EVE General Discussion

I'm not your friend, so no. And yes you must buy a secondary account.

"Choke Point" has a real world meaning and a wikipedia page. The "usual locations" for 0.5 -> 0.4 Gate Camps fit the definition.

Of course they're not just a side-effect of the topology. Other factors include where people want to be in highsec (Trading Hubs, Arnon, mission hubs, etc) and places that look like good destinations in lowsec (which also includes "honey traps"). And given a meaningful perspective on sources and destinations, the "choke points" are a side effect of travel time.

Of course there are alternatives. But if the difference between a choke point and the next best route is 20 jumps, the first path that attracts people's attention will be through the choke point - the "price difference" is the additional (and notoriously boring) travel time. Basing a claim on the existence of alternatives if like telling someone buying a bottle of water at a stopover airport that they can buy one cheap at the nearest Walmart. True, but irrelevant in context.

I don't doubt that CCP know all this at some level. But that make the existence of rookie-hostile choke points in the game evidence that they don't mind at all that fun-vampires treat rookies as consumables.

It seems inconsistent with the idea of re-working their approach to trials. On the surface you'd expect that to be intended to increase the number of long-term subscribers, not the number of inactive accounts. But perhaps they feel their future income is all going to come from today's old-timers, and Alpha Clones are only intended to provide helpless victims for fun-vampires.

I am especially adept at avoiding camps, but I think their mechanic is 1000% stupid, and has never been changed because it sells accounts and coddles online sociopaths (who are account buyers)

And yes you must be really bad at this game if you get caught while spawn camping, which is a risk-free activity providing instant wins if you have two neurons to fire together.





Because delayed info = risk + doubling travelling time = stupid

Do you know friends who can follow you whenever you're logged in, and scout for you selflessly?

You do not have to get a second account, that's true: you can be a victim of spawn camps, that is allowed ^^

And yet you do have 3 accounts, say that they're handy to scout, and advise people to ask for their friends to scout.


Truly the most special snowflakes with special needs, this EvE community

The point of the thread is that they're easy to avoid except for new (and according to some claims in this very thread new and naive) players.

If we factor that in, these camps are designed solely as annoyances, to force people to travel much further than they would like, and/or to destroy ships of the least appropriate targets in the game.

Of course even a foolish rookie flying a fragile hauler with billions of ISK worth of stuff aboard is a fair target, but I doubt that's the typical victim.

We've certainly seen no proof that the risk is shared. A few claims, but most of the posts defending 0.5 - 0.4 Gate Camping have been perfect examples of "argument via truthiness", but very low on logic or facts. It always seems to net out to "we like to smash things, and we don't care about the possible consequences".

I think it's crazy to block the 0.5 - 0.4 interfaces. It gives new players one more good reason not to venture outside highsec. How is that good for anybody? Even the fun-vampires would be better off if it was easier to access lowsec, and on balance it paid better (even given a much higher frequency of losing ships to PvP) than highsec.

Old-timers should want new players to get well set up economically so losing a ship didn't matter to them. Taking pleasure in destroying most of a new player's net worth in a single one-sided engagement seems stupidly perverse even for a fun-vampire.

I'm detecting a double standard here. You accuse people of not being truthful because they have no evidence, but then make assertions (such as "gate camps hurt new players) without offering a single shred of evidence.

What if gate camps are actually good for most new players? What if they serve to teach new folks to not put all their eggs in one basket (the msot valuable lesson in the game)? What if dying in a gate camp lights a fire under many new players to go out and seek revenge, or go outand learn things like the MWD cloak trick or how to travel via wormholes (which might not have happened save for the gate camp)?

People have been camping gates since 2003, and yet EVE is still here. Many of us have been killed in gate camps (I know I have) and yet we are still here. And the best evidence we have from CCP states clearly that new players getting blown up is a good thing.


I'd be very happy to see the evidence you used to come to your comclusions about things. I mean, since you are demanding evidence form others, you must have some, right?

@ Jenn aSide

It's not a matter of evidence. A shocking proportion of the posts in this thread are obviously synthetic scenarios created to suit whatever the the poster is trying to demonstrate, with no attempt to relate to reality at all.

When that happens in a thread like this, we need only wait until the story stabilizes, then just run with it for a while.

In this case the story is "Only an idiot would get caught in a Gate Camp, therefore there are hardly any victims, and hence Gate Camps do no harm". This is self contradictory. Gate Camps exist -because people get caught by them. We can safely question the veracity of the story, and all the "synthetic pseudo-facts" used to establish it.

Back in the real world it's clear to most readers (including the people who put together the plausible fantasy explanation) what they are for. The weird thing is that they really are exceptionally stupid for old-timers in general, the campers, and CCP.

All three would benefit from lowsec being full of players. A very likely pre-req for that is that it pays better than highsec. A minimum requirement is that players newly exposed to a genuine "PvP Zone" can afford to lose ships. And of course it needs to be accessible.

TBH I enjoy the discussion mostly because my natural opposition (the innumerable fun-vampires infesting EVE) should be the ones trying to change this. They are the ones who would gain the most from asking CCP to make lowsec more accessible and profitable for rookies, since they'd get a huge increase in the number of potential helpless victims. But of course they're trapped - they can't live with themselves if they admit what they are, and the necessary denial precludes them from acting in their own interest.

Cognitive dissonance - a greatly underestimated factor in MMO games /lol.

That's shaky logic.

Why would the game benefit from more people in low sec?

What is the proof that gate camps are the cause of low population numbers in low sec?

And if gate camps were somehow the cause of low population number sin low sec, why haven't WORMHOLES (one of the innumerable ways into low sec) led to an increase of population in low sec?

Why doesn't the "don't go into low sec!" pop up not stop 'new players' from dying in gate camps. That's why CCP added all these safety pop ups.

Your posts are so filled with assumptions that any one of them failing destroys your entire idea of things. People don't stay out of low sec because their are gate camps, they stay out because there is pvp and most people can't stand the idea of loss under any circumstance. If it had been the gate camps fault, wormholes would have fixed it, but they didn't.

You also assume that some new player that dies in a gate camp won't go further. Yet again, here we all are, most of us having died in a gate camp at one point. And like I said, the safety pop ups were supposed to stop people from doing dumb stuff. What, do we need a pop up telling you to not disable pop ups?

And the assumption that making more money in low than in high will fix things. This has been proven to be untrue, as since 2006 CCP has piled rewads on low sec in the form of exclsuive content, starting with lvl 5 missions, the PVE in FW areas, clone soldiers, the huge buff to the mid level DED sites rewards drops (like the pithum/gistum invuls which mostly come from level 4-5-6 DEDs) and more.

It didn't work, again because the problem with low sec isn't access or rewards, it's pvp.


But your final assumption is the worst one, because it supposes that making it easier to enter low sec will elad to a population and thus content increase. It's wrong, it will do 2 things:

-More safety on entering low will cause new players to learn the lesson of not putting all their eggs in one basket even later than they do now, setting them up for a bigger shock in the future(once people get used to safety , taking it away hurts more).

And

-Older, richer players WILL find a way to turn it into increased profits (because of CCPs past "PVE in low sec efforts"
) widening the gap between them and younger/free to play new bros. It's called Malcanis' Law.


CCP knows this, which is why the proposal floated in 2013 at fanfest to stregthen gate guns on entry gates into low sec was shot down. Good intentions (like "think of the new players") tend to lead to bad consequences, and the gate campers would have just found an even harsher way to punish people coming into low sec, the exact same way CCPs buffs to mining ships and hauling ships lead to MORE ganking in high sec, not less.





If you want to help new players, find them, teach them the game, warn them, help thine figure out ways THEY can defeat the gate campers (nothing ticks them off more than MWD+cloaking or wormholeing past them) like they don't even exist). Set up "anti-gate camp" fleets the scrub low sec gates of campers from time to time. That's how you beat them.

But thinking you can somehow get CCP to game design them away for you?....as I always try to tell people (and they never listen), that's just the way to insure that things get worse.

This thread is nostalgic to me. Haven't seen a lowsec gatecamp subject in a while really.

My first loss to PVP and podding was at a gate camp. Parts system I think. It was almost 10 years ago. I was in NPC corp and a couple of noobs got blapped in that system and were making ragequit noises. Having already been playing for a while, I thought that was not the proper spirit. So I gave the noobs some new ships and modules and put together a BC for doom and took the fight back to the campers. I knew we were going to lose.

The excitement of the noobs was unforgettable. They waited for the post-jump cloak timer, in the chat there was much hyperbolic commentary. This was Eve noob PVP at it's best.

After losing horribly to some pirates who, I would later learn, were actually pretty good at what they did (their CEO is someone I would learn about "combat scanning" from and his knowledge would form the basis of my nullsec exploration survival). These were true lowsec pirates back when adults played Eve (or when civilization had adults in it. Who knows) .

One of the noobs befriended the most successful pirate of that group and got into piracy himself. The other became a goon (Ok sometimes things don't go well ha! ).

I would always say that gate camps are a crap mechanic. If ships could dial in system to system warps by whatever mechanic it would be a better game. Gates are "fatal funnels" and anybody in a tactical (or even strategic) mindset sees a fatal funnel as pure folly. A game built on it would not look good to them. But it would appear that gates are part of the games session/node structure and an alternative might not be possible or too much outside of what can bear the present load. Oh well.

No, that is the nature of the game. Play it safe and expend extra time and effort, or don't and take the risks.

It is about risk vs. reward. If you want low risk it comes at a higher cost and thus a lower reward. That some people keep going the high risk route and then complain about it suggests a significant problem in their problem solving ability. We see the same thing with freighters. You can take the lower risk approach and tank your freighter (and carry less, make more trips, etc.) or go the higher risk route and anti-tank your freighter and make fewer trips/carry more. You can also mitigate that extra risk if you anti-tank by using a scout and/or webber. The point is when you take and action that increases your risk…well sometimes it isn’t going to work out for you.

This is a game about choices and your view is to take away choices. Choices to take on risk, choices to impose penalties for taking on risk, etc. You are fundamentally anti-choice and thus your views are fundamentally at odds with the very nature of this game.

What? I do think you are making this up. That gate camps catch people is not in doubt. Sometimes they are lazy, sometimes they are ignorant, sometimes they are unlucky, sometimes they were foolish or dumb. Nobody has said gate camps do not catch people. As for “harm” that is a word that can have multiple meanings. Harm as in blow up a ship? Okay, sure. But how much harm is there in that? FFS, it is a game and it is essentially an imaginary thing you don’t even really own. Harm as in bad for the game? No, probably not. That is what the game is about, blowing each other up, competing with each other. Securing those resource first, getting to market first, taking your stuff, etc.



Yes, they are there to blow up ships.



LS is a genuine PvP zone, just not of your liking. Most of us arguing against you prefer the open ended classless system we have. Yes, there are times when a pilot will get a boot to the face from a bunch of guys. Fine, I accept that as part of the nature of the game. I react to that, adapt (if I can). I can find ships that can get me past that problem safely and let me do what I want/need to do. I can make friends and comeback and put a boot in their faces. I can look around for another activity.

You want clearly defined boundaries, by the sounds of it, well that is not this game. EVE is a game with as few boundaries as possible. It is a game about emergence. Throw all these players into this game with a few boundaries and rules and see what comes out. This is an unguided process, not a guided one. The results are not something CCP aims for or intends. Some things they’ll look at and deem “not good” and take corrective measures. Gate camping though is not one of those things that needs correction. As I noted the first thing that should be allowed for is players to react. To find a solution on their own. For gate camps there are plenty of solutions.

An example of something without a player reaction/solution: boot carriers/drone assist. Fleets of carriers using sentry drones, remote repping, and drone assist lead to a situation where there was no player counter. So after a while that type of game play was essentially nerfed out of existence.

Gate camps are places of conflict, and while they can be unbalanced it is not dominated by one side. There are counters and so it is not an issue.



Your notion of a “fun vampire” is not one shared by those of us arguing against you. I think it is fairly safe to say we disagree at a fundamental and philosophical level. We like this big stew called EVE and we like to see what comes out of it. You on the other hand find that unsettling. Don’t worry, your view is largely the dominant view out of the game. But for the long time players our view is probably dominant. So you really should go find a game that does not favor emergence and spontaneous order…a non-sandbox game.