EVE General Discussion

There you go, you are getting what you want: more PvE content. Eve is saved.

Looks like CCP is going to double down on the dynamic and challenging PvE content the Drifters started to hint at. Soon(-ish) NPCs will be shooting and ganking players even in highsec, thus shaking them out of their Netflix-induced comas, at least a bit. Mission AI will get a lot better and dynamic, the Sansha Incursions will be replaced by the more riskier Drifter Incursions, and highsec will start to retreat from the "peak safety" we have just reached.

The strategy is clear: if you can't let players provide the risk, at least let the NPCs try to do the job. Player-driven risk is better for many reasons, but I get that CCP has to take into account the psychology of some players who cannot handle losing a ship to another player. Eve will be a more dynamic and interesting place which will hopefully produce increased and lengthened retention. The increased destruction will stimulate the economy and increased the demand for resources and production.

We'll have to wait and see what CCP can deliver.

That's the point we're arguing about. Competition can be limited as in your examples of sports. But if you want a simulation of politics between nations, the competition must be as unlimited as possible. Think cold war USA vs USSR times. Several times they were on the brink of flinging atombombs at each other in sufficient quantities to wipe mankind out of existence. That's the kind of unbounded competition we're talking about.

There's an off switch to corp member vs corp member fighting. That pretty much makes awoxing almost impossible.



Games have three choices to make engaging enemies:
- write good AI, which is difficult because the AI is faster than humans possibly can be but also less creative.
- add randomness to spice things up, which doesn't change the AI but makes it less predictable
- replace AI with human intelligence. This one allows you to play chess without electricity or any electronic components, that's how powerful human intelligence is compared to AI.

From the start EvE was designed around pitting human intelligence vs human intelligence. Whether it was to find the best mining spot, build the most lucrative items or ship combat, you were always challenged by other humans. The little AI interaction here and there has never been particularly surprising or engaging.

Human interaction, both cooperative and adverserial have been at the core of EvE since the beginning. The amount of interaction possible is bound by game mechanics. In 0.0 it is as free as it can possibly get and in high-sec it is necessarily restricted to a level tolerable to new players, and yet free enough to be challenging.

Furthermore EvE functions as one world. This means that actions in one place impact other places too. What happens in high-sec is not limited to high-sec. Anything that creates ISK or spawns items has an impact on EvE as a hole. Anything that imprints a certain way of thinking of how game mechanics in EvE work, impacts EvE as a hole.

Those two things are the reasons why WH, null-sec, low-sec players don't want to see high-sec become a place that has nothing to do with EvE anymore. I'm thinking of the image new players get of EvE as a hole, when high-sec is necessarily the first place they experience. It's in high-sec where they get recruited and thaught by high-sec corporations how to live in high-sec.

The feeling is that you guys want to permeate high-sec mechanics and mentality at the detriment of the other regions. You don't hurt the other places on purpose. Likewise every region has people who only look after their own interests.

All this could be resolved by keeping an open mind and discussing things. You Lucas, unfortunately, are not open to other people's viewpoints.

Oh come on... stop it with the good suggestions. I mean what are you trying to do? Get Jenn to come here and tell you how you are playing her game wrong and since you don't like her game you have to leave?

Your last point, I can think of a couple. Anarchy and Perpetuum were both examples of what games would look like if they were just like Eve only 100% pvp... extinct.

If CCP is to get players the emphasis must be on safety. Safety is what drives PvP because the perception of safety means more targets. As long as carebear player A thinks it's too risky to operate in a PvP environment he won't go out there and risk himself.

The gate travel system is a good place to start. Players spawn at 15 km, well within range of even a basic long point. The power of ships, especially in terms of tackling has increased from a short 14km to up to 100's of kilometres around gates yet the mechanics in terms of ship spawn ranges has not increased at all.

Interceptors are useless for the average carebear wanting to operate in unsafe space.

Make travel safer and you increase numbers of travellers, increase numbers of travellers and you increase the chances of PvP. The up side of this also is as travel becomes safer the skill requirement to tackle targets increases from mindless gate camping as a blob to roaming and out thinking your adversary.

The other side of the coin of course is a requirement to provide areas attractive to carebears where they can be interdicted occasionally and where escape is a little harder than stay aligned and warp whenever someone enters system.

If you think ganking is harassment you really picked the wrong game...it's a sandbox, as you said yourself, if you can't kick people sandcastles over it's a crap sandbox. What does the date have to do with anything anyway ? People have been turning up to EvE and "putting up with " ganking, scamming, wardecs and anything else since 2003, why does the current date mean that all of a sudden, people can't cope with this.

Truth is you don't like it, you picked the wrong game but rather than move on, you expect everyone to have to change for you. Don't hold your breath.

And now, upated for October:

2015 average, January to October: 32k (-7k)
2014 average, January to October: 39k (-7k)
2013 average, January to October: 46k (+5k)
2012 average, January to October: 41k (-3k)
2011 average, January to October: 44k (=)
2010 average, January to October: 44k (+3k)
2009 average, January to October: 41k (+8k)
2008 average, January to October: 33k (+5k)
2007 average, January to October: 28k (+6k)
2006 average, January to October: 22k (+11k)
2005 average, January to October: 11k (+3k)
2004 average, January to October: 08k

We should see a small bump in November and then some lows in December.

These discussions don't really prove much.

With the introduction of skill queues longer than 24 hours, players don't need to log in so frequently. Although of course that doesn't effect older characters where the skill times are so long anyway.

I myself log in usually a couple of times a week, normally just to see what point the skill queue is at and to organise the next book to be added to my skills.

It's active accounts that count.

What is killing this game is a 40k man coalition that circle jerks itself, jump fatigue, fozzie sov, and trying to deevolve combat to local pockets rather than multi regional conflict. So half the people in space are friends and the other half have to take a million gates to get to each other.

Hell yea, well said.

I'm stuck by that posters use fot he words 'normal people'. Normal people suck and this guy (and the entire "Eve is dying/fix the game to be something i like" crowd) are basically demanding that CCP sell out on what has made this game great and kept it alive for more than a decade when most MMOs fold in less than half that time..

How intensely short sighted and selfish can they be? If they think that games that 'normal people' like, why not go play those and let the rest of us get on with things here? Not that I don't appreciate 'hater money' (cash from people who hate EVE but keep playing anyways, whose names tend to end either in "Fazmarai" or "alt" lol)

Free to play, pay to train.