EVE General Discussion

You hit the nail on the head there brother.




....Exploration

... "open world"....

Let me tell you something.

Here's how I used to play Eve and loved it.

Back in the day before there were SoE ships I used to fit a T1 Cyclone for exploration (a real "Captain Kirk" fit to would be ridiculous by today's standards but it worked) and use wormholes to go from highsec to nullsec and hit exploration sites. Occasionally I would hit sleeper sites too.

An "exploration" Cyclone as I had it at best could do a lvl4 mission or a 4/10 so sleeper sites at above a C3 and anything high up in the nullsec anom offering would be instant doom. Mainly I did this for exploration. For all other purposes such a ship would be poor for both PVe and PVP. The few PVP encounters I had with it went well only because they didn't call my bluff and I managed to escape. I did a lot of sneaking around and cloaking in nullsec I could add.

So in this "open world" as the game was, I would hit the WH/null exploration sites and draw off the NPCs using some very skillful speed and shield tanking along with drone fu. Then once I had them pulled off the cans and small fast threats killed, I could warp in, use my all level 5 analyze/hacking skills and run off with the loot before they could catch up.

I can see the forum warriors complaining already: why, you can't do that! You have to bring friends! You need an alt! And all the other stupid forum platitudes of people who are stultified in life and bring it into the game.

I did this for years, with that one ship. Never getting blown up, caught, destroyed. It even had a large rig from the days when rigs were all one size.

Then... one day....

"This container cannot be opened while it is still being defended".


It was over. And while it was probably in some dev blog or patch note somewhere, there was no fanfare, no chance to scream about it in any forums, no exploration CSM, no recourse. Nothing.

Other changes would occur, along with the advent of some very tough SoE ships. If CCP had done that in 2009 I would have died from the most epic nerdgasm in human history. But by the time those ships were introduced... well: meh.

Then came warp speed changes, making it harder to escape. Then interceptors that could escape their own bubbles (was fun not ending up in them).

Then came recons that you could not find on D-scan.

Then came WH changes that put you farther away from the hole, based on size. Just about everybody in the WH community hated that one.

Then ultimately, came the total revamp of exploration. Turning it into just another aspect of grind/farm content. With the original probing space seemed huge but it needed a revamp when wormholes were introduced (and that murdered lowsec mission running BTW) but it was OK.

Now space seems small and the exploration sites are not combat sites but we have nice ships at least. But hey there ARE some exploration sites (that I have not bothered with) that have some fighting.

And you need friends, or an alt. The world is not so open. I'm in a time zone where even most of the gankers are sleeping by the time I log in.


Exploration whent from being "what am I going to find today" to just more stultified, aspergian, grinding boring crap.

My version of the mistake being made here is that the game has turned in the direction towards people who do everything with one eye on their wallet or their killboard but that community of people who just loved the game and playing has been given the shaft.

Right now I'm playing something else.

For me, I don't like following the herd, I do what I find fun, for me it was belt ratting in 0.0 and doing it with people trying to catch you. My preferred ship was the drake, 72km range great tank and ability to kite, I set up BM's around the belts in the system I was operating in and warp down to a roid then kite to a safe spot, people would come in try to get me to warp out but I would just keep blapping the rats then warp out. I would then return with a Hurricane set up with warp core stabs to salvage and would do it in from of them again. The bounties were not great but every so often I would get a faction drop, or even rarer an officer spawn. Certain players would run around after DT looking for them so you had to be quick. From the modules I gathered I would refine and make ships for PvP.

I had great fun doing this in a contested system, all the tactics and the strategies were mine, I had these ideas from reading the forums and trying out stuff in lowsec before heading to Stain, I then refined then from experience, watching how others did it

What changed was reprocessing, because players were taking advantage of changes to build cost CCP added additional material then to get rid of that they cut the refining in half, as I was in Stain shooting Sansha rats my standings were bad. So a massive hit. Other changes were making officers really tough so I could not take them down without something meaty, which I agree with but that nerfed my income too, though later I had the ISK for a carrier and was using that to kill them

More and more people got into black ops so you had to be very careful, I had three failed attempts on me by the top FC of Stain Empire, I got a rep as being difficult to catch with them so they hardly bothered to chase me after a while.

After the drake got nerfed due to 0.0 fleets using it, I had to find another ship but nothing really worked to the same degree, by this time I had a second account so went with twin Phantasm's set for PvP but when the combat recons were made to be invisible to D-scan the risk level became too much for me. Because I would carefully pick systems so I had good D-scan cover in the main, so when people undocked or jumped through even in cloaky ships I would get intel, that knowledge went with the D-scn immunity. I explained why this was an issue on EN24.

The fun for me was operating in 0.0 when people were trying to catch me, sometimes I would turn on them and kill stuff, sometimes I would bait them by being passive and then just go very aggresive and blow them up, most people get lazy when you are passive with them for example one guy used to shoot me every time I undocked, so I would do it and dock and he got lazy, then I went for him and blew him up.

I keep hoping that CCP will at least throw a few crumbs my way, which is why I ask for a small citadel with cloak abilities and a small capacity, so I can do this nomadic type approach in systems that are not used by greedy large entities. But no.

CCP seems to have a fixation on forcing people to join large entities in sov space, I like small groups operating like this, for me its more fun. Furthermore my times of play don't fit in with the real action periods in Eve, I normally find myself playing with Aussies for example which is great but limited.

So back to hisec I went, decided to do something fun in terms of little guy stuff and there I walked into the total imbalance which I refer to as hisec farming aided by the Ganking Community Manager (I would love to know what went on with the decision to allow hyperdunking.) Which has just about put the lid on my disillusionment, I actually came back because of medium citadels, I wanted to help Aaron setup in Stain by donating to him a Medium even though he hates me and uses me as a convenient excuse for his own failings, but found that the 0.0 players had got the market removed for reasons I have yet to find out.

So I had a good long look at hisec and what I found shocked me, I talked to a lot of people and found the majority of people in hisec were alts of 0.0 and low sec players, I hardly found anyone that were dedicated hisec, and those that were were niche players, they find something that worked for them and avoided anything else. They keep their heads down and avoid, initially I wanted to try to set up something to develop in hisec, but the player base in hisec is so passive and so over farmed it just has no spirit for it, also many of them play Eve with the feeling that CCP hates them and their play-style, they have become totally fatalistic and are diminishing in numbers.

And what is evident to me with the disappearence of the prey who realised they were just patsies due to many bad balance decisions by CCP the game is stagnating to where risk averse gankers, hot droppers and scammers will be the majority and it is sad to see.

There are many good things in Eve which is why people like me keep at it, the combat system is sophicticated and fun at small to medium fleet levels, my ideal situation would be with a group of people who could get 12 together for fleets, that is just so much fun. You have to find people with the same sort of lets go for it type of attitude, but you have to avoid the people who just want a green killboard because their attitude to play is akin to dropping a black ops fleet on a single ratter, execution style with no risk. And that for me is what is killing this game most of all, that mentality.

The worst thing for me is that everyone and his dog does black ops add to that the boring AFK cloaky camping and that finally just said enough is enough, when you operate in systems where all of them have a cloaky sitting in it you will know what I mean. That sort of mentality by those players is just lame, CCP needs to adjust balance to deal with player attituide, just forcing prey into 0.0 is just not going to work.

Max PCU was around mid 2012 if I recall correctly. The differences IMO between now and then was that Eve was at the height of it's complexity back then with new feature upon new feature being added. This was seen as a problem though as there were a lot of features which were left for years without update as development time was being used bringing out new features. There was a big drive to streamline things and remove needless complexity, and this was around the time when tiericide was first envisioned.

Although reiterating on some of the old features was much needed back then, CCP went a little crazy with their new vision for a simplified and more user friendly eve. Their drive to 'remove needless complexity' and to streamline everything is probably what is killing player numbers more than anything right now IMO.

Eve is a game in which the players love to play around with mechanics and found ways to do things that others had never thought of (watch any RnK video for an example of the this type of gameplay in action). Eve players are definitely not the type of players that like cookie cutter theme park rides. Herzog's story of the exploration cyclone is familiar to me and is definitely a relic of the old eve, and I think part of what made the game really enjoyable back then.

The problem is this: you can't market a scary, complex, ruthless dystopian universe with great success for a decade, and then wear some $1000 jeans and make it a shallow, pale, idiot-friendly ghost of its former self.

Maybe by keeping EvE "true" to its mission, players would bleed anyway, because we are witnessing an epocal shift towards simpleton oriented, huge expendable playerbase free to play stuff. And also, towards a "press F1 in 1k fleet" brainless sheep.

But by making EvE a "stuck in the middle" game deluding old-timers while still not attracting enough simpletons, is going to get the bad of both decisions.

Yes yes, you want to mine your PLEX and have to look away from Barney on YouTube...we get it.

This I can agree with.

Well, All but the F1 nonsense, Fleet fights aren't about individual skill, they are about cooperation and participating in something epic, the only people who complain about 'f1 monkeys' are solo pvp'rs who think they are special lol.

I think the point was that the changes to simplify exploration were largely unwelcome to the true explorers.

That's true, just like CCPs tinkering with other forms of PVE (Seagull mentioned something about PVE on the o7 show and it made me cringe) will probably have the same result.

Like I always say, there is a reason most of us who do combat style PVE (missions, complexes, anomalies) in this game are doing that rather than trying to kill drifters of sleepers or whatever. Sometimes CCP demonstrates understanding of this (Burner missions are the best example, they even said they are 'engineering challenges') and sometimes they don't (Drifter Incursions anyone, ow wait, you can't).





It's kind of funny, till you realize it was CCP catering to a vocal minority of lazy as hell explorers who constantly whined about exploration being to hard from 2007 to 2012. IMO it's like how miners begged for years for buffs to barges (and the removal of insurance payouts for gankers), got those buffs, then experienced even more ganks lol. Same with wardecs, fix wardecs, end up with blanket wardecs.

It would be the same if ccp 'fixed' cloaky camping, the result would be way more hot drops, not less.


The moral of the story for all these complainers and beggars is this : Be careful what you ask CCP for, they just might give it to you...

I too am thinking of going there... my only fear is that it looks like "Ark in space" and Ark never interested me.

No, really. Fleets are also those made by a 5-12 guys, they are the most fun and, for sure, you can't get away with them just by spamming F1.

I am very subjective on this, for my own self, below 20-30 guys it's still "fleet", above that it's "blob". I hate blobs and mob mentality in general. I repeat, it's subjective of me. However, since I care about my opinion(!), I am not going to pour time or money on something that rewards blobs far more than "interactive" PvP.