EVE General Discussion

There shouldn't be a need for conflict drivers in an environment like new Eden. If anything, Eve should be a game about avoiding conflict which in many ways, it is.

If you want conflict in eve the best way to get some is work with PL (-10) . They will back stab you and you will get all the conflict you don't want. It is saying something that I trust PL less then I trust the goons. At least goons have the balls to admit that they are bottom feeders and don't claim the moral high ground. If goons shoot you it will be in the face not a PL back-stab in a dark alley which they will then justify as your own fault.

This is already the case if you know what you are doing.

However, if you are trying to say that all activities should produce/gain more ISK than what is effectively lost even while being incompetent then I only have this to say;

You do know what inflation is, right?


The real core of the problem is...

- anyone with half a brain will try to minimize the risk to their money making activities. It just makes sense.
- humans are, by and large, risk adverse. The real question is to what degree is each person is adverse (see: what is their "tolerence level"?)
- once humans reach a certain level of comfort with something (see: they acclimate), they don't want to see it change... especially if the change takes away some of that comfort or makes their current level of comfort seem "bad."


To create or engineer conflict you have to challenge these things in all areas of the game (so people can't just "run and hide").

Ostensibly one good way to increase conflict and content drivers is to stop removing them.

F

You want a real conflict driver?

Here we go:

Make all resources finite. And of the stuff built from finite resources, make them a resource that is also finite. For example: a capital ship goes down, make it yield enough to build say 80 percent of the next capital - or maybe it gets scavenged by someone needing to build smaller ships.

Imagine that: resources are finite. People will fight over them (as they have done in the entire history of the human race). After the fight, there is plenty of salvage in the field.

People are going to fight over that too.

Will you be the one controlling the resources or will you be snatching scraps from the table?


Make resources finite, EVERYWHERE, from the highsec belt to the nullsec moon. Do that and oh you will have conflict alright. The game would be unrecognizable after a change like that. The only people who will squeal the loudest are the ones sitting on their piles of moon goo and growing fat in their dotage and can't play the game any more.

Nice idea! Maybe not actual finite, cause RL is also based on (assumed) infinite resources . But an economy based on 80% recycling would be interesting.

Worrying about 'conflict drivers' is a mistake. Those things are artificial and rely on certain beliefs that end up not being true (such as the idea that people in a video game will compete for finite resources lol). Because the belief is based on false ideas and the false belief that you can entice people into doing what you want, you end up with weird results.

Here is my favorite example.

The real end result was the exact opposite of all the above "expected consequences".

This isn't the only example, CCP stuffs low sec including FW with rewards. End result conflict? nope, end result farming lol. in some cases, rewards and 'conflict drivers' spawn COOPERATION, not conflict. Remember OTEC?

People should let go of the idea that you can engineer people behaviors in an open world mmo video game. You want conflict, just make a game and don't ve super strict on the rule of engagement, be loose on the rules of conflict in game. Add guns. Watch fighting start. And tears. Followed by metagaming in the form of the weak begging the developers to nerf the strong while pretending their begging is all about new players and player retention

Such an idea opens the way for a true deadlock. All the current powers have to do is throw their manpower at mining and missioning for a while to starve the rest of the game out of potential competition. Storage of assets in invincible NPC stations ensures they cannot be lost and used against you, and aversion of risk becomes rampant due to the mechanical inability to replace losses. When every titan you create means a titan your opposing coalitions can't have or hundreds of subcaps denied from any entities that might harass you, why would you not be stripping every system bare and cranking them out?

Concord is a necessary evil. The current implementation of faction police on the other hand...

Defender allies are probably one of the most detrimental parts of the war declaration system with regards to its use by the general populace. While it makes getting help easy, and is great for mercenary work it presents a tremendously powerful deterrent to using war declarations if you have anything at all going on in your corp/alliance other than PVP.

Effectively declaring a war allows anyone else in the game to declare war on you for free and to be able to shoot you in 4 hours, rather than 24 and doing this has no additional consequence for either the defender or their ally.

The best example of this was when the mechanic was introduced. Several nullsec alliances had the idea that highsec PVP was "broken" (largely because they didn't understand aggression mechanics, didn't have their overviews set up to show who they could shoot at and because other people in nullsec had also told them various erroneous things about highsec PVP) and that somehow inferno would "fix" it without actually having the faintest idea what the changes were.

Subsequently TEST and GSF declared war on various highsec groups they didn't like, in particular The Honda Accord and subsequently found their war jumped on by every trade hub camper in the game.

A less extreme version of that scenario is the experience that Joe the miner is opening himself and his corpmates up to if he declares war on his neighbor because he's annoyed at them mining out the asteroid belts in his system.

People like myself who're in a perpetual state of highsec warfare and whose corpmates are exclusively doing highsec PVP all the time generally couldn't care less about who allies into our wars and as mercenaries are largely only positively affected by the mechanic. However it provides a massive disincentive to everyone with any non-PVP activity going on in their group.

If people want wars to be fought between peers with rivalries rather than professional aggressors against whoever there needs to be more balance in the ally system. Choosing to accept an ally into your war needs to have a potential consequence for the defender, because right now there is none.

Having declaring war paint a gigantic "Please screw my butthole until it's raw" sign on you might sound great to some people, but all it really does is make the mechanic useless to the vast majority of the people in the game while doing nothing at all to affect people who live on highsec wars.