Player Features and Ideas Discussion

ISD sometimes lets these threads carry on for a while before they inevitably get locked. I've stopped bothering to report them as redundant because it doesn't seem to matter, and letting one thread ramble on for a few dozen pages does keep new threads like this from popping up.

What is boils down to is there are people who enjoy Dark Souls level of difficulty, and there are those who enjoy Skyrim on novice with liberal use of the console. The problem here is that people like the OP, who come into a game with Dark Souls difficulty and want their novice mode and 'tgm' console command.

Everything you've mentioned can be, and is, done in hi-sec.

So you're saying people should just get all of the benefits, and none of the detriments, of being in a player corp? And that's your idea of "Balanced"?

I don't think we are remotely talking about the same thing. To hopefully clarify, I'll try to adapt my points within the context of your post.

The smart decision for a freighters pilot is to stay out of the indy corp.
The risks of the corp out weight the usefulness in every highsec scenario.
As a result, many highsec indy pilots stay out of corp make their own single man corps to jump out of when dec'd

To me, this is poor design. The point of a corp is to bring people together, manage people conveniently, etc. But it is avoided due to the strings attached.

What standards do you use to rate the corp system as a good or bad design? How successful is it at achieving its purpose?

Rd frog are permawardecced and continue to operate just fine.

That's a penalty according to chaosgrimm, unfettered access to corporation tools is much more important than being able to carry out business as normal because they use the corp as a front for NPC alts

He doesn't appear to understand that the CCP provided corporation tools are basic and often arcane; or that they have been replicated and vastly improved by players and are freely available, whether you're in a player corp or not, to anybody that can be bothered to install them on their PC.

Some of the social groups in at least one of the NPC corps (CAS) use 3rd party corp management tools to organise their activities FFS, that's how freely available they are.

Your interpretation skills are troubling, you could always ask me to clarify if you dont understand something. I wont bite.
Red Frog's Freighters are already exempt from wardecs.

You also did not answer my previous question. What metrics would you use to determine whether or not the existing corporate design is a good one?


To reiterate my stance on this, I will give you another example.
Let's say I design and write a fitting tool.
My target audience is anyone who wants to experiment with fits. When I design the application, I need to remember my target audience and keep their needs into account.

If it's completely command line, the less technical potential users probably couldnt use it. It would be a poor design choice.
If didnt take industry stats into account, industry folks might be able to view data models and perform the calculations themselves if they really had to, but if industry folks start complaining about the lack of industry support, it is my fault for not taking their needs into consideration as they were clearly a part of my target audience. It would be inappropriate for me to blame the users for not being able to calculate it based on the models provided. These users who have used other fitting tools in the past, such as EFT and Pyfa (my personal favorite) expect a certain amount of support that I just didnt provide.

I believe (which is admittedly assumption), that ccp created corporations to encourage social aspects of the game such as grouping up and working together. While the corporation systems works well for many users, esp null, it doesnt work well for industry pilots in highsec. Some corps just use alternatives, websites, sacrificing character slots, etc to be able to use replace the feature that is normally standard in mmos. Others replace the game entirely.

If you believe like I do that ccp spent development on a corporation system, so that players would form corporations and actually make use of the system they spent time and money developing, you also must admit that the design clearly does not support all of the players it was meant to support.

Your inability to grasp the fundamental nature of the game and understand concepts like risk vs. reward being a player driven dynamic is also troubling.

As for the corporations I don't see how any answer is even relevant because as soon as a war dec happens why the cost is too burdensome.



Corporations are the same for everyone. The idea of creating different corporation mechanics would almost sure lead to abuse. This has been the general pattern whenever CCP has tried to cater to a subset of players. They tried to cater to new players reducing pre-allocated SP when creating characters and doubling training times. Older more established players who understood the SP system far better than the new players were using it to get characters into various ships/roles quickly and efficiently. Thus, the older players benefited to a greater extent than the new players.

In fact, this kind of reasoning lead to Malcanis' stating what has become known as Malcanis' law:



Malcanis then generalized his law,



In short, that corporations are the same for all groups of players is a good thing, and your argument is very suspect. It is suspect because it is unlikely to provide the benefits you think they will and may very well be used to the detriment of what preferred group you are arguing for. This point was made early on in this thread and you just did not grasp it.

More from the article by Malcanis,



Yes, I am not addressing your design arguments directly. Contrary to your claims, I get your argument. It is an old, tired, and wrong headed argument for this game. Maybe it would work in other games that have more restrictions on player behavior/actions, but this game is very open. I am instead attacking the philosophical basis of your argument...the weak foundation on which your argument rests. Your suggestions cannot produce balance because somebody, probably lots of somebodies, will exploit the **** out of it.

Further, most of the people responding to you don't care about the loss of corp mechanics because most of us have moved well beyond that stuff. We have numerous modes of communication OOG so that even if the game is offline we can still communicate if necessary.

It is bad design.

You don't share your standards for design, because you don't have any or you fear you are wrong. You can't think for yourself, which is also my evident from you adding quotes to your response lol.

Do share. if you think the design is good as a whole, why?
What changes would need to be made to the system for you to consider it poor design and why?

It's easy to think yourself to be right when you don't define wrong.

For highsec indy, the corp system isn't risk v reward. It's just risk, so it gets replaced

As a long-time highsec industrialist, I find most of what you have to say about "highsec indy" to be fairly laughable, which makes it pretty unfortunate that you've appointed yourself our representative. I think I would like to see a resume.

As it is right now, I can easily navigate my way around war decs. Some other high-sec indy players - my competition - clearly struggle with this (which we can assert with a fair degree of confidence merely because threads like this one exist).

The existing system creates stratification between me and a portion of my competitors based on our respective ability to manage our risk. If they're camped into a station by a war dec, they're not building things and bringing them to market, and I have fewer competitors.

Explain, if you would, how I would benefit from your thoughts on corp design and wars, which would effectively eliminate that entire set of concerns which I have learned to cope with, and others have not.

There are definitely aspects of corp mechanics that are really poor for industrial play, but most of them pertain to internal risk factors - not external ones.