EVE General Discussion

And here we have a typical supporter of the CONCORD ...
... demanding safety and protection from a hatred he himself keep fueling.

I have to dismiss your post, because it literally only consists of your personal hatred against players who actually would have nothing against you, if it wasn't for people like you who keep forcing their false PEACE upon us!

Good to know that your ideas aren't worth defending even for yourself.

First of all do we need to get something straight here, because you're kind of out of the loop.

I am playing a game. Within this game, the global storyline eventually involved CONCORD directly. Since the rubicon has been crossed they were a completely valid entity to bind into the actual game which means players like me are free to address them. You can also check the RP forums; they do it too.

I have to dismiss your post, because you are trying to tell me to stay apathetic in a game that allows literally everyone to be whoever the **** he wants.

You prove me right! You defend CONCORD and the mediocrity!
You want me to stay silent so you can just go on living this false PEACE of yours ...
... that only benefits YOU but none of us!

A lot about this game has simply become "meh" for a lot of people for a lot of reasons. The Great Malaise of 2014 was just the start and the bandaids applied to the game (not necessarily in the form of nerfs and buffs to favorite/unfavored playstyles either, these biased arguments ring hollow in the big picture) have not been helping. Some of the changes made to this game would have been welcomed as "epic" 5 years ago, the sorts of things people were begging for 5-6 years ago. But those people are long gone.

Now it's like nobody cares. Spergers will min/max new content for 2-3 weeks then move on, and time+resources spent on bringing in more of them for 2-3 weeks is only good for... 2-3 weeks. The actual community who gets more out if this game than just distraction from - something - is left in a sea of content they didn't really clamor for.

Ultimately it's not really the fault of the game nor the developers. They are doing a fine job with a legacy system that when you step back from it, it's really a marvel how it works and that it works at all. Games will grow and progress and that's simply that. Progress or die.

The problem is in the community and the community has become toxic. When you drive off the casuals, stack CSMs, and make entire movements out of butthurt or treat the sandbox like a litterbox, a time comes when all you have left are the kind of people who are into that, and the rest of the people won't pay money to put up with it. "Play Something Else" tanking will win every time. Remember they built a monument and it got vandalized.

It's as if lowsec has infected the rest of the game.


CCP has the power and leadership to address this and make some positive changes but it will take some turnover of the people in charge of this aspect.

Another nerf hisec post...

Look hisec will have something to fight over, indy structures will come soon and I am betting that CCP will not enable the indy players to pull them down within 24 hours. There you go, you will get your wish.

But level 4's are terribly boring, Incursions set my teeth on edge and mining is already a damn chore on small roids that last one and a half damn cycles, and don't get me started on ice. Level 5's were fun to do as a group until CCP made them low sec only.

From my perspective its players like that who want to kill the game by removing any fun for more relaxed and casual players, if they want their fun go and fight in low sec, null sec and WH space, why do people want to screw up hisec just because they want security to pick who they fight in hisec. And I can say that as someone who spends my time in hisec, but when I want to do PvP I JC to Stain.

Add faction police to the cause too.

Faction Police are hostile to many players that normally pvp in lowsec, and who under a wardec, would come to highsec for a fight, or to defend someone who asks for assistance.

CONCORD then, also prevents many players from taking pro-active action (eg. just ganking the wardeccer ships).

As a result, the mechanics currently reduce the amount of aggression and pvp based player interaction that can take place in highsec.

Get the mechanics out of the way and let the players both create and resolve issues.

Say ... can you expand on this?
Or link it, so I can do so myself?

I don't question it, but it's worth expanding on.

That plus the other part about CCP Rise and how interaction increases retention instead of lowering it.

ganking is not 'personal business'. It involves 2+ players. So nope, these things are different.

To OP: Eve is real. We have model of real society here. And lots of people just model themselfs (me included).

Yes, this is game, etc.... But it's not for everyone to completely change their mindset when you log in. Personally i cannot. I still play myself 'in space': mostly peaceful person minding my own business.

"Thank-you for your post" (if you agree with me)

"Change how you play" (if that's different from me)

If everyone who's not like you left the game, oh self-exaulted one, only you would be left. Then, you'd be complaining about nobody's here to play the game. Fortunately, for us, diversity is how we got here, and it's how we'll remain. Even more fortunately for us, OP, we get to remain like us and don't have to be like you! (Amazing, no?)

Your psycho-ranting, then use of pejorative language ("...if you're not like me, you must be apathetic....") serves only to demonstrate (rather ably) that you are not one to be taken for an authority on much of anything, and your opinions are far from well-taken, however vehemently and visciously you may throw them about.

tl;dr? Owning the Vitriolic Thesaurus doesn't make you someone who should be heard.

I should lend a deeper explanation to the toxicity to which is referred in recent posts.

In the book "On Combat" by Lt Col Dave Grossman, the term "toxic" is used to describe the environment in which you have people trying to kill each other. That is a given, presumably, for situations regarding real fighting.

But as a primer to the topic, the author goes on to explain a situation with the same end result but in a contrast of sorts. In the end a house is wrecked and a family ending up without a home. But two scenarios are described to achieve it.

In the first, the house is destroyed by a storm.

In the second, it's destroyed by a gang who did it simply out of malice.

Then the author goes on to point out the stark differences between these two scenarios that we can logically claim has the same outcome, but beyond that, we would view this as two entirely separate incidents.

When you have people who will destroy your in game progress seemingly out of malice that's all it takes. That the same people bandying about some min/maxer on a rant in comms like a trophy and/or publically shaming people in their blogs then go and try to claim "it's just a game" rings as hollow as the gang in the second scenario saying "it's just a house" (note they would not be inclined to say "it's just a home"). We can say in the first scenario that if it were your family and everybody got out alive you can say it was just a house but in the second scenario such a statement, even by the perpetrators, would be viewed entirely as distasteful.

The "It's just a game" excuse had the height of its distaste in the E1 fiasco. The monument being vandalized didn't help, and an entire movement of highsec ganking being described by and for and founded on being mad over the removal (or limitation) of can flipping and added difficulty to mission baiting surely does not help the "it's just a game" cause.

On the flip side, we can imagine that the family in the second scenario would be quite perturbed at the gang who destroyed their home out of malice and the notion that "hey man, it's just a house!". Now I know the HTFU crowd would use this opportunity to claim it was just a game after all and most players know this, but in the daily human condition, the results of and response to the 2 scenarios is the norm. And when not playing a video game, people are living in that norm. It's next to impossible to shed all humanity and human conditioning by logging into a video game. But those who might have the appearance of doing things out of real world malice do take their basking in their "accomplishements" into real world blogs and that one well known scandal. (that surely does not help).

So getting back to the flipside you have some players who do act like they are on some revenge against some gang that wronged them simply out of malice. But the choice is usually made at that point (or there are those who can't make it who are truly food for those who want to make it for them, or as I like to say "yes you made the carebear blow a gasket and claim that this person has emotional problems but what does that make you as the one who goaded them into that state?") for some people to either deal with it (HTFU approach) or not play the game. Many gank victims I have contacted wondering if they would join AG only to find that the loss of an occasional freighter was already factored into their costs and they simply didn't care. They shrugged and moved on. But there are those who do froth at the mouth but more often I see them get kicked out of the AG channels. The reason being is that they are somewhat of a drag on the game.

Now we can consider game mechanics. Again: we cannot expect the average player to shed all humanity and say everything is "just a house" on the one hand, but on the other, in the human sphere of existence, a gang that goes about wrecking houses out of malice would have a harder time going about it. There would be no point where they reach an equilibrium where they can still operate. We can build stronger houses and shoot on site gang members for example, but remember the malice is still there and in as much as I have known martial artists and firearms specialists who can pretty much kill everybody they meet, they don't go hanging out in ghettos or trailer parks getting into such situations that require this outcome. (This is also one of the points brought up in "On Combat" that even those who can prevail in the toxicity of people killing people, they won't gravitate towards it unless they have some mental issues). But on game mechanics, it matter not who wins the argument over who is getting nerfed more, the gankers or the carebears (via ganking buffs), but the appearance of it matters more than the reality. Because people are trained on the reality, they cannot manage the time to shed it on the short term for a game, and the objective of a GAME is to be entertained, not exercised in putting off malice as "just a house".

This is the conflict as I see it and while such things have always been elements of Eve (and even AWOXing too), they become more problematic because the community has become toxic. Or even worse: there is no more connection between pirate and pirated. Once upon a time everybody had a comeraderie of sorts where players understood each other even if they did things differently or disagreed with it.

Hence why I say that the community has become toxic. Perhaps the solipsism and self-absorbtion of millennial players has lent these elements? I don't know. But CCP does have the leadership and ability to bring back this sense of community if they wanted to. "Community management" of Eve Online is in a state of mismanagement and at it's worst IMO and this need to be addressed lest all the skins in the world will change nothing.