EVE General Discussion

This is a lot of text to say essentially nothing. But, it looks...weighty, no?

To yon OP: Huh?

I don't think anyone really looks down on solo players as such, in fact i think a lot of solo players are actually more respected in general (PvP anyway).

I think most people just take issue with players who claim to be solo players yet seem so inept at actually playing solo that they make forum threads about how the game designers are screwing them for trying to play solo.



Get away from my EvE you MONSTER

I must be missing something here...if you want to play a solo game, why are you playing EVE?

Sorry, that's just being lazy and entitled.

You want to be a hit-and-run raider behind enemy lines and do it solo? The tools have already been placed before you (T3 cruisers, mobile depots, interdiction nullifiers, wormholes)...don't complain because you haven't worked out how to use them to best effect.

I've been pwned by solo PVP players many times. Funny...none of them were in stealth bombers, which OP seems to think ought to be some magic carpet of instant death capable of blatting swarms of enemy frigs out of the sky. But I digress.

I know a lot of players who spend a lot of time doing stuff (including PVP) solo. Some of them do quite well at it. They study the strengths and weaknesses of their opponents, they have good situational awareness and they have a very good understanding of their own capabilities. They succeed because they take calculated risks and commit only to fights they believe they can win. Usually, they win.

That's skill. Work on that rather than asking CCP for a magic pwnmobile.

OK, I'll bite.

1. Several posters in this thread have told you already that they are playing the game mostly solo. T3s, Recons, Inties and SBs are good ships for soloing, but it is of course hard and you'll have to chose your targets carefully. Do you really want a ship that lets a solo player wipe out a small or medium gang without effort? That brings us to

2. If such a ship existed, it would of course also be used by the large alliances, and you would soon see whole blobs of them, demolishing everything in their path. (Malcanis' Law: Whenever a mechanics change is proposed on behalf of ‘new players’, that change is always to the overwhelming advantage of richer, older players.)

3. Eve is a social game, you are supposed to ally with like minded players and work towards a common goal. Not doing so is your very own choice. So if you deliberately neglect core aspects of the game, why should the game reward you for it?

4. Solo players can be very powerful- just not in the sense of taking down whole fleets on their own. I'm talking about meta-game here. Goonswarm 1.0 was brought down by a solo player who infiltrated them and destroyed them from within.
Even Gevlon Goblin managed to acquire some dubious kind of power (or notoriety) all on his own.

Hope this helped.

I like the no corp idea. Or at least being able to close corp/alliance/local chat.

It's certainly already possible to PVP solo extremely effectively if you are really good at the game (which I'm not.)

I don't think it's realistic to expect CCP to create features catered to lone wolf players when the data shows that people who stick with the game overwhelmingly play with others. And I'm saying that as someone who owned a wormhole by myself for 3 years and who doesn't particularly enjoy being on comms with the majority of the sperglords and twats who play this game.

Alright so I finally had the time to read the OP. I can see the point, but let me add this.

I would say that few people are more lone wolf than I am . Been at this since 2006 and only since November have I had more than one account going at one time. Yes that much lone wolf.


Now it's no secret that CCP tries to promote group play and interaction and that has been the case for a long time. They do make it harder on lone wolves but in doing so, they only made the game more challenging.

This is why I always say "Bring the pain, CCP".

Everywhere I look I see people trying to make everything easier and if that results in having to play in groups, then that's what they do. But not everybody is out to make things easier, especially in a game.

Back in the day, here is what I used to do alone most of the time:

- find wormholes to WH space and/or nullsec in an "exploration fit" Cyclone.
- descend on heavily defended (that right you noobs, hacking and arch sites were ALSO combats sites years ago) sites and use some extreme Captain Kirkery and warp fu and drone fu to survive in said sites with exploration fit low DPS Cyclone.
- profit

This usually meant using my 100MN AB (yes, in a Cyclone) to speed tank and draw the enemy off then warp onto the cans and do the hack/anal (lol) get the phat loot and run off the moment the drones were back. Then find wormholes to get home, usually with no more drones, missiles, and no armor, and a plasma trail.

And I will say that is a lot more fun than F1-click 1 percent of the time and 99 percent nerd drama the rest of the time.

I did this for years and it was fun. Yes folks, I did not even look up the sites. Once I had to run off from a drone site (the ship had a top speed of 1008 m/s) that was sucking cap even from 50 KM out and barely scraped out of there. Life was good. This was my solo play style, trespassing in nullsec, getting phat loot, thumbing my nose at the cartels and overlords. I used intel and a lot of wormhole experience instead of "get a second account hurf blurf don't be a loser hurf blurf" to get by and used the same Cyclone from 2009 to late 2012 (until luck finally ran out and that was to some hardcore rare NPC escalation).

Then one day I got this message on my screen (paraphrase here):

"Containers cannot be accessed while still being defended".

CCP brought the pain. Or more of it. That one change nuked what I did. I did not complain. I said bring the pain. Oddly, they went the other way and changed exploration so that the sites were no longer combat sites but for a while there, it was over.

They brought the pain and I had years of white-knuckle abject fear going into the unknown. I got my money's worth for my sub.

Wormhole travel? Now larger ships do not pop out the other side next to the wormhole, meaning that if it's camped, you have to gauntlet run back to the hole, meaning you are going to have 10 webs on you in 2 seconds. No thanks. Part of my play style is not feeding ships to someone else's statistics addiction. But they did make interceptors have interdiction nullification making travel much better in regards to bubbles.

But nothing was as "group play forcing" as the incursions. Gather round kids, and let me tell you about the incursion expansion, day one, and how the fields were littered with mission ship wrecks. I don't recall the total count that day for ship loss, but by the end of that day, after many had their BCs and BSs peeled like bananas, it was obvious that incursions were not solo.

Some people complained. I did not. They brought the pain. And for my sub I got my money's worth. I have also said for years that in order to get me to stop playing solo, they will have to find some mechanic or lore reason to blow my ships up at undock simply for not being in a fleet. (Incursions come pretty close to that but you still have to be asking for it).


Could we say now that CCP is still forcing group play? I'm not sure. Changes to exploration make it mostly solo play. I never saw that coming. I think that the CCP has realized that the player base is older and bitter vets like myself who only see obstacles to solo play as a mere challenge are not as uncommon as the forum trolls (hurf blurf! THIS IS NOT SOLO LOSERPHAGGOBACKTOWOW!!!1!!!!!eleven!!!) would have us thinking. So they went the other way with exploration. Some of the other mechanics proceed to forcing group play like the wormhole changes but now there are wormholes and systems that favor small gangs and small gang PVP has been sorely missed over the years.


One thing that does and will run off players is this and I have noticed and warned against it: content that requires a solo player (read: someone who does not have much time because they pay their own bills) to "get more accounts" looks like a Pay2Win scam. When a new player get told "You need an alt just to do this. You need another alt just to do that", then it becomes a "he who has more money wins" situation and there are a lot of P2W games out there competing with that (that don't take a long time skilling up on top of P2W). The SP system in Eve has always been genius in preventing the "he who has more time wins" situation (the manually skilling up/gathering bling items from raids thing). Based on the changes I'm seeing, I think this finally sunk in, that having to double or triple your sub costs just to do anything other than grind in highsec looks scammish. On the other side, changes to the rules regarding IsBoxer and automated input seem to go against the solo player but that's another topic, these guys with the 30 accounts obliterating highsec belts in 2 minutes.

Finally, they need to address the mechanics of the game that support the play style that is centered on not playing the game but just preventing others from playing it. This has been the cause of the "Great Malaise of 2014".

Why again missiles?
My dream ship would be a cloaky AF...not game-breakingly powerful, but versatile enough to deal with a lot of situations.

Right, let's try this: Answer a straight-forward question:

What, precisely, do you want? Aside from "buff my stealth bomber so I can insta-kill stuff?"

You say you want (I paraphrase here) "solo access to more content." Like what?

You've been provided with a plethora of examples of things that solo players can do and do well, including references to a whole aspect of the game (exploration) that is designed for the solo player. So if that is not enough for you, then what is it you want?

I'm not interested in tears. You claim you are after rational debate. So am I. So hit me with something specific rather than some rambling philosophical argument that seems to be summarized as CCP needs to "nerf goups" and "buff solo players" in a multiplayer game that is strongly tilted towards incentivising both conflict and group play.

Your dream ship already exists. It is called the Astero