It was a lot of fun.
I saw signs of adaption among those I hunted. Very successful adaption in some cases. The most competent alliances retained the ability to control their space, as is only right.
I encountered content daily, eve-offline numbers be damned. Better content than before or after blackout.
I spent lots of money subscribing characters.
Null sec is lame with local.
As someone with 3 rorq accounts I can share some context that you’re missing:
Eve depends upon the pve-pvp ecosystem, if all the prey leave then the hunters are going to starve.
That’s why blackout wasn’t healthy for the game, you actually need to incentivise pve to keep the prey out there for hunters to chase after else everyone will just switch to pvp.
We know from the Eve Offline stats, that blackout reduced PCU numbers from 30k in July to 20k in September. That’s a lot of sand lost from the sandpit which is bad for everyone in terms of targets to go after + less sub revenue to CCP for improving the game.
If you want real change, I think blackout and cyno update need to be scrapped, bring those pve accounts back, BUT introduce isk sinks to balance the MER and then give hunters more tools to hunt their prey - maybe an insta spin up cyno inhib or a new ship line that prevents you appearing on local, that sort of thing i.e. you don’t nerf pve, you buff pvp - feels much less punishing to do it that way round imo
I killed:
5 rorquals
2 orcas
1 dread
4 carriers
1 nyx
several mission Tengus
Many subcap ratters
I lost:
1 Mach
2 Vagas
So many Sabres
So many cruisers
1 Loki
So many covops scouts
A Luxury Yacht 
This excludes the gatecamps and fights with response fleets, which were very good and daily occurrences! One well adapted small alliance camped our most valuable member into a pocket - without local! It took all day to get them out, with many skirmishes. Was fun.
Happy you fit up your Stratios. Also 100% sure you gave up without knowing how to use it - your experience reflects your inexperience with hunting or the fact that your alliance narrative discouraged you from playing the game in any manner than Rorqual multiboxing.
One doesn’t nerf or buff PVP and PVE as separate activities. This is EVE.
Here’s the context you’re missing: less local-dependent AFKish miners means more money for you, the intelligent, attentive Rorqual pilot. Ore prices would have skyrocketed and those that adapted would have been richly rewarded for their perseverance.
You do understand you are who we want to go away so telling us you unsubbed just makes us want blackout back that much more.
Blackout was the best anti parasite feature ever implemented.
What you’re both misunderstanding is pve and pvp are not mutually exclusive, having a mining account doesn’t mean you never pvp, far from it, it’s usually because you like to pvp in bigger ■■■■ than most and it’s a convenient way to fund it. I like to drop supers and long for the next BR5, UALX etc.
You do understand you are who we want to go away so telling us you unsubbed just makes us want blackout back that much more.
Quit being so obtuse, did you see the impact on the PCU? 30k in July to 20k in September. It was killing the game. We need more players not less. What brings in players is reading about super capital escalations not people roaming low sec FW plexes, we need to make the big null fights happen again. Somehow break up the big alliances, spread resources around a bit so 1 area of space isn’t sufficient for all activities.
Also 100% sure you gave up without knowing how to use it
Lets not go there, your misconception that having a rorq account means you dont pvp is clouding your judgement… but you know that I’m sure, you’re just frustrated and venting…
Ultimately we need more players not less and more money going to CCP to fund development.
What you’re both misunderstanding is pve and pvp are not mutually exclusive
Exactly. And they shouldn’t be mutually exclusive based on what activity you choose to do today. In the present meta, they are. You can choose to mine in perfect safety, or you can choose to login in your Stratios - and never the twain shall meet. It’s disappointing that Eve allows this attitude to fester.
Your Rorqual needs to have a reasonable requirement to defend itself or be defended at a less than strategic level. Otherwise, every fool has a Rorqual, the game is boring, and the economy is ■■■■. Wouldn’t you prefer to be the elite Rorqual pilot who knows how to survive and gets dank ore prices as a reward?
At least in the Eve I loved you wouldn’t have a choice.
It sure was - If parasites are those who actually engage in more than “easy mode PVP” like those who say a complete blackout is the only way to go - Then it did a great job at removing those who actually put in the effort to keep Eve alive.
Get rid of ALL the “parasites” and your next vargar will cost you 3 or 4 billion isk + what, another 2 bil for fittings. Yeah lets go full pvp screw pve as a play style.
You mean nothing but well placed well organised Bloc groups controlling all of Sov. Not sure that is a decent goal at this point
Then it did a great job at removing those who actually put in the effort to keep Eve alive.
10,000 Rorqual + Titan multiboxers is a terrible version of Eve. It’s only alive in the strictest sense, and it will continue dying. You need the cool kids or the game will be a pile of 5,000 Titan pilots mining for more isk that they will spend on more titans that will have nothing to do. Ironically, they’ll have devauled isk so much that they’ll be constantly mining more and more just to keep pace and plex - the game without blackout is in an economic deathtrap (in addition to being fantastically boring).
Get rid of ALL the “parasites” and your next vargar will cost you 3 or 4 billion isk + what, another 2 bil for fittings
Other people, people more interested in a game about human interaction, not mining lasers and wallets, will fill the void - think of the profits! And if they don’t, fine, I’ll pay for that Vargur. And lose it to a defense fleet I couldn’t see in local (so much for easy mode). Happily. The majority of the lifetime of Eve has been without incredibly cheap ore and Vargurs, and somehow it worked.
You mean nothing but well placed well organised Bloc groups controlling all of Sov. Not sure that is a decent goal at this point
That is literally the state of Eve.
Nullsec intel is clearly overpowered, certainly for ratters using tools like Near2 and arguably for hunters via dotlan. We need more obscurity, the fog of war.
I supported Blackout but I think the player response shocked CCP. They thought nullsec players were hard and could take the chaos. Obviously not but what do you expect when you’ve spent the last few years making everything safe and cozy and driving away the players who actually want the challenge?
We need a solution somewhere in the middle. Nullsec roaming is just a joke now and the brief taste of Blackout makes it extremely difficult to accept the status quo.
Let me add that Rorqual + ore proliferation makes this less likely, not more, due to the strategic calculation every alliance is forced to make. Supers are necessary to hold sov; a massive super umbrella breeds more Rorquals and therefore more supers; anyone who risks their super fleet and loses it will never catch up to surviving umbrellas’ super fleet growth. This is the lasting lesson of BR-5.
The blackout doesn’t/didn’t change anything important.
You want more ways to get a fight, more reasons to keep a fight fighting and more sources for small gang content.
We don’t have any of that right now. There are no catalysts besides roaming about to get a fight. No reason to fight other than the hell of it. There is nothing to gain besides dank killmails.
For a game supposedly all about pvp, it’s sure hell to fight a fight without one side just warping/cloaking/jumping in instant they feel like it.
It unlikely blackout will come back, or at the least, not in the same way, the dedicated null farmers have seem to have won their way, and CCP has back down from the event after a great deal of abuse from the null sec community directed at the game developers.
It a great shame that the community knee jerk response was to threaten to unsub, to quit, to call the development team a number of different names as well as slander them. I wish the community would remember that this content is not a right, and CCP is in no way obligated to continue support with the game. So I hope in the future, if CCP wishes to perform another event like this, that the community keep a level head and provide actual input on what happening, and instead of blind threats and name calling, they provide suggestions on how to further improve on the game going forward.
Or warping to safety the instant there is a hint of danger.
link your killboard pls
This post isn’t about proving that I got more content, or that content was more available in general, or even about fixing Eve.
It’s about one simple assertion: Blackout made Eve heaps more fun for me. It was excellent. I got fights, I got fun, everything was more dangerous and more engaging & more requiring of teamwork.
It’s back to boring now.
I think a lot of folks feel the same way, but don’t have a massive alliance to spin that narrative for them. I also think a lot of folks could have had fun, but weren’t ready to try a new way to play Eve in null. It was a new learning curve. The leadership of several alliances was certainly stuck in that way, and perhaps their members listened to them a bit too much.
Many alliance leaders told people to stay docked, to not go out, to not risk anything. Shepards protecting their flock.
They are doing the same with the cyno changes now.
I thought it was a game where there was risk, and for a brief period of time there was. It should be brought back.
@Arrendis Your opinion is always welcome.
My opinion… hrm.
My opinion is that null badly needs destabilization, and that anyone who thinks a loss of fully 1/3 of peak logins is a good thing is insane. Calling people names like ‘parasite’ doesn’t do anyone any good, it only serves to make sure both sides dig themselves in deeper and glare at one another more while listening to one another even less. Anyone claiming that strategic-level defenses are excessive at a time when 200 stealth bombers from what amounts to a PUG can drop out of no-where at any time to nuke the most expensive ships in the game has no grasp on what the actual landscape is in null. And anyone who thinks null players choosing not to be loot pinatas without a reasonable chance of fighting back means they weren’t ‘hard’ enough should probably ask themselves how often they enjoy slamming their own head in a car door until they pass out.
Rorqual + ore proliferation does not have a single thing to do with why people don’t risk their supercapital fleets. Rorquals are not the reason you will not catch up again if you lose your supercapital fleet. Rorquals did not exist in their current form until October of 2016, 33 months after B-R5RB. UALX was never going to be a bloodletting on the order of B-R. That the combined slaughter of both X47 fights even came close to B-R was suprising to all of us in command during the fight. With or without Rorquals, nullsec has been in a ‘get all the supercapitals you can, risk as few of them as you can’ arms race since more or less the moment Steve got built. It’s just taken a while to snowball, but make no mistake: it was inevitable that it would. Even if we were all still mining with battleships, we would get here.
It doesn’t help anyone to try to pin something that has been a part of the game for over 13 years on something that went in less than 3 years ago.
It’s great the Blackout made EVE more fun for you. That’s a good thing. It clearly made EVE less fun for a lot of people, though. Is there a way to make EVE more fun for both groups? I don’t know. If there is, it won’t be an easy thing to design. It’s going to take a lot of trial and error. But it’s going to take a lot more than just ephemeral changes like the Blackout, and it’s probably going to involve a whole lot of things being less fun for probably everyone, at different points in the process.
It’s also going to take a lot more communication from CCP. But I may turn that part of my opinion into an article.
Edit: Oh, and…
I guess all those ‘neutral states’ don’t exist? Don’t get me wrong, plenty of null is controlled by… 7? blocs… 8 if we include Provibloc, but I really can’t condone calling them ‘well-organized’. But plenty of it isn’t. And the map’s kinda designed to bloat the impression people get of the blocs’ control. Always has been. After all, look at what happens to DeadCo, up in the north, if we mute all of the purple that isn’t actually useable star systems:
They suddenly look a lot smaller, don’t they? The whole structure of that map is built around creating the impression of parity between east and west, in terms of size. If you were to strip away all of the filler, and just show star systems, though… you see that the east is a lot more densely-packed.
For example, let’s look at the Imperium regions: Cloud Ring, Fountain, Delve, Period Basis, and Querious. Keep in mind that in a lot of cases, the coalition only controls some of these systems… but taken together, it’s (40 + 115 + 97 + 40 + 95 = ) 387 systems.
Now let’s look at WinterCo. Just WinterCo, not PanFam or Tri-Wagon or anything like that. Visually, WinterCo looks smaller, by a lot. But let’s add it up: Oasa, Perrigen Falls, Cache, Insmother, Scalding Pass, Wicked Creek, Detorid. (85 + 104 + 44 + 110 + 81 + 82 + 96 = ) 602 systems.
So, remember: actually look at the hard numbers. Just that little area between DeadCo and NCdot is 257 systems, two-thirds as much space as the Imperium holds. But, you know, that’s a side-issue.
Probably something in between, not full blackout but not full local either. You want enough risk that hunters and PVP can go and actually hunt, but enough security that miners, ratters, and krabbers are willing to go out and mine/rat/krab.
A semi-delayed where you show up in local if you are using the chat system you show up in local might work assuming it’s possible on the backend. If you are using Alliance, Fleet, Corp, Local, or any custom channels you show up in local, if you close out of all of them you don’t show up.
Hunters could go dark, closing out of all chat, and scout targets with d-scan.
Targets get to see when the horde of ships fly in, because lets be serious, coordinating more than two people in a fleet with no fleet chat is basically impossible.
Is it possible? Who knows.
Is it abusable? Probably.
Does it give hunters an advantage if they are willing to shut off chat and do the work to find people? Yes.
Does it give targets a chance to see 50 people flying towards them so they have a chance to get safe? Yes.
Personally i couldn’t think of a better way to completely break the community. Can’t use the chat system without putting yourself at greater risk, no thanks.
So Hunters get ALL the advantages while their targets are either completely isolated from their group of friends (by not using chat to stay out of local) OR give hunters easy targets by being social.
One scout with tackle and or cyno enters system with all chat channels closed so he doesn’t appear in local - He finds target, gets in range and calls in his friends using external comms, like TS, Mumble, Discord and boom - Target has no warning of approaching danger and dies.
