These forums have been archived and are now read-only.

The new forums are live and can be found at https://forums.eveonline.com/

EVE General Discussion

 
  • Topic is locked indefinitely.
 

Does Eve need new players?

First post First post First post
Author
Previous Topic Next Topic
Victoria Thorne
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#521 - 2014-02-27 16:17:02 UTC
Jenn aSide wrote:
Karon Grandolf wrote:


The unlimited number of concurrent wars is a problem for several reasons. They do cost the agressor iskies to maintain. That just means that the wealthy is able to dictate the gaming environment for more players than the unwealthy.


Which means that if you don't like it, become wealthy or find more interesting ways to fight back or evade.

The problem isn't the ability to use wealth to influence the game and the environment of others, that's what a game is about (you better believe that the guy with the big stack of chips in a poker game is using that stack to 'bully' the player with fewer chips in to taking risks that can be beneficial to the big stack guy).

The real problem (in game as is in real life) is that rather than fighting back or being creative, the 'little guy' tries to enlist the help of the 'authority', 'powers that be', 'government' (CCP) to changes the very field everyone is playing on to gain an advantage.

if ccp changes the way war decs or other aggressive actions (like bumping or whatever) works, people will just find a new way to agress. If those being aggressed learn to fight back (so to speak , it need not involve shooting) they'd end their own troubles by being the hard target the war deccers/griefers/gankers/bumpers don't want to screw with.


As a good example of that... The mass ganking of miners really got started after the barge rebalance which added ore holds to barges & removed jet can mining. (With the exception of Hulks, which were considered to be worth ganking before the changes, if not properly tanked.)

Before that, it was jet-can mining, which had it's ups and downs... But, as a miner, if someone flipped your can, you could reship into a combat ship and duel over it. I actually used to have a lot of fun before the changes, it was a nice break from just sitting around. And if you didn't like the odds, or the situation seemed suspicious, then you could just give up the ore, without losing your mining ship. I stopped mining not too long after the changes, as it turned mining into a very boring activity.
Oliver Wendel Jones
Citizens of Fernando Po
#522 - 2014-02-27 19:18:01 UTC
Except that you can still jetcan mine if you want, and people can still can flip.
Victoria Thorne
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#523 - 2014-02-27 19:43:09 UTC
Oliver Wendel Jones wrote:
Except that you can still jetcan mine if you want, and people can still can flip.


Yes, but the reason ganking wasn't done back then was that the old mining ships that were in common use (Osprey, Rokh), besides the hulk, were not economical to gank. (No strip miners.) Now, the barge mining efficiency makes using anything else silly.

When I started, you'd see actual group mining for safety, with almost continuous local chat in any halfway busy system. Now, the only time I see chat in high-sec seems to actually be from gankers.
Hound Halfhand
Dark Venture Corporation
Kitchen Sinkhole
#524 - 2014-02-27 19:43:26 UTC
EVE definitely needs new players. Players are content in EVE and without them there wouldn't be much to do. I would love to see EVE have 1 million active subscribers. It would mean tons more content, including the fixing of a lot of little stuff. The problem with EVE is not the sandbox style play and the dangers involved in it, that is the attraction. The problem is a lot of younger people only play free games and on top of that want a game they can play on tablets, smart phones and consoles.

Us older players who have been around awhile do not really mind the PC only subscription model. We grey up on EQ, UO and DAOC.
Jonah Gravenstein
Machiavellian Space Bastards
#525 - 2014-02-27 20:15:08 UTC
Hound Halfhand wrote:
EVE definitely needs new players. Players are content in EVE and without them there wouldn't be much to do. I would love to see EVE have 1 million active subscribers. It would mean tons more content, including the fixing of a lot of little stuff. The problem with EVE is not the sandbox style play and the dangers involved in it, that is the attraction. The problem is a lot of younger people only play free games and on top of that want a game they can play on tablets, smart phones and consoles.

Us older players who have been around awhile do not really mind the PC only subscription model. We grey up on EQ, UO and DAOC.
They don't like hard games either, some gamers are used to getting a prize for coming last.

Oh how I wish for the days when if you died playing a game you started back at the beginning because there was no such thing as savegames. You actually got a sense of achievement when you defeated them.

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

New Player FAQ

Feyd's Survival Pack
Karon Grandolf
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#526 - 2014-02-28 08:06:45 UTC
Jenn aSide wrote:
Karon Grandolf wrote:


The unlimited number of concurrent wars is a problem for several reasons. They do cost the agressor iskies to maintain. That just means that the wealthy is able to dictate the gaming environment for more players than the unwealthy.


Which means that if you don't like it, become wealthy or find more interesting ways to fight back or evade.


Thank you for your answer.

I mentioned the agressor cost of war in ISK, to indicate the primary limiting factor, of how many players can be war decced in high sec at the same time.

At one extreme we have a situation where every single pilot is in his own corp. On the other extreme we have a situation where all pilots are in two corps, one for the war deccer, one for those who's being decced.

To war dec all pilots in one extreme would be very expensive, the other very cheap. A small corp is relatively more expensive to war dec per target so to speak.

When ISK is the only limiting factor, there could evolve a tendency within the high sec community to follow some of the good advice given, and migrate into smaller entities and/or NPC corps. In that case we have a potentially more fractured high sec.

At some point high sec wars would become the normal state of high sec, and that would in effect mean that the game mechanics that belong to the corporation entity is denied a large group of pilots in high sec.

As it stands, I believe that more pilots are now denied access to the benefits and the mechanics that a corporation allow. At least if they want to experience the industrial mechanics in high sec, and has limited, or no interest in the ship-on-ship combat that EVE also offers.

Reintroducing a limit on the number of war decs at any given time will not hurt the mechanics that governs when war is in effect, neither will it protect corporations or players that has a tendency to get into trouble.

A limit does not allow the individual player or corporation to hide behind CCP. It changes the balance so that war becomes more of a consequence of actions, and less a natural state of order.

If we consider that the net effect of normalizing war in high sec is the denial of corporation game mechanics for the player, another way to adapt is to build these mechanics out-of-game. One of my ideas was to simply accept that CCP don't want us in a corporation, and that as a result we would have to create tools out-of-game, to allow cooporation and a sense of community regardles.

On the other hand it may be worth considering that when games deny content that is already in the delivered code, for instance in DLC and pre-order extra content, it is often met by gamers with protest. For good reason.


Jenn aSide wrote:
The real problem (in game as is in real life) is that rather than fighting back or being creative, the 'little guy' tries to enlist the help of the 'authority', 'powers that be', 'government' (CCP) to changes the very field everyone is playing on to gain an advantage.

if ccp changes the way war decs or other aggressive actions (like bumping or whatever) works, people will just find a new way to agress. If those being aggressed learn to fight back (so to speak , it need not involve shooting) they'd end their own troubles by being the hard target the war deccers/griefers/gankers/bumpers don't want to screw with.



Well, in the case of EVE, the government is already there; a more appropriate name for CCP would possibly be 'God' though, as CCP not only governs, but created and continously recreate EVE as a closed universe. In that sense EVE has no natural state that would settle if CCP and/or the pod pilots were not there. The big guys have more ressources to influence 'God' than the little guy, and there is no way to remove 'God' from the equation. A government can be removed, a God cannot.

Just as in real life, the 'authority' is always enlisted by someone, and it is often those with the most resources that has the best chances to enlist. Disregarding that the 'authority' is also never completely isolated from those who do the enlisting, and the 'authority' would not be an authority if it was isolated from those it authorizes.

It is true that changes to the game mechanics will lead to players adapting. It is what they adapt into that is the question here, both on the individual level, and the collective. And finally how this new state influence the influx of new players, and the quality of those new players as well.
Kaarous Aldurald
Black Hydra Consortium.
#527 - 2014-02-28 08:14:17 UTC
Quote:
Reintroducing a limit on the number of war decs at any given time will not hurt the mechanics that governs when war is in effect, neither will it protect corporations or players that has a tendency to get into trouble.


You seem to think we need less freedom for player choices, not more.

There is almost no "problem" big enough to warrant cutting back on player freedom. If every single highsec corp of less than twenty members were exterminated tomorrow, it still would not warrant curtailing player freedom.

As soon as you start making little cuts here, and little cuts there, you don't have a sandbox game anymore.

"Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws."

One of ours, ten of theirs.

Best Meltdown Ever.
Divine Entervention
Doomheim
#528 - 2014-02-28 08:23:43 UTC
You should only be able to have as many total wars as people you have in your corporation.
Karon Grandolf
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#529 - 2014-02-28 10:59:22 UTC
Kaarous Aldurald wrote:
You seem to think we need less freedom for player choices, not more.


I think there are two sources of limits and freedoms in EVE.

The first is the initial rules and mechanics set by CCP. You do not have the freedom to fit cruise missiles on a Rifter for instance. And there's a plethora of other initial conditions set by CCP. These conditions has been, and will continue to be, subject to changes made by CCP. We can influence this as a community by providing feed-back to the developers, on how the rules influences our experiences within the game.

The second is the actions we take as players within the framework given by the initial conditions. In that sense it is true that I want the freedom of player choices to be potentially limited, for instance by one group of players war deccing another.

In a practical sense, a war limits the available choices. It's not practical to continue doing AFK hauling during a war. This is of course one of the main reasons for war, to limit the freedom of the target.


Our freedom are limited by design from the initial conditions set by CCP. Our freedom is also limited by the player choices made within the game.

In the end there is no escaping limits to our freedom, from CCP or from other players. To me the question is what kind of limits allows for the best experience within the game.

The most exciting systems are unstable. Too much freedom in initial conditions will often lead a system to solidify in a stable equilibrium where nothing new ever happens. It grows stale. This can seem paradoxial, since the very lax initial conditions seems to provide a high level of choice and freedom.

I believe that too lax restrictions on the war mechanic can lead High Sec into a stable condition, where war is so common, that the corp mechanic has become non viable for non combat oriented players.

The initial conditions allows the freedom of the system to solidify in this state, but in turn limits the freedom of the non combat players to experience the non combat parts of the game. There is no comparable mechanic that limits the PVP combat oriented players access to the PVP combat oriented parts of the game btw.

It can be argued that this state is the natural result given the initial conditions. Any limits to the freedom of the non combat player is then a natural result of the initial conditions, and the dynamics that it allows.

So in a sense their lack of choice is in fact an expression of a more fundamental freedom. Untouchable fundamental freedoms can sometimes lead to less choice as a net result. However, if a small number of people gains a significant advantage over a large group of people as a result, the majority may begin to question the fundamentals.

But the question was if EVE needs new players, and how do the current war mechanic influence the influx of new blood.

I would like to qualify my suggestion that the number of concurrents wars should be limited. I think only agressive wars should be limited in number, a corp should not be able to escape war by having other friendly corps war dec them without actual conflict. In short, limit the number of wars that can be declared. Not the wars that can be suffered.
Kaarous Aldurald
Black Hydra Consortium.
#530 - 2014-02-28 11:04:53 UTC
Quote:
In a practical sense, a war limits the available choices. It's not practical to continue doing AFK hauling during a war. This is of course one of the main reasons for war, to limit the freedom of the target.


That is so wrong on so many levels.

First of all, don't haul while afk. Secondly, never not neutral haulers.

Thus far all you've proved is that people limit their own freedoms due to making really stupid choices. And yes, I believe that people should have the freedom to fail. If you don't fit a tank, the person limiting your actions is not the person who chose to shoot you, it's your own damn fault.

Quote:
I believe that too lax restrictions on the war mechanic can lead High Sec into a stable condition, where war is so common, that the corp mechanic has become non viable for non combat oriented players.


This could only be true in a world where dec dodging wasn't a thing. You don't get to ignore the elephant, it's right here in the room with us.

"Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws."

One of ours, ten of theirs.

Best Meltdown Ever.
Scipio Artelius
Weaponised Vegemite
Flying Dangerous
#531 - 2014-02-28 11:06:16 UTC  |  Edited by: Scipio Artelius
Divine Entervention wrote:
You should only be able to have as many total wars as people you have in your corporation.

Why? What's the connection between number of Corp members and ability to declare war.

Doesn't that just favour large Corporations over smaller ones?

Doesn't it also limit gameplay where there is a real reason to go to war? If there is a 1 man Corp who decides to go to war against another Corp, they could simply prevent it by creating a separate 1 man Corp and declaring war first. That would then stop the legitimate war from occurring. That seems very limiting for no gain.
Divine Entervention
Doomheim
#532 - 2014-02-28 11:09:11 UTC  |  Edited by: Divine Entervention
Scipio Artelius wrote:
Divine Entervention wrote:
You should only be able to have as many total wars as people you have in your corporation.

Why? What's the connection between number of Corp members and ability to declare war.

Doesn't that just favour large Corporations over smaller ones?


I'm new. You figure something out regarding small corporations ability to terrorize new players driving them out of the game.

Unless of course your answer to the thread title is "No".
Scipio Artelius
Weaponised Vegemite
Flying Dangerous
#533 - 2014-02-28 11:11:09 UTC
Divine Entervention wrote:
Scipio Artelius wrote:
Divine Entervention wrote:
You should only be able to have as many total wars as people you have in your corporation.

Why? What's the connection between number of Corp members and ability to declare war.

Doesn't that just favour large Corporations over smaller ones?


It makes it so small 3-5 man corporations can't have 2000 corporations declared for war.

HIRE MERCS NEGOTIATE ASK FOR HELP TEAM UP

nah

Show me an example of a 3-5 person Corp with 2000 wars.

Also see my edit above. That justs limits the gameplay of the small Corps.
Divine Entervention
Doomheim
#534 - 2014-02-28 11:13:51 UTC
Scipio Artelius wrote:
Divine Entervention wrote:
Scipio Artelius wrote:
Divine Entervention wrote:
You should only be able to have as many total wars as people you have in your corporation.

Why? What's the connection between number of Corp members and ability to declare war.

Doesn't that just favour large Corporations over smaller ones?


It makes it so small 3-5 man corporations can't have 2000 corporations declared for war.

HIRE MERCS NEGOTIATE ASK FOR HELP TEAM UP

nah

Show me an example of a 3-5 person Corp with 2000 wars.

Also see my edit above. That justs limits the gameplay of the small Corps.


The amount of war declarations is unlimited. Maybe there's not a 3-5 corporation with 200 wars right now.

But there could be. In the realm of unlimited possibility, anything is possible.
Divine Entervention
Doomheim
#535 - 2014-02-28 11:15:40 UTC
I think CCP should use this opportunity to institute a skill point/sovereignty/entire game wipe and restart.

Veterans say the most fun they had was when they were new, but they cannot justify playing new characters because of the discovered efficiency and potential of their older, established characters.

If we do a clean wipe and start completely over, everyone will be happy because they can now have all of that fun they tell new people they will have flying only frigates with no skill points!
Octoven
Stellar Production
#536 - 2014-02-28 11:18:32 UTC
Eve doesnt need new players, it needs to allow time for hardware changes to catch up with the already existing player base so we dont have tidi fights 70-80% of the time.
Scipio Artelius
Weaponised Vegemite
Flying Dangerous
#537 - 2014-02-28 11:18:40 UTC  |  Edited by: Scipio Artelius
Divine Entervention wrote:
The amount of war declarations is unlimited. Maybe there's not a 3-5 corporation with 200 wars right now.

But there could be. In the realm of unlimited possibility, anything is possible.

Sure it's possible, but that doesn't explain why it should be limited. What is the gain from limiting based on member numbers? That doesn't seem to be a logical connection so I'm just trying to understand.

However limiting based on member numbers would definitely affect small Corps, particularly a 1 person Corp that wants to go to war against someone else for a legitimate reason. It would be very easy to prevent using current practices to avoid war.
Karon Grandolf
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#538 - 2014-02-28 11:39:23 UTC
Kaarous Aldurald wrote:
First of all, don't haul while afk. Secondly, never not neutral haulers.


That seems like good advice. I mentioned hauling as an example of actions that are more difficult to do during war time. Do you disagree with the statement that war limits available choices? If so, what is the point of war?

Kaarous Aldurald wrote:
Thus far all you've proved is that people limit their own freedoms due to making really stupid choices. And yes, I believe that people should have the freedom to fail. If you don't fit a tank, the person limiting your actions is not the person who chose to shoot you, it's your own damn fault.


I too believe that people should have the freedom to fail. I'm not so much interested in 'fault' though. EVE has no justice system, so it doesn't really matter who's at fault in anything.

Kaarous Aldurald wrote:
This could only be true in a world where dec dodging wasn't a thing. You don't get to ignore the elephant, it's right here in the room with us.


I'm not sure about the elephant, if you see it would you be kind to describe it? I think you may be hinting at problems with my proposal, and I would be happy to discuss them if you or anyone else like.
Oliver Wendel Jones
Citizens of Fernando Po
#539 - 2014-02-28 13:07:53 UTC  |  Edited by: Oliver Wendel Jones
Karon Grandolf wrote:
I'm not sure about the elephant, if you see it would you be kind to describe it? I think you may be hinting at problems with my proposal, and I would be happy to discuss them if you or anyone else like.


It really is pointless to talk to most of the respondents here over and over again about whether or not there should be changes. Despite the fact that CCP makes changes regularly, they are first and foremost desperate to maintain their ability to go after easy targets. Anything that would limit their ability to do that and encourage them to focus on people in their own league would be unwelcome, probably because their belief in their abilities would crumble in the face of a real challenge.

Rather than this endless debate that doesn't offer anything new, perhaps focusing on potential options to improve the system (from the standpoint that changes should be made, for the sake of moving the conversation forward) would be more interesting?

Suggestions of raising the cost of war decs, limiting number of active wars, basing cost on relative average SP, etc?

I also like the idea someone mentioned of having a system mechanic that encourages good behavior. For instance, let's say that Concord patrolled space is overworked, so if your character maintains a certain security level, you are able to purchase special modules and ships from Concord, like an LP store. But anyone mounting these modules can't take them through gates to non Concord space and if you do anything that lowers your sec status below a certain level you get Concorded, destroying those modules and whatever was carrying them. Hoohoo, I bet some people aren't going to like that idea!
Tippia
Sunshine and Lollipops
#540 - 2014-02-28 13:20:17 UTC  |  Edited by: Tippia
Oliver Wendel Jones wrote:
Despite the fact that CCP makes changes regularly, they are first and foremost desperate to maintain their ability to go after easy targets. Anything that would limit their ability to do that and encourage them to focus on people in their own league would be unwelcome, probably because their belief in their abilities would crumble in the face of a real challenge.
No, it's probably because their correct belief that it would be exploited to hell and back and wouldn't actually improve anything. “Easy targets” already have all the protection they need if they choose to use it.

Quote:
Suggestions of raising the cost of war decs, limiting number of active wars, basing cost on relative average SP, etc?
Those suggestions only make sense if they were needed. If there was a problem. The supposed problem is so ill-defined as to not actually be a problem at all but a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how the game works. Actually, they wouldn't make sense even then since they arbitrarily reduce player options based on completely meaningless metrics.

Quote:
Hoohoo, I bet some people aren't going to like that idea!
It's hard-coded NPC morality so it's a pretty stupid idea from the start.