Posting this here because while there is PVE, there is also PVP. It is features and ideas content, but it is not so much a proposal as it is a plea for some kind of correction.
COSMOS has been around for a very very long time. I love the concept, I have always loved the concept, full disclosure. I love the idea. I do not love what it has become and you absolutely shouldn’t either. We recently got a post about positioning cynos and other stuff off beacon, off grid to prevent exploitative behavior. I think we should spend some time working on some other behavior that is absolutely gray area in most cases but not in this case.
COSMOS complexes, COSMOS sites, COSMOS probables, COSMOS. Used to be good PVE, PVP, and Trade content.
But it has been out of sight and out of mind for way too long. It is absolute ■■■■ content now. It was supposed to be good storyline content, with a GIGANTIC level of risk in the form of unrecoverable standings losses, and for those who were willing to go the distance high reward. It is the only content where a character gets one chance. Fail, and you live with it. This to me is very much in the spirit of EVE. What is not though, is “players” being able to effectively create a hostage dynamic where players may commit to this content and be doomed from day one by permanently AFK players (I am not going to go as far as calling them bots because CCP is very clear on what constitutes botting) denying them any hope of obtaining the items they need to complete the missions in the allotted time. Unless they buy the items on contracts. If they can afford them.
Expecting players to hit google hard to understand what they are getting into is kind of the norm these days. I get that. But they can’t get any help from third party websites when we have people farming the sites 24/7. And these farmers are skirting the rules by not using third party tools. As long as you cant get hit with broadcasting, you can go to bed and log back in and OWN this content. Expecting players to hit contracts for items that are almost permanently unavailable due to obvious potential RMT vectors is also absurd.
This is one of the ugliest symptoms presented by the introduction of structure based highsec war declarations. Anyone who has been in Ani, Okkelen, Araz, and Algintal has seen this ■■■■ and we all know what is going on. Passive tanked untouchable denial of content. People are being denied progression because they have absolutely no viable counterplay. Buy it on contracts? You have just been ransomed by someone who is permanently AFK. Everyone loses. And there is a serious RMT vector here. For all of the mission items I have seen farmed, statistically zero make it to contracts or the player market where applicable.
“Its old POS code”. Yes. Its legacy content. So what. Make some policy instead. Make afk gameplay that denies other players access to critical items an exploit. AFK mine all you want boys, nobody is going to lose half their faction standing over your plagioclase.
COSMOS used to be amazing, as amazing as PVE content really could be, but the state of it without the highsec war mechanics we used to have and CCP’s stance on what defines botting is cancer in this example. I absolutely want it to be competitive. ■■■■, move the plexes to lowsec, if you want to get crazy with it. Or just delete it. But 24/7 rattlesnakes hoovering everything anyone needs literally all the time with no counterplay is astonishing, considering that most new players who encounter it are going to report the farmer as a bot, and possibly have action taken against their account.
You have created a huge RMT vector. You have created total denial of progression gameplay. Make rules. Be nice. Be brutal. Make denial of progression an exploit. Move it to Lowsec. Do something.
Full disclosure, I farm the farmers, don’t RMT, and give everything I can-flip away and it is hard to keep up with four entire constellations just getting railroaded like this. I angrily typed this up in notepad. Would probably be more deliverable if I used an LLM.