About 1 hr in there’s talk about a recent event site, think it was a Null Sec Hacking site, that had a mine field in it which required players to manually navigate their ship through it in order to get to the loot can. The discussion made it seem like this was something new.
The Level 3 Guristas Epic Arc has a mission that’s similar with a mine field around an acceleration gate. The player has to manually navigate through the mine field in order to access the gate which leads to the final room for the mission objective.
It was a very cool mission, definitely different and fun to complete. Out of all the missions in that Epic Arc, that mission is the main thing I remember. Whether in event, exploration or mission sites, it would be cool to have more like that.
I think there is a lot potential in both using some of that data inside the client (popular fittings) and as well having fun with digging into the data for players.
Happy to hear this, and thanks once again for the reply.
Good luck with the Quasar platform, the (invisible to us players) slow migration of services, etc. Reading between the lines, it sounds like the platform gives new services built on it access to async logging capabilities that wouldn’t have been possible with Python’s GIL and the traditional Tranquility server. Naturally, the development of a framework for structured logs processing follows suit.
This is probably the most disturbing answer you can get from CCP.
You actually show that you have no metrics or ideas what you wanted to achive by “Scarcity”.
It was just “feelings” that you are using to decide the situation.
If you think something is bad and needs change you better back it up to show that the situation did improve. If you are only changing things randomly without having any metric to actually check the changes, then there is basically no way to decide if the changes worked in the first place.
If you are doing decisions by feelings and assumptions then I can tell you this.
“Assumption is the mother of all f***ups”
Not really, data oriented helps avoiding our wrong subjective view.
Problem is, the scientist also has his subjectivity analysing data, that’s a new challenge in the area.
Nonetheless it’s a great step taking decisions based on data, problem is when the game stops being a game and start being just A/B testing. Also enough data is necessary.
I also not saying CCP is doing it right, since Hilmar declared “triglavians kill people and they came back”, I acquired a sense they don’t know how to interpret it. It’s just a sense (see the trick here?).
The thing is that I still remember this post and the graph:
It did indicate that CCP actually has a measurement they are trying to follow.
After all this graph was probably only the opinion of some CCP devs. No actual metrics, just opinions. They should never show a graph if they are only talking about personal opinions.
CCP could have just told us what they actually were trying to do with “Scarcity” and what they are trying to achive. They just never cared to explain and used random words like “reducing stockpiles”.
And I am just a gamer, not someone who should figure this all out. It is their job and they get payed for it.
But for me one of the biggest and most obvious problems is this: https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/blueprint/?typeid=20187
I do not understand how this is healthy and good in any way. And the market is like this for quite a while. They never addressed this in any way. After changing a working market. And I never understood or heard an explanation from CCP why they did this.
CCP took and is taking long overdue steps to correct issues they created with Rorquals and skill injectors. They had a meta going on where every miner in Nullsec felt entitled to have their Rorqual and mine to their hearts content.
Reducing stockpiles is pretty straight forward. Lots of minerals and materials were stashed during this period where it seemed resource gathering went unchecked.
This is the confusing part to me though… everyone complaining about capital proliferation, super umbrellas, how it no longer really meant anything to own or lose a capital, and that entire meta. CCP finally sees the light and moves to correct it and now everyone is all up in arms.
CCP stated from the beginning of this correction that it would be painful. One can assume that they had metrics they were monitoring and had/have a target number for specific things. They have also stated that the resource gathering people were accustomed to prior to their intervention wouldn’t be returning. Rorquals and Orcas should 100% be mining support ships.
it’s not about dumb mining changes and not about “painful” changes. But about zero information, discussion and clear goal with proper metrics. Not “We have plan but can’t tell what is it because it won’t work”, “trust us”.
If CCP would provide clear goals and plans. Most of vets would just clench their teeth and carry on while helping CCP fixing the game. Instead they decided to use any possible way to simply upset everyone and so far. Making game even more broken.
I dunno, I think CCP is doing the right thing by not divulging information to the playerbase. We’re notoriously terrible when it comes to being critical of their logic and decision making. Granted, I agree that CCP hardly does anything right but they aren’t obligated to share their metrics nor are they obligated to run their ideas by you. No matter what they say or do, they’re going to have a group of neckbeards playing arm-chair developer.
They ought to have a goal and a vision for what they want Eve Online to look like and I dont doubt that they are working towards it. I for one am happy if things are more expensive. That means that losses are more meaningful, or ought to be.
To add, they did seem pretty clear that scarcity was over right? We’re in the age of prosperity and the issue is that everyone thought that prosperity would be returning to the old. This is what normal and prosperous should look like. Sure it’s not perfect and there’s tweaking and adjusting that needs to happen, and hopefully they do that.
No. People thought that “age of prosperity” wouldn’t be even more nerfs. 90% of “age of prosperity” patch was redone by community.
What you say is not reflected by CCP actions. There is no sign of any reasonable vision or prosperity. Losses aren’t meaningful. They just mean that you either krab more or use cheaper ships and everyone is critical to their logic and decision making anyway.
Change was needed. Everyone will agree on that. It’s simply that CCP executed everything wrong way.
Anyway. No point in copying what was said milion times over last years. At lest it’s not worth my time.
I don’t completely disagree with you, I honestly feel like CCP faces many challenges that the most vocal people here and on Reddit just minimize by calling CCP stupid or lazy.
The game is aging and they will continue to face the associated technical limitations
The game still requires many balance passes over already existing things
Surely they want to develop new content: ships and modules for us to have fun
Surely they want to redo old archaic systems like getting rid of POS code
It’s clearly obvious that the players experience and out of the box thinking is a valuable asset as we know how the game is going to break or be changed as soon as they talk about something they want to add or change. Things they wouldn’t have stepped back to consider.
I’m not saying we should cut them slack because I am also very critical of them at times. What I’m saying is that I don’t blame them for not wanting to interact with the community when we do nothing but scream at them and publicly crucify their staff.
I disagree but I also don’t have a capital to say with experience. Things are more expensive now right, so if you lose your capital you bought at a fraction of what they are now the loss might not be painful but the repurchase will. But then maybe you’ve farmed up so much ISK and input materials that even now replacing them is trivial… well over time maybe you lose enough and drain enough of your liquid and input materials that losses actually start to mean something.
The way it’s been, people treat losing a capital like they would swiping their credit card at a gas station for a corn dog - they probably don’t think about it too much.
Maybe prosperity was the wrong term for them to use. Without looking at numbers it would seem like we can still use establishing what the new normal is going to be. Maybe it should have been Scarcity → Rebalancing → Prosperity → Normalization.
Whos stockpiles were the problem? 2 largest aliances. Which combined are, what, 10% of population? Has scarcity hit those aliances as hard as everyone else?
Generalization problem. They dont care which players do have stockpiles and which do not.
I didnt have stockpiles or capitals, nor my mates I played with. My losses were meaningful already. Ships now are x2-3 more expensive for me and my mates, all of whom stopped playing. It became meaningless to aim for better ships now.
Loss aversion is a cognitive bias, which explains why individuals feel the pain of loss twice as intensively than the equivalent pleasure of gain. As a result of this, individuals tend to try to avoid losses in whatever way possible.
Battling loss aversion by making things x2-3 more expensive, which makes percieved loss x4-6 more intense, is genius meme level game design.
Players should be willing to undock. Players should be willing to undock fancy expensive blingy stuff. Instead scarcity made 20-25% players quit, and 5-7k average is 50-70k characters not playing anymore.
About the PCU: Are your numbers pre-bietnam? There were/are a lot of factors that went into a higher than normal PCU.
Covid lockdowns
Major war in Nullsec
Other games
It’s no secret that as the world was told to stay home and everything was shut down that more people were trying Eve for the first time and more players returning to the game as they now had free time.
Major wars will always draw in players. It’s always been the case. Look at what happened with this last war, the crusade against Goons (which ironically the goal was to actually make them quit playing Eve Online - dropping the playerbase). It appeared that after M2- the momentum of the war shifted and Papi realized they had lost and numbers started dropping. The war of attrition was over.
Then you factor in other games such as FF14, New World, and others that have had updates and just another reason to draw people away from Eve Online. For a large number of players, Eve Online has always been a game you play passively in the background while they wait for the next fight or ping.
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So I’m not saying that the above are primary factors to hand wave and give CCP a pass. This phase of scarcity has definitely been a primary driver for players stepping away, but it appears as if CCP isn’t fully done or that it will take some time to reflect weather or not scarcity was a failure or success.
About the stockpiles… If they’ve come out to say it, I didn’t see it but it appears as if they think maybe the Nullsec blocs that used and abused Rorquals the hardest are the ones in the crosshair. If they say there are stockpiles they are wanting to see reduced then I believe them and they obviously have their eye somewhere. No it may not be you or your friends but we don’t have the full picture or data pulls they have.
In the end, either play the game or don’t. If you aren’t happy just stop paying / playing. Maybe just SP farm your accounts so you can easily jump back in if there’s something that draws you back. I’m mostly a Highsec ganker so my losses are baked into my activity, so there’s no doubt I feel differently about loss than you do… my feelings are more directly tied to my success and the loot fairy. I’ve taken breaks in the past when I’ve been unhappy with the direction or been mad at CCP.
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I’m so excited to hear them talk about doing a structure balance pass and at this point any nerf or removal is a +1 in my book. As long as it isn’t some dumb crossover content, anything they do would be good at this point.
