EVE General Discussion

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/summer-of-sov-nullsec-pve-and-upgrades/

There are some things said here that I think warrent some addressing.

I don't know about anyone else but this doesn't excite me. I resubbed to WoW about 6 months ago after a 5 year hiatus to see what it was about. I paid 3 months upfront. Within 7 weeks I had leveled a worgen to cap and was stuck with running old content or being carried by highly geared other people with nothing to do. This is significant because of two key things.

Changes to PVE.
Lack of affirmative action regarding their PVP.

WoW PVE was once both the best of and worst of the MMO genre. Best of due to its large raids, difficulty and the companionship people got from each other as they ticked off the boxes. It was the worst of the genre due to the leveling experience being a hollowing (I'm borrowing the concept from the souls series here) experience that burnt players out and eventually pushed them in sad directions as they struggled to justify their investment of time and energy.

Today I watched a man burn $1500 aus worth of warhammer figurines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plUPJ0inN4c

Listen to his complaints. Hear what he has to say.

Let's now look at CCP's balancing behaviour when it comes to PVP, compare it to blizz's behaviour, compare it to GW's. This one is really hard because I actually feel like CCP do a good job when it comes to ship balance with most ships having 2 or 3 viable builds. Blizzard don't actually care at all about their PVP which I discussed with a senior GM and more or less got told that people unsubbing doesn't really matter especially if PVP was the reason. In particular for WoW was proliferation of EULA violating bots going unpunished despite being publicly shamed via recordings and statistics. Games Workshop on the other hand are completely insane and are possibly moving in the "unbalanced gameplay is more fun (and profitable)" direction.

Your question by this point in the post is: 'how is any of this relevant to the dev blog?'

From the top;
-nullsec anoms. An AFK activity. More of the same **** isn't going to get me to undock. I tried it for a few hours here and there but honestly I don't play a videogame to work a second job.
-Mining in nullsec; same story. Those are mostly bots and legions of alts. Or people CODE was created to persecute.
-data/relic and combat sites - these are so predictable one guy ran 4 of them in 15 minutes. I've seen cargoholds for a single ishtar pushing 7 billion in a single day. We do not need more of them.
-incursions are ridiculed everywhere for being easy isk. I personally know a guy who flies DPS in one fleet and logi in another at the same time and he still finds time to play solitaire. They are to date the one piece of gameplay I've personally never done.
-wormhole changes make no sense. I would never have advocated for this particular change to go through.
-ESS. Just the mere fact they came with a penalty out of the box meant they would see little use. I've seen people with ratting carriers not even know what they are. FWIW if the little infographic popup didn't come if I were to steal all the isk for myself noone would even know or care at all that I had put one in system. And I would be stealing that money all the friggin time. These are a wasted opportunity, they should have offered ONLY payouts in LP-credit chips.

and finally the point made about burner-incursions. I am utterly at a loss on this one. I hope you know what you're doing because I sure don't. Kudos if it works (and lasts longer than a year or two and isn't endlessly farmable etc etc infact just refuse multiple connections from the same IP and you solve every problem on that front at once.)

And this ties in to the evidence presented earlier: a large amount of simplified PVE content is not worth creating because it is exploitable and drives the game in a direction where too many people spend too much time repeating the same stuff over and over to make any progress. SP is not a limiting factor for anyone with a good skill plan. After 2 million SP you can be a capable t1/t2 frig pilot that's just as effective at it as I am with my 79million SP. Money is the main limiting factor and prices are controlled by a very few people pulling strings across an entire game universe which in turn creates a very controlled and manipulated gamespace that benefits the needs of a very select few for reasons not yet known. CODE was no accident, their killing 1-trillion isk a month was no accident either.

I don't have any suggestions or specific insights to post here because it's not the right time or place and GD is not a good forum for honest debate either. I couldn't take this issue to reddit or 4chan either due to their drone/hive mind mentality and they get scared when the boat rocks. I don't honestly feel that an environment where I have to be careful about offending somebodies obscure sensibilities is a healthy environment for rational discussion as we should be able to debate topics that cause offence *if they are important*.

EVE does not need more anoms or belt-sliding npc hunting. Why I cannot scan down burner missions as signatures in and of themselves leaves me mystified as I would much prefer that than wading through 45 battleships in hostile space and being exposed to being ganked frivolously for much of that time. Infact most of the game would benefit from switching to a higher intensity format with more concentration. Which this direction we are seeing is not. It's lots and lots of time consuming low energy activity. Gas mining is one such activity that makes my heart weep salty tears.

There are better ways to be doing things.

But you could have taken it here, where they actually care:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=433556&find=unread

Or is that not special enough?

Ye gods, that video, the personification of man-child.
My skin is breaking out...i ......just.....no.

Ranting or duplicate thread? Lets see which the ISD choose.

EDIT:

waaaat

You lost me at "WoW"...


Aye, it does. However, I really did like the 'old' hacking sites, with rats and explorer ships with weapons and weapon mods/rigs. The rat removal and hacking mini-game with hacking mods/rigs just added another layer of fail to PvE while totally abandoning what was kind of ok. But w/e

Wow is easy, leveling is also easy, you can level from just doing battlegrounds for christ sake.

I can't help but agree

You forgot to switch toons

Edit: I would like to see harder pve content in null.
For example combat site version of the burner missions.

I do realize that the issue with harder content with less time (Creating even more ISK per hour) will lead to blizing sites as people will just find the optimal ship and fit to plow through the room(s).
It's a very difficult problem that i still hope CCP will address at some point.

If you have comments on a Devblog, please use the comments thread for that particular blog to express your opinion.

Cheers.