Allow people to break out of normalized behaviour, aka increase chaos

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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What?

Allow people to act stupidly and within their own responsibility.

Reason:
Seemingly random freedoms increase the livelihood of the game. It’s the sum of all small things that make EVE feel alive in context of a thriving game world with lots of activity. Right now that is simply not the case. There must be room for breaking out of normalized behaviour.

Example:
Allow capitals, that aren’t allowed in highsec, to enter highsec via gates and turn them to suspect permanently. Disallow them to run missions, but allow them to use public sites. Allow them to fight back once engaged. Disallow docking. Yes, it’s basically a deathtrap unless you’re really smart with your bravery. Maybe you simply want to be known as “the guy with the super in highsec”.

Or maybe you just want to welp it and provide some fun to complete strangers who aren’t part of a big group of friends.

Allow people to provide fun content if they choose to. Why should an ISKrich man, who wants to have fun, not be able to welp a big ship in highsec, where there are more people who will appreciate it more than anywhere else?

All player-events regarding blowing up a big ship always have been a success. There’s almost no way for anyone to be active in a permasuspect ship and a cap would be a magnet for people to come and blow it up.

Random events increase the livelihood of the game. That’s why, when people see Chribba’s VeldNaught, they post about it. It creates an impression, which is good for the game.

Another example:

Allow people to opt ouf of CONCORD protection if they choose to do so and include a colour for those people on the overview, without adding it to the default setting. Everyone who cares about seeing them will change his overview accordingly and everyone who cares about lacking CONCORD protection will opt out. It will create interesting content for those who want to be a part of it and it will create visible action in space for everyone. It will increase the perceived livelihood of the game.

Another another example:

Remove the suspect timer, or nerf it appropriately. For rookies it is a 15min death trap where they can not play the game and potentially keep getting blown up all the time. It is unfair punishment for those who wish to be creative and curious. Stop deterring people from breaking out of the normalized behaviour you, CCP, wish to force them into. I understand that you had your reasons to implement this and I also understand the outcome you’ve anticipated, but there is little doubt that it seriously backfired.

If you want more chaos and livelihood, CCP, then the suspect timer in its current form needs to go. It prevents rookies from growing into something that’s outside of the norm. Dare I say it makes the whole game much more boring for them, because all they get to do is the laid-out-■■■■ you’re providing them with.

They’re being deterred from game-play that was the norm in the past and the consequence of breaking out of the current norm (aka turning the button to yellow and daring) is a literal death sentence, which will be perceived as the inability to play for fifteen minutes.

Highsec feels like a wasteland, CCP, and it’s your fault. It’s boring, unimaginative and sends off a vibe of “it’s full of bots” because local chats are silent pretty much anywhere except for important spots like trade hubs. More random freedoms means more random interaction, which leads to more people talking in public, which translates into the game feeling more alive. Livelihood.

You want more people to find friends and playing together, yet many years ago you’ve brought changes that actually reduced the amount of verbal interaction in the game massively. How about admitting your mistake and changing that back again, for your own and also our benefit?

Epilog:

I don’t care about discussing this with people. I’ve provided two examples to help you understand what I am looking for. What I care about is your ideas for “random behaviour that breaks out of the norm” of which you think it might add to the livelihood of the game. A big amount of “small things” contributes a lot more to the whole than one or two “big things”, because lots of “small things” have higher variety than a few big things.

That’s why I’m asking you for “small things”. They might be silly, they might not be. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is providing more opportunities for breaking out of the norm. A Big Impact on society doesn’t come from yes-men and bean-counters, it comes from people who are being perceived as weird, unusual. Those who break out of the norm.

The current protection/suspect mechanics are a joke compared to what we had before. They limit the potential of the people and reduce the amount of potential interactions, which are vital for finding friends in an organic way and new and interesting things to do. They (a) offer the option for daring behaviour, while (b) making sure that the punishment is severe enough to further deterr people from breaking out of the norm. You, CCP, are punishing rookies who do not wish to walk the laid-out-path.

The current highsec mechanics, in general, are not actually allowing people to be make the game feel real. While fully unrestricted freedom is absolutely bad, what we have now - and had for years - negatively impacted the shape of the thoughts of thousands of rookies. A controlled amount of options for breaking out of the norm should absolutely be preferred.

A better way of crowd control is to be able to control those who wish to break out of the norm, instead of outright trying to suppress it from happening in the first place. That’s why giving them options, without providing unrestricted freedom, is a good thing.

Final Note:

I’m deliberately not posting this into the “Little Things” thread, simply because that thread is about something else. This thread is about “small things with potentially big impact on the livelihood of the game”.

Thank you.

Edit: People, who are responding to the examples, are missing the point. Examples are by definition something which tries to communicate an idea that’s behind them. Or above them, if you prefer that. Here, with the examples I gave, it’s about:

Allowing people to break out of the norm.

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Verbal interaction is actually from the gankers, and 3rd party tools.
Gankers spent years targeting anyone speaking in local in order to then generate emotional responses from said people. People learnt to not communicate in local as a result and instead took comms to all the 3rd party tools that are far more prevalent and higher quality than they were in the early days.
This one isn’t on CCP, it’s on the players. And a perfect example of how the players often ruin the game for themselves by self interested actions.

As for most of the rest of your points, I feel like they are aimed towards a very particular playstyle which already is highly enabled, and disagree with the details you’ve chosen to list. However I suspect we won’t see eye to eye on those points so am not going to not the thread down into trying to dissect counterpoints

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A rookie cannot go suspect unless they change the settings to allow going suspect. If a rookie is afraid of going suspect, they will never lose that fear. Moreover, how else are they supposed to grow out of the norm if you remove dangers and traps that are not the norm (ie. the suspect flag)?

Is it? I see flagged people all over the place. I also see quiet spots where I can do some stuff on my own without having to interact with people all the time. High sec offers a huge variety of space, activities and situations.

So, by removing the suspect flag, which actually makes people engage and which, in case of the mistaken rookie example that’s being used ad nauseum, make them talk to each other after the action, high sec will be even less communicative because a danger factor or a factor that piques your attention was removed.

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The crimewatch system is the best we can get, if you want to steal/shoot nobody stops you, the consequences are balanced.

The deeper issue with all of this is, that we veteran players have solved the game. There is no challenge anymore we don’t know the answer, whether we want to give them or not. So chaos area is disappointing, because it’s not actual chaos, but just options taken away or creating more oppression from the well known kind forcing you to pick the next best solution or put more effort into the same.

This is not chaos, but transitioning the universe from one stable state to another maybe less pleasant.

If CCP wants chaos, they have to shake up the fundamentals (temporarily, random). Randomly choose a highsec system to become lowsec/nullsec for a couple days. Disable gates. No Concord for a weekend. Increase the spawn rate of null wormholes drastically. Weather conditions in constellations more drastically as in invasion systems. Allow cynos in highsec, allow booshing in highsec.

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…but some (all triglavian) ships aren’t quite as balanced…

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What do you mean? Player ships or NPC?

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Chaos is the moment an upwell structure with Asset Safety Removed blows up and spills thousands of loot boxes into space.

Pure, Unfiltered, Chaos :rofl:

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The player ships. We used to have a healthy balance until capital online and now it looks more like this:

triglavian HAC > triglavian ass frigate > titan > mothership > capital > loki > else

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This is an idea I’ve thought about myself. I like it, and definitely gives opportunities for content creation. However, I doubt anyone would use it based on the fact that I’ve never seen a capital in low sec.

So, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but there’s a twitch streamer that flies Orcas through high sec with a suspect timer. It’s kind of funny because he fits his Orca for battle, and it actually takes on challengers pretty well.

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I still like my Loki, it’s the most versatile ship in the game, and I’m very happy it is not the overpowered meta anymore. :wink:

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chribba mines in a dreadnought so this would kill his mining.

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The first post actually responding to, because the others all don’t get the point. I hope that relevant people actually get the point, which wasn’t about the example, but about the concept they’ve tried to communicate.

I didn’t know such a person exists. That’s actually a really good idea I haven’t thought of. I might actually give this a try. It’s like being -10, but without people being immature retards about “criminality”.

Agreed. Chribba deserves an exception as a true and the actually only lasting person-landmark of this game.

Again, people are missing the point of “examples”. They’re EXAMPLES. It’s not about the content of the example, but like all examples it’s about the idea the examples are trying to communicate, which is:

Allow people to break out of the norm.

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No, this is factually wrong. Gankers did not magically begin to achieve what they failed to achieve for over a decade prior years. Gankers did, in fact, not magically manage to convince tens of thousands of people over several months to stop looking at or talking in local. Nope. Not possible.

You are required to at least explain how you’ve managed to come up with such an opinion that does not seem to be based on first hand experience, of which I have plenty, which is why I can actually talk about these things.

You did not quite read my post and do not actually understand what you are talking about, otherwise a “fifteen minute death sentence” for stealing from a jetcan would be balanced, which is pure and utter nonsense.

Your perspective is that of someone who does not understand how things work for people who are shoved into a new environment. The the experiences new players had prior to the protection button and past its implementation are significantly different and I sugget you think about that long and hard, before you form another opinion about it.

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Insults don’t bring your ideas forward. I read your post, most of it, and at every proposal I was thinking … it’s already possible, it’s done by people, where is the new point?

Personally I was introduced to suspect baiting the second day I played this game and have learned a lot from it. Again, one problem is that we vets have solved the game and are sharing all solutions with the newbies, whether they want or not, so they don’t feel the need to try or experience things.

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You appear to be thinking about what constitutes “breaking out of normalized behaviour” in sociological terms, and then trying to extrapolate that to game mechanics, which just doesn’t make sense.

A computer game is not like real life, where people usually behaves in some socially acceptable or “normalized” way, but then it’s possible for them to behave differently, i.e. in real life what constitutes “normalized behaviour” is a subset of all the possible behaviours. In a computer game such as EvE, there is no distinction between “normalized” and possible behaviours. Everything that’s possible within the game constitutes “normalized” behaviour there as well.

There cannot be such a thing as “breaking out of normalized behaviour” in EvE from a software development point of view. There is only replacing one set of game mechanics with another, thus effectively changing what constitutes the new “normalized behaviour”, but then not allowing breaking from that after the change…

This is why you’re having trouble finding an actual example of what you’d like to do and then getting frustrated when others discuss your particular examples instead of the idea. Frankly, this is all your fault and you’re the only one to blame for that, not them. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

A solution to this conundrum would appear to be for you to figure an actual working example that people might discuss, but you won’t be able to do that because the moment you think you’ve found one, you’ll be faced with the problem that it would require the game mechanics to be changed in some way that would simply change what constitutes “normalized behaviour” after the change, not allow breaking out of that aftwerwards…

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