EVE General Discussion

Really?

It always seemed to me that the most people were around when the USAmericans got online.
In any case do I not agree on using PCU and ACU as a metric for activity around the whole day.

It's not accurate enough at all. I'd rather have people look at the highest numbers online for every hour each day,
and base their opinions on that. It's far more accurate and descriptive of what's going on.



And now ends my free time.

Back to reality.

Your memory is faulty, you're out by around 20,000 and the peak was in April 2013; at least 6 months after James 315 and his band of merry mayhem mongering marauders started their commerce raiding operations.

IIRC most agents of the New Order make sure to stay within the terms of TOS, the whole permit thing is a direct result of that. They may tread very close to the line on occasion but very rarely cross it.

In my experience Eve is less brutal now than at any time since 2009, in their endeavour to attract players from more mainstream games CCP have either watered down, or removed completely, so many mechanics that allowed us to affect other players that their tagline is becoming a lie.

Some of the decline in player numbers is by design, an example would be the banning of input broadcasting; but for the most part, as Jenn so nicely puts it, when Eve was harder and more unforgiving it had more active players than it does today.

I dunno, there was that one with the really long character name that used to throw spoons at people. And I fail at reading...

yeah I misread your post as you could be worse :doh:

Ankesamenpatakah, or however the furries spell it

I don't believe in the importance of stats (as you might have read several times).

I believe in physical feedback. When EvE does good, I log in and my character gets forcibly moved out of Jita during log on, because the node reached the maximum amount of players. Jita is a good indicator of how "lively" is the game.

Now, it's months I don't get moved. Used to get moved 3 times out of 4 in the past.

First of all I'd like to thank you, because you put thought and care in writing your reply.

I still beg to disagree on a portion of it.

EvE is sold as a free form sandbox. I have played "PvP centric" sandboxes and they don't truly compare. The first "sign" of a PvP sandbox is it giving missions where you kill NN enemy players and get paid money. Not rats.
The second is, even in case of PvE, those games really have it as bare as possible: go kill NN NPCs and get back and little else. EvE got multi-phase missions, exploration with NPCs inside, incursions... Resources have been spent into placing this PvE content in a lore perspective as well.


And it's good to be so, because if you want a PvP game, you either create a symmetrical environment (everybody involved is armed, willing, and ready => many games do this) or you create a "chain food", more natural environment, with its gazelles and its lions. Gazelle players however need to be actually enticed to be there and interesting PvE (and mining!) would do that.




You know, you may get into a Viper, go in "player mode" and then fly to one of the known hot PvP areas. Voilà, in the worst case you have to wait as much as you'd have to wait in EvE to get your PvP fill.

Also, piracy is much more fun, actually tackling and play "catch and flee" games brings some additional variables to what in EvE is exclusively about:

1) Go to known 0.4 system.
2) Have 2+ accounts.
3) Get insta-lock setup. It invariably locks people and pins them down, very tiny variation and thus fun yields to repetition.
4) Places is always the same: either at the gate or (rarely) at a station. That's it, rinse and repeat.

YAWN!

Gazelle in the process gets discouraged because the above little "procedure" works 100% (if done well), he just gets NO ESCAPE unless he forgets his favourite ships and only use proven, copycat gate running ships and fittings.

Imo in this "gank process" ED is so more fun and varied than EvE it just puts it to shame.

Is this "extra stuff" so wrong? To ask for EvE to be less catered to F1 spammers who get F1 => repeatable result?

Even something as stupid as mining: in EvE you copy and paste THE min maxed fitting with best tank vs yield. Fly to roids. Press F1. Wait for NN minutes. Yawn. Get back to station. Or dump into Orca (with an hellishly clunky cargo implementation).

In ED you have a much more active role. Sure, pressing F1 won't be enough. And if you get attacked, you can have fit your ship to defend itself despite being a mining setup.


Would make mining in EvE less of a vein-slitting process go against its PvP nature? Don't think so. It's just 10 years people ask for that and all they got is stupidly overpowered tank.

Also, not regarding ED: in any smart game you have big reward where's big risk.


What do you get in EvE for having purchased the best scan bonus ship, best probes and spending minutes with them? Some pathetic and utterly useless mining field. They are the most difficult thing to scan, reward is just not there.

What do you get for living in a WH? Or for living in low sec? Or even for living in NPC nullsec?
In one you are not spoonfed by mommy local chat, in the others "THERE BE LIONS".

However the best reward is given to F1 mummies in sov 0.0. The most features, the most extended ability to build structures, the "sites" and so on.

As a minimum, remove local from sov null sec and even that would not be enough to counter balance how dangerous is to live in low sec or NPC null sec, much less WHs.

But no, CCP caters to the "elders", to those who spam 2k ships on grid, exactly like in my other MMOs that slowly died because "elders" became the dictators of how the game MUST work: with them strictly stuck in their comfort zone, with advantages no new player can dream of for years (how many give up, when they learn they'll take 5+ years just to get vaguely competitive...).




My ASP explorer got a 6A fuel scoop. It takes too little time to refill to call it "waste time"

There's a huge difference between retiring a -10 character to start anew on another character slot/account and biomassing one to start anew in the same character slot; one is a bannable offence, the other is not.

I'm merely pointing out that CCP do enforce the rules regarding the recycling of neg status alts for the purpose of creating a new character and avoiding the "consequences" of said sec status. Gankers are much more likely to retire a gank alt, which is not a rule violation, than to biomass it, which is a rule violation, because of that enforcement and the punishment attached.

Yes you are, and no I'm not. You specified recycling/biomassing, I said that gankers don't do that because it breaks the rules, if they wish to roll a new alt and start anew they are far more likely to retire a gank alt and roll a new character on a spare character slot to stay within the rules.

Yes there are, and they are ways that don't involve breaking the rules regarding recycling or biomassing, ergo they aren't ToS violations which makes the whole premise in your original reply to myself moot.

According to many of the doomsayers player average activity and total sub numbers are directly affected by things like this, so yeah it does belong here in a roundabout way.

PVP centric does not mean PVP only, it means that a majority of things are PVP in various ways which it is and much moreso than any other current active MMO that doesn't completely suck. Also, when they were making EVE it was actually the case that NPC and PVEing were an afterthought resulting in the earliest belt rats being uhm... interesting, that is why PVE has sucked since forever because it wasn't on their to do list at all.

Your vision of what a PVP game is is quite limited tbh.

...

it's exactly the same in ED, people sit in a known system at the point of entry (sun) or destination (station), preferably with friends and gank everything they can find. Also, there is no "instalocking" in EVE, it doesn't exist. The point is that because of how the server works in E:D it's not actually a persistent world and because people can do solo play there isn't much interaction other than "lol gank". The chance of 2 random people bumping into each other in E:D and going "you know what, we should make a clan and get some teamwork going" is pretty much nil because it lacks that sort of interaction, it's meaningless as an MMO.

And again, your vision of what PVP in EVE is is very limited. I go out on PVP trips all the time, solo or sometimes with 1-2 friends. We don't camp, we don't use lol ships, gang links or anything and we certainly don't sit still. We roam and it's great fun and works just fine. Sure, you might/will die at some point but so what?

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I'm not at all against changes to mining, I'd welcome it if only to see non-effort semi-afk miners rage like hell and extra stuff is nice and good but the issue is that you're comparing a 1st person sim game to an RTS (which is what EVE effectively is). How are you going to make mining "fun" in an RTS with all the limitations and constraints that come with such a game type?

I'm not a fan of large fleets either and I love how CCP is slowly working to battle them a bit but at the end of the day that is what EVE is, a large scale PVP centrix MMO where anything goes. And how much should EVE change in order for you (or me) to a point where we'd fully agree to what can be done, it wouldn't be EVE any more (which is the main point I'm trying to make), it'd be an NGE and would have the exact same result as it had in SWG.

I didn't mean the action of scooping itself but rather putting in the effort to get lost amongst the stars :) Also, I want to have 4 SRV because I don't want to end up in some arse end of space behind a 40+ LY jump and then lose my single SRV and being unable to make it back because of that. 3A scoop will have to do.