EVE General Discussion

I was using freighter ganking to make a general point. Every player's risk is dependent on the player's actions and those of other players. The game won't suddenly gank you. Only other players do that. And NPC corp won't wardec you, only other players do that.

If you face risk in the game it is based on your actions and other players seeing a opportunity to benefit from you taking on too much risk.



I’m not dismissing it. I am telling you that your views are diametrically opposed to the core nature of the game. Lots of HS content has been lost over the years. Targeted HS war decs and can flipping are two examples. Other things like suicide ganking have been repeatedly nerfed with things like faster CONCORD response times and the removal of insurance for ships destroyed by CONCORD.



First new players are rarely suicide ganked, well at least the ones who are 15 days old or younger (see the above youtube video). Second players who have been suicide ganked or killed legally and were 15 days old or younger…they stayed longer than those who were not killed. And you are also basically talking about dumbing the game down. Sure we could make it a dumb game and it might get some new subscribers, but my guess is you’ll lose even more of the long time players and you probably won’t get enough new players to offset that.

And yes, I know you won’t like the youtube video. You’ll likely try to dismiss it with some weak argument. Please don’t. I’m tired of having to keep typing out the same responses again and again. A sample of 80,000 players is more than sufficient. Where I work we have over 5 million customers and we routinely make do with samples of 50,000. In fact, we could go even smaller. We go big because we invariably are asked questions about some specific sub-set of the population. And while a population of 3,000 might be sufficient to come up with summary statistics for the population it will be too small for a specific sub-group. But with 50,000 you are more likely to get a valid sample for the sub-group inside that sample. Further, even if CCP’s analysis is wrong, being wrong does not make suicide ganking somehow a problem.

To be honest Im amazed how safe the game really is.

As a newbie I accidentally got lost at my first explorer trip.
So i thought what the heck, for hours I fumbled around in wormholes
scanning and warping (no cloak).
Kept my cool, failed 90% of hackings but made it back safe.

Since then I have always explored in WH and losec. Generally players
are friendly and helpful.

Been ganked a couple of times, always feeling helpless.

Still, my point is that the first month or two are way too unforgiving.

That would ruin the economy with a flood of stuff that nobody has put any effort into obtaining, and basically turn hisec into a PvE only shard. It also completely ruins it for everybody that doesn't AFK all of the things.

AFK is not fun, you may as well not be playing at all.

They moved lvl 5 missions to lowsec in an attempt to draw players from hisec in pursuit of the higher rewards; it failed. PI is better in lowsec, mission rewards are better in lowsec, exploration is better in lowsec, anoms are better in lowsec, etc, etc. People still don't go there.

Newbies already have better skills and access to more ships than they have at any time in the past, many of us started playing when there were learning skills, skills you trained in order to train other skills faster, despite a SP speed bonus to 1.5M SP they took months to train; if you didn't train them any skills you did train did so at a vastly reduced rate. We mined in frigates, because the Venture didn't exist, hell many would have exchanged a testicle for a ship like the Venture to mine with.

CCP could start people with millions of SP and access to battleships and they'd still demand more, because they'd still die by the dozen in entertaining fashions. The amusing thing is that the SP isn't as important as knowing how to leverage it properly; it's not what you have, it's what you do with it. Older players are better at most things not because of the amount of SP we have, but because of where that SP is placed and because we know how to leverage it properly.

I think the highest SP on any of my characters is 45M ish, and it's an alt.

Everything has a counter, this is known as balance. Ship doctrines are constantly evolving and new tactics developed, it's up to you to figure out the counters; you do this by trying and dying, and then having another go.

God no.

No, these sale pitches wont work.

@Jonah Gravenstein

You right. Here is where you oldies now what you are talkin about.

Im still amazed why newbies are afraid to enter WH and losec.
Maybe this is where the focus should be.

Every now and then Im completely alone in a losec system, scanning and hacking.

Yeah sadly a romanticised vision that only actually happens rarely.

It wasn't a sales pitch I linked it because it was a guy finally getting his revenge.

Figures can be manipulated to show just about anything. You should know this.



As per why I posted back to this thread I don't think its newbies dying that is the problem (might put a small number off) its the realisation that their realistic options for retaliation are pretty much non-existent - some tools to let them better understand the dangers earlier might help maybe as well I dunno. And even then many of Teckos's counter arguments to that require the resources of an experienced player with either lots of alts or an active corp behind them to carry out - which many newer players might not have access to.

I would hazard an educated guess that the retention rate for newbies that join from OOG communities such as Reddit and SA and go to nullsec when they start is far higher than that of those who never leave hisec. Part of it is the support network that the OOG communities provide for their newbies, in terms of knowledge, attitudes to explosions and SRP's.

In hisec players are left to fend for themselves, they often receive poor information from people, who have often never left hisec themselves, in the NPC corps. Many of the player run corps in hisec are lead by people who are poor leaders, either through lack of knowledge or just being not cut out to lead. In short hisec is probably what drives more newbies away than anything.

That said, there are knowledgeable people and social groups in the NPC corps that provide many of the advantages you get with well established corps that like newbies, and there are well led hisec player corps that do the same, it's just a shame that so few ever find them.

Despite being a mainly hisec player I do my PI in lowsec, because it absolutely sucks in hisec; Wormhole spelunking is also fun, I often leave an alt in one for a week to get the right TZ, and then I strip all the sites while they sleep.