Assembly Hall

How exactly are you quantifying "a lot".

Exactly how do you know more people will subscribe and play?

Eve is not terribly fun when played like one would play WoW. You don't even need to team up to run missions. Most people can run missions by themselves. So the teamwork one finds in WoW or other such games is not needed in EVE.

What makes EVE interesting is the competition between players. What you suggests is removing that....based on nothing.

I would love for CCP to make one constelation 100% safe. Limited resources a couple of level 4 agents and nothing much else to do. It would not impact the game all that much. The people who want that kind of space get it. And we can all put this argument to bed forever.

The boring people can just hang out in those couple of systems and circlejerk all day long while the rest of use can go and shoot ships in peace.

Go play in rookie systems or the test server then.

And the irony that you "want to shoot ships" but are pissed that other players want to shoot your ships. Perhaps you don't quite get the underlying nature of the game. Here let me put it simply:

So long as I am willing to accept the consequences I can shoot you anywhere I want in game.

Those consequence maybe from NPCs (e.g. if I use ewar on you in a mission the rats will start attacking me, or it could be CONCORD). The consequences may be from other players. If I AWOX you the other corp members will likely do their best to blow up my ship and pod. I'll also likely be kicked from the corporation and made KoS. That is the nature of EVE you are never really truly safe.

I thought EVE was having trouble getting in new players because of competition with other games? I mean, there are emerging MMOs now that support sandboxy elements like player driven economies and player factions. There's ESO which is buy to play though it's a themepark but it is fun though. Guild Wars 2 is fair F2P. Crowfall is buy to play (yet to be released though). Albion Online is another buy to play. In fact, if EVE didn't go F2P I wouldn't even bother to play.



My point is, I don't think that not having a risk free high sec space hinders the game from having new players. I'm freaking new myself. Risk is fun in this game and drives people to form groups. Playing and coordinating with others is what's fun in this game. For me at least but I think other people will agree as well. Coordination with others mitigates risk. I don't think sandbox and consensual PvP mixes well together.

You clutch to that quote like an orphan might to the last remaining photograph of their long deceased parents, who gazes longingly at it remembering better times that really only exist in their mind.

If you put that quote into a search engine, it is apparent that you have trotted it out multiple times over the years to make a point that simply isn't true. First, it doesn't mean what you think it means. Oveur said "not easily" for design intention of "pirating". He didn't say that all highsec violence should be "impossible" or something like that. Well, pirating is not easy in highsec. Almost all transport goes unmolested in highsec, and only a small number of players even attempt it. CCP spent years after that quote nerfing highsec piracy by removing insurance, buffing hulls and CONCORD and the like to make highsec a hard place to be a pirate.

Second, over the years multiple CCP Devs have confirmed that suicide ganking and a not 100% safe highsec is working as intended. I've linked some in this thread already, but you also can find examples in the minutes (p. 59) or this devblog detailing changes to suicide ganking which specifically says they want players to be able to shoot each other in highsec. Heck, if you go through those search results you'll even see your beloved CCP Oveur use phrases like "you can PvP anywhere, as long as you take the consequences".

You are denying the undeniable: CCP wants non-consensual PvP to be possible in highsec and CCP intends for it not to be 100% safe. This has always been the case, since Eve was just in the conceptual stage, all through to today. I don't know why or how you have constructed this alternate reality in your head which claims that for some reason, CCP has been unable to make highsec safe after all these years even though they really want it to be, or that CCP Oveur had some divine claim to the development of Eve Online and was doing his best to make highsec 100% safe but was usurped by CCP Falcon and his HTFU crew, but you are completely mistaken. Actually, probably more like completely deluded. Your alternate history is utterly false, and requires leaps of faith and in logic so large, it would do the most rabid conspiracy theorist credit.

Seriously, your bemoaning the fact the Eve Online isn't what you want it to be serves no one. Eve is what it is, and that unambiguously includes an unsafe highsec where you are indeed at risk to other players. And it always has, even back in Oveur's days. In fact, since Oveur left, highsec has only been made safer, year after year, buff after buff, and that has correlated with less logins, less activity and less content in highsec and in the rest of New Eden. I shudder to think what would happen if in your alternative universe a CCP Oveur was still a lead developer and was given free reign to implement the carebear paradise you accuse him of wanting. The servers probably would have been shut off years ago.

Good thing this is all just in your head.

Of course its in my head - where else would it be. I have first hand knowledge and experience of EvE from its inception to launch over every change and expansion. Do you?

Oveurs post is trotted out whenever I read nonesense like your post. You are either deliberately misleading or ignorantly misleading people on the forums with crap like that.

The post states a number of things and its from the ultimate source, the lead and original EvE developer.

See next post for details

Piracy, as a profession is almost impossible in highsec. Either we are looking at a different set of facts, or you have an unconventional use of the term. The only thing you can make a profit shooting in highsec is haulers that another player has chosen to put too much value into. Mining ships, even the most undertanked ones, do not drop enough to allow the suicide ganker to make a living. Maybe they can cover the costs in the best case scooping their own wreck, but there is no ISK for a pirate there. And the tanked ones? It can take a dozen players and 100M+ ISK loss in ships to shoot it, what all for 10M ISK in loot drops? Mission ships are even more safe, and usually have the protection of a mission gate that makes them 100% safe in there from outlaws.

Haulers are the only thing that can be shot for piracy, simply because the player gets to determine how much to put in there. No matter how high CCP sets the costs to attack, the hauler can put more goods in the ship thus making themselves a profitable target for the pirate. However, CCP has raised the cost to attack over and over again, leaving quite a generous window for haulers to operate. It takes dozens of players and hundreds of millions in ships to even attempt an attack on a Freighter which can yield nothing if the attack is thwarted by the hauler or her friends, or if the loot fairy is unkind.

I can get that someone might claim that suicide ganking isn't hard enough, because, hey, why not complain that the other guy has it too easy? Whining is easy and cheap, certainly less difficult than actually playing the game. Therefore, I can easily just write you off as 'uninformed' or, perhaps more likely in your case, a person with an agenda to make highsec 100% safe because you have brought too much of your real-world persona and morals into a spaceship shooting video game. What I can't get is how you constructed a narrative in your head that highsec piracy is somehow easier than it used to be in Oveur's time and that is hurting the game somehow. Back in that era, ships were flimsier, CONCORD took much longer to arrive, and even if you failed a suicide gank, the silly people at Pend Insurance would reimburse a large fraction of the cost of your ship. At times, you could make a living as a 'pirate' just suiciding your battleship into the side of a station because the insurance payout was higher than the cost of the ship.

The reality is mechanically, highsec has never been safer. This is undeniable. There have been dozens of changes, both direct and indirect to highsec piracy, and with only a few exceptions, they have all gone in the same direction: they nerfed it and made it harder, just like Oveur said CCP intends. And it has worked. Most people in highsec have nothing to fear from a pirate - the costs to attack are so high there is zero profit to be had in the majority of cases. The only reason highsec piracy happens at all is that haulers, especially the most imprudent of them, have adjusted to each increase in safety by hauling more stuff, and there are just so many of players in general attracted by the safety highsec generally offers.

All the reasonable metrics (like the ones CCP Quant provides) say that highsec is indeed, the safest space as CCP intends. You have the least chance of losing your ships there by an order or two of magnitude when compared to the other spaces where there is no, or very little cost to attack another player.

But as to your point 3, nowhere does he say "you should need to go to low null for non-consensual pvp". All he says is you should go to low/null if you want to be a pirate, AKA make a living from shooting other people's spaceships. If CCP wanted highsec to be free of non-consensual PvP, they could do it tomorrow with a single line of code preventing us from using the red safety setting. Further, wars are are a significant source of non-consensual PvP (at least at the group level) which have been there since Oveur's time. This idea of yours that CCP, or a favoured developer of yours at CCP, wants or wanted a 100% safe, non-consensual PvP-free, highsec is bullocks. This was never the case and never will be the case. It is just something you want so much for your own personal reasons it is clouding your interpretation of reality.

Back when CONCORD was vastly weaker than it is now. And yet, here we are with yet another whine..."Just one more nerf and all will be well."

Never mind that players logged in are declining.
Subs, which are most likely correlated with players logged in are probably also declining.
Yes, CCP has been clever about monetizing the remaining player base...which Ironically leads to more whining about pay to win, usually from the likes of you.

Might there have been justification for buffing CONCORD back then? Maybe. But this is now, not then. So trying to use an argument from over a decade ago would be like arguing that because we were in a deep recession 7 years ago, we should pursue counter cyclical economic policies now. It is just stupid an nothing more than an argument from an out-dated authority who probably knows nothing about where the game is now.

And seriously, I am so sick of people whining about suicide ganking. It only works now because some moron puts too much stuff in his freighter turning it into a loot pinata. How stupid does one be to put 7 billion into an anti-tanked ship that can be taken down by 15 players in 150 million ISK worth of ships? Pretty goddamned stupid. You know what happens with stupid people? The rest of us have to clean up after them.

I have zero sympathy for a dumbass that turns his ship into a loot pinata. None. They were stupid and they were taught a lesson. If they don't like the consequences of their stupidity, well too bad for them.

And spare me the consequences for the gankers. They paid the consequences for their actions. Their ships were destroyed. Yes, an alt or buddy scooped the loot and in the end they profited...but only because some other moron was too stupid to realize he was creating a suicide ganking opportunity.

Seriously. Grow up. Take responsibility for your actions. Stop wanting others to do what you need to do for yourself. Goddamn child.

Who gives a **** if it was intended or not. EVE is a game of emergence or spontaneous order--i.e. we will get things nobody intended. That is the goddamned point of the game. To get things nobody intends.

Did CCP intend pipe bombs? Probably not. Did they intend the "false POS" probably not. Did they intend rental empires? Did they intend something like Red Frog? Did they intend coalitions? There are lots of things in game that CCP did not intend...that is the nature of the game.

So your observation is pretty useless...kind of like you.

It was misinformation. Why make **** up?