Try it with roulette. You’ll probably stop giving him $100.
Blackjack is one of the few games where the player can gain a slight edge.
Very true, although most LV Blackjack boots have 6 decks in them; some have up to 8. You can find the 2 deck tables off the strip, but the payouts actually aren’t worrth it. Takes a special mind to handle 6+ decks; although even a novice can make some reasonable choices based on the cards he currently holds. As you say, beats roulette though. Poker is the game you want.
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I would say that Keepstar battle (was it MTO-2?) was pretty big and happened like week or two ago.
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No, it isn’t a false dichotomy, at least not completely. A single universe game like Eve cannot feature both consensual and non-consensual PvP as everyone plays by the same rules. Eve has non-consensual PvP - you cannot opt-out - while Elite: Dangerous, a game in the same genre does not. Players of Elite have a flag they can set that turns off unwanted player interactions and this, by definition, means there is not non-consensual PvP interactions in that game. This also means that there will never be an interesting player-driven economy in Elite, nor will any of conflict be anything other than play acting where the players take roles in a developer-created set piece.
But that wasn’t my primary point and explicitly said I think CCP has and should continue to try to build corners of the sandbox that allow more balanced conflict to take place between the players. I think there should be places for honourable duels and fights between small gangs for meaningful objectives, at least as much as is compatible with an open-world sandbox. My point was, and it isn’t a strawman of any kind, is that the decline in players numbers cannot be due to a lack of balanced PvP options, since none have been taken away. We currently have as many as we ever did, and while you can argue that more would somehow be good for the game and attract more players, CCP has not changed anything that has limited or reduced the options for those looking for honourable combat. If anything, they have softened the game and given more options to evade unwanted combat and watered down the sense of loss (and thus meaning) by flooding the game with resources in recent years and it has failed to re-ignite growth in player numbers.
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Too bad CCP cannot introduce some type of faction gladiator arena where battles between teams of 1,2,3,4 could take place in a controlled environment. Throw in some isk betting and gladiator fluff prizes, limit teams based on some sort of battle value or ship class for equal fighting, have a fool proof way to prevent cheating during the duel, and have CONCORD patrol the arena system with an iron hand to prevent out of duel fighting. While you can have honorable dueling now, perhaps adding a more organized and regulated area would encourage an increase in participation for those looking for such activities.Ofc, all the normal current PvP should continue.
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Never from what I can see in the history. The record is around 65K.
Eve has always been losing players. The only thing that changed was the number of new players arriving to offset the exodus was once sufficient to allow the game to grow.
We are in furious agreement, except that I think you are unduly kind to the culture at CCP. There have no doubt been numerous attempts to remove the bullying, cowardly mentality of the corporate bosses, and replace the rigid hierarchy of players with a more egalitarian game that appeals to individual merit. They all meet the same insincere attempt to claim that such efforts will break the sacred sandbox.
Anyone who believes the economy of Eve is a sandbox is dim or trusting or both. The economy of Eve, right, is transparently manipulated in 100 ways from Sunday in order to preserve the semblance of macro stability. I mean, this isn’t a secret. CCP publish market data, nerf loot drops as required, and sell as much plex into the game as they can. Hardly a sandbox. It is a sandbox insofar as it is rectangular and once held some sand, long ago.
But that is fine, in fact it is great. Who wants a sandbox anyway?
Who ever said that the greatest thing in life was to play an MMO where some fetid geezer with a degree in boring has created a working model of “the economy”? Was it one of the original owners? Must have been. It isn’t even all that interesting, as an idea. I suppose one would have to be born privileged to imagine oneself capable of creating a simulation of a macro economy, anyway. It’s so vain. “Oh look at me, I understand EVERYTHING about money. Everyone, I’m fabulous.”
I think you are very generous with your terms. “Softened” assumes it was hard, and has become easier. It was ridiculously opaque, is what it was. Now it is not quite as ridiculously opaque. As for flooding the game with resources, I thought we had established that we cannot, we must not, ruin glorious macro economy simulation? The SANDBOX. Can I have an amen?
Anyway, ships are hardly less expensive. The whole ship experience is still a big joke, because the only ships worth fighting in are tech 1. It is theoretically interesting to fly the other 90% of hulls, but the reality of blobs and ECM mean you are nuts to undock in anything beyond a tech 1. You just attract swarms of pirates looking for a newbro to gank. With overwhelming odds and ECM. Cause MUH SANDBOX.
But, you could be right. Maybe if they went back to the original idea, everything would be awesome. Again, that seems nostalgic and a bit flattering. Who ever said Eve was a great game? I think it always had potential. It was never great.
The lag thing with the big fleet battles is the smoking gun, in this respect. The lag makes those things a bad joke, and of course most players who start out aspire to one day being part of that concept of large fleet space battles. So Eve is all about the promise of things, the potential to build on the base.
The base is awesome. The artwork, the lore, the scope of the story are all world class. What has always been missing is the implementation. CCP are great at ideas, and pictures, but they seem to hit a wall when it comes to executing the mission and getting the real stuff done.
Still, one day we hope they will get it right, or more likely be bought out by folks who know how to get things done. With luck, that won’t wreck the great bits of Eve, which are totally worth preserving.
As artists, CCP earn their plex. As game devs, they need to be decimated.
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I think it’s been said earlier but stupid game design is definitely causing people to leave the game.
Over the years the things that people really enjoy get nerfed because some cried enough. I don’t actually think CCP understand the demographics of the player base because if they did I’m pretty certain they would not have considered Alpha clones let alone bring this into production let alone let them have 20m SPs.
As more P2W elements come into the game it loses the sandbox which turns it into something like World of Tanks or Dreadnought (2 great games but I feel no connection to).
With the recent changes to reactions a huge part of my enjoyment in the game has subsequently gone. I think CCP started off as “let’s make history and create a game the gaming world aspires to” and i really believe 80% was focused on this while 20% was focused more on profit. Over the last 5 years it feels, as they have grown in good times and subsequently shrank in bad, the engine of CCP is focused 80% on regrowing and profit and 20% is focused on creating a good gaming experience. I alude to Fozzie sov, jump fatigue, cap changes, refineries, citadels, personally i feel this is not setting the game up for the next 10 years.
Businesses thrive on loyal customers - i think CCP should focus on getting their house in order and focus on these players rather than rip the foundations of a game that for 15 years has done alright because all of the recent changes are destroying the reasons why people have stuck with the company.
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Unorthodox? meaning “contrary to what is usual” huh!?
Your joking right (sorry if that’s obvious from the conversation you’re having but I cant be bothered to travel all the way back & read everything), this has to be irony or sarcasm (on your part) yes?
If not then what have you been playing? because I don’t think it can be EVE 
Multiple toons & simply blue balling anyone who camps you by using one of your other toons is (& probably always has been?) very standard game-play in EVE (for individuals & small corps at least).
It already is, see above 
OK, I’m pretty sure now you’re actually poking fun at whoever you were talking to now?
My memory may be playing tricks but I’m pretty sure the numbers where in the thousands when I popped in to watch it, you may need to check your facts?
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It’s funny you say that, because the roulette table is my territory. i had to shove him away from the table, because he just wasted his money planting several orders at once whenever he played. he learned to stay away. 
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Actually:
- couple years ago you could make like 50mil/hour (for example) and these days you can have as much as 300 mil/hour
- ship prices hardly increased
So yes, ships ARE less expensive these days.
I don’t know about you but being logi in fleet i always use Scimitar. Because it’s better for small gangs than T1 version.
EWAR ships? T2
Interceptors? T2
Swarms of pirates? “Overwhelming odds and ECM”? 
I haven’t seen such place in my 7 years in the game. Yes, you can get blobbed but it’s not “every day experience” unless you live and fight right in Goonland Hometown.
No matter how complex you make your model, you still cannot explain a change with a constant.
Many things have changed in the game over time, but you are lamenting for something that was never there. That maybe can hypothetically explain why Eve didn’t grow more or faster, but it can’t explain why Eve went into decline when “more balanced PvP” was absent then and it still absent now.
Come now, who is building strawmen now? Of course the economy of New Eden is manipulated by CCP - it is a completly artificial construct built by the developer, and constantly monitored (although not as closely as they used to or is healthy in my opinion) and directly tweaked by the them. Further, almost every game change made by CCP also influences the market indirectly meaning anyone who declares the economy a perfect sandbox is indeed “dim”.
But the point is that Eve Online does feature a player-driven economy, probably the most complex and vibrant of all MMOs. Not only that, I would wager that the majority of the activity in this game, more than PvP fleets, more than group PvE efforts, more than anything else, is motivated by players gathering and building stuff to trade to other players on the market. I’ll assert without evidence that that aspect of the game has brought and kept more players than even the prospect of those big space battles that make a splash in the mainstream press every-so-often.
The amount of player effort required to build the machines for war dwarfs the amount of player effort that goes into prosecuting those wars. If you want to look to a more likely source of the decline, I might look at changes that concentrated production capabilities, made it easier to produce which both increased supply of virtual wealth and pushed non-competitive producers out of the game, or reduced destruction (and thus demand for industry) rather than the game balance of those PvP encounters the market supports.
On this I will agree. Well perhaps not decimated, but there have been far too many short-sighted decisions made out of expediency or to placate various interests, both internal to CCP and external, to claim the development of Eve has been done well in the last few years. Perhaps that is the fault of a lack of vision or oversight at the top, too much technical debt from the early days of Eve, or maybe a lack of resources, but much development time has been wasted, and gameplay even removed, in the largely failed attempt to make the game more accessible or easy to attract more players. We have made so little progress in realizing the original idea of Eve as an full-time, PvP sandbox game where everything is destroyable and the players control the universe and make the stories in the last 6-7 years that it is actually depressing when you think about it. In fact, by many metrics the players have even less agency and ability to affect the universe than they did back then.
For sure though the game looks better than ever, and gets better every year. Kudos to the art department. Now if only CCP could find enough game developers to expand the sandbox and more fully realize the original concept to actually add new game play where players can interact with each other instead of the new “features” we get these days that just shovel more wealth and safety upon the player-base with the hope they don’t notice there is very little actual new game play being produced.
Lifeblood looks like it might actually have some new things to get players interacting in the sandbox though. Here’s hoping that they work as intended and get people playing again.
I had that conversation at Fanfest 2016 with a CCP dev about changes forcing players from the game, the answer was a shrug of the shoulders and a comment that they can always get more players if players leave.
With an attitude like that we shouldn’t hold our breaths waiting for CCP to take any notice whatsoever of anyone outside certain organisations or cliques.
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I think (like most businesses these days) CCP have concentrated on getting new customers, at the expense of their current loyal ones.
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Well old vets will soon have access to 20mil SP so it’s not a total write off in terms of trying to accommodate old players.
The problem they might have one day is just these monolithic organisations that have far too much reach with too little effort.
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That went well.
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Yeah, it is hard to get an edge at roulette, you have to spot something like the table itself is faulty in terms of construction…and most casinos are not going to like you standing there gathering data, putting in a computer and running analysis. 
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I can’t agree with some of these. I don’t mind the number of Titan’s. The change I would implement would be to force a titan to commit to the warp when it is bridging. Problem solved. Risk is now relative to its utility.
A majority of cyno pilots are rarely considered to be ‘in combat’.
Alliance standings should be applied and restricted only to other alliances.
#4 solves itself if you require Titans to commit to the risk, imo.
I would say it requires a vote from anyone who owns a share of the corporation. I can’t speak more on shares. I don’t know how they work.
getting DD’ed is pretty cool sometimes. Can’t see how an aoe wouldn’t wipe a frig. That kind of immunity is not science. Target locking them is and it takes a stupid long time. Long enough to see that a titan is yellow boxing you.
::edit:: damn, now I lost my place for reading this threadnaught through.
Sorry, I didn’t realise I need your approval…