You guys are bonkers. CCP has done nothing but buff your playstyle and you’re still complaining. Just off the top of my head they . . .
added attack battlecruisers
made cruisers viable ganking ships
removed the rate of fire penalty from tech I destroyers
added easily scannable mobile tractor units that CONCORD does not protect
suspect timers
changed barges which undoubtedly lead to more of them IN SPACE
alpha clones (i.e. easy targets)
logistics buffs (victims rarely had RR)
If I actually sat and thought about it, I’d probably have a list that was three times as long. What you should consider is that maybe the players are adapting and maybe new players are entering the sanbox and are better prepared for New Eden than their predecessors.
It’s easy to blame external forces but ultumately, you were probably just lucky that the game had the demographic that it did, doe-eyed RPGers looking for guilds and quests to level up their space mount. But that was last decade. Some of those players have figured the game out and some of the newbies never played Dungeons & Dragons. You’re probably going to have to adapt to a changing galaxy . . . if you can.
This will result in a significant EHP buff to ships that can’t or don’t fit Damage Controls, but most of those already have very low hull hitpoints. The impact is Freighters, but we like to pair buff and nerfs to suicide ganking to keep things in balance, and after the February Wreck HP change these ships can handle a bit more tank without the “predator and prey” environment being thrown out of whack.
Now, taking CCP Fozzie’s clear acknowledgement of that nerf and combining his statement that CCP like to pair nerfs and buffs, then even your own list suggests a whole series of nerfs to ganking in recent years.
I also like this:
changed barges which undoubtedly lead to more of them IN SPACE
More barges in space means a buff to ganking? Lol. Show us the stats that prove this.
Actually no need. Here’s the stats for barge loss in highsec from the start of 2014 to mid last-month:
A small point, but to be more precise… You CAN have multiple alpha accounts logged in at once, just not with a single simple PC setup. Basic VMs and multiple PCs both work, they may be more common than you have considered.
was immediately followed by banning of boomerang and removal of insurance for ganks.
needed for pvp usage of said ships, and in any case the neureus hauler achieves 40k ehp, which a vexor can’t gank solo.
which you aren’t forced to use.
lost can flipping.
procurer has 60k ehp with 175 dps and scram/web. if you shield tank it, it still mines, and if you hull tank it, it has a prop mod and neuts. ie you can take the bloody thing to uedama and kill -10 cats with it.
neureus (gallente most popular alpha and they have a gank resistant hauler), and the second point makes no sense.
Eves mechanisms are unique, there isn’t any real substitute for playing it to learn it. I can’t imagine that anything has really changed with respect to new player knowledge.
Scipio you do realise that when I pointed out Fozzie applied the DCU buff to freighters it was to balance off against the EHP wreck of freighters being buffed which ended AG players fun at ganking ganked wrecks, I was laughed at and told I was wrong. Thanks for linking that.
If that wreck EHP had not been changed the entire ganking environment would be a lot different to what it is now because the AG players were actively going for that tactic.
Do you have details of how many people bother to mine in hisec, I would guess a big reduction…
And a question for the OP, have you even contemplated that what is left in hisec are players that are completely bored with that gameplay.
Let me take ninja salvaging, when I was in Osmon it was oh dear another Ninja salvager trying to get me to react, it was boring as hell. And of course the reprocess rates was nerfed so much and the LP’s better if you blitzed it worked out that way. So you count that as a nerf to griefing?
I wasnt responding to you, so that isn’t really relevant.
A claim was made (not by you, by Morgan) that there have only been buffs to ganking. That claim is false, which that quote helps demonstrate.
The quote is also relevant in showing that for every buff he thinks he can show, there’ll equally be a nerf elsewhere, making his claim even more untrue.
Outside that scope for quoting Fozzie, I don’t really care.
Of course there is a hamfisted attempt to balance, that one is a perfect example where CCP destroyed completely a direct player lead attack on the gankers by their own stupidity and ganker aligned CSM advice and made it easy again. Of course you don’t care.
I don’t care whatever crusade you are now on. Of course I care about the direction of the game and design decision CCP make. I don’t personally agree with the effect of the wreck HP buff on the gank meta either, though I agree with the logic behind the change.
But that wasn’t the purpose of me quoting and taking what I wrote out of context is expected I guess. But I honestly don’t have any fucks to give on that at the moment.
I quoted Fozzie to demonstrate how incorrect Morgan was. Your claim of quoting it,blah, blah, I couldn’t give a hoot about.
It has nothing to do with me, so just move on and pick a different fight. I responded to Morgan. Nothing to do with you.
I will give you some credit for honesty here, the thing here is that I agree with increasing the wreck EHP overall, but this is a multi faceted game and decisions have knock on affects, such as removing the watch list which was killing escalation in null sec and that killed hunter killer war deckers in hisec.
What many people who post here fail to realise is that balancing is difficult and not all impacts are intended.
If we talk about can flipping that can be done easily still, but the can flipper goes suspect, so any one can shoot him, and that is too high a risk for can flippers. People also got bored with that too, I just warp to the station unload ore and get back to it, feck them.
I also detailed above the ninja salvage impact, but people shoot MTU’s and they still get kills, but oh dear another one, it got old pretty quick.
AWOX’ing, it was funny and I enjoyed the stories, however as every man and his dog did it most players in hisec gave up on recruiting new players causing major issues in terms of engagement, hence the arrival of the friendly fire yes/no. People can still AWOX, but they can only do that in lowsec and nullsec and that has risk.
When I joined the game as Dracvlad in 2009 I had read a lot of C&P, what was striking to me is that much of the gameplay was based around gotcha mechanics, people who had worked out how to use the mechanics to create bugs which they then exploited, my favourite one which really shocked me was in October 2009 when a corpmate in a mission with another corp mate suddenly going suspect when he had not done a damn thing, I talked to him afterwards and went through everything he had done when these players came in. So what I found was that there was a top tier of players who were finding such mechanic issues and using them and that has not changed, it just got harder and this is also a major part of people saying that griefing is being nerfed.
Mining ships were not re-balanced in terms of tank for many years after destroyers were buffed to have high DPS, and now they have been, so your choices matter. I can argue that the two and a half years of not adjusting mining ship tank was a massive buff to ganking, I can also argue that the decision to not treat hyperdunking as an exploit was a major buff to ganking. and yet when it was ended with a nerf that screwed up other play the gankers cried nerf to ganking having directly benefited from it
There have been plenty of buffs to ganking, most gankers pretend that they did not happen…
The OP made a very valid point is that there is no benefit to taking risk and it gets even better when certain activities have no risk which he also realised.
Anyway my post was not to attack you, more to point out to the freighter gankers again that they had a buff there because I can tell you now they really found it difficult to defend against wreck poppers. and there staring at you right in your face is a great big buff!!!
Welcome back to the game Garresh! I thought I’d post as well so that along with yourself and Bladewise, we have more Suddenly Ninjas dudes posting in a thread than at anytime since 2013.
Mobadder_Thworst has a couple of excellent threads in the Crime and Punishment forum that hit on some of the same points. I think the biggest issue here has less to do with risk free PVE than it does with how silent and boring High Sec has become. You can go to the old mission hubs and other systems and local chat there is silent as the grave. Literally, nothing is going on other than people leveling up their drake/raven.
What’s missing is compelling conflict and Bad Guys. Sure, the Savior of High Sec has a few acolytes running around, but they really only rev up the odd miner or three. There is no question that this results in a lot of dudes playing for a few weeks, thinking this game was going to be hard and dangerous, finding out that for the most part, unless you’re mining in an untanked Retriever like an idiot, it’s not all that dangerous at all.
EVE Online used to allow you to Be The Bad Guy. Starting from the first week in Akiainavas (or wherever you were), you would see lively banter in Chat, people frequently shooting at each other, stealing from each other, competing. Many of these systems were more violent than Tama or Rancer and made the game feel more dangerous and alive. If you wanted to try your hand at thievery or whatever shenanigans you could come up with, it was easy to do so. This led to newer players testing the PVP waters in a very low stakes fashion and created player-based conflicts, even if they were only over some few 100K ISK worth of Veld or wreck full of craptastic modules. If I wanted to steal your stuff, only you and your corpmates could stop me. This encouraged new players to get into groups and tempted a lot of players to “grab that special piece of loot” where, today, the notion of going Suspect to ALL OF NEW EDEN, is really only something that older players who are baiting are willing (and eager) to do.
Crimewatch was a huge mistake. It certainly made the aggression mechanics easier to understand, but made for a High Sec setting (let’s not forget, this is still where a huge majority of New Eden’s players are located) where the only conflict you might encounter is the occasional CODE gank, a few scams, some ridiculous Sleepers that you probably shouldn’t aggress on gates (or if at all really) and that’s just about it. Along with the failcascade of Walking in Stations and Monacle Gate, this has led us to Pre Apocrypha numbers.
Personally, I don’t much care what they do for PVE players, but I do hope they’ll bring some content back for new players who want to make mischief. The game is better when the Bad Guys are other players that interact with you, make you mad, make you want to exact revenge, etc. Mining Incursions aren’t likely to do that and though I think they will help build some community in much the way that Incursions did so, I don’t think they’ll fix the problem of a boring and just flat out, uninteresting High Sec.
I don’t have time right now to offer detailed responses, but let me just say that lost ships graph is pretty damning. I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten. I thought(incorrectly) that code was making a bigger impact. I was even considering messing with them in a friendly manner as “revenge” by stealing from their gank wrecks. Though to be fair I’d do that without incentive. I like stealing. Now I’m thinking I may train up a gank alt and join them just to keep the pressure up. We need that balance of heroes and villains. It’s why Goonswarm is by and large good for the game even if they’re toxic as hell and exploit and manipulate constantly. Whatever your personal love or hate for a particular group, villains are a necessary part of any sandbox.
I see Fozzie using the wreck HP buff as an excuse to justify the nerf to freighter ganking like they had already concluded they wanted to do. If you actually believe CCP buffed every ship in the game as a way of balancing the ganker/ag meta(lol!), well… everyone knows Drac is a very gullible and conspiracy-minded person…
You believe that not me, Freighters cannot use a DCU mate, apart from shuttles every other ship can, so I refer you to what Scipio posted above. You are as per normal one incredibly dumb poster.
coughactually you cancough Though you risk getting banned if reported and they find out your doing it. Most multiboxxing gankers use the exploit, because they risk nothing having all their alpha accounts banned on a proxy IP. I know quite a few people who use the trick, and have not been banned for using it since alpha clones were added.
Then name them, and report them, otherwise there’s no reason to believe you. It’s correct that it’s easily doable, but if gankers get caught multiboxing alphas, they’ll get banned with them. It’s not rocket science to draw the obvious connection. anyhow, you not reporting them makes me want to report you.
