EVE General Discussion

All quotations are taken from the /vg/eog thread.







Per the above I have had this creeping feeling in my guts for months about certain things going on in EVE and the game community at large. I think in EVE specifically we've entered a long cold-war period of the game where you get flashpoints flaring up across small parts of the game but the threats of M.A.D. is long passed and the only thing keeping everyone going is a couple of artificial conflicts over abjectly nothing being instigated to keep people interested enough to not leave.

If the question of why CODE attracted so many players were ever to be asked I would say that yes it's because of the maturity of the game economy and game design and that attitudes towards warfare in EVE simply aren't as polarising as it was historically. There's people I know who don't want to commit to the battlefield because they see it as a chore rather than an opportunity to create some small slice of personal history. Then of course there is also the enduring opinion that 'null is ****** and boring' but only rarely do you see a realistic solution being offered, something that the devs can feasibly actually do with the game that won't break anything.

Personally I think that much of what we are seeing surrounding the stagnation of the PCU (rather than its decline) is coming from the long stability of the game world itself. It has been said before elsewhere that the game needs strong villains to drive it forward - but the point missed by that author is that people like the Kings of europe, the emperors of Rome he romanticises and all the other historical figures that stick in our cultural memory is that they came to prominence during times of reactionary or proactionary crisis and political downfall - which is something we are only now experiencing after about 3 years of stagnation. The collapse of large null groups isn't tragic, it's inevitable as the lack of common goals and the steel curtain of passive-aggression between major alliances and coalitions drives them to get bored and start attacking their own members.

While the CFC doesn't outwardly suffer this problem it does show the signs, goons are strong culturally and they enforce this will on to their client states inside the CFC and as such the client states are only doing what they're told and the resentment from individuals builds, except here in game you just leave and unsub/go somewhere else unlike in real life where constant oppression forces your back to a wall and with death being a very real prospect you either flee as a refugee or you become a 'terrorist' and fight for your self-determination.

I use CODE as an example because they are like the summary catalogue of issues with EVE.

You're right that this game isn't so hardcore as it used to be, with the definition of hardcore being very open to debate, however I would posit that EVE had more energy and inertia when people were still 'finding their place' in the world compared to today when everything is undergoing a spiral of entropy.

Playermade stargates don't seem like a solution to me, making supers and titans consume fuel to stay active does. No fuel? Ship shuts off, capacitor goes dead and all modules offline. You sit in space and wait to die. Harassment tactics can therefore start interrupting the refueling process and the nature of this inevitable decay of usefulness for the ship itself if it isn't constantly replenished (and therefore, used) forces them in to exposure and risk.

We watched a titan die in YA0 the other week, if we said the refueling can only happen externally from a module on a station (not a POS) then you will definitely see more chances to interdict a super or titan at a point of weakness.

This is correct. Development shifted years ago from making a cut-throat, PvP sandbox game about Empire building, to a more gentler sandbox where everyone can just "have fun". Highsec has been continually made much safer and more lucrative, to the point where no one's "fun", except for the most clueless freighter pilot can be actually ruined. Lose something? Just go grind enough in highsec with near perfect safety to replace it.

The current state of the game is a predictable consequence of those decisions. With easy, and safe, resources available to everyone, there is no reason to go spend the effort to carve out a space and establish an ecosystem of miners, industrialists and so forth that are vulnerable (and thus content) to others. It is much easier to just grind enough for a ship in highsec and go on a roam elsewhere, than to truly live outside of highec.

So we have entered a spiral of less and less targets outside of highsec, and the ones that are there are just the ones looking for a fight. Activity will continue to decline and nullsec stagnate, but Eve won't die. It will just continue to move to a less "hardcore" consensual spaceship PvP game, and away from the single universe PvP sandbox it was originally conceived as. Gone are the days of big player-driven wars and real battles for dominance, and we will get more small, meaningless fights just for bragging rights rather than resources.

Highsec will be a place where those that spend any effort will continue to be 100% safe, and thus only AFKers, new players, and the completely clueless will explode. But as all the former targets continue to migrate back to highsec to enjoy this safety, so will the hunters whose content and targets have been decimated by this development direction. Therefore ganking will continue to increase as it will be the only real from of non-consensual PvP left.

I am not sure CCP is able or even willing to turn things around at this point. Certainly player-built star gates is not going to be a magic bullet to get people back to nullsec. This will only happen with new space and a land rush and/or a complete rebalancing of the risk vs. reward balance of most of the PvE in the game. Otherwise, people will continue to stay where the rewards are earned most efficiently, which in the current state of the game, is highsec by a large margin.

Able? Very possibly. Willing? I highly doubt it.

They'd have to find the courage to slay the sacred cows of highsec and Concord, something which they have proven unable to do in the whole history of the game.

We'll see.

Or make PVE more deadly so that L4's can't be farmed endlessly by 2slot tanks.

The idea I would have is L4's accurately reflect the difficulty you're supposed to get from them. Angel extravanganza should be HARD not a meatgrinder.

Rather than making PVE more deadly, please rework that crap.

*SAVE US, CHOSEN ONE* becomes lame really quickly. I'd give mouthhugs to the dev that leads away on missions where I have to rep 2 NPC CBCs through an onslaught of frigates, or am paid to jam out enemy logistics. Or be labeled the bait for a top sekret operation mainly involving preparing my ship for 2k incoming dps for a few minutes before my NPC navy bros show up and save me instead of the other way round.

Make me feel less special and more like an expendable capsuleer and I reconsider not touching missions ever again.

CODE-like non -wardec illegal aggressors in HS, are the greatest beneficiaries of HS security.

Thry can fly around, looking for targets in HS with impugnity, while protected by CONCORD from aggression.
Fair enough. Everyone else flies around under that protection too.

The problem is in the repercussions of illegal aggression in HS, of which CONCORD is merely a reactionary element.
When they engage a target illegally, the cost/reward is easy to anticipate.
Its only substantial mitigator, is the random roll on how much loot survives.
This is largely arbitrary, since its universal throughout EVE anyways.
Everywhere in Eve, cargo and module destruction % is rhe same.
So that too, is tabled, and not an issue.

The missing factor, is a greater security standing penalty for illegal acts in HS, so as to more proportionately reduce them to -5.0, so that they themselves have to respond to overt player aggression, as they themselves enact on others.

Laterally, this does not reduce, remove or impair HS illegal meta.
It just means:
A) You have to, sooner, recoup sec standing inorder to continue it without red status.
B) Have to deal with player aggression if you dont, and fly red.
C) If you do go red, recoup standing in sectors where you yourself are a target.

This reintroduces an actual risk/reward element to the activity, aside from PvE of CONCORD, and back into player moderation.

I think the current modifier is 2.5%x various secondary variables.
Id move for doubling that to 5.0%.

I wasnt around in 2008.
Which nerfs are you referring to exactly?

Would you have a problem with increasing sec standing loss for HS illegal actions?

Slower concord response times, ships had less HP, we used battleships to gank stuff, we got insurance payouts on our gank ships, concord didn't stop you from warping the second you open fire, you couldn't sell killrights. There is more I am missing from that list but you should get the idea.