

According to CCP and ISD, this is the thread for it.

I believe he is now in charge of Icelands university.

Also posted these posts

https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=164773&p=4

#66 Posted: 2014.06.08 21:06
5
Jadek Menaheim wrote:
I wonder how the Eve bros are responding to this news? CCP's Lapdog and Captain Crutches pointed out on twitter that CCP Manifest and CCP Mimic are not on that list of the new Community Team.
CCP Falcon wrote:
The community team is now made up of:

CCP Falcon
CCP Frame
CCP Gargant
CCP Guard
CCP Leeloo
CCP Logibro
CCP Phantom


CCP Mimic isn't part of the Community Team, she works elsewhere in the company, but lends the team a LOT of help when she's not too busy.

Likewise, CCP Manifest is not part of the Community Team. He's our Senior PR guy, but sometimes works alongside the Community team when needed.

Hope this clarifies the situation.

- F

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Gemini Cuspid wrote:
You can accuse of m@@hattery but when I hear statements such as


Seasoned veteran of EVE
the same courtesy I extend to EVE players
redefining roles


The implicit message I am getting that is subtly hidden and tucked away is this:

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You might want to re-read what I posted:

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CCP Falcon wrote:
Myself and the entire roster of the community team are seasoned veterans of New Eden

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New Eden does not equal EVE. New Eden consists of all our products that are currently playable.

You can read between the lines as much as you like, but when it boils down to it, it's in our best interests to have the communities of both DUST 514 and EVE in a healthy state.

Argue all you like and attempt to read between the lines, but that's our objective.

But I'm pretty sure despite that he's still at CCP.

I'm stealing your sig. I think its highly appropriate.

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Q: So many well known dev's left lately, should we be worried? A: (Jester): Nope. (...) Worry a lot if Fozzie, Masterplan, Rise, Veritas, Bettik, Ytterbium, Scarpia, Arrow, or even Greyscale leaves. Worry a little if Punkturis, karkur, SoniClover, Affinity, Goliath, or Xhagen leaves.

Yeah Elite II and III were "brilliant" bugriddled messes that had no functioning combat system that utterly failed to live up to the awesomeness of the original (because Ian Bell was not involved), and Freelancer Online was stillborn.

"Top Notch" indeed

Dude, you don't need to convince me, I am lost to PvP in EVE. Some people don't enjoy exploding player ships.Take my word for it, OK?

It's not about me or my issues with EVE.

It's that most people pay CCP to play a game that it's not the "core" of EVE, but the outskirts of it. And CCP is adressing that by pushing/luring those people out of the outskirts, hoping they will move towards the core rather than leave the game. Despite the evidence that those people will rather quit than be forced into another way of playing the game.

Latest case (just an instance): POCOs in empire space. People I knew personally left the game because they didn't wanted to pay taxes to other players, and the only way to avoid that was PvP, which they didn't wanted. By playing EVE their way, they painted a bullseye on themselves and were driven out of the game by CCP through a feature in which they weren't asked nor listened to.

That's what happens when you play the outskirts of EVE: commitment is low and anything can kill it. Now, maybe those people should had been given the abbility to bribe some NPC to build a NPC C.O. in their favorite planet, and anyone willing to change that should ahve been forced to engage in NPC interaction too... rather than just force PvErs to PvP, also force PvPrs to PvE. Is this stupid? Or just a way to even the odds for the 80% against the 20%?

Another instance: think about how wardecs work. Through wardecs, PvPrs can easily and risklessly force their playstyle on PvErs at any time. But they never risk being forced to PvE when PvErs fight back. The very idea looks silly, right? Yet this is how every year, thousands of players are driven out of the game.

The point is that rather than change the players, CCP should change the game. It can be done without betraying the spirit of EVE nor turning it into what it is not.

Rather than push the 80% harder than ever, CCP would be smart to start taking them seriously. Why would someone pay to mine, run missions, perform PI or build stuff in hisec? Why should that force those players into terrible content and negate them any chance to generate content? Why should they be subject to being forced to play in a different way by people who don't expose themselves to being forced too? How can PvE content become as good as PvP content?

CCP is doing what they think it's right, and they're fighting for their life so they will not change course easily. But they also are wrong, in my opinion. What kills you is not a deficit of what goes right, but an excess of what goes wrong.

80% of EVE players are not creating content. CCP can say, "the tools to create content exist, but the players are wrong", or can say "the tools that exist are only a fraction of all possible tools, and they are wrong for 80% of our customers so let's expand them".