The thing nobody realizes today is that we could be beaten back then.
You can’t really beat a ganker and no PVE Corp is going to beat Marmites.
But back when wardec aggressors were 3 or 4 guys in T1 ships… we could be beaten.
Can flippers had to fly crappy ships to get fights… they could be beaten.
Today’s content destroys engagement… it’s not good. The bears have no way to win.
Killing flippers was a goal of mine early in the game… and it was attainable.
I personally think that if they roll-back crime watch to the old Corp aggression mechanics and drop war decs to 2 mil (like they used to be), add whatever station mechanics stuff they are already working on, and hard cap wars to 1 per week… the game will go back into balance.
Oh yeah, and ships that need 6 clicks in 15 minutes need to go… let them choose to jet can or run back and forth… or work as a team, or jet can in a mission deadspace pocket, or any of the other 30 ways to jet can mine safely.
We need interaction back.
Oh man. You are never going to get that back. MMOs have one and all abandoned the idea that other players or anything more than annoying NPCs you have to deal with occasionally. Because that’s what the players want. Interaction with other humans is undesirable, even in a genre that supposed to be all about it.
Eve was built on that interaction and we’re all still watching.
They destroyed that interaction in 2012 and have been competing on level ground with other mmo’s since.
I think Eve’s niche is interaction… and if they bring that back they’ll get the players back.
Today’s PvP in eve is broken. The pve is not better than the rest of the game market.
I know you hate PvP, but you and I wasn’t talking about the same thing at all. I hate today’s PvP in eve for the same reasons you do.
But I still love eve’s pve from before retribution. If you had been around back then, I bet you would have been shooting and giggling right along with the rest of us.
I actually don’t hate PVP. It’s not my cup of tea, but it would be churlish for me to ■■■■ on people for exploding spaceships in a game that lets you explode spaceships.
I do, but that’s why I keep coming back and whining on the forums.
I hate what passes for PvP in Eve today.
I loved the PvP it used to have.
Many of us share that story. I don’t blame you for thinking it’s crap. It is. The current state of Eve PvP isn’t worth playing to me.
I wish you had seen what it used be.
*bows to the Don*
And to answer your question…
Yes, yes there is! We need to talk!
Game is clearly heading and relying on the kiddymillenial level of friendliness or casual fulltime working parent crowd, just to stay afloat as a company.
Nothing good to be expected of it on the long term, this game used to be mainly populated by lonely basedwelling students with depression problems, but times and people certainly do change.
Goodluck i guess ?
Give it a shot bud. Let me know if things are changed.
I hope you find a beautiful home of strife, nonsense, and numbnuttery galore.
Mo
As someone who has mostly sat on the hisec sidelines, quietly exploiting the shenanigans of others for opportunity and profit since 2009; hisec is not what it used to be.
Through necessity wardec corps have become behemoths and gankers have become organised. I expect this evolution to continue happening, I also expect to see a certain group keep complaining about them; even though it’s their own complaining that has led to a situation where they have even more to complain about.
Safaris no longer take place, the hunters having abandoned their hobby and gone elsewhere. Targeted wardecs are a thing of the past; various changes in crimewatch and intel tools having loaded the dice in favour of those that are greedy, feckless, lazy or just plain stupid.
Eve is turning into a shadow of its former self, the equivalent of a notorious retired gangster regaling others with tales of their reputation; all the while sat in a retirement home surrounded by the elderly, knitting and playing chess.
Burn it all.
edit: Hi Mo & Don
Are you writing a masterpiece that challenges the mighty tome of James 315 in its magnitude?
I’ve been doing a lot of self reflection lately and I’m really torn on how to make of all this. Since I started down my own personal ‘Dark Path’ in Eve Online, it’s always been in Highsec. Is there something about the other areas of space that make a lot of what we enjoy impossible?
If we’re all honest with each other these things are very possible if not equally possible in other areas of space. I’ve been asking myself this question lately, ”Why have I felt the need to do it in Highsec?”
It’s been strange reading a lot of you guys talk about how wars and highsec pvp was over a decade ago, and it’s glaringly obvious that it’s not even remotely the same. I am not really concerned with why it’s not the same, but more concerned with why are we sometimes so ignorant to the fact that the general playerbase and scenery of Highsec has changed, where we insist on maintaining the same?
I’m not saying that the player count has fallen so harshly because of wars, but I’m sure it has played a factor… my point is that in the Eve Online of 2018 should we be so concerned with trying to have the sandbox we had back in 2008 and beyond?
Should we be a little understanding when it comes to CCP protecting new players and giving them lots of room to grow into players that will stick around after learning the ropes?
Is less conflict or more conflict better?
The highsec of 2018 is filled with a handful of pvp groups that most of the time don’t or won’t fight each other, so there’s not a lot that’s keeping all parties involved in check. The other residents that inhabit highsec are either alts of Nullsec players, new / newer players, casual players, and lifetime highsec players. I’m not saying that it’s unfair because it’s not really… what I am saying is that you have some pvp groups in highsec that terrorize some small - medium sized industry group that has no idea how to handle this kind of conflict. Is it best if they quit the game or stay logged off? No way. We would prefer that they adapt and learn to be better, but that just simply can’t be the case all the time.
The essence of my post is that we’re faced with a ■■■■ player count and a Highsec that is devoid of meaningful content. Maybe it’s time to let CCP allow highsec be a space that’s meant to be solely for introducing new players to the game instead of the possibility of some insurmountable obstacle in player interaction.
Maybe CCP should do this and completely nerf highsec income into the ground and have real carrots on a stick pulling people into other areas of space instead of forever staying highsec residents?
Just a thought from my honest reflections.
It wouldn’t bother the likes of myself, many of us have played in other areas and often have the social networks in place that would facilitate a move out of hisec.
Cynically, I would expect the complaints to continue, just in a new vein; something along the lines of “why should I have to leave hisec to make isk?”
You’re right that complaints would shift like that, there’s no doubt about that.
Take Pirat for example… As Mercs in the scope of Highsec were a dominant force. We’re the go to group for structure contracts. All the blanket war decs are just content to fill the void and to line our pockets with the ISK of people that fall prey to the Jita 4-4 watering hole.
What’s stopping us from being that same group in a Wormhole? The answer is simple, and it’s likely a number of reasons.
The number one thing that keeps me coming back to Highsec even though I’ve dipped my toes in other areas and flown with some really great groups is that my closest friends are Highsec residents. So part of me really hopes that CCP obliterates the ■■■■ out of Highsec content so that I can finally go on to be the marauding wormhole bastard that I was meant to be (with my friends alongside me of course).
Sorry, I know this second wall of text was uncalled for. I’ll step down now 
The mechanics are a little different, and the present occupiers of that niche know them better than you
It would certainly be a different kind of warfare, one that you’d find challenging and generates good fights
On a side note IMHO most of my survival in hisec is down to spending the majority of my early years in Eve in a wormhole; you rapidly develop a sense of situational awareness and how to use dscan and probes.
Faylee,
-if we leave high sec… what will new players see and talk about. I’ve shared my exploits on this forum dozens of times, and shared stories by happy victims or customers laughing at the chaos of what we did.
-I was called a griefer, but I never truly was. I was a custodian of the noobs of Akiainavas who played a vocal hand at balancing the order of the mining community with entertaining Chaos.
If we leave, we leave only two things:
Which is better for the Indy players?
I’m just posing honest questions to myself and trying to be transparent and unbiased. I know that some level of risk, conflict, and player interaction is good and helps to continue drawing them into the game. So I’m not saying that we need to make it the land of green safeties and friendship… I’m not sure exactly what the answer is. I just know that I want more people playing the game so that we all have more people to have both positive and negative interactions with.
They’re fair questions and I hope that doesn’t come across as flippant.
I think wardecs need a nerf… we were wearing the pve guys out because we had too many wardecs. The increased cost thing just caused the pooling of assets… and the pooling of assets caused increased rules about flying nice boats… which made the problem worse in several ways.
It’s the casual chaos that made eve funny and interactive though… and I think they have to have been suffering since they got away from it… in 2012 specifically with the retribution patch.
I was a pve player for my first year. After that, I haven’t been able to keep interest in pve for any period of time… it’s the same crap over and over.
I was a PvP player for 2 years after that… and it was so good I still want to play it.
I used to tend Akiainavas like a garden. If someone was being mean, I pulled their card. If someone was being cool, I introduced them around. I ran operations in local to entertain the noobs, crashed baiters… or if they wouldn’t fight me helped a noob kill them.
It was fun… and not just for me.
Mo
rofl. “why did I do it in HS”.
You know why. HS is where concord helps you move and find target. Where it helps you be able to scout with an alt, without even taking any effort.
Now why is there nothing to burn ? Because all that remains is things that resist fire. That’s called natural selection. When a mechanism aims at killing people, only people who have the random capacity to survive it will keep living there.
When you start a game and after a month people kill your barge you saved for with ■■■■ skills, and can’t do a thing because the catalyst that killed you costs 10 times less and is easily replaced by your other activity, how do you have fun in that ?
Sorry you don’t, and you do all you can to repeat that experience.
Risk adverse “HS gankers” have made HS a place where only risk adverse players can have fun.
And now they complain that people don’t bring them the fun they denied to other players ?
You expect people to get in position to be easily beaten. And you complain when they don’t ? Maybe the game spoiled you.
You don’t know what we are talking about.
We aren’t gankers. We don’t care to kill the noobs you’re talking about.
We used to be the chiefs in a tribal war system that spanned highsec…
That all died 6 years ago… and we all quit with far more disgust at the current system than any noob you’re imagining.
We knew the current system was bad for noobs… most of us were in the business of rescuing noobs from boredom.
Yeah, we played rough… but you haven’t got a clue how much fun this game used to be… or what kind of game we are talking about.
I want you to imagine that when you are declared war on, a single hawk shows up and holds the field no matter what you send out.
He plays, win or lose… and gets to know your people. Maybe we get to be friends, maybe not… but he can be beaten.
I’ve fought wars in an ibis in order to get fights.
This game didn’t used to be like this.