I’m obviously reacting to the points the person I quoted made, as those points were more an issue for high sec “hide in a corp sec mining/missioning” play styles than null sec.
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The issue is the consent. While it is true that in the absolute interpretation non-consensual PvP exists in highsec, it has become steadily more prohibitive to be aggressive in highsec.
The effect of this that I can see is that if a group is aggressive in highsec, then it almost necessarily follows that group is too formidable for a small group to directly contend with.
We had problems with gate camps, can flippers, and war-deccers in the past, but these groups were significantly smaller, or transient. They presented a problem, but we generally agreed that the problems we had were surmountable. If not in the immediate present, then in a short term future.
It is not the only problem I see with Eve at present, but the belief that all unscheduled challenges are insurmountable is, to me, a definite negative factor in recent times, and the belief seems to arise as a direct consequence of increased safety (or harsher control of non-consensual pvp, if you prefer) in highsec.
Increasingly, highsec PvP has become a philosophical choice players make to save their game and their play styles from theme park corruption. A battle being lost by degrees.
I am stuck in an uncomfortable middle. I don’t want to be a criminal, but they keep things interesting and I believe in their cause. I adapt to the threat they pose, but I’m not inclined to interfere with their work or put a stop to them. To quote Weird Al “I know Darth Vader’s got you really annoyed, but remember if you kill him then you’ll be unemployed.”
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It’s weird how all the “PVP is everything” folks focus on a “too safe high sec” as the core of EVE’s problems. It’s like they aren’t capable of doing actual PvP in the 2/3 of EVE space which is always and everywhere fully PvP, and instead need a safe space filled with easy targets in order to engage in PvP.
So hardcore, these folks!
What this actually shows is all these “safe HighSec is the problem” types have no deeper understanding of the dynamics and drivers of game activity than CCP does. They all think “Well EVE sure was fun back in the day, and hey, made a lot of money too!” and somehow think that a slightly more dangerous high sec caused all of that.
Seriously, people, think a bit beyond your own need to have easy targets in a safe space where you aren’t a target yourself. The game needs more than just a shallow adjustment of the rules in a single security range.
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That was brilliant game/gameworld design. I started playing Eve because of a Wikipedia article about a notorious old infiltration/awox/assassination among nullsec enemies. “Wow, this isn’t an MMO for teens.
It’s a gameworld society for thinking adults.”
I understand what you mean but here is the issue I think many supporters of the dark side have missed, it is NOT the PvP they miss but the terrorizing, the molestation of other players, the satisfaction of having power over another even if it’s only virtual power the fact that they get a rise out of their actions.
All of this still happens, if not CODE then another group of such as the group that loves to blow up MTU’s, burn Jita, etc, the lists of the group’s out there being nefarious are abundant and most of them reside in high sec, the only reason they do is because that is where their prey resides and where they can feed themselves, again if I’m missing a point I’m sorry I really am a bit thick but I cannot see how high sec is any more safer then before, I certainly cannot put up an upwell structure because I’d be extorted into protection and since I wouldn’t pay it get blown to bits wouldn’t it, I’d like to put up a gantry up to export at 0% tax but can’t do that as I couldn’t defend it, if I get others together in a Corp there would be a Corp thief or AWOX or some other issue, no, keep it simple keep it good for myself as I don’t want a full time job in the virtual world as well.
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In regards to high sec PvE
There is a need for the “safer” sources of income, especially for those who do not want to be just another cog in the machine of null sec corps. There is really no such thing as a PvP isk faucet, as there really isn’t a way to make PvP generate isk without it being easily abused. “Earning” isk is the only way to show work/time invested in the game, and is what helps makes the feeling of loss so potent. So the high sec folks must have a fairly consistent way to gather the resources they need from PvE sources, with acceptable losses, so that they can engage in more dangerous activities when they feel they can do so.
EVE can be thought of as a living ecosystem
NPC’s are the vegetation; the grass, the bushes, the trees. “Mostly PvErs” are the herbivores that feed on the vegetation; the rabbits, the bisons, the elephants. And finally “Mostly PvPers” are the predators that prey on the herbivores (and sometimes each other), keeping herbivore population in check and evolving; the foxes, the wolves, the tigers. Get rid of the vegetation/PvE, then there are no more herbivores/“Mostly PvErs”, leading to scavenging and carnage among the predators/“Mostly PvPers”, until they too are no more.
So then we should all acknowledge that PvE is a vital part of EVE
With that said, does that mean high sec can use more danger? Probably. But how much more danger and in what fashion? That is the problem CCP has with high sec, sometimes they balance and re-balance and can over-correct. And I’m not saying it is an easy problem to solve or that I even have any answers. I do know that even when I first started EVE, I was self-aware enough to know that I kept coming back due to the danger. I’ve played many single-player EVE-like games that in some ways were better than EVE. But it was always the endgame, you get too powerful, therefore it becomes boring. In EVE, there really isn’t an endgame. There is always a bigger fish, or a bigger school of fish. The danger is always there.
But again, how to balance more danger?
And to do so while making as many people happy, or at least content, as possible? Or perhaps give these last recent changes a little more time. Maybe now that high sec player corps have more free reign to grow, they will eventually expand into more dangerous territories and create their own new content. Often many players/entities need to feel they have “enough” resources/assets before they take on more risky behavior, and “enough” is a different number for different people. I know in my own case, 15bil isk in assets was my turning point, for others it may be more like 50bil isk, or as little as 500k isk, everyone is unique. But only time may tell if the changes were worthwhile or not I guess. And if not, hopefully more ideas come out of the community and hopefully CCP may listen. 
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I have yet to experience meeting a person who fits this description. I think it’s more likely people think this because they have trouble rationalizing the other player’s motivations. That’s what it was like for me the first time I died in lowsec. I saw someone appear, and I didn’t know what they were there for. I thought to myself, “They won’t shoot me. I have nothing”, but shoot me he did. Then I thought “He wouldn’t pod me. There’s a big penalty for that, the game said, and I don’t have anything.”, but pod me he did, and I had no idea why.
Now I know the answer. He was just playing a game. He didn’t have a reason, and he didn’t need one. Wardeccers and can flippers were no different. They didn’t hate me. They were just playing a game. They weren’t particularly organized, nor had they put a lot of thought into it. These small groups of trouble makers were accessible conflict. People who we could potentially beat, and so we would aspire to improve so that we could beat them.
With the increased restrictions a different kind of enemy began to reign over highsec conflict. The large group of dedicated, organized pirates that could survive the harsher limitations. Those who wanted to practice the art had to join up or die out. You can still contend with these larger groups and mitigate the threat they pose, but the option of defeating your foe outright through force of arms is probably not available to you in the same way it was available to me. Knowing that victory is within your grasp is a powerful motivator, and the reason we would form ad hoc coalitions of corporations that operated in the same system.
I don’t know how to bring back the little pirates. Those scamps and ne’er do wells who would roll in and bust up the monotony with their shenanigans. It was not their intent, I’m sure, but they none the less brought people together in a common cause that was more meaningful than earning isk for throwaway PvP.
I have my doubts that people aren’t safer now than ever, but even if things were exactly as dangerous as before, they’re much less satisfying and accessible to the newcomer. I think people who lived it instinctively know this, even if they can’t put their fingers on exactly why, and they speak up because they know something has gone wrong somewhere for things to be as they see today. The newcomer, conversely, doesn’t understand that the motivation of the veteran is that they want newbies to have the meaningful experience that motivated them to stick with the game long enough to be a veteran.
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Agreed.
There is no upper limit to the demands of safety, which means that adding safety is not actually going to help anyone. Instead it’s a downward spiral of never ending demands for more safety until we live in a totalitarian society where everything and everyone is strictly under control.
I get that, but that is low sec, people should expect that and being there says a player is open for that, that is not the type I’m describing, the post is falsely claiming that high sec is safer then ever, not much has changed except war decs and that changed because it was a problem with spam deccing, everything else is still pretty much the same.
So the solo pirate, for years many posts have railed on about people not interacting in high sec the solo miner, the solo missioner, the solo corporations, those’s posts said those types are bad for a social game, well the solo pirate should be an exception???
I would say CCP only gave in this case exactly what they asked for, a reason to become social, I can’t have my taco cabana in my favorite system playing solo (fair enough), but these harsher limitations, specifically which?
I just want to understand the stance, high sec hasn’t really changed, if people are leaving the game it’s not high sec that’s doing it, I would say that it is like anything, the party can only go on so long and like the movie groundhog day it becomes mundane, only few old vets are still around, and the one’s incoming don’t have the same vision or excitement for a space game, the frontier has become common place and there are more choices on how you can experience this frontier, there is a way to bring in more people but that requires much more people (CCP side), writing new experiences into the game and this legacy code has it’s limitations, but at the same time it is what makes eve, Eve.
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Oh wow… I’m in that article.
Such nostalgia!
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*reads through article again*
Verone.
HOLY ■■■■ THAT’S YOU! 
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I understand it was a wall of text, but you are nitpicking on semantics of the very subjective terms need and “safer” and taking a single sentence out of context. In the end I was actually arguing for a more dangerous high sec. It would have been better if you had not replied at all, saving us all from pointless back and forths…
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I’m describing the encounter for the sake of explaining player motivations and confusion other players feel when they don’t understand those motives. This is an encounter 13 years ago. Low was not so starkly separate from high.
I have lived in Highsec almost all my life. People generally leave me alone if I don’t give them reasons to want me dead. Someone will make trouble now and then, but they don’t seem, to me, to be on a power trip.
Wardecs were the core mechanic in regulating highsec aggression. Saying ‘only wardecs’ implies they’re not critically important. They are. EHP buffs, making CONCORD untankable, nuking the watch list, raising the fee from 2M isk, etc. More has changed in 13 years than I think you realize, or are willing to admit to. The results of these changes take time to fully manifest. It’s not only in how they affect existing players. They also shape the next generation of new player who hasn’t started playing yet.
The solo pirate has to, by definition, interact with someone to be a pirate. They present a surmountable challenge to the other players. They are definitely a class apart from the remainder of your list. ‘Little pirates’ were not necessarily solo, but came in small groups of 2 - 5 relatively disorganized troublemakers. These small groups were beatable, or could be driven off. They got people who otherwise wouldn’t meet or cooperate to do so. Things the other solos on the list don’t do, and alliances like PIRAT and such also don’t do because banding together would make no difference. Yes. Solo pirates would be an exception.
Highsec has changed a lot over the years. I think you’re right in that for large groups, it’s mostly business as normal. They can afford 100M for the dec and 500M minimum for a structure to anchor, fuel, and people to defend it, if the thing is even valuable enough to them to merit defending. The players hurt by the changes are the small (new) ones. When they up the EHP of indy ships, the pirates hurt are the ones who can’t afford the additional accounts and hardware it takes to kill them before CONCORD spawns. If they can afford enough accounts and military hardware to do the job, they’re not a little pirate anymore. They’re an organized force to be reckoned with.
I’m going to close with a bit of philosophy. This is not something you have to agree with, but it is my belief and what guides my interpretations and actions. I don’t think highsec was meant to be safe, and I don’t think it should be. I think highsec was for keeping conflict accessible by limiting the scale of it. I think changes were made with good intentions of maintaining that accessibility, but instead had the opposite effect by causing the number of small pirate groups to shrink or be absorbed into larger ones. Without these small groups, players who came under fire came to believe their foes too large to fight, and turned to logoffs as a defense. When logging off was a defense, deccers would be deprived of content. When deprived of content, wardeccers put out more wardecs. I don’t think things would be like this if we had used ships instead of changes to game mechanics to address the pirate problem back then.
We can’t go back to the way things were. Change is already here. When moving forward, though, I want to keep in mind that ‘new players’ includes ‘new pirates’, and they won’t advocate for themselves, so I need to. They’re the future little antagonists that I think Eve needs to get back on track.
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Did you really deduce that? And how if I may ask? 
I disagree.
And Eve is progressing and blooming and CCP growing and employs new developers and makes great expansions …
It’s funny how you focus on ad hominem attacks at ‘pvp focused’ players but ignore the actual discussion itself. Project that others don’t understand what’s going on but fundamentally misunderstand the whole design principles of the player driven market. Complain to others that they can’t think beyond their own world but show complete ignorance and tunnel vision.
How many times have you been shown up in other threads?
Players are bored and un-engaged. Whether you like it or not, that is a far cry from the pvp centric eve of the past.
They did when eve was more cutthroat pvp focused yeah.
Had to nerf pvp before things became a problem.
I’m sorry, asking why they don’t PVP in low sec and instead prefer to do so in a safe, protected environment like high sec, where they aren’t themselves targets, is an ‘ad hominem attack’ in your eyes? I mean, it’s a simple fact, evidenced by the constant complaints you and other ‘PvPers’ make about high sec being too safe being the cause of much of EVE’s problems.
Again, not sure what you mean here. By ‘shown up’ do you mean trolled, or disagreed with by people using only their own opinions and no actual facts or data to back it up? You know, the kind of facts and data I go to the trouble of putting in my own posts? Verifiable things, not just opinion statements like
I also am unclear on what you mean here? I have stated many times that players are bored and un-motivated to play by current poor game design. I’ve stated that the current game design does not encourage PvP. I’ve also stated that the usual forum opinions-not-facts types (like yourself) completely misunderstand why this has happened, as has CCP.
Your post only confirms this, as well as confirming that you have trouble getting past your own assumptions of what you think other people are talking about and actually comprehending what they are talking about.
Look, I know we got off on a bad start, when you looked at a clearly labelled graph I had posted, and you completely mistook the data on the graph for the hand-drawn trend lines which I had slapped on top of them, and you even completely didn’t notice that my post told you what they were. I understand for those addicted to their own opinions and blind to all else, that it is hard to process new data that disagrees with their cherished prejudices.
But do please try. It will do you good.
Here’s a thought to maybe get you started down the right direction. If what EVE is lacking is a proper ‘PvP-centric’ focus like in the past… and all of low-sec, WH space and Null is completely wide open to PvP of any sort… why do you and other ‘PvPers’ keep insisting that the problem is high sec?
All the PvP you could wish for exists in most of EVE space. Yet you still keep coming back to needing to PvP in the safest space you can do so.
Don’t you find that a bit… hypocritical?
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High sec is not safe. It is not designed to be safe. It is as much a pvp area as low sec, the rules are merely different.
That’s what I’m referring to when i say ignorance and tunnel vision.