EVE General Discussion

Why are you assuming those disappearing assets are carebear accounts and not bored nullsecers?

I'm not sure what you're trying to point out, here. We all do what we find fun. I found it fun to sacrifice a 400M isk ship, to see what the miners would do? Would they launch 60+ drones?

That would have been a very, very strange killmail for the Rattlesnake pilot to swallow. It's experience for me, on a number of levels. It's just a number. A graphic.

The real gain was in seeing HOW you would respond, when someone tossed 'conventional wisdom' out the window.

The time for this may come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn02c176YuI

But, not yet.

Likewise, old wealthy players too.

Same thing? They are players bored with too much safety and hand-holding, or players bored by never finding the real game at all. Eve players love to whine and complain for more safety in the name of "balance" or "quality of life" or some other euphemism that ultimately just results in less opportunities for conflict, player stories, and motivation to actually "do stuff" in the game. This insidious ennui strikes higsec player and nullsec player alike. When the game is softened to the point no one can lose, then also no one can win nor is there really anything interesting left to do. Eve in absence of risk and competition is a visually pretty, but fundamentally uninteresting game.

There is a non-negligible fraction of players who play Eve for fleet battles and would be just as happy if CCP just seeded everything on the market and killed the sandbox completely. However, for the majority of us, we play because what we do effects and has meaning in the greater virtual universe and its economy. This especially true for PvEers and industrialists who essentially are given resources, and often effectively get their accounts paid for, by players who want the virtual goods they collect and build to wage war on other players.

Players can get bored and quit either because they never get engaged (the stats CCP has provided clearly show this) in the first place, or because they build and build but meaningful opposition never comes. Some of that might be on them for lacking the imagination to create content and set goals for themselves, but it certainly doesn't help when CCP continually makes everywhere, but especially highsec, safer and safer, and removes conflict driver after conflict driver, and tool after tool to make content. And of course, like any game, there is a certain level of players churn as people leave due to changes in their real life or when it ends.

As for wardecs, they are a key tool to allow player groups to interact in highsec, and most importantly, contest structures. They aren't going anywhere, especially as we get more structures and structure functionality. As CCP Rise said:

"We have tried and tried to validate the myth that griefing has a pronounced affect on new players - we have failed. The strongest indicators for a new player staying with EVE are associated with social activity: joining corps, using market and contract systems, pvping, etc. Isolating players away from the actual sandbox seems very contrary to what we would like to accomplish."

Wars may be too punitive on players who shouldn't be in a competitive corp in the first place and I am sure players are lost because of this. The solution however, is not to make the rest of the game more boring and safer for the rest of us. That has been tried for many years now and the player counts continue to decrease. The solution it seems to me is rather to make a social corp or some other structure for the newer//casual/social players so they can splash about in the sandbox in relative safety, while leaving intact the competition between the rest of us for control of New Eden's economy either through savvy and efficient industrial activity, or direct force (or better yet both) as the game was designed.

If you want a vibrant PvP game, fortune needs to favour the bold. ECs are a good first step to put some risk vs. reward back into industry and make some space for both brave industrialists to make more profit, and newer or more timid ones to find a safer space more comfortable for their level of risk tolerance. More needs to be done, but I am glad CCP seems to be changing direction and trying to reinvigorate sandbox play with how these new structures work.

@Black Pedro

How many variations on a theme do you think you can blind yourself to, even trying as hard as you can?

A sandbox vs a story, has an inherent weakness. You have to overcome this, if you want a vibrant field of play.

Your enemy knows everything about you. It's a sandbox. They participated in creating the content, too. They're not stupid.

Versus a story, where a group of us, yes, actually good story tellers and role-play arc creators, push, a little, leaving most of it to you, but guiding a story.

You can have personal power or you can have an intriguing story, but you can't have both. I made the UFP lose 2 times of 3, for the story, and nobody complained on that MUSH. I lose, here, and do you know what happens?

Nothing. They still won't tank, they still won't fight, they still won't toss a single drone in my defense, even if I sacrifice myself for them. What are they playing for? They don't even seem to do anything with the money, but make more money.

Tearing down your barns to build bigger barns is a fruitless exercise, is it not?

Are you joking? We 'carebears' give you advice on either how to increase in mining, or research, or even missioning if you want mining to be a side job, which I chose to do. We give you free ****, all the time. I can't count how many times somebody was ganked and I just tossed them a 10 run BPC. And that's not uncommon. We're not jerks. Most nice human beings, that you call 'carebears,' actually do try to help new players.

What the hell?

I think you must have completely misunderstood my post.

I was saying that CCP's explanation for not protecting players has always been some variation on 'we don't want to seperate them from the real game', which isn't what we're suggesting. Simply that new players are given a little more protection from being randomly curb-stomped as they learn what they're doing and start forming corps.

There's no such thing as a pure sandbox, they apply limits all over the game, from rookie systems, to sec status and far beyond. They just chose not to here. Which is fair enough, it's their game, they can do what they like. It's cost them a lot of players over the years though.