Assembly Hall

If I'm hearing you correctly, it sounds like you're asking CCP to cross a line which they, themselves, had drawn in the sand. As a rule, CCP does not play in the sandbox alongside players on their official/admin accounts except to provide occasional backdrop, storyline events, and sometimes to just chat in trade hubs for a few minutes to promote something related to the game. What CCP does do is to hand out the buckets and shovels for others to decide how they want to play in the sandbox.

There's nobody stopping you from operating your own vision of the Auxiliary Force in your own name. Send out your recruiters, get a lot of new/old guys, and start waging the holy war on ignorance of the vision of what high security space should be. Police the hell out of it and reshape it ... but ... don't ask CCP to do that in the same style. They're much more likely to make adjustments to the environment itself in order to incentivize play styles.



We're just going to have to agree to disagree on that point.

Have you actually read what the war dec guys have written? I have and I find their arguments compelling. Unless you are going to do infiltration, and even that is now harder thanks to the change in the watchlist, camping is pretty much it. Have lots of wars and camp pipes and hubs and let the prey come to you. Much easier than trying to find somebody that is now damn hard to find.

I'm aware of the cost scaling of war declarations, and most wars are declared against small organizations at the base cost of 50 million per war. I posted roughly the minimum cost for that many wars and your argument on how it should cost more isn't helping your case.

I'm not saying you're wrong about the reasons for people blanketing entire regions with wardecs. It's certainly easier to throw cheap wars everywhere and see what sticks ... but it's also counterproductive in the longer term for the game as a whole. So, yeah, maybe some additional changes and/or rollbacks would help the problem as it stands. That said, I still believe there needs to be a hard cap on the number of wars to keep something like this from getting out of hand again if such improvements fail to live up to expectations.

Your post was too long to quote all of it, but I would give you all of my space likes if I could. Well said.

I kept the most important part. If you dislike the game they way it is, then go find a game you enjoy, instead of trying to change this one to be the game you were looking for in the first place.

I do not think in terms of just ISK. I don't know what gave you that idea, but that is quite simply wrong.

However, higher ISK cost would lead to less wars....all other factors held constant. But those other factors are not constant and many of those factors are something players can control such as banding together into a larger group. This would open up new opportunities for making ISK as a larger group can now field more pilots if needed to defend things like a reaction farm.

As for the link he goes rather badly off the rails right away:

I don't think that will do anything, to be quite honest. The reason why wars are lopsided is that one side, generally speaking, has chosen not to learn PvP mechanics. As such unless this structure is vulnerable 24/7 I doubt anyone will undock to shoot it. And if it is vulnerable 24/7 then war dec corps are going to get screwed again. They'll anchor the structure and then it will get blown up while they are in bed. And even the war dec corps and alliances get even bigger to have 24/7 coverage of the structure we are back to no defenders undocking.

The "problem" with wars is one of attitude. One group of players like PvP and they know the mechanics. The other group does not like PvP pretty much at all and they do not know the PvP mechanics. Thus, one side is just NOT going to fight. They are not going to fight now, nor are they likely to fight over a structure.

No prior to the nerf each corp might have 15 wars. After the nerf, they might be able to have 7-8 each. They band together and can have 15 or 16 or more.

The question is, are there economies of scale in ISK making? If the answer is yes, then they might be able to have even more wars. Maybe even 20 or possibly 30.



I disagree. As I noted I think the issue is one of attitude. What Winning Condition will induce people not interested in PvP to undock and face PvP?

Exactly. I've been reading this thread, in various stages, for almost 10 years now, and no one has yet even managed to come close to reconciling the irreconcilable.

As long as people with no interest in learning how to defend themselves and no interest in paying others to do so keep forming corps which can be wardecced, this "discussion" will continue.

It's not really a discussion though, because there simply isn't enough common ground for it to really be a discussion. It's just squirrels and sharks yelling past each other about which would be the best place for them both to look for food. The squirrels want to look for nuts in the trees; the sharks want to chase fish in the seas. There is no option to satisfy one that doesn't kill the other.

I alluded to part of the root problem in another thread;



People in this very thread have, with all sincerity, advised those troubled by wardecs to "go rat or mine in null" because it's safer there. Of course nullsec isn't intrinsically safer! It's riskier in 50 ways! Such safety as exists in null exists purely because the level of risk is such that the inhabitants have no other option than to work together and put effort into measures to make it be safer. The better organised and better led ones are more successful, and their miners, ratters and builders operate in a measure of safety.

Contrariwise, the situation in hi-sec is that hi-sec is statistically so safe that the overhead of providing safety to one another is so cripplingly high that virtually no-one bothers to do it. If you're making, I don't know, T2 Invulns for 2 mill*, and getting a 250k ISK margin on each one, then it is evidently foolish to 'spend' (whether in time, ISK, opportunity cost, higher mats costs, whatever) 150k ISK per unit on protecting your production and transport operation when there's only a 3% loss rate due to hostile action.

Doing nothing costs you 60k per unit, protecting yourself costs you 150k.

However, when that 3% is taken, it's not taken as just a lower overhead on each sale, it's taken all at once as a whole week's production gets ganked because you didn't warp your hauler to a Jita 4-4 instadock or whatever. And when the situation arises, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

It's an "unfair" situation to the gankee in the sense that it's "unfair" that a pair of 3s will always lose to 4 Jacks, even if the dude with the pair decided to bet a GSC full of T2 mods on his hand on the basis that the other guy folded on the previous 48 rounds.

Despite having watched CCP repeatedly nerf non-consensual PvP in hi-sec since almost the day I started, I have not seen any drop in the number of complaints about non-consensual PvP in hi-sec. That's because reducing the incidence doesn't make the occurrence any more acceptable to the guy it happens to. In fact it makes it less acceptable, because every such nerf makes it less worth taking any precautions, inevitably meaning that the actual encounter is perceived as even more unfair, provoking even more passionate complaints.

That's why "one more nerf" will never fix the problem. Each nerf makes the problem worse.


*I can't remember what T2 invulns actually cost right this second, and cba looking it up. Figures are for illustrative purposes only.

They certainly can't be "fixed" with stuff like tinkering with how many simultaneous wardecs a corp can have. That's a silly nerf that entirely misses the point. The only number of allowable wardecs that the Squirrels will accept is zero.

Generally agreed. Additionally, with the tightening of areas where the "mainstream" player types had traditionally found their homes in EVE ... there's simply less room for them to have their play style. Say what you want about what the sandbox is, how it should operate, and where the rules and the players must adjust to one another ... the bottom line of the conversation is still: How badly has EVE been hemorraging players over the last handful of years and can it regrow the playerbase if the current environment is maintained?

I would argue that, clearly, CCP has created a massivly successful new revenue stream in the form of skill injectors, but I would also argue that such additional revenue streams are commonly created out of necessity. If CCP didn't feel the squeeze of loss, then they wouldn't be inclined to allow this thing which they've shunned for so long (i.e., quick skill points for a price) because it's a form of power creep leading ever-closer to a pay-to-win game. So, even knowing they grudgingly shuffled a half-step closr to a pay-to-win environment, they bent to the demands of the playerbase because they knew the additional revenue would do them some good. Let them deny it if they want, but I'll still argue it's the truth.

Ultimately, CCP is, without possibility of debate, losing more customers than they're gaining because the game envornment is shifting based on rules changes. I would argue this is much worse than "catering" to "whiners" by not permitting highsec to become lowsec for a section of the players who tend to stick to highsec and generally not bother anybody because they want to run minnig lasers and just be chatty for a little while. Let war be in highsec as an intermittent kick in the pants to get people to wake up, but don't let it basically be there in the form of spamming wars without any reason other than the people spamming wars can't be bothered to go fight in low-/nullsec where there's a level of risk over which they have no control. The irony of this problem is the aggressors discussed in this topic are manipulating the Concord safety net which has historically been relied upon by those who just flat-out can't accept constantly being at war ... and that is how CCP has failed to enable a significant section of their customers' expectations to be fulfilled regardless of what highsec "should" be.

If CCP wants to increase their subscription numbers again, then they'll have to make another change which permits casual non-aggressive players to have some breathing room while also operating as player corporations ... at least in highsec. If not, well, then the game can be what CCP wants it to be, albeit with fewer whiners roaming the stars. There's the chance, however, that all of this is by design: If CCP wanted to filter out what generally amounted to non-PvP players from the game and knew they couldn't survive the economit hit unless they created a new form of income ... then this would fit that mold. Honestly, however, I see injectors as a reaction/accomodation rather than a part of a plan.

Many of us are painfully aware of the debacles of years-past where previous sets of management basically ignored problems players declared needed to be addressed. Incarna is a pretty strong example. On the other hand, CCP Seagull has made it her personal crusade to not only save EVE by seeing that features are complete when added, but that swaths of existing sicknesses are removed from the game and replaced with something better. For that, Seagull, I salute you. Keep kicking ass and don't ever stop pushing the Future Vision.

Highsec is PvP-restricted, but not enough to convince tens of thousands of players to continue playing ... and the rub is that, for years, CCP has been trying to push people to get out into nullsec and fight wars over space and resources, partly by making highsec less attractive by being less safe than it once was. This push has had very little success as measured by the number of players in various security levels of space.

In conclusion, one or two things are happening. Opton 1, CCP is actively promoting an environment whereby these players remove themselves from the game because these players are "ruining" what the game was designed to be: a system of rules which encourages lawlessness. Option 2, CCP has failed to comprehend the expectations they've set and are now denying any accommodation to the players who are leaving in droves because both sides are acting on their incomplete understandings. Both options are likely, and both would lead to what's going on. There is no third option ... but there is a chance of both options being true.