Crime & Punishment

Hello space friends,

You may remember me from such great initiatives such as Kill-It-Forward, the Order Of The Glowing Dildo, and as a purveyor of such fine narrative works as The Hisec Asshats Handbook.

I have troubling news however.

After careful consideration I have come to the conclusion that hisec should be reduced in size by 75%, have all safeties locked at GREEN, and all ISK generation in areas other than nullsec nerfed into the ground; all as incentive to get more players into the nullsec warfare stories and narrative that have been proven to actually drive new player subscriptions.

This is not a troll.

My friends, EvE has become stagnant, devoid of content and lacklustre; in no small part because of the half-measures CCP took in partially nerfing hisec agression mechanics, while not having a comprehensive plan to get more people into the null storyline.

So it is with regret, I hand in my champion-of-hisec-asshattery card, and no longer call for the preservation of hisec agression mechanics. I instead plead with everyone still there, be ye ganker, wardeccer, merc, asshat, pirate or fetishist of mixed sort, come join me down in nullsec.

Let's make EvE great again, or more accurately -- what those media stories claimed it was, back when we originally joined.

Yes, it will take hard work. CCP must finally put a bullet in the head of TiDi, and fine-tune the positive steps they have taken with jump ranges, fatigue and new SOV mechanics. However, you must choose, as I recently did -- to either watch the hisec we love slowly wither and die to a lack of strategy from CCP; or just leave the entire mess for a land of PVP milk and honey, where there are no more pansies, no more gate guns and more dank ISK than you can shake a stick at.

Nullsec. It's time. It's your time.

Be assured, when you arrive down here, I will greet and embrace you all as brother,

Respectfully,

Feyd Rautha Harkonnen,
Grand Inquisitor of HTFU, Retired
Dark Lord of Crux, Retired

If this is a suggesRion it should be in the features and ideas subforum.

For it's just some of your typical inane rambling it needs to go wherever locked threads go.

Why should low sec ISKs be nerfed?

So, you are saying that nullsec still sucks despite changes, so we should nerf everything else and see if that works?

I think you'd just end up with even more empty null sec systems if this happened, and the variety of emergent gameplay in the sandbox would be greatly diminished.

I'd probably still play though

On your blogpost, the changes down to nerfs to others space I pretty much agree with. I too miss battleships and think they need a serious kick into relevance. As for the nerfs though, I just don't see why. EVE is a sandbox and people can play how they want. Punishing them for not choosing nullsec seems the wrong way to go about it.

Personally I'd go about it slightly differently. Just off the top of my head. each section of space would be viable but amplified in their focus. I'd have:
WH: Exploration focused. Loads of undiscovered and unique things, lots of variety. A few more WH station systems like Thera would be needed.
Null: Ownership, customised space, fleet battles and guerilla war.
Low: Pirate haven, shift faction warfare to work with pirate factions too. Rebuild FW so people actually need to fight. More ranges of PvE as well as PvP missions to assist with FW
High: Safe, lower income. More variety and completxity to missions and mining. very much PvE focused.

I'd then make it much tougher to move large ships between the sections of space. So moving a freighter from high to null or high to low or null to low, etc would be more akin to moving them to WH space. Moving smaller ships between these would still be pretty simple. The idea would be to push for more self sufficiency within each type of system. A new player would get a clear option to pick which section of space he wanted to start in along with an idea of what that would entail.

Getting people in to null isn't going to change anything. The best\safest place to carebear is in null.

Stop making sense, you. This is See 'n Pee you're posting to.

You can come to vale....although....you will only get gf's in local:/

i will join you in null but i dream of supercapitals and im too poor to buy one myself

I still love shenanigans in general, the problem is that CCP has already nerfed much of it in hisec, without counter-weight increases in draws & pressure to take part in the nullsec narrative that actually drives new player aquisition.

One needs to first acknowledge that premise, that stories of big fights like 6-VDT, BR5 and others in null are what primarily drive new player imaginations and cause spikes in new players joining EvE.

So it is in that context, that while EvE is at its core a pvp-centric spaceships game who's nullsec warfare narrative drives new player subscriptions -- why try to be that great burger joint on the corner that also tries to sell fish-sticks or salads to a niche market, when your burger stales start to go stagnant (or slump)?

I love asshattery, and remember my times doing same in hisec with great fondness, but my eyes have opened since moving to nullsec. I have now come to believe that by CCP trying to be all things to all people with core population density spread across too many zones of play (and concentrated in hisec), they miss out on critial-mass (in null) being constantly reached, and constantly generating those new player draw stories.

Its in that holistic context, that having played in all areas of EvE, I now believe in the nullsec thunderdome concept -- that for EvE to *grow* in the future, hard pressure must be brought to bear to get population density into null.

I fully support everyone's right to argue for status quo, because again I enjoyed those other areas of play; I just now firmly believe that for EvE to grow substantially, a bigger rethink is needed on where population density is driven to.

F