An old article about ideas UO and Crowfall developer in PVP

It worked for 16 years. Sounds pretty sustainable to me.

It isn’t the only way but it is A way to design it. And why shouldn’t there be a game where it is designed that way? If you don’t enjoy it, go play something else, there are hundreds of options. There is no option for people who enjoy a sandbox with non-consensual PvP the way EVE does it and a large portion of the player base played this game because of that.

It actually doesn’t matter what game implements this kind of gameplay. The result would always be that there is a faction of carebears demanding it to change.

EVE was fine the way it was years ago and for the most part still is. Highsec aggressions are pretty good balanced in my opinion. The only complaint I currently have is wardecs and the shitty citadel mechanics which is somehow designed for people who have no job, no life and still enough money to pay a sub.

Oh and spare us the tears about “you just want to kick weak players”. This is a PvP sandbox and thing like those happen. If you want fair fights go play a MOBA. This is war.

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:woman_facepalming:
That intense PvP is skill heavy gameplay, sensitive to UI positioning, control macros, hardware and latency, means they will have only a bunch of hardcore players that will scream “no pay to win here or else I quit”. And if they will introduce some pay to win, it will lose basically everyone. Its all a very known thing that games of this type are unheard of and basically players doesnt play it because they have more targets anywhere else on PvP grounds. Its like devs want to do something they like, but will be always in a shadow of multiple more famous titles with bigger marketing budget.

There is one anomaly tho, where you can get PvP and PvE players coexisting in a massive numbers totally, not on one server tho. You can see the success of GTAO, and what you can call PvP there, but its dependent on the game entirely, the game itself is very playable and fun, even without people, there are constant updates, and position that Rockstar carved out thru many years.

The game is just very good, starting from player animations thru customizations, activities, graphics and everything.

The unbearable level of cringe from GTAO roleplayers is not something that many a player can/will enjoy tho, imo.

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Preying on others in UO:

8803LordJRasp

Trammy 8303Patrol

Come on. You can share your anecdotes or feelings about suicide ganking, but you can’t just make up facts. The data show suicide ganking in highsec has never been lower, at least since CrimeWatch 2.0.

Like there have only been 6 suicide ganks of freighters since the last patch and the latest nerf to the activity:

That is almost three weeks! There used to be 6 a day or more on weekends a few years ago. And there have been literally zero freighter ganks in the last week. The activity is essentially dead, at least for now.

And more generally, September had the lowest rate of CONCORD activity ever seen since verified killmails via the API were made a thing in 2013:

September kills (data taken a few hours short of month end) are going to be a third of what the monthly average was five years ago. A third.

Not only has highsec been made repeatedly mechanically more safe (CrimeWatch 2.0, friendly-fire switch, wardec nerf, bumping nerf, etc.), statistically less crime (AKA non-consensual PvP) is taking place in highsec than ever before. And general highsec activity has never been lower. Sure, lower activity is also going to result in less crime, but there is no evidence that making highsec safer does anything for player activity or retention. The experiment has been attempted repeatedly and it has never worked.

Here is one of the latest attempts to drive highsec activity:

Like I get it. It probably has never been harder for a new player to get into the game. CCP has flooded the game with safe wealth in some misguided attempt to drive activity leaving new players far, far behind. But you can’t misrepresent reality. Highsec is very safe. As a veteran, it is nearly impossible to lose something non-consensually outside of perhaps a deployed structure. Making the game safer for these veterans isn’t an answer. It just entrenches the veterans even more by isolating them from disruption where they get even wealthier widening the gap over new entrants.

Splitting the server à la Trammel isn’t an answer, not to bringing about Eve Forever anyway, but neither is staying the course. The current trajectory game is unsustainable and unless CCP can find a way to flatten the advantage of incumbents and reduce the power gap to give upstarts a chance to catch up and compete (paying CCP money for SP wasn’t an answer, that was a short-sighted cash-grab which has sped up the sinking of the ship) the game is done. So no, making you perfectly safe from the other players does not help the new players compete with you - you are blind or being selfish if you even try to claim such a thing.

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Can you provide a graph that shows situation before this graphs starts? Like a few years back in time?

Also CONCORD kills provide you a data on high sec crime only. It shows spikes and lows, depending on actual criminal activity. You could say it is very dangerous sometimes. despite having timespans of peace.

Also what is that nerf to ganking?

Probably, but the data is all public on http://evemaps.dotlan.net/ or https://www.adam4eve.eu/ and it all shows a dramatic slide in all highsec metrics over the last 5 years. That doesn’t prove anything other than what CCP is doing isn’t working. So I am not going to bother - go take a look yourself if you want.

The latest nerf is to ganking is the 3 minute warp timer. Ganking may have not been target of the change, but it has essentially killed freighter ganking which relied heavily on bumping targets. It too soon to say if it is really dead, or just in a period of recalibration, but it definitely made freighter ganking significantly harder.

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Thats coresponding with actual lower amount of players in the game.

You are right to not delve deeper into the causes. It would be fruitless discussion. there is so many opinions and assumptions that anyone can argue its because of some subjective issue.

Ah this one, but its not harder for people who have many alts, as they can essentially still gank as previously. Also scrambling resets timer. So there is that.

Do you think it might have been more a psychological effect? Like a morale breaking?

Go away. EvE is not for you

The truth is almost all freighter ganks have been done by the same half-a-dozen or so people for the last year or two. The ease of multiboxing (due to skill injectors) kinda killed the public ganking fleets, and the 33%-50% buff to EHP Freighters got two years ago didn’t help the situation. The bar for entry for new frieghter gankers is so high, new people stopped taking up the activity, so it’s kinda expected we’d see a die-off when the bar was raised yet again.

The freighter hunters were already complaining that the targets had dried up well before the bump timer. I think the decrease in highsec activity had already made the fun-to-effort ratio rather low and this latest nerf just pushed the last holdouts over the edge. So yes, it broke their already low morale. It could be a bit like the pouting that went on in nullsec when the Blackout hit and maybe some will return, but I think the writing was already on the wall for the activity. It’s just too costly/difficult to gank freighters, and if on top of that there are fewer targets because there are less people playing, the activity isn’t viable.

It will still happen occasionally if for no other reason it makes good stream content or something different to do for a bored fleet of a large nullsec group, but the true pirates are probably gone for now. If freighter pilots start getting lazy or complacent in the absence of predators, they may make themselves juicier targets and spark a Renaissance of freighter hunters who will be attracted by the fun of preying on these fatter sheep, but unless CCP turns things around and finds a way to increase highsec activity, I predict the apex predators are not going to return to the trade lanes any time soon.

I guess if you call years of downsizing, slow development, player loss and the inability to re-write or update the base game engine (a source of many issues) ‘sustainable’, then yeah sure. To me though that looks like ‘steady decline’. Of course, UO is still active and still selling subs after 22 years, so obviously Trammel is quite sustainable and the game was not really hurt by kicking all those pretend PvPers to the curb.

Hundreds of thousands of players have gone and played somewhere else. That’s why we’re at 1/3 of peak numbers now. That’s why income is so low that CCP had to downsize, turf teams, delay development and finally sell the company. Pro tip: “go somewhere else” isn’t something you want to be saying to your customer base.

Yeah there’s a reason for that: most companies are smarter than to design their product to please 10% of their player base while convincing 50% of their players to “go somewhere else”. And by “large portion of the player base” I guess you must mean “less than 15%”. Since CCP’s own stats show that only about 15% of the players even do PvP, and presumably they aren’t all high-sec safespace noob-gankers.

There are no tears, except for the wannabe-PvPers crying “give me easy targets in safe high sec!”. I’m not arguing for safety or less PvP, in fact for more of it. Simply intelligently designed, sustainable PvP. As opposed to shooting fish in a barrel until the fish are all gone, and then crying that you don’t have fish anymore.

Actually, no. It’s a business. And businesses only stay in business so long as they cater to enough clients to pay the bills. Smart businesses know better than to cater to 15% of their customers at the expense of the rest.

Hopefully CCP gets smart before they get the boot.

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Well, you know, except for that whole “Crimewatch release lead to EVE’s best year ever thing”.

Yeah, except that it did. Crimewatch, best year, etc. The fact that all the rest of the game was still badly designed is the issue, not ‘making high sec safer doesn’t work’.

Heck, your own graph (the first one) shows that Concord activity kept increasing for years after Crimewatch was introduced. Man, so safe!

And speaking of graphs:

Apparently you can misrepresent reality. Lets try that graph again, but with a little more context:

Oh gosh, look! The “wardec nerf” (which was just a change, not a nerf) is completely meaningless and inconsequential, but the overall lack of activity in the game is the issue. You know, the opposite of that thing you were trying to imply.

As for “Highsec is very safe”, again, CCP’s own MERs consistently show that the most destruction by far occurs in high sec, month after month, year after year (except for the occasional major war or event elsewhere).

Agreed. So let’s focus on how to get CCP to make the game actually interesting, rather than trying to distort reality and ‘prove’ yet again that somehow a ‘safe high sec’ is the source of all EVE’s problems. It isn’t. Neither is ‘ganking in high sec’.

The issue is poorly designed competitive balance and opportunity and reward across the board. PvE and PvP both. Combined with an ancient game engine that they should have re-written years ago but instead they threw all their development resources away on failed projects.

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On a per capita basis hisec is safe, certainly safer than anywhere else in the game; population density is always taken into account when considering such metrics. A city can have many times the crime of a rural village, and still be safer than the rural village simply because the population density reduces the chance of being a victim of crime.

IIRC hisec accounts for circa 75% of the population, leaving 25% of the population spread between null, low and whspace. If hisec destruction accounted for greater than 75% of all destruction, then you would have a point; last time I checked it was well under 50%.

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Many other titles that cater to carebears only have come and gone, are now shutdown while EVE is still running. They run a company for nearly 20 from the money this game generates and have driven any other project directly into the wall. The reason they had yo downsize has nothing to do with EVE, but with extremely stupid investments in technologies that where DOA.

How fast you forget.

Wow, OK, you still didn’t understand what I wrote. Let’s try again: There are different people liking different types of games. The market for PvE MMOs is completely saturated. The market for non-consensual PvP sandboxes is largely only dominated by EVE.

This is called market segmentation. Not everyone likes the same games, that is why they are different and attract different audiences. EVE was designed a specific way to target a specific audience.

In other words: Not everyone likes fastfood. The majority of people does and that is why there are so many fastfood restaurants. But some like to eat in a restaurant. You are the person entering this restaurant and demanding that they sell burgers because they would make more money. They wouldn’t, they would get a small slice of a saturated market and we would overall just lose an option for different food.

Yes yes, keep crying. No one cares how heroic you are. This game is not about e-bushido. Go play a MOBA.

Yes a business working in a segment they completely dominate, which is a really good position to be in. I know you rather had another MacDonald’s.

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CrimeWatch is still here. It hasn’t gone anywhere. I don’t see how you attribute a slight bump (that came with a bunch of other changes) to CrimeWatch, but not the many years of decline afterwards to the same change which was left in place.

What? I said that the wardec nerf didn’t increase highsec activity. It didn’t. The downtrend in highsec activity we have seen the past 5 year continued. I didn’t misrepresent anything.

It is another example of a buff to highsec safety that didn’t increase player activity in highsec. We continue to slide into oblivion despite yet another increase in safety to highsec.

The MER also shows that a fraction of a percent of the value moved around highsec is destroyed. And of that tiny fraction, only part of that is losses to criminals. Almost every single ship makes it to its destination in highsec every time it undocks.

Debating whether that is too much or too little is a foolish waste of time as we have no right answer. All we can say you have a very small chance of losing anything to highsec criminals and highsec criminals are exploding less than they ever have since reliable metrics became available. And yet still player activity goes down.

I never claimed ‘a safe highsec’ is the cause of the decline. It is almost certainly the fact CCP hasn’t solved the ever-growing power gap that will appear in a persistent game like Eve. Not only are new players bewildered, confused and bored by a complex game, they are out-competed, and occasionally exploded by veterans with vastly more power than they have. I maintain that CCP giving these veterans more safety hoping it will help new players is counter-productive and hasn’t helped player retention or increase highsec activity, but it isn’t the primary cause of the decline.

I think that is primarily caused by CCP letting the economy get away from them, massively increasing the power gap between a new player and a veteran, and now that things have predictably run their course, killing the sense of meaning and purpose for even the veterans now that they are all so rich nothing they do matters. But I think I am already more off-topic than I am comfortable with, so let’s stop there with this train of thought.

What could have been… Yup. They failed to balance their economic/ecological game for far too long, undermining the meaning behind both PvE and PvP. Restoring that will be quite the trick and require radical change, and probably more resources than CCP has available. And no matter how perfectly they execute it, such intervention is going to drive away a large chunk of the player base.

Good luck CCP, you’re gonna need it.

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Will just remind you all that Ultima Online turned 22 a few days ago (launched on September 24th 1997). It still is being paid for by players and developed by a small team of devs (six, apparently) and the overall population might be around the thousand players.

It’s pretty much undead, not alive and not dead, and certainly it is older than EVE will reach to be. Actually, it’s likely that UO still will be online the day EVE shuts down.

CCP bet the farm to the Rubicon plan back in 2013, and they lost that bet. There’s nothing they can do at this point, even if they had a clue, even if they had the skills, even if they had the right people and the money and time…

Fortune is bald behind.

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My therapist said I should indulge in playing the bad guy in a virtual environment.

He said it is a way for me to express myself, and dampens on the possibility of ending up doing said bad things in RL from too much held-up frustration.

Yet dimwits want to take that right away from me to farm in yet another risk-free farming simulator clone.

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Coming from a point that there is less freighters having expensive cargo overall warping in high sec, thru the people resigning, there may hae been less freighters being ganked. But of course freighters arent everything. There are ships there, really expensive that are way below freighter EHP. Ganking was never about freighters only, so it will not die out.

I’m playing a HateSpeech detector today,
finding both bad people and those who pretend they’re good people! :blush:

*beep boop beep*

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Why don’t you just go play some other space game if there mere existence of PvP bothers you so much?

No Man’s Sky would be a great choice for you. No “pretend” PvPers, you can mine all day, build a base - hell you can literally farm.

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