BlackOut: Dissecting the Experiment

But, I like your posts, hit-and-miss for the audience

Stay, out of spite

“good” = ‘accurate’. I know players who were not happy and were not playing. :frowning:

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Depending how strong the BO, I find antiperspirant is ideal in most circumstances. As for undocking in a local channel blackout, chuck the deodorant can out the window and listen intently until it hits something.

I like that they want us to take psych meds just to play eve.

In unshocking news I don’t need to run an empathy test to detect different views or playstyles, because I’ve played this game. If Hilmar or Falcon have ever personally run a 24-hour nullsec evac, or fought an actual null war, I’d take their opinion into consideration.

What an amazing message, in 2019 where we wake up every day to a vicious world. So you want your core demographic of 25-55 year olds to put aside their lives whilst you ejaculate stupid ideas on our faces.

Oh dear, something happened in real life that sucks up all of our time.

As it happens - and as CCP knows (or do they, really) - the Northern Hemisphere is on fire right now. Brexit is a massive national trauma. We wake up daily to news of school shootings/200 immigrants drowned at sea/and venomous political polarisation. We don’t need to log into a ‘cold, dark world’.

We’ve been living it, ingame and in the real world. Wind your neck in.

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The initial problem was there was no timeframe. If they had put on their big boys pants and come out to say “this is a test. It will be over in 2 month”, we could have all potentially looked at it as experiment and given appropriate feedback.

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facts. that said I really wish they would’ve just delayed local. I still wish they would delay local by 60s - 2min. Its like a compromise between pvpers and PVErs that want their perfect intel channel.
“Hunters/scouts/tackle u have 60sec of not being in local, make the best of it, good luck. ok 60s is up, you are in local now, they see u and they have clicked warp, they’re now 100% safe, u took too long”
2min is the time it takes for my cloaky legion to get on top of a VNI and tackle it (200m/s vs 1k m/s) but 60s is enough time for my arazu to get on grid and make a mess of a vni.
Delayed local should also be “if you arent in a system longer than 60s or 2min then you dont ever show up in that local and thus can be unreported on intel channels” (including reported to NEAR 2 apps that make ratting and mining even more safe)

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putting a time frame on it would’ve effected the results of their experiment. they wanted the raw data from this. Would’ve had players unsubbing to return later. they wanted to see who would’ve actually quit quit for real.

controls for experiments aren’t always enjoyable.

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yea and the result is a debacle. And no data. And potentially no more players pending on how many of us will fully return to the game

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well their accountants have the actual data that matters to them. we’ll never see that data. Most ppl are still in their circles. Cant resist the eve call for long. Gotta have our internet spaceships bro.
Its an addiction. That said I hope they delay local in the future. Removing it and complete blackout mightve been the wrong move but bringing it back completely is also the wrong move (opinion). Should throw us pvpers a bone and give us a 60s delay or 2min delay so we can have a chance to actually kill these VNIs that are alrdy in warp to their astrahaus before we have even loaded our gate grid. Where’s the fun in roaming 20j to watch other people dock and get lucky enough to shoot that one weirdo that wasn’t in comms or in an intel channel that happened to take 1 gate in his miasmos?

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So I’m not experienced enough in Null to evaluate this (effects of delayed local on Null). However the player base reaction to “local blackout” seems a pretty strong indication that “total blackout is too much”.

How do people think “delayed local” would work to keep things not entirely “big blue donut” safe, but not so unsafe that people simply refuse to participate? How long of a delay would be effective?

And as usual, the killer question is: “how would people abuse/exploit/evade/get around” a delay? Especially if as suggested, a <delay time spent jumping through a system means you would never show up at all (thus intel from the next couple systems over might miss you).

  • Could you jump in, scan down a target, mark it, jump back out, jump back in, and warp straight to your target? Each step in under the “delay” timer so you never showed up at all?
  • Would people just watch/scan gates? Could that be botted?
  • Someone mentioned that gate activations show in some log file. No idea if true, but could something like this be used to bypass local notifications?
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Instead of having a delayed local, why not implementing a subspace radar station. Every so many seconds all ships in the system get pinged and are added to the local. That way, bots do not get more data than now initially and there would be counterplay, which can also be countered (destruction of the radar station). Could also see the introduction of a spoofing module, to hide your presence for 1 ping (module burns out)

As for your original question, yes, total blackout is too much, delay would be nice. There should be at least that much time it takes to perform one combat scan before you enter local. 10-15 seconds sounds ok, but needs testing nonetheless. If someone were to use the delay stratetically (by jumping back and forth) that would be ok to me since that counts as tactics in my book.

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Well a radar pinging every 60 seconds is pretty close to a delayed local, except that people would first enter to determine the cycle of the radar, then they would just enter after a ping and have a 59 second delay.

Having a space structure that could be countered, ewarred, or ‘anti-Sov’d’ (from my OP idea of sov currency mechanics) could be interesting.

I also like the idea of a ‘spoofing module’ that gives you some time without detection. I’ve been tinkering with the concept of adding 3 “consumable” slots to your ship HUD, which would be something like boosters for ships. These would be consumable, use once and then need fitting service to restock (not auto-reload like ammo). Maybe have an offense slot, a defense slot, and a utility slot. The utility slot could have something like a spoof device in it that gives you 1-2 minutes ‘not detected’ before burning out.

That would deal somewhat with the notion of people abusing delay timers to pop in and out, since it would be one-shot and then you need to refit.

(I won’t go into the other uses for Offense/Defense/Utility consumables here other than to say that they are intended to both shake the combat system up a little and be an ISK sink.)

The experiment itself can be considered fail but it will never be accepted as such because from the beginning, it was shielded by an undebatable argument. So, no use even mentioning.

But I can tell you what failed.
It was the opening statements. Saying this crapscade was in favor of one group over another was the mistake.

It’s wrong when it derived in discussions within alliances, corporations and friends in general. That’s where the fail is.

In our case, there’s been discussions in favor and against, which is healthy somehow but the moment came in which we had to make a decision: Do we play along?

And there is when $hit hit the fan.

This division was unnecessary. We have now two groups that used to just play a game not even noticing, expecting or even suspecting to be divided.
Now we even have the most respected voices out there, hesitating.

That has done more damage to the game and all dependencies than just flipping the switch on local comms would ever do.

For this reason, who ever came with the idea of segregating EVE in classes, should sit, relax and reconsider. Meditate on a way to undo that crap and allow someone else to acomplish whatever the BO did not.

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You are allowed to debate, but please don’t do the casting couch routine whilst shivving the inmates

Not opposed but, watch it if it’s derivate - and utterly tedious anyway.

There is a real age and attitude split that is going unnoticed, and as it happens - we generally don’t fight our bastard offspring, unless

but we’ll never know if ccp keep randomly helicopter-parenting in

Hello Kezrai,
You obviously have two parties. The PVPers that mostly want a blackout. Truth is we don’t really care for the game to be blacked out entirely (it would be nice if it was, personal opinion) and you have the other group that wants to be safe ratting or mining. I’ve played the ratter and the miner and the pvper.

Background: near2 is an app that gives u an audible notification when a player says in a channel the system of a player and their ship. It records your system and counts the jumps out the enemy is from you. Then even if you aren’t paying attention it will tell you the number of jumps out an enemy is from you as long as your friends are putting that info in a chat channel with the correct format. You don’t even have to pay attention at this point if you have a lot of friends online and active.

You have two different playstyles and two different ppl. Sometimes you have to compromise on ideas. Delayed local would give a local and still force miners and ratters to pay attention to their d scan and be active with their buddies coordinating intel, even to the point as to use gate eyes. I got scouted by gate eyes during the blackout and b4 the blackout. Its nothing new. even had a CEO in my crab alliance stream a popular gate choke-point on twitch for us while we mined. Its part of the game and its just what it is.
A reasonable delay would be anywhere from 60s to 2min long. Nothing more should be needed for a pvper to be on grid with his target. Especially if that PVPer is in an interceptor. Slower cloaky ships would take longer to get on grid and get tackle. This is fine and should require more work. Interceptors and arazu are part of the game for a reason.
You could abuse this by jump back n forth between locals theoretically. Maybe this would need some rethinking. Maybe you leave an imprint on a system so if you re-enter that system within 2min then you apear in a local? Gotta compromise somewhere…
Gate-watchers are already being used pre/post/during blackout. They’re botted and they’re actually players. I’ve jumped in systems and seem 10 myrmidons land on a fort and seen a single pod on the gate grid. These are manageable and part of the game, bring it on. Killing bots is actually some people’s past time and what they enjoy actually.

Gate activations shown in a log file, i heard this and I also heard that warps were shown in the log file. Most players i dont think know much about this so its not a big deal yet until apps like near 2 record it. Then its a problem.

In real life the human body is really big, but we often don’t the microorganisms required for our survival. Eve is similar, those big blocs need the small groups to stimulate content the same way the small groups need the big blocs to provide targets for. Just like the pvpers need the PVErs for targets and the PVErs need their PVPers to defend them.

Of course, there’s also guys that play eve for what it is and don’t even care about local regardless. I envy them lol

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I just think its really interesting that this whole story about local and no-local is that much of a topic now. A few years ago local was there and it was fine, no one would have had much against it. This changed when capital industrial ships became big exhumers and capitals could be manufactured in large quantities since the needed ore was now not scarce anymore. The problem isn’t local per se, the problem is that the space its in changed so much over the last years.

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its all brave’s fault. pvpers used to be able to go to brave space and have hordes to noobs throw their ships at them. Now brave got organized. we actually have to work harder for our kills.

Also, intel channels got better, super umbrellas got better. More reasons to complain. Less shooting. I heard eve was really empty back in the day too. Sounds like u didn’t have to worry about gate scouts. We just want fights and when we cant get fights we want ganks. I tackled my first super in blackout recently. It was fantastic. Prior to blackout that was way more complicated than it was now. It was addicting to tackle that super. Felt great. I want to tackle more. There are fewer supers ratting in blackout but prior to blackout those supers were complicated to tackle because they were always aligned to their safes. Only the really dumb/distracted ones died prior to blackout.

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About that. People were whining about Rorq skins via the anniversary pack, and funnily enough they shouted a LOT. Later CCP decided that it would be a nice idea to boost this unused ship by making it grotesquely OP in terms of mining power, invulnerable via PANIC aaand with game-breaking-mining drones.

Also in terms of the screeching about null, I built supers at the exact price they are now, 10 years ago. Shockingly, you can make arrangements.

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I dont mind rorquals being op and hard to kill because theyre actually a massive content generator if u tackle one. Those OP mining drones had everyone rorq mining (even myself) and when one got tackled it became a big rush by both parties to either save it or blow it up and both sides got to make a lot of mistakes. Defenders even had home court advantage with their athanor/tatara. good content

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I guess the main problem about caps right now is that there are too many and we can’t get rid of them.

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