No, we lost wardecs because CCP gave in to the whiners and couldn’t come up with a better solution. The problem was not that nobody could fight, it was that they refused to get better at the game and fight. Instead of coordinating and annihilating the aggressor corps they kept flying obliviously on autopilot into trade hubs and whined and cried about dying until CCP finally gave them what they wanted.
I was a CEO in the Orphanage and one of the three founding members of Concentrated Evil.
We killed ships that weren’t asleep at the wheel. Even fleets.
I actually don’t remember losing any fleet fights… usually we wouldn’t even get a good fight out of it.
I’m arguing that forcing the down-ship will bring senior and junior player conflict back to reality because new players can’t afford to undock that kind of isk.
That’s why the docked up for a week (and because they haven’t got a clue how to defend themselves… but if the baddies weren’t so overpowered perhaps they would try).
That’s nice, but it’s not CCP’s stated reason for changing wardecs. The numbers they cited were about ships getting insta-killed by overwhelming fleets, mostly in Jita, with most of the target corps failing to score even a single kill. The core of that problem was that 99% of highsec corps suck and shouldn’t exist, fly obliviously into dangerous situations because it’s “safe space”, and feel entitled to risk-free PvE farming. The solution was to let these people continue to die because EVE is survival of the fittest, but instead CCP decided to panic over player retention numbers and pander to the lazy idiots.
Your fleet fights and aware targets, as fun as they may have been, had nothing to do with the sort of conflicts that got wardecs nerfed. They were just unfortunate collateral damage.
I’m arguing that forcing the down-ship will bring senior and junior player conflict back to reality because new players can’t afford to undock that kind of isk.
Except it won’t do anything because the core problem remains: highsec has nothing worth fighting over. Newbies vs. newbies is inherently limited because nobody can afford high-end stuff, and vets vs. newbies is only appealing for vets who want one-sided killmail farming and will find a way to do it regardless of the limits.
I don’t understand your argument.
Whether it’s worth fighting over is the call of the people there, not yours.
If there is nothing worth fighting over, might as well make it more relevant to the people at that level of progression by downshipping everyone from endgame rides like T3 and Triglavian to stuff people at that level of progression can use.
I don’t really get your point.
It’s because your proposal reads as attempting to address the exact same problem that the updated wardec mechanics addressed: that of much better equipped and more experienced players picking on groups of newer, lesser equipped and generally more numerous players.
Except that the problem wasn’t really one of asymmetric fights, but of players dedicated to basically bullying other players out of the game.
Only that problem doesn’t really exist anymore.
Current wardec mechanical design. RvB. The ongoing TEST vs Horde war that basically amounts to the latter being mad that the former dropped a highsec Keepstar market hub first.
There are underlying mechanics which support PvP in highsec (in numerous ways, both consensual and not). There are also organizations which support PvP in highsec, either by design (RvB) or accident (TEST vs Horde).
Neither one seems to have problems with blingbotes ruining peoples’ day.
I’m going to take this one rather than the previous sentence because the fact of the matter is that highsec PvE is still quite profitable; mission blitzing and public Incursion fleets being the main sources that are highly visible (highsec DED plexes are probably also quite profitable but I don’t know much about them and the nature of exploration anything means that your ISK/hr is basically meaningless by virtue of being extremely dependent on loot drops and the tables thereof).
Abyssal filaments are also highly profitable, and can be run from literally anywhere in the game.
On top of all of this… a practical PvP fit Leshak is probably going to run two damage mods, which puts it ~2k DPS with Occult T2 damage ammunition at full spool, which requires ~1min 40 sec to achieve. Best-case, with 4 T2 heavy drones, you can hit ~2300 DPS cold.
This is not impossible to achieve on a Vindicator, which in a brawl will have vastly superior application due to a combination of a tracking bonus, the mids to run dual web, and the 90% web strength it gets. More than that, huge DPS is valuable, but for highly asymmetric fights like, say, HAW dreads vs whatever kind of blob (which in highsec analogize as bastion’d Marauders) having extremely robust tank is equally viable.
Perhaps more so in highsec actions, because it becomes increasingly difficult to just bring more DPS despite higher player densities.
Removing T3/Triglavian ships from highsec just means that instead whatever groups that you claim to be removing PvP opportunity in highsec will instead fly equally blinged out pirate battleships and Marauders. Maybe even blinged out Black Ops if they’re feeling both especially cheeky and especially risk averse.
There’s still RvB. And the aforementioned brawl between TEST and Horde over the Perimeter Keepstar. All the “holding corps” shtick really did was mean that small-scale newbie corps were not going to be rapidly dec’d and repeatedly ganked and farmed by so-called “elite merc corps”.
That people resort to holding corps so that their “main corps” doesn’t get dec’d (assuming of course that they want their corp to have an anchored structure for their own use) by scrubs who think that they’re good because they grief people into leaving EVE speaks to an entirely different problem that has basically nothing to do with the mechanics of highsec.
As far as I know the mercs and the griefers were primarily one and the same outside of comparatively rare cases of contracted structure removal services.
Which incidentally contracted structure removal has always relied on much more “informal” means to arrange (being that there’s no way to actually contract a service in-game outside of freight transit), and it still works.
Oh there’s the doom and gloom proclamation.
Except that RvB still exists. TEST still exists. Horde still exists. Goons still exist. And RvB is as is their longstanding tradition locked in an eternal Red vs Blue struggle that will never end (outside of purple fleets I think? was never really in RvB myself), and TEST and Horde are probably unlikely to stop fighting over the Perimeter Keepstar.
Which is literally one jump from Jita, the supreme tradehub in the game, that is also deep in highsec.
Please point out specifically where I am lying. I fully admit that I don’t have much experience in highsec PvP outside of randomly dueling a handful of people, and one welp of a gank-Hurricane into someone who was annoying me, but I don’t see anywhere that I have outright lied.
If the information that I have presented is wrong, please point out where it is wrong.
If this is regarding the “I have personal experience with the Leshak as a low-player-counter/high-SP solution to structure bashes”, then that is correct since I did actually kill an Astra in a wormhole, which I found with some help/intel from someone in the Spectrefleet channel (in fact the other person on the killmail: Astrahus | Equinox Operations | Killmail | zKillboard helped me get into the wormhole after locating a highsec entrance, and I managed to make it with ~3 minutes left on the timer before it would no longer be vulnerable).
I will grant that that is my only experience with that, but I think it still qualifies as “experience”- I perhaps could have worded it much more accurately but even so.
Probably not, since the Leshak is the only Triglavian ship that can really achieve anything resembling that limit, and under live conditions… well you basically need a whopping four damage mods, on top of overheating. Even then checking in Pyfa reveals that with 4 damage mods a Leshak will require 110 seconds to spool to full DPS (2450 DPS at all 5s, 4x radsinks, Occult, and no heat; 2818 with heat).
Pre-spool DPS is a bit over 1000- which is pretty good but that’s also still after using half of your low slots (the tank slots of an armor-tanked ship, which the Leshak is generally armor fit) is not exactly an ideal trade unless you’re doing something very specific, like Incursions.
Even then, a typical Incursion Leshak is only modestly more expensive than a comparable Incursion Vindicator, primarily due to the relatively more restricted supply chain through which Triglavian equipment is produced, and the chief conditions the Leshak comes into its own is when dealing with Assault/HQ sites, and particularly those sites which have a singular extremely-high-HP target. Like whatever the AS sites are that include tower bashes, or actually “popping the mom” of an Incursion, since I would (logically) assume that the mothership in the Kundalini Manifest HQ site would probably be one of the highest-HP PvE targets in the game that can be dealt with by a battleship fleet.
At the point which you’re considering flying Incursions with a Leshak, you’re probably going to be evaluating it against a Vindicator, or in certain cases a Kronos (I think that mostly depends on whether or not you’re the sitecaller in AS/HQ sites).
Ah, so here it comes out.
Will you also be including the T2 battleships? Because they are just as capable of unbalancing PvE/PvP conditions by comparison to their T1 and Navy counterparts (in certain cases even more so) as their pirate equivalents.
Wardecs were changed because a small subset of player corps were deliberately griefing new corporations of equally new players so that they could present themselves as and pretend to be “elite” PvP’ers because… they could farm new players for killmails 23.5/7.
And numerous sources- to include CCP- were able to track a measurable, definable impact on new player retention.
Do not for a moment think that the wardec mechanic change had anything to do with a small handful of corps being too good at PvP for anyone else to fight, rather than that they were actively detrimental to new player retention.
If it had been anybody else I’m pretty sure that some other solution would have been devised.
I’m pretty skeptical of this since AFAIK while there’s certainly quite a few people who ticker tank in CODE, I don’t think PIRAT ever had such a “following” of actually good PvP’ers who joined so that they wouldn’t instantly empty a constellation of fights and targets when someone saw their corp/alliance ticker.
That and, you know, technically a pretty good amount of them are probably Goon alts, on top of which I don’t see any of them picking a fight with TEST over the Perimeter Keepstar; if they were actually so good at PvP that they doing so then wouldn’t they have basically slapped TEST into the dirt and then forced TEST to give them the Perimeter Keepstar?
Which, you know, is a massively huge source of trade revenue (particularly in terms of brokerage/taxes from ‘offshore’ PLEX/injector/extractor trading).
While I may disagree with some of Merin’s other points this one is important:
What is there to fight over in highsec? Most of the time, that’s why people will get into a fight- particularly for low end parties.
Certainly there’s times where it’s basically “I want to have a good fight because that’s fun” or “I want to make this person cry and whine and be mad”.
But there’s not a whole lot of conflict drivers for highsec PvP- and highsec wardecs in particular- outside of “because we can” and (at present) “the Perimeter Keepstar”.
Which basically boils down to RvB and whoever decides to try and take the one and only highsec Keepstar from TEST.
So… I guess the really important question is… what exactly do you expect people to be fighting over in highsec? There’s not much in the way of moon mining, or PI, or regular mining, and how would you even contest a mission hub as a (presumably) small up-and-comer corp. Tradehub domination basically means “whoever can slap the biggest cheapest trade Citadel within one jump of Jita”… which is currently TEST so that’s probably out.
But if you can answer that question maybe you can find a better reason for why people shouldn’t get to use any and all non-capital ships (and even a few of those!; Chribba’s Veldnought still exists AFAIK, and I know for certain that there’s a popemobile that putters around Amarr looking shiny and golden every once in a while, owned by Max something-or-other).
No, it’s simple fact. Highsec has worse ISK/hour than nullsec and it is trivially easy to move to a new highsec area instead of fighting to defend your home. That’s why all the major player groups go out and build their empires in nullsec, and throw obscene amounts of ISK into wars to defend them.
If there is nothing worth fighting over, might as well make it more relevant to the people at that level of progression by downshipping everyone from endgame rides like T3 and Triglavian to stuff people at that level of progression can use.
But forced downshipping does absolutely nothing to fix the core problem. Not being able to use a T3 ship doesn’t make highsec missions pay at the level of nullsec farming. It doesn’t make scrounging for untouched asteroids in highsec pay at the level of multiboxing capitals in a nullsec mining operation. In fact, reducing the ability to use high-end ships in highsec increases the gap in income, making highsec homes even less worth defending.
Not what i said.
I’m telling you that sp loss is a piss poor balancing technique. Much like cost is a piss poor balancing technique.
The rich and old can use disproportionately powerful tools and easily recuperate the loss of such powerful tools and the poor and new are powerless unless they use extreme numbers. The irony of which being that new people don’t have a working relationship with nearly as many people as older richer players.
Yay for ■■■■ balance and ■■■■ all caring about engagement.
Like it or not, hi-sec is where your game is. This IS a game of interactions. To say otherwise is an outright lie or fundamental lack of understanding. And the vast VAST majority of interaction happens in hi-sec. Trade, war, chatter, production, destruction…hi sec DWARFS the other areas. Delve surpases the forge in some areas, but hi-sec far surpases null sec.
Don’t be content with the ■■■■ state that hi-sec is. It’s the crux of the game and always has been (it actually used to be 80%).
Treating it like a noob area got us into the crap hole we’re in now in the first place. Players are bored. Hi-sec pvp is a ‘joke’, faction warfare is full of bots, low sec is worthless and empty, null sec is ‘supers or gtfo’ and living in wormholes needs next level dedication.
If everyone is supposed to start as a small fish in a big pond, your suggestion is to change nothing at all about the ■■■■ show that is hisec and tell them to go to the barren wasteland that is low, join the super blobs of null or live alone in a wormhole?
Meanwhile the industry characters and traders in hi-sec (some of the oldest and richest players in the game) should be ignored?
That’s your argument?
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Just because you don’t like my house doesn’t make it any less valuable to me.
Isk per hour is a major motivator for some… for some it’s not. Role players, many pvp’ers, space fans, many miners… don’t care.
We come to the game for things besides hoarding isk and being arrogant about.
I don’t care about isk. I care about people and interaction and stories and fun. I love conflict and strife and surprises.
Highsec used to be much richer in those areas than anywhere else. That was why I was all highsec PvP.
It’s worth defending. It’s worth saving. You just don’t get it.
We may be so far apart as to make arguing not worthwhile.
We see this all fundamentally very differently.
You see aggressors as bullies, I see them as initiators of the drama that fuels the game.
I think they’re critical to the life blood of Eve… you’re happy they’re gone.
We can agree to disagree. I don’t understand why you think having such high end ships in a noob space so devoid of value is necessary.
If it’s a noob zone, why are there so many senior players flying around in multibillion isk ships? Shouldn’t they go somewhere else with those swooptie ships?
Don’t you want bullies to have to fly crappier ships that gimp their “bullying”?
This proposal would seem to suit everyone, to me. It bridges the power gap between new and old and helps our new players compete and try new things without being outpaced by ridiculous levels by senior players in pve and PvP.
The wardec corps are not targeting new players. This was explicitly explained by ccp.
Pushing your agenda with lies.
The exact opposite is happening.
Players are using holding corps for their structures and members are in different corps.
Is pvp up? No.
Is destruction of citadels up? No.
Is player activity up? No it instead looks like it’s down.
How do you think more pvp translates to more structures and therefore more wardecs?
No it didn’t. Read it again.
They said it had an effect on corp activity. There is no indication that they tracked members after they left corp.
They said nothing of new members other than they weren’t targeted.
Or…
Link your numerous sources.
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This is stupid, we got people with piss in their Cheerios about some ■■■■■■■■ claiming that even more ■■■■■■■■ will fix the ■■■■■■■■ problem. See, it’s all ■■■■■■■■. I’m done with this thread.
Thank you for your succinct, cogent, and valuable input.
I hope your next thread is more pleasing.
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From what I understood of the, for lack of a better term, social issues surrounding the previous wardec mechanics and the fact that they were often (mis)used to indulge in fairly low-risk PvP by people that wanted to pretend to be elite by farming killmails from others who either did not know how or would refuse to fight back.
There is also the issue that there is much more “drama” initiated over assets and resources that ‘matter’ (like that one highsec Keepstar…) than by random pretentious fools who think that they are good at a game because they can swat players that do not understand or refuse to fight back.
I am happy that the mechanics by which people could with near zero risk farm new players in highsec corps have been changed.
I don’t see how this has impacted groups like RvB or the spillover of the nullsec great powers or even just random “merc” corps deciding to wardec corps that have made the decision that they want to participate in PvP.
In fact this is something that gets brought up in the official devblog from early December 2018; very literally:
We believe that the best EVE experiences involve players making informed choices with benefits and consequences. As much as possible we want to avoid having the game’s systems push players into situations where avoiding social interaction in NPC corps or logging off for a week are optimal choices.
[taken from here: War Declaration Changes - The War Adjacent to Christmas | EVE Online]
So clearly the previous wardec mechanics were a failure in that regard, because there was little explanation and no real ability for most new player corps to make an informed decision that yes, they wanted to be involved in formal wars with other player organizations.
Particularly since if they were forced into it then they either ended up dropping corp and/or logging off for a week or more- like is mentioned in the devblog.
I don’t see a reason to classify highsec as “noob space”, nor do I see a reason to artificially regulate subcapital assets unless you can provide clear examples of ways in which these tools would be systematically abused to grief- as defined in the EULA- other players.
I can think of ways to do that with MJFGs, and as much as it pains me I accept that it is probably better for the health of the game if MJFGs cannot be used in highsec (as is currently the case).
I can’t think of ways to do that with a Triglavian ship or T3 ship that I couldn’t do with… basically any other equivalent pirate faction or T2 ship… or even extremely blinged out T1 ships.
Would you prohibit the use of anything bigger than a T1 battlecruiser and any modules besides faction for any and all endeavors in highsec? Because that’s… kind of where this sort of thinking can easily end up leading.
I think there are much better solutions than artificial regulation of subcapital ship access, and I think that the current mechanics are a much better implementation as-is than what you propose.
First off: I did not lie.
Secondly; I fully admit that going over the devblog and the Winter Summit minutes… the devblog says nothing about this, but the Winter minutes do note that CCP Lebowski showed the CSM data that indicated that few new players are getting dec’d.
So I do admit- I was wrong about that statement; however I did find where I got that impression- that being some anecdotal accounts from this reddit thread: Reddit - Dive into anything; it’s the second most-upvoted comment in that thread from a u/zylithi.
So I don’t think that it’s fundamentally wrong to argue that wardec corps were harmful to NPE in certain cases, but I do agree that it is misleading and I will try to be more clear as to what my position is on that.
However the overall sentiment- that there were corps whose only goal was to generally use wardec mechanics to ruin the enjoyment of other players, does still stand. The same CSM minutes that clarify that very few new players get caught up in wardecs also states that the data CCP presented to the CSM on activity during active and after an active wardec was a stark drop compared to prior to the wardec.
It’s not possible to argue that the previous iteration of the wardec mechanics did allow for some enormously lopsided odds to form. In fact the exact quote from the minutes is [devblog here: The CSM 13 Winter Summit Minutes | EVE Online, direct link to minutes here: https://assets.ctfassets.net/7lhcm73ukv5p/4tSKkWWjRe0yagAAYgOUYC/99b4c9be6477bafab52de5b85b786ff5/CSM_13_Winter_Summit_Minutes.pdf]:
CCP Larrikin pulls up activity data for players of corporations that have wars declared against them
and it shows considerable activity drops in all activities during the war. They also show that the low
activity continues after the war ends. Brisc Rubal noted that the numbers here were so stark, it
would justify immediately removing war decs as a mechanic and promising a fix after the fact. The
CSM in general were surprised at how stark the numbers were and noted it was clear this mechanic
was having a significant impact on player recruitment and retention.
[the above quote was taken from page 12 of the minutes in the economy section]
So it seems that there is some kind of impact on overall player retention to the game, even if it isn’t strictly new players that are being affected.
I rechecked the devblog and the minutes, and yes the devblog didn’t say anything, the minutes did not particularly not new player retention, however it the text does seem to indicate that overall player retention seemed to be down due to the previous wardec mechanics.
I may be interpreting the information incorrectly, however the only way to be certain would be to grab one of the CSM or a dev who was present for the minutes to confirm either way… which probably wouldn’t happen because that would be a pretty big marketing fail on CCP’s part.
Unfortunately this means that we are left with supposition as to the actual data referenced and what it means.
The specific quote is as follows, from page 9 of the minutes under the War Declarations section:
Lebowski brings up the data which shows that it’s not actually a lot of brand new players that are
being war decced, because they are not worth declaring war on most likely. Typically it´s more
established corporations that get hit once they are big enough to be a target. This does however still
affect new players such as in Karmafleet, Brave Newbies and so on indirectly through which
corporations are being decced. The CSM feels that looking at the corporations being decced is not
the approach but rather we should focus on the the age and retention rates of the players who die
due to war.
There’s also this interesting detail (also from page 9 in the War Declaration section) which would also seem to disassemble OP’s point about banning T3s/Triglavian ships (and as he also noted pirate battleships):
Fozzie asks about the size difference between the corporations involved and what the CSM feels
about it. Jin’taan and Sort Dragon point out that while the deccers may be outnumbering/oppressing
the victim, it’s more so because they are selecting their targets and looking for the easy wins. An
example is mentioned: An industrial player undocks from Jita and gets attacked by 5 war deccers
and their logi alts. This makes Innominate point out that assistance from those who are not party to
the war needs to be addressed.
Which also incidentally seems to indicate that the value of the previous wardec mechanics were not at all healthy for the game given that it basically amounted to people picking the lowest-risk fights they could that would still allow them to easily farm killmails.
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I applaud the effort you put into this. I wish you had a bit more experience with what happened with the highsec PvP community since 2012. I think you’ve only experienced the recent state of wars which has been broken for years.
The recent state of highsec PvP is something most of us would contend was deeply damaged.
Before 2012, highsec PvP was in the fields of flipping/baiting and wardecs. A wardec cost 2 mil. Flipping was free.
We were all broke, flying silly little ships and causing as much chaos as we could. I spent more of my time looking for fights in a T1 frigate.
The Retribution patch made the risks of theft unbalanced, causing flipping to go away almost overnight. And wardecs increased in cost 25x… making them too expensive for little corps (of about 3 to 5 guys… who could actually be beaten and were usually flying T1 ships because those inspired people to fight), causing an exodus of the PvP community.
Well, the remaining guys split into 2 groups. The true griefers who loved tears became code… bumping miners and ganking in a multi year protest against the Isk-hoarding direction of the game.
The ones who liked fighting joined up with the new merc alliances just to get fights. Those mercs were controlled by whoever was paying for the wars… and there were rules. Lose a stupid build, you’re out. Lose a “poor”, you’re out. Stuff like that.
So in came risk aversion, overtanking, and lots of other toxic activities. Out when the chaos of yesteryear and all the fun and numbnuttery that we used to cause.
Highsec became pve people who had no way to dabble in PvP. They were being slaughtered en masse by a 7 year gate/station camp made up by the portion of the PvP community who was willing to spend 7 years blapping flashies with almost no real fights and limited freedom. All my friends quit.
Code was left too… and I agree with their protest. The direction of the game is towards stagnation and boredom.
I just don’t find ganking or gate camping to be worth my login time. Now the gate camping is over because the pve crowd has the ability to simply opt out of it for no cost.
So what I’m saying is that we are arguing apples and oranges. I’m talking about something different than what you are. I didn’t like PvP in Eve since 2012…
I’m arguing for the small boat, solo and small gang numbnuttery of yesteryear where we used to giggle as much as we shot our guns.
The main obstacle I see to your proposal is that it seems a rabbit hole; if overtanked excessively expensive T3C/Triglavian ships are the “problem” right now, and are banned… then the people using these ships will just move to pirate battleships.
Or Marauders. Or Command Ships. Or even HACs (the dual rep battery Deimos is pretty absurd in itself) or pirate cruisers (the ability of an Orthrus to farm light and even heavy tackle is practically self-evident).
Maybe it eventually ends with these merc corps using ships and methods that make them look an awful lot like a lot of nullsec micro/smallgang PvP’ers but they’re probably also still piling on a huge quantity of neutral logi alts to save themselves if things get too hairy- a luxury that is usually, well, a luxury that more traditional smallgang groups can’t afford.
Maybe it ends with the merc groups disappearing and most of the highsec “wars” consisting of RvB (which AFAIK still functions as you describe, being full of people that just want to have fun fights with each other), or spillover from nullsec.
On one hand it’s a technical loss of conflict drivers, but on the other hand the way that the mechanic and the use of the mechanic ‘naturally’ grew over the past half decade seems to me to indicate an issue that has little to do with the ships available to the players and more to do with the motivations and reasons to fight.
FW in lowsec is pretty broken, yes, but it still has uses even for someone who isn’t even part of the FW militias if you want a way to exercise great control over your engagement profile, and a lot of the reasonably busy FW constellations/systems are also pretty close to highsec (it’s ~8 jumps from the Amarr hub out to Huola/Kamela/Kourmonen for example, and Huola itself has a highsec border that doesn’t seem particularly camped that would be reasonably convenient to stage out of if you wanted to be closer than the tradehub itself).
There’s even still opportunity to roam out through null if you’re interested in epic arcs or even just going for a roam in general.
Functionally speaking they could always opt out at little-to-no cost by going back to an NPC corp, or corp-hopping to a new outfit that hadn’t been dec’d (yet), or even just straight up not logging in.
I am hard pressed to find it a bad thing that they have an alternative that at least keeps them logging into the game contributing in their own way to the gameworld, even if it’s only as a source of faction modules, implant production, and the usual cycle of production/destruction of acquiring and every so often losing ships for their PvE activities.
Perhaps it’s a problem that they can no longer be “brought to battle” against their will unless you go in for suicide ganking, but… how much worse is that than that they cannot be “brought to battle” because they simply don’t play the game anymore (even if only for the duration of the wardec)?
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As for the rabbit hole, I’d argue the question is whether a well flown T1 can beat it.
For marauders and even command ships, I’d argue that they can be beaten if their drawbacks are known and exploited by a knowledgeable pilot.
For me personally, T3s are maneuverable, small, high dps, with good range, and they’re fast and heavily tanked. Literally, there’s no drawback to exploit… and if they’re in a team you just can’t kill them fast enough to outpace the arrival of their buddies.
I think the question of whether they negate the use of T1 ships is the datum line.
As for forced PvP on people, I think it needs to be metered. I think it is more important for people to see fights as they drive through systems than to have fights forced upon them.
My concern isn’t that I can’t force PvP on people so much as that nobody is pvping anymore.
Think about it… are you seeing fleets camping gates or hunting? I’m not. When was the last time you saw someone get his butt kicked?
If someone logged in to evaluate Eve today, is it dark and gritty and dangerous or is it uneventful, uninteractive, and grindy?
That’s a nebulous standard though; are we assuming two equally (player) skilled pilots? Is the one counterfitting/picking so as to optimize his chances of killing the other? Even assuming that there are drawbacks and disadvantages that can be exploited, considering the previous data that lots of these groups transitioned towards much more risk averse methodologies I’m doubtful that any artificial restriction of ship access would be remotely healthy.
Maybe you could get away with doing it to T3Cs (though this does present a slight issue to the distribution of T3C hulls and subsystems, since like most things the bulk of it is traded through Jita), but T3Ds don’t really represent that level of capability, nor do Triglavian ships really do so either.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ongoing engagement in highsec that wasn’t part of a duel or random suspect baiting, over off-and-on playing for a bit over seven years now.
So I suppose the answer is “never”, but OTOH it’s also “about 5 days ago when I managed to duel a particularly bad player who thinks they’re the best at EVE ever because I duelled their Rattlesnake in a dual rep Domi and they won”.
Which kind of makes the point doesn’t it? There’s not been those random fights like that unless they were consensual in the first place- or else people being outright jebaited and bamboozled into a fight that they thought they could easily win (or at least escape) and found that they really couldn’t.
Thankyou for going through it.
But wardeccers are not just noob stomping. They are just stomping. And that hasn’t really changed since the latest wardec nerfs.
Several years ago it was made unsustainable to be in a small wardec corp and find targets/content to feed your members. So wardeccers merged into bigger groups and hub camped. Any that didn’t were probably starved of content and quit.
The latest wardec changes only further that kind of behavior. Fewer, bigger wardec corps who cannot be beaten in a straight fight. Anyone that doesn’t join up probably wont be here for much longer.
And if wardecs were so oppressive to the games retention of players, then where is everyone since thousands of players are now immune to decs? The last wardec nerf didn’t improve player retention and this one appears to be having the same effect.
I don’t think the issue of bling ships is the main driver for crappy decs. I’m not defending the op’s idea as much as I’m attacking peoples misconception that wardecs are used for noob stomping (or that anyone who wants to pvp should get out of highsec and ignore the whales). It’s merely that small outfits are incapable of conducting wardecs. So they are forced to join with big players, who stomp anyone and everyone.
All this talk of saving new players, but what about the new players that want to get into wardecs? We are constantly raising the barrier of entry into the most engaging part of the game, pvp.
Hunting miners is how many older players first cut their teeth in pvp. You want to call it bullying, but that is players having an impact on the game, on the players, around them. CCP have said that such moments when a player has agency, can influence their surroundings, feels empowered are great for a players retention. And for a lot of new players, hunting someone and meaningfully impacting their game is when they fell in love with EVE.
“the risk of having your day ruined by other people is the cornerstone with which EVE was built” -CCP Solomon
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I’m fine if we just agree to disagree.
I would argue that T2 ships were designed to be beatable. Yes, you can kill them if you know how to fight. Most players fly poorly.
I’ve got a couple threads on maneuver technique, you should check them out. I bet you would get an idea of what I’m talking about.
I wrote one recently called “a good fight”… kind of details the thought process of a frigate fight from a perspective with which you may not be familiar.
Oh, and I’m not doing this for me. I’m proposing this to make PvP accessible to new players.
The core PvP elements of this game right now are just too hard to fight. They will decentralize if we give a better fighting mechanic. And they will be fightable to lower skilled players with a few changes.
We need those fights back. My system in 2010-2011 was crowded with baiters and flippers. I could find a fight in 15-20 minutes most days. Probably once a week my Corp or another local Corp had a fleet camping is.
People undocked to go mine through fleets, they watched smack in local chat, they had that entertainment.
I haven’t witnessed a fleet, smack talk, or a fight in highsec in ages.
It doesn’t happen anymore.
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Mo’ is right.
While I am not sure of the practicalities and feasibility of the sweeping changes proposed in the OP, one of the major core problems with the game is that CCP has failed to solve the inherent ‘increasing power gap’ problem of a persistent game. Highsec is not the “new player zone” - that is the starter systems. Instead it is a zone as much a part of the sandbox as anywhere else, maybe more so than most given the very high activity levels and the fact it is the place new players are dumped into the universe. The rules shape the conflict to be more new/sol/casual friendly, but dismissing it as a only PvE zone when it is so integrated to the rest of New Eden has gotten us into the current mess we are in.
Instead of trying to continue to shape and balance highsec to support accessible conflict, CCP instead took the easier tack of just nerfing content and trying to build more walls for balance. This works to some extent to “balance” the game to make a space for the less capable, but has the predictable consequence of eventually driving away most of the activity. The harder you make content to generate, the less people will play your game - this isn’t a revelation to anyone stepping back and looking top-level down on the game. Further, it has the problem that is just makes it even harder for new players to compete economically by allowing established veterans with their uber-powered ships hyper-farm highsec completely out-competing any true new player, killing a whole other class of content - newbie accessible industry - by providing a safe space for veterans to spawn resources into the universe.
I see the rationale of the OP and it was the same one used ages ago to remove capitals from highsec. Designing the game from scratch, I absolutely agree with this idea - I would make highsec T1 ships only, lowsec the realm of pirate ships, T2 (and maybe T3 if they were balanced as intended) and then nullsec and WHs the land of capital ships and the more exotic overpowered items so the various sectors of space give multiple ways to play the game, some new player-friendly and some end game. As of now, we have such a power gap that capital ship warfare dominates any real conflict outside of highsec, and meaningful highsec conflict is the realm of a handful of completely blinged out expensive ships (often sitting on the undock) that no new player has a hope of competing without an unrealistic excess of numbers. Probably only wormholes, with the mass limits shaping the types of ships used, and the end-game level of resources present is in a healthy-ish state, but it isn’t new/solo/casual friendly.
The game would be more interesting if there were places where all types of ships could be used without any non-play fight just escalating to the top-tier ship well beyond the reach of a newer player. I think it is probably too late, and far too much effort, for CCP to attempt to implement the ideas in the OP, but I am very sympathetic to motivations behind it. And I think even CCP kinda realizes this as Resource Wars was an attempt to bring some organic balance back by limiting the types of ships so new players and veterans could fly together in ships of more similar power. Too bad that failed.
Honestly, I am pretty pessimistic at this point. Not only has power creep made it so new players are having a harder time than ever competing in meaningful PvP, the addition of Skill Trading and the tacit acceptance and prevalence of multiboxing makes it even harder for new players to compete economically with the established veterans who can leverage multiple accounts to scale their income massively. Instead of closing the power gap, Skill Trading exploded it, and I honestly wonder why any new player would stick with this game given how much of an advantage the established players have. Their only hope to catch up now is to join up with an existing power bloc.
This game will not grow again until CCP finds away to allow meaningful conflict/competition/cooperation to go on for newer, small group and casual players. I think it probably is already too late given the lack of courage and resources CCP seems to have left, but if there is any chance, it is the Hail Mary Pass that the upcoming war revamp will contain something that will give purpose and space to the little guys who have been pushed out of the game by highsec safety creep and general power creep.
Hmm. So I guess +1 for this idea? Certainly +1 as part of a general revamp of how the game works.
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