EVE General Discussion

before you leave, can i haz the remainder of ur stuffz?

Oh, and ... EVE is DYING!!!!!!!1111ONE!!!!ELEVENTY!!!

Can we get a "Block All Alpha Clones" button. Consider it a pre-emptive strike.

How do you explain the earlier years?

And consider that things like ganking were, mechanically, easier in the past. There was insurance for ganking. CONCORD response times have been decreased (i.e. CONCORD responds faster), You can now tank your freighters, etc.

Note that all of these things were supposed to reduce or eliminate ganking and yet it is still here and people are still whining for more nerfs....

In looking at war declarations what do we see. People whined about the costs of war decs, so that was changed and increased. War decs shifted to being more camping trade hubs and roaming the trade routes and less targeted small scale war decs. The increased prevalence of war dec alliances. Then the watchlist removal which really hammered targeted war decs. And what do we see...people are still whining about nerfing war decs even more. Whining about how trade hubs are camped and the trade routes are not safe.

In short there have been attempts to make HS safer to cater these players who whine and whine and whine. And look, number of people logged in is also going down. Hmmmm....coincidence? Maybe.

And then we look at CCPs attempt to quantify the effects of suicide ganking on people's time in game. The results are that getting ganked and also legal PvP increase people's duration in game. I know, I know that study is horribly flawed even though nobody can explain how. Every attempt to do so highlights that the person making the claim is actually ignorant about the analysis. There are valid criticisms about that presentation, but considering the critics of said study know f**k all about statistics they never raise them.* However, these criticisms do not necessarily invalidate CCP Rise's presentation.

The point is player-on-player interaction/competition is good for retention. CCP should be encouraging not discouraging it. If you go and look at PFaID. Alot of the ideas are how to make it "better for a player to ignore everyone else" when you get right down to it. Players who want freighter ganking stopped want less player-on-player interaction. Players who want to make war decs less common want less player-on-player interaction/competition. These suggestions are exactly the wrong way to go to retain players and bring in new ones. Eve was successful because it was a sandbox where you could interact in all sorts of different ways with the players. And as CCP has taken away that functionality, players logged in has been dropping.

*Note in past discussion I have raised these criticisms, but I'm not about to go looking for them, do it yourself.

So let me get this straight, ganking is really just a lottery. There is no thought that goes into, it is just that the gankers decide to gank people randomly?

Bullshit. Gankers pick retrievers because they can be ganked. They avoid procurors and skiffs (unless they are very badly fit). Freighters that get ganked are generally carrying way, way too much cargo value.

You quite clearly ignorant of what goes on with ganking.

Here is a hint: try it. Go ask CODE. if you can go ganking with them. You'll probably learn alot. And that way you can post based on hands on actual experience vs. ignorance.

And making ganking impossible? Thank you for proving my earlier comment that it is players like you who want to limit player-on-player interaction. That you don't understand the basic nature of the game, and that so far to date, research shows that limiting player-on-player interaction actually will reduce player retention rates.

It is views like yours that are the true cancer in EVE.

That's ok.

That's balanced by the not hardcore crowd being thin skinned over the style of play to begin with.

Swings and roundabouts.

Well, wardecks could use some work; atm the best way to win a war-deck as the defender is by just using an alpha clone hauler alt. Most things can be moved by an iterion 5 and if you tank it right and don't carry plex or anything else stupidly expensive it's not likely to be ganked. So far I have had a few weeks of being wardecked in my 4 or so months of playing and it's pretty much boiled down to "avoid x trade hub for a week" I have never seen a war target in local and a locator agent would usually be useless against me (go ahead and try to find Jxxxxxx so you can kill my 500k isk heron) it would be nice if there was an actual objective or victory condition because as is they seem pretty pointless.

The penalty in high-sec is that you die if you commit a criminal act. Is that not sufficient enough?

There is that.

Dammit

I don't think you'll find many mercs that will disagree, wardecs are broken, the trick to fixing them is to find the balance between the wants of both the mercs, and those that they prey on.

Once upon a time many of those mercs would use the watch-list and locator agents to figure out where and when people were active, and then hunt them down based on that intelligence; the watch-list got nerfed a while back because it was also used to watch for known titan pilots to come online and then go kill them.

Victory conditions are currently between the parties involved, an official one would need to hashed out with the merc community before being implemented

On a related notes mercs generally aren't just in it for padding their killboards, although shiny stuff is always a good kill.

Some of them like the fun of "gud fites" too, and may accommodate what could be seen as "fair fights"* in terms of numbers and ship classes in order to get some, those that do so will may well be open to giving a breakdown of it afterwards in order to show areas for improvement.

Something similar happened in the recent past when a corp beset by wardecs got help with leadership, tactics and doctrines from some of the merc community, both those that had them wardecced, and those that didn't, in order to ensure that everybody had fun.

I agree. When I ran a hi sec corp years back all we used to do was missions. We got war decced and I was able to spring into action. I had a small group of 20 day old noobs and working together we got a couple of battlecruiser kills. More of them came to fight us and our corp fell apart. Looking back it was still a great experience it got us all involved and we had some good convos working out strategies.

Regarding your CCP comments I think they should stick with the dark cold miserable and unforgiving nature of Eve because there are already more than enough tactics and play-styles in place to ensure a 0% loss if you're careful and take the time to listen to others.