EVE General Discussion

And I am betting that this will just get us talking at each other in circles again like a bad Michael Jackson video. You can't shoot at these people because of the C word. And it would be kind of presumptuous of me to say that you wanting to shoot at these people will increase their risk and lessen yours if the C word were nerfed.

Back into the circle we go.

I feel dirty for agreeing with a Benny Ohu post. Like getting an open mouth kiss from an aunt; that dirty.

it's pretty much the same cause as the 'nullsec' complaints. some parts of the game, especially npc parts, are robbing everyone of depth and emergent gameplay in a game where depth is supposed to be the order of the day

I saw this:



In the CSM Assembly Hall and nearly lost my ****.

Damn you Benny making me like your posting!

There are a couple of parallel conversations here. First, the interesting thing about highsec L4 income is that it's actually pretty bad unless and until the mission runner gets engaged in the market--that is, with other players. Similarly, baltec1 makes a lot of his ISK blowing up freighters, not running missions. The real money in high sec is in interaction with other players, either in the context of the market or in the context of the logistics and PVE that the market drives (which is why there are so many people flying for SoE now--it's not because the agent rewards are so hot). As incentive structures go, this is actually less broken than nullsec ratting, where you get paid in straight ISK without having to interact with anyone. It's better for retention, too, because other people are the game. You can nerf LP payouts for high sec missions, sure, but not without provoking inflation. If the numbers Mabrick posted recently are at all accurate in the general case, the ISK sunk cashing out LPs is comparable to the ISK generated by bounties. That's not a bad outcome.

But even if you do that, so what? the real money is in the market. That's what makes the LPs worthwhile; it's what draws all those big, fat freighters, and keeps the barges out in the belts. And guess what? No safety, no market. There's a reason why every attempt to build a Jita in nullsec has failed: the mechanics don't support the creation of one. The nearest approximation are the trade centers of huge alliances, but as long as those remain walled gardens they will never achieve the status of a major high sec hub. Not only that, but the fact that you can send fleets of freighters to Jita and be reasonably assured that they'll get there also fuels the market.

Then, sure, you can buff player-owned manufacturing (and please CCP, make it so!) but again, proximity to Jita (or Amarr, etc.) will still be one of the major variables for any would-be mogul to consider.

On top of all that rests market trading, which tends to be where real fortunes are made. (And, incidentally, high sec is centrally located: it's a literal hub.)

So, the question is, how do you "nerf high sec" in any substantive way without neck-punching the EVE economy? And if you do neck-punch the EVE economy, what next? Is someone going to try and set up a new Jita in NRDS Providence? How's that going to work out? (Not to mention that the only effective way to nerf high sec income is to nerf player interaction, and why do we want to do that?)

I missed the part where anyone is asking them to.

If Baltec is not asking people in High Sec to come to Null Sec then who is he asking to come to Null Sec?

Is this a joke? Everytime I do exploration in nul the majority of systems are (1) empty and (2) chock FULL of combat sites and DED plexes. Untouched. Unthreatened. I'm not saying they trump incursions in terms of isk/hr, but don't sit there saying there is not enough good isk sources in nul sec. That's a blatant lie.

OK then. So the big issue is reliable sources of isk matching the potential of what can be made in nul by someone. I can see that. But what about this?

The nature of nul is such that, to conquer it and the moons and resources in it worth billions upon billions, one must work together with others to get the rewards. Alliances. To reap the isk, people work together and work hard. That in mind, nul takes hard TEAMwork to benefit from. Nul isn't about solo isk making. It's about doing that, and other things, together.

I can't think of a better way to word this...hope my thought came across. Maybe someone else can phrase it better.

Well, to 'fix that' you have to look at why they do it in the first place.

As someone in another thread said (paraphrased), "you know what we call people who don't min-max in PVP? 'Dead'." Now add the consequence of loss of sovereignty, and potential billions of assets getting locked into a now-hostile station that you once used for staging. Nobody is less capable of min-maxing than the new player. Sure, you can put them in a tackle frigate and point them at someone, but because they're probably going to head straight for the enemy fleet or something like that, and because their characters' Navigation skills are poor, their own navigation skills are undeveloped, and their frigate is crap-fit, they're probably going to get blapped. If the fleet meta doesn't even require tackle (sniper Nagas, say), then what? From a min-max point of view, you want people to fly the ships that will win the fight, fly them well, know how to follow FC commands, and so on, because the alternative can be costly. Larger alliances tend to be more newbie friendly because they tend to have no problem fielding numbers.

Similarly, with industrial players: the current meta favors numbers more or less absolutely, at least until the server goes wobbly. Since the gaining and losing of sov is currently determined by ship-to-ship combat, every player who is not in a combat ship for a fight is a liability. Even if they are, if they haven't spent much time in it then they're probably not very good, and so they won't be as effective. if their alliance loses a fight on an important timer, the number of ships made and the amount of ore mined doesn't matter. Besides, anyone doing industry in null sec is either mining rare ores that aren't available anywhere else, or being deliberately inefficient.

Similarly, again, nullsec industry is in high sec, mostly around Jita, and mostly done with plausibly deniable alt corps or NPC alts, because for a variety of reasons that 's the most sensible place to do industry. I have no doubt that the Goons could move out of the Forge tomorrow and build out an impressive number of manufacturing outposts in their space, but if they did so they would be 20-30 jumps from Jita instead of 0-5--and Jita is where money is made--and they'd be working out of destructible, vulnerable outposts while some rival nullsec alliance moved into the generous and impregnable industrial and logistical capacity of The (aptly-named) Forge, thus gaining a clear advantage. Why would the Goons cede such an advantage to anyone? Nobody else in nullsec would.

That's not to say that there's no problem, nor to say that the problem is intractable. There are some interesting approaches that pop out of any close analysis. But the most important thing you have to do if you want to be able to understand what the problems in EVE are is assume that the players are responding more-or-less intelligently to the incentives the game offers, and more so as the penalties for failure increase. If you dismiss people as jerks, or idiots, or whatever other label springs to mind, you're only blinding yourself (even if they are being jerks: that's not interesting; what's interesting is why).