Crime & Punishment

Incorrect.

First of all, there was a time when high-sec wasn't as profitable compared to other areas of space. And it was during that time that low-sec and null piracy was extremely common.

Furthermore, correlation does not equal to causation. While it's true that high-sec is "safer" for all players, and it's also true that pirates prefer to live in high-sec, you have no actual proof that one is a factor of the other. All you're doing is trying to strawman people into the belief that high-sec pvpers are cowards, and therefore also hypocrites.

As someone who is a high-sec pvper, I can tell you for a fact that you are wrong, both with regard to myself, and with regard to the community as a whole, with which I am intimately familiar. We go where the money is.

You want our "actions to speak louder than words"? Give us a reason to go to low and null. And no, having "honourable pvp" for the sake of "gudfites" is not a reason.


I said "approaching," not "is." Furthermore, it's actually been proven, most recently in the hyperdunking thread, that high-sec pvp (in particular ganking) has actually decreased over time, and significantly so. Also, as someone inherently familiar with the war mechanic and its history, I can tell you for a fact that there is less warfare today than there was during the days of the Privateers. Take away the few major hub-camping groups that exist in the game, and the war scene is almost dead, actually.


You're ignoring the point that the presence of spies is inherently more hurtful to the corporation, and especially hurtful to the new players who aren't being recruited, than awoxing ever was. Even if awoxing is a mechanical concept and spying is more abstract and intangible, the latter is still more more significant in scope and effect as far as the reasons for removing awoxing go.


It would be entertaining enough for most of high-sec's population, which wants nothing to do with any form of pvp combat whatsoever.

Saying that it's fine to see awoxing go because it suits the majority but it's not fine to see wars/ganking go because "it wouldn't be entertaining enough" is a huge double standard.

A lot of that though is technique. High sec is only more rewarding if you minmax the hell out of it. Things like incursions are great, sure, but then the effort and number of characters you have to sling into it makes up for it. Level 4s actively blitzed are at best on par with an active null ratter with a proper setup. When you consider how much more passive isk can be made in null too though, that's where null excels. Wormholes are much the same just you're shipping sleeper loot instead of collecting bounties, and have a bit more of an unknown element. Lowsec sucks, but then that's because lowsec always has an needs to be looked at, not because highsec is pulling in too much isk.

The main thing that makes people collect in highsec though isn't the reward, it's the market. It's a neutral market with pretty much everything you need being piled into the hubs.

True, it's not necessarily the reason, but I have to ask whether people who are PvPing are doing so because they like that gameplay style. If it's about profit, then there are other ways of making far more profit. If it's about PvP as a gameplay style, there are far better places for that too. To me it seems like a lot of highsec PvPers choose to live in highsec but also choose to complain to no end about the mechanics that differentiate highsec from other areas of space. And I just don't get that.

But then what you're asking for is them to nuke highsec into practically nothing, since anything short of that is not going to stop it being the go-to hub for market trading, and that's what will make sure that for someone looking to kill people for isk, that it's the place to go. Even if you took away all missions but level 1, made mining 1/4 speed and chucked all incursions into lowsec, it would still be more profitable to gank haulers in highsec than go anywhere else.

Where is this proof?

And I fail to believe that wars are less common now than they were before the new wardec mechanics. In fact since I have war data from CREST randomly dumped from last august, I can show you the yearly wars declared:
2003 841
2004 3,873
2005 7,348
2006 10,215
2007 23,411
2008 21,661
2009 32,303
2010 36,603
2011 45,088
2012 102,081
2013 52,048
2014 37,638

So 2012 was when the main wardec changes occurred with most wars occurring in that year after that month, and 2014 only goes up to the beginning of august (Judging by war IDs in January, 2014 ended at around 61,000 wars). Certainly doesn't look like wars have decreased.

If they're deliberately avoiding us, they're playing the game. If they don't accept that it's part of the game then they should quit before they get upset over the insignificant loss of pixels.



Why would I care about player numbers. Heck, even most devs shouldn't be worrying about that - it's the job of the marketing and accounting departments. All I care about is that the game is available and it's fun to play. I'd wager that most of the devs don't give player numbers much thought, either, as long as they know their jobs are safe. This is a nonsense that's been used repeatedly by players who are desperately looking for something, anything to justify their desire for a further wussified game.



I haven't been in highsec "all my life", but thanks for re-affirming that you belong to the "PvP doesn't belong in highsec" crowd. Highsec is part of New Eden and thus is as much a PvP zone as lowsec, nullsec or wormhole space.



I can't see BAW or Kane crying at all, seeing as it would give them more people to shoot at. Marmite might, but that's because Tora is a soft cuddly carebear on the quiet. :P

- Awoxers can also be of any age. You don't need more than a few hours to train for destroyers.
- Any random alt can be an awoxer.
- Awoxers can be countered by actively monitoring information security.

You're just listing examples of why awoxing is a minor issue compared to spying at this point. Spying is a bigger deterrent to recruiting new players than awoxing ever was. This is something I've come to know from my many years of infiltration, as mentioned previously. I can count on one hand the amount of times awoxing was discussed in the corporations I've been a part of, and it happened in practice even less than that. Meanwhile, spying and the dangers of warfare were a daily topic, constant even, in the majority of the carebear corporations I was a part of. I don't think I've ever even seen a new player get passed over because of a risk of awoxing. Corp theft? Sure. But awoxing? Never. Meanwhile, CEOs and directors rejected newbies by the boatload because of a fear that they were Marmite alts etc.


Look at the general sentiment of the high-sec carebear population from an unbiased perspective, and you'll quickly realize that what I'm saying is true. Talk to them, hundreds of them, and you'll see that the majority would like nothing more than for the "griefers" to be kicked out so that they could mine and run missions in peace. I'm serious; you're looking at this whole thing through 0.0-tinted goggles, and that's skewing your perception, because 0.0 players, even renters, aren't averse to the concept of pvp, even if they don't personally engage in it. You think that most high-sec players wouldn't love to get rid of high-sec pvp based on some kind of ideal, but that really isn't the case.

But it's not a separate consideration. PvP is only so profitable in highsec because people live there because of the market hubs. If the market hubs didn't exist in highsec, you have no freighters rolling through in the thousands, and you'd see people move their areas of operation to close to where the hubs are. Clearly people collect around the hubs and its that concentration of people that makes high sec PvP as successful as it is.

Well dec shielding stopped existing in 2012, so it wouldn't occur after then. Also, that would just mean that the number of actual wars has increased even more than the stats indicate.

CREST doesn't have much on war kills prior to 2012, so it's not so easy to look at kill data, but at least in recent years kills are about the same. That does mean that kills per war would be lower, but it certainly doesn't indicate that there's less fighting in highsec, it would suggest it's about the same.

I'm hoping CCP will go ahead and release all kills on public CREST, as I'd love to look at the analysis of highsec kills overall. zKB doesn't offer the facility to grab bulk data from long time periods unfortunately, only walking through given characters, corps or alliances. Everything else you're restricted to 10 pages of data.

No, high-sec would still be used as a market hub even if the entirety of the game's industrial base would be moved to 0.0/low/wh space. In fact, high-sec is only responsible for the majority of manufacturing and LP/ISK generation. While about two-thirds of all total minerals get mined in high-sec, the majority of raw resources are still extracted in the other three areas of space. The manufacturing would still stay in high-sec for the most part, while LP/ISK generation wouldn't affect the amount of freight traffic present.


Right at the end of 2012, actually, meaning that a significant amount of residual declarations went out into the next year. And while the amount of wars continued to rise throughout the years despite the removal of dec-shielding (you can cut the 2012 number in half and this would be correct), as I already mentioned, other factors play into why this number alone doesn't show the big picture.


Even if the amount of fighting is the same, because EVE's (and high-sec's) population is growing, that would mean that there are less kills per war/per capita. You said it yourself. How this would translate into less fighting, I have no idea. I don't judge violence by the amount of ammo expended, but by the outcome.


Look, all I'm saying is that the reasons given for the removal of awoxing apply much more to wars than awoxing. Follow along here:

1. Awoxing is removed because it's responsible for corporation managers passing over new players due to fear of betrayal.

2. War spying is responsible for corporation managers passing over new players due to fear of betrayal.

3. The degree of (2) is much higher than the degree of (1).

If (1) is true, then there's a significantly greater incentive to get rid of wars than there was to get rid of awoxing.


I'd estimate that at the height of my activity, I was privy to the thoughts of machinations of about 50 people per week on average. Now, that's 2600 people per year, which is quite a decent sample size when you're considering a singular demographic. Most of those players expressed the exact opinions I mentioned.

Industry is done in high-sec despite the fact that most materials, especially the advanced ones, come from other places. Just look at T2 and T3 production. People aren't importing those ships to high-sec from the places where their base materials originate from; they're importing the materials, and then selling the final product, which creates trade.


Retribution, actually.

Sure, they import moon materials from null for example but that's not all that's used to make them. Moon materials also tend to be spread all over hell, so rather than moving them all to one location in null, manufacturing then moving them all back out to where they need to be, some production is done in null and the rest is shipped to highsec for sale as materials or production then sale. Logistically that's more sound. Manufacturing then shipping would take you considerably more runs for most items, and it would require you to ship in materials from highsec too.

Retribution was crimewatch. Inferno was wardecs.

You're still not getting my point.

I understand that spies aren't always as huge of a danger as people make them out to be. I understand that dealing with them is often easy. I understand that in your experience, they are a non-issue because you've been desensitized to their presence. I understand that awoxing presents a more immediate danger that's mechanical in nature. I get all of that.

But what you're not getting is that I'm not saying spies are a bigger danger than awoxers to corporations, but that most corporations perceive them as a bigger danger than awoxing, or anything else for that matter. And because of this, new players are often not recruited, at a much higher rate than they weren't recruited because of awoxing.

Do you understand? The fact that spies can easily be dealt with is irrelevant here, because they're the big scary boogeyman that keeps carebear CEOs awake at night.


I'm speaking strictly from the perspective of interacting with these players as a member of their corporations.


I stand by what I said. Very little high-end production is done in null, supercaps excluded. Which is why, you know, CCP did a whole bunch of industry expansions for 0.0 (which didn't even have their desired effect). Fact of the matter is that in high-sec, you can produce with zero danger, and selling is closer/easier too. Most goods actually see Jita before being imported for use in 0.0, even those produced in 0.0.


Correct, but dec-shielding was finally neutralized in Retribution.

I'm the guy who's personally done like half a thousand wars, not including the thousands I've been part of on my other characters in other corporations. Take my word here.

Nope. The primary perception is that new players = fresh characters = spy alts made to spy with their spying and spy spy spy.

Once again, primary source, hundreds of corporations. Don't believe me? Start doing what I do.


Ganking would still be prevalent, but there isn't enough of it to go around for all of the high-sec pvpers. There are only so many fat haulers that fly around each day. If other profitable high-sec pvp activities were eliminated, then the ganking scene would quickly become saturated (it kind of already is, actually), and market forces would take over and force many of the gankers out of the profession as quickly as they entered it.


That spike was essentially a "shiny new feature" kind of thing. Judging a sample by its outliers is silly. The fact of the matter is that aside from the massive spike in 2012 due to dec-shielding reaching a fevered pitch, the amount of wars went up steadily throughout the years. Which I haven't disagreed with.