EVE General Discussion

On occasion, if my curiosity gets the better of me, I'll buy 1 item from someone to identify the person and run a locator agent. More often than not, these people are station traders that are driving the prices down. Not industrialists.

Many people just sell to whatever the highest buy order available regardless of if they make a profit or not. They don't want to bother with spreadsheets or they don't want to play penny wars with the station traders. This is what drives prices down because station traders will always sell at the lowest sell price possible at that given time.

On occasion, when I have the time, I'll play penny wars and watch someone beat my price by a penny every 2 to 5 minutes (sometimes faster depending on the product). Then I'll drop my prices by 25% just to mess with them. Sometimes they match, sometimes they buy everything outright. What is happening is that station traders set the market price. Not industrialists.

You could say "But but the industrialists sell the product at the price they want!". They can but there is always other industrialists who sell at buy order prices. Those prices are set by station traders and you'll either go with them or you'll have to play penny wars to sell anything.

Sometimes on the rare occasion I set price and forget about it, it eventually sells in a month when the market price wavers.

I think station traders are the most misunderstood or at least the most overlooked profession in the game. Most people don't even know they are there and they pretty much dictate the prices industrialists sell at. And they often make more money than industrialists without ever producing anything of value.

Well, my point of this was that yes, you can find out who your competitors are, but chances are they aren't industrialists.

That's just it: everyone has trouble quantifying it — even CCP, since not even they can reliably cut through the veil of Person vs. Character.

Now, I should probably point out what it is I mean when I say the above quote — it needs to be parsed correctly.

I'm not making the positive claim that “[a majority of players] do indeed [live in not-highsec]”.
I'm making the negative claim that “it is not the case that [a majority of players live in highsec]”.

More specifically, I'm pointing towards the fact that we have absolutely no idea how many people live in any part of space, highsec or otherwise. To claim that any one of them is a majority is to massively overinterpret the available data. So the same sentence holds true for all sectors of space and in the end we don't know if any of them actually hold a majority or not. Or, well… we can probably say with some certainty that w-spacers are not a majority, but that's as far as it goes.

Personally, based on purely anecdotal evidence on null- and lowsec players' alt usage, I interpret the character statistics as showing that highsec players make up maybe 35% of the player base… and, in fact, that there is no clear majority for any specific sec level at all.

How on earth can people confuse "balance" for "equal"?

Highsec and nullsec are "balanced" they just are not equal.

1 is more focused and industry friendly while the other favors combat.

Neither of the areas are impossible to do as a role/career. Just 1 is going to thrive BETTER than in the other.

People who live in nullsec and use secondary pilots for a specific role as a career choice aren't doing so for that career. They are doing it for money. That's the first problem.

Start learning to do the things you like then worry about how to make a profit doing it, and go to the area that supports that endeavor.

Stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

Before you want to kneejerk any sort of "you don't understand" reaction, keep in mind... I'M not the one doing it wrong.

Look, I'm not arguing just to argue guys. I am only questioning some things being presented as fact that I thought were unquantifiable since the proposed solutions (that I've read thus far) would negatively affect my gameplay.

It just seems to me that security "is" also a factor here - not just logistics - and if that is so, then only discussing/adjusting the logistics will not accomplish the desired outcome - most especially if the imbalance is by design.

You can't start walking toward the moon.

YK

The problem about giving more of an advantage to nullsec to balance things out means putting more power into the hands of small groups of individuals in charge of the alliances who dictate who may or who may not use the resources in null.

This is a clear cut advantage that Null has over hi-sec which I believe balances it out.

People in hi-sec do not get to control who produces what or who gathers what resources.

Null sec alliances usually do not allow people who they do not approve of to mine their belts and use their manufacturing resources.

In that regard, Null sec industry is controlled by the alliance systems in place. This is power enough. You do not want to punish people that are in small corps for not being in a major alliance.

I have been posting the same fix to nullsec for years. I cba to go dig up the post from the old forums but they are there. So here is how you fix this game. A Sandbox MMO thrives off of interaction and interdependancy. It is the cornerstone of making a sandbox work. The basic premise of my idea is you make all zones dependent on eachother but without excluding any zone. For clarification when I say zones I mean highsec lowsec nullsec and wormhole.


Its my assertion that different zones should be bonused to different activities whereby all activities are possible in all zones with a few slight exceptions. If you think about society in real life and how its laid out generally speaking rural areas are where you see farms logging mining and things of this nature I like to think of rural as nullsec. Also secondly you generally see production happening in industrial zones I equate this parallel to lowsec. Whereby most commerce science technology and business happens in urban centers I think of this as Highsec.


So how can this translate into Eve and how do you balance it ? How do you make incentive for interaction? The aim is to not alienate players from partaking in any endeavour anywhere


High Sec

Activities with bonus
Research
Copy
Invention
Market Orders
Contracts

Unbonused Activities
Exploration
Missions
Production
Mining
Refining

Lowsec

Activities with bonus
Production
Refining

Unbonused Activities
Exploration
Mining
Missions
Research
Copy
Invention
Market Orders
Contracts

Null Sec

Bonused Activities

Mining
Compression
Exploration

Unbonused Activities
Production
Missions
Research
Copy
Invention
Market Orders
Contracts


So as you can see different areas offer carrots to different activities. If your a trader or research/invention player high sec will offer you the greatest yield profit. Whereas if you are into production lowsec will suit your needs best. Lastly if you are a miner or want to get into non wormhole exploration nullsec is best suited for you. This gives each area a unique purpose creating interaction between all areas. All the while not limiting what you can do anywhere only providing you with a carrot to do it in X place.


I know I didn't really speak to wormholes but I think its quite clear that Wormholes already have a unique purpose that all other zones depend on.

People always dig up that little nubbin of information. Its a brainstorming session on a whiteboard. That's all it is.

No.
To say it without putting words in my mouth, I can make a fair estimate based on the numbers we have and it does not yield the result that the “highsec über alles” militia wishes it were…

…which is far better than wilfully mislabelling numbers as something they explicitly are not — a tactic said militia usually favours.

Before you ever have an item you can trade it must be built.

If the bulk of an item is built by a group of individuals that can not be wardecced, because they don't play in player run corps, you can't identify them.

If the bulk of T2 production was done in player run corporation, through necessity, you would be able to identify who is building what, and where, then take action against them.

Players need to be in player run corps if they're going to have such a large impact on other players, and industrialist by there very nature are impacting every person in EVE; more so other industrrialists.

…and that's exactly what the character location data shows.

The problem and fallacies arise when people assume that “character” means “person” and then go on to make unfounded claims such as “the majority of players live in highsec”.

They do, with relative frequency. What they show is the only thing they can show: character distribution. Player distribution is something rather different and much more difficult to get right.