EVE General Discussion

Personally I find a bit puzzling how EVE pretends both that people hang out together for everything and yet allows anyone to backstab any other (even hundreds or thousands of people) with zero consequences.

"Play alone or risk being fukked, then be fukked for playing alone" is one of the weirdest metaconcepts in EVE.

A complete reconstruction of the bounty system would dramatically improve the "lone wolf" type play style.

Of all the MMOs I've played EVE probably does the most to encourage solo play, while doing the least to support it.

A couple of things that I think would help solo players some is a 100k km phase in point on the far side of a gate, to help thwart gate-camps and promote spreading out from hi-sec, and some way to tell if another ship is warping to your current grid.

Would be nice for Indy characters to be able to hire a cargo ship to haul their ore for them. This would end the need to open a second account. The positive is this would make the game more accessible to more people.

I understand that more active accounts is good for ccp but I would like to think the active accounts would stablize with the new people able to afford the game. It wont happen but would be nice for newer players.

As a solo player (for a variety of reasons that are probably beside the point of this thread), there are a lot of things I don't expect to be able to do.

For example, I don't realistically expect to own space, hold sov, attack or defend a POS, farm billions in passive income from moons or PI, win fights against gangs, carry out large-scale industrial or logistics operations, fly around in supercaps, and probably many more things.

One thing that would be nice, though, would be more tools to enable solo players with enough training to move ships and personal-scale assets in and out of 0.0 space with greater reliability.

I think gate camps as they currently exist are a bad gameplay mechanic--every bit as bad in EVE as in FPSs that excessively reward camping--and changes to shift action away from gates and onto objectives within systems would probably encourage many more solo and small-group players to dip their toes into 0.0 space. Getting more people into 0.0 seems to be a common theme here, and that's probably one of the major obstacles right now. Many players psychologically are willing to tolerate risk and loss in the course of trying to accomplish an objective (say, getting ganked ratting in a belt or running a mission because you were careless), but not when they prevent you from even reaching your objective to begin with.

Personally, dealing with bubble camps on 0.0 access routes under the current game mechanics as a routine feature of moving from A to B is just more frustration than I'm willing to tolerate in the gaming time available to me. If there were a more reliable way that I could at least get myself and a small amount of possessions in and out of 0.0, that would probably be enough for me to accept the other risks of being there. Right now, there really seems to be no point for the solo player given the disproportionate risk involved in travel alone.

Asking for any "love" for solo players from CCP is like asking for world peace.

But that's what makes things interesting for solo players.

In fact, bucking the game system is the goal of many a griefer and metagamer, and so to play solo in this game is probably the most benign way to stick your thumb in the eye of this game. The former is always saying "this is a sandbox" but the goal never changes: hit the other kids over the head with the pale and shovel and then point and laugh, until "mommy" (CCP) ends up having to take the pale and shovel away (nerfs, buffs, etc).

But the solo player is truly trying to buck this game system and laugh at all of those people singing "this is an MMO".

Yes, it's an MMO. But to play with others just because it's an MMO is the same logic that has everybody stuck in the same traffic in the same place almost every day at the same time. Backroads? Side streets? Nope. It's "rush hour" and you are supposed to be stuck in traffic.

Crap logic. Yeah it's an MMO and I like that too, but play solo, because server-driver NPCs and AI are only a little bit dumber than most of the other players - but I don't try to interact with NPCs except to blow them up or run away from them. With other players, it's the same thing, only a little more challenging.

"A Little" is key here. My drones have more creativity than an average gate camper.

As for giving some lovin' to solo players, if CCP had been visited by three ghosts this Christmas and are inclined to change their ways, they could start by creating a ship that is intended for the most popular form of solo play: an exploration ship. Gankers have ships, miners have ships, haulers have ships. Even salvagers got ships. But explorers? Nothing. We still have to outfit a BC or at best a covops or SB for exploration.

Funny thing is, EVERYBODY likes exploration. There are miners who will never gank. There are gankers who will never mine. There are mission runners who never PVP, and PVP'ers who will never (again) run missions. But across the board, everybody will throw on a probe launcher and roll the dice and see what space has to offer. The PVP crowd has their slow days, and find themselves alone - they go exploring. Same for mission runners and those who belong to mining/industrial corps.

So you would think that CCP would figure that an exploration ship would be a good idea.

In the meantime, Nova Fox has pitched some very good ideas for factions Exploration Ships, the faction being Sisters of Eve. I recommend that everybody find them and support those concepts at every chance in the hope that we get exploration ships someday.