CSM 13 - High Sec Issues/Suggestions/Ideas

Council Of Stellar Management Assembly Hall
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284

So Brisc asks for input on how CCP can improve highsec life and your answer is do nothing, it’s fine. Well maybe it is for you. CCP certainly made your life easier. Was a time you’d never see a -10 living in highsec. Passing through, sure, but living there - never. Now you have your own fort, and can pvp to your hearts content against ships that can’t defend themselves…and play the game the way u want.

Nonetheless, Brisc (and we can assume) CCP is not very happy with the current trend in EvE of losing around 30% of its active player base. He is attempting to champion this cause and find the reason. Yiole has some valuable insights into what has happened and why. I get that you don’t agree with him, that doesn’t make him wrong. Additionally, you have added no suggestions to make highsec life better and try to grow our player base.

Not every player in EvE is ready to PvP on day one of their EvE life. Some highsec corps realized this and worked to get players to that level. Like it or not, we need experienced players to want to stay in highsec to take the newer players under their wing and teach them the game. This appears to be something CCP forgot.

There is no reason CCP can’t have 80,000 active players or more. There is no reason for EvE to be bleeding players, this game has no competition. There is no game like it. Maybe EvE needs some changes, maybe CCP needs to rethink their ‘plan’. Brisc is trying, I respect his efforts. But if your stated goal is not to help CCP acquire and hold players, then you’re wasting our time posting here.

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I already offered my suggestion on what to change/add earlier in the thread in another post. The post you cited was just criticising the opinion of another poster that thinks CCP caters to PvPers when the truth is that most of the new content that came in in the last few years is all about PvE. Just because it’s not his taste doesn’t make it go away.

As for your implications about ganking having something to do with player attrition. CCP looked into this extensively as it is a sentiment that comes up every other week. They found that the numbers do not support the claim that ganking is the reason new players quit.

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EVE is as niche as you can get

You won’t get any more players unless you make the game go mainstream, at what point most of the people who would have payed for years will quit.

EVE is not and never should be for the mainstream sjw/snowflake/idiot population

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I did not imply ganking effected player retention, I simply stated an observation after playing EvE for 12 years and how CCP made your life in highsec easier, and perhaps that’s why you think highsec life is fine.

It would surprise you to find I think ganging is necessary in EvE. It is the possibility of loss that adds value to items, far more than in other games. It makes accomplishing something in EvE that much more enjoyable, because it it harder. My observation is now that it is easier to gank( able to live in station, higher dps and alpha in ships)than before, and that since you enjoy that lifestyle your perception is that highsec is fine as is. Period.

That highsec is not “fine as is” is clearly shown in EvE’s inability to grow its numbers (and in fact is losing players) even though it has no direct competition. Something must change to change this trend. CCP made less money in 2017 than in 2016, no business would be happy with that trend. As players who support the game, we should not be happy either.

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If we talk about lower player population, we need to talk about whole of EvE, and especially the absence of meaningful conflict, tedious structure mechanics, and the existence of an invincible fortress. Satisfied and frustrated people play less. These are mainly non-highsec issues.

However highsec plays a special role in all of that. It’s the entry place for new players and it’s the “glue code” keeping everything together.

If we have a low retention rate, we have to ask why highsec failes to convert new players into EvE players? An EvE player understands how New Eden works as a whole, and can make an informed decision about where and how she or he wants to live.

Is the NPE sufficient to that goal or does it trick people into believing EvE is something else than it is?

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289

Yeah, of course, how oh HOW could EVE ever reach to have 57,213 PCU as it did on February 9th 2014…? Or 63,170 PCU as on January 23rd 2011? (I’m not considering the absolute 10th anniversary record of 65k+ as it was an event).

You know… EVE used to be larger. Like, A LOT larger. So pick your choice: either it has become “more mainstream” by losing players… or has become “less mainstream” by losing players…

Personally I think it just lost the people less engaged with the “core game” for nothing else than a strategic mistake based on poor inteligence and a good dose of echo chambering from special interests.

EVE, if anything, has become more “fan focused” by letting out disengaged customers. This, in a game where every customer is worth the same revenue, is not the brightest idea in the bag.

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290

All MMOs are losing players. EvE is no exception.

Ganking isn’t easier, we just have new ways of doing it. The reason why you see more -10 is because of the massive increase in sec status hit for ganking and people adopting to it. Also the removal of insurance payouts and therfore a switch to cheap hulls made it more realistic to just stay -10 because if facpo. But it’s not like we can still just sit at a gate and wait for something to blap, a -10 ganker has a lot of stuff he has to do to avoid getting killed before even reaching his target and he can be intercepted by people who know what they are doing. Ganking is at an all time low btw.

I don’t think decline in player numbers has something to do with highsec at all. It’s not like it became more difficult to live there. If anything it became more boring.

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Something something imput broadcasting was still allowed back then…

Like that guy who solo ran incursions
Or that one guy with 300 some skiffs ending belts all over the place :joy:

Not fan-focused
Focused on people who can’t adapt to losing ■■■■ ingame
Just look at all the gank nerfs, the watchlist nerf, the freighter buffs, asset safety, etc etc

They made this game so easy that those wanting for it to be easier are still asking for other buffs to their easier life playstyles

That’s what’s killing EVE
CCP

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292

It’s not more difficult to live there. It is boring to live there, and that’s part of the problem. Highsec should not be boring.

Tipa and Yiolo said it very well, highsec is where players start. Some are ready to leave very quickly, and should. Some aren’t, EvE is a very big sandbox and CCP doesn’t hold your hand. So who does, the players. But if CCP has made living outside highsec so much more valuable, who’s left in highsec to help new players adjust to the game. Answer - very few. So they are left on their own, and they leave EvE. It happens, and is happening every day. Tipa is right, EvE has many problems, but players start EvE in highsec, if players aren’t staying in EvE, we should consider that highsec isn’t preparing them correctly.

Everyone appreciates the job EveUni does, they help the game. But they are not alone, and they can’t catch everyone. There were many great training corps. Corps that recruit and train new players, I was part of a corp like that, and it’s gone. How many are left? To be effective those corps need active players in highsec where they meet, interact and teach new players how to play EvE.

That’s right CCP needs to offer something, to keep enough senior players in highsec, so there are people there to train new players. I had a new player a few weeks ago who proudly told me they completed all the tutorials, yet didn’t know all the different sites available to them in exploration until I took him out and showed him. Spent time teaching him how to use all the parts of the scanner, and showing him What he could do. None of that would have happened if I had put all my characters in a wh or null (as an aside, I love wh life - one of the best ideas CCP ever had).

So that is why I think this discussion is important, why changes have to happen. Because there is nothing like EvE, nothing even close, and we will all lose if CCP shuts down the server.

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It’s not just his or my taste. it’s nobody’s. Nobody does RW, FOBs, NPC mining OPs. Whatever there was else.

And it’s not that activities are bad themselves. They are just unrewarding. All they needed to do to fix was to add and balance the rewards. I mean profit from the new activities is about one tenth of that of Lvl4s/DED combat sites or whatever else highsec people usually do. How could they even hope people would switch.

I don’t understand why they don’t rebalance, revamp what is already there. Noone uses it. And they could.

And new stuff is so isolated and shallow. People always bring up how complex the game is. It was. Older mechanics are complex. That makes them deep, interesting and engaging. I mean look at those charts.

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For example, how many professions does T2 or T3 production take. PI, WH Gas huffer, rat hunter, salvager, hacker etc etc … And it’s engaging and rewarding in the end of the day. You get to build/sell/fly cool ships, and everybody uses them. It takes effort of many people playing different playstyles. This is what rewarding is.

What do you do, and what do you get out of running RW? Or FOBs? Or NPC miners? You need to kill rats and that’s it, and you don’t get anything valuable in return. No one uses results of your effort. Its like belt ratting in disguise.

Even earlier stuff like ghost sites, besieged sites, sleeper caches is shallow and dull. They are not interconnected or connected to anything. In ghost sites you get both bpcs and materials doing the same thing - hacking, theres even no faction flavor, they are all the same site.
Sleeper caches when you figure them out are dumb isk faucets.

And latest Abyssal Deadspace is like that too, you do the same thing over and over, kill rats in this case, and you get it all , the mods, bpcs and even materials, in the same place, doing the same thing.

Shallow, unengaging, dull.

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The sad situation probably is, that nobody at CCP still understands how these things are all interconnected, so fresh people rather opt for the addition with minimal interference with existing stuff. I would likely do the same to keep my job.

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295

Very well said. I can’t possibly give this enough likes…

Tipa, I really hope you’re wrong. You probably aren’t, but god I hope you are…

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I have been talking with my group of friends about Eve. I am trying figure out what makes Eve so bad or unappealing compared with other MMORPG.

The first thing I hear is that they don’t like the non consensual PvP in High Security space. The very long training time is another one that comes up quickly, as I have talked about some skills taking a month or more but those are high level skills. The War Declaration is another issues because that is another non consensual PvP, just with a different name.

My suggestion would be to make High Security space 100% consensual PvP only. I would increase the difficulty of NPC belt rats for 1.0-.5 and maybe have destroyer or cruiser rats in the lower security areas. I would take Low Security space and make it play like High Security does now. Null sec should stay as it is.

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Structures and POCO’s, war decs have to be kept in no matter what, they can not be removed cuase of this very reason…and before you say remove those then as well…i caution you to think about it harder.

And then nullsecrs move a ton of stuff through highsec…with NPC alts…cant wardec them…so you need to gank them…

Sorry but your words are not going to find much traction in the community.

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The failure of Eve to evolve is what is costing them players. I am starting to see how skewed this game is against any players/groups that are not PvP. I don’t care if CCP fixes Eve or not but I can tell you if something is not done CCP will lose another paying customer.

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Here we have another issue. “Players” like you, who actually have no clue and hate the game for what it is, talking to other people about the game.

Also these forums … Bob beware that potential new players come here to seek information about EvE, they could easily get the false impression things like ganking are a problem.

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Perhaps not remove wardecs, but make them require both sides to dec, that would take them back to what they were supposed to be in the first place. Eventually we do need to address ganking, but in a way that does not hurt the pve community, or the pvp side of things, maybe 100% safe high sec is an answer, maybe not, but telling anyone that at least tries to put an idea out, that it’s wrong, is just the ticket to end the chances that the game will recover, perhaps, a good answer is to limit where ganking can happen to .6 or lower, that would still leave a variety of opportunities in a target rich environment, as well as facilitate the free game play most are looking for as far as missions and mining are concerned. This is by no means a perfect solution, but any better would require a community shift that I don’t see happening anytime soon.

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nah

because “no one wants to be decced”…

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What you are not seeing though is the reason why a certain demographic play EvE and flourish…

They enjoy challenge, and it is those that would end up leaving in a 100% safe highsec, including myself an Industrialist.

People that pay subs, sometimes several at once over the course of a year…the boredom and unwillingness to live in nullsec would drive them out in droves…and eventually nullsec as the buyers and sellers of their wares goes into lah lah land…once the economy is ruined, and most of the rest of the content creators and people who enjoy (for the most part ) the current state of the game(yes we all still want things fixed or improvents) then EvE will die, and die fast.

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No. This is not a solution, it would be the end of EvE.

  1. There is no ‘end boss’ in EvE. There is no PVE that is a real challenge. EvE’s end game is PVP, it always was PVP. Creating an area where you were forbidden/prevented from shooting ships, what would you do there? There is no challenging PVE for you.

  2. The market would collapse, the heart of EvE would be ripped out. Why would you buy anything that you can’t lose? You’d never need more than one of each ship, since they would be completely safe. Mineral prices would bottom out, there’d be no reason to mine.

  3. On a typical day more ships die in highsec than most other areas combined. Remove this need for replacements and you’d cripple eve. Not to mention, if you never lose anything, why would you buy replacements?

EvE is different, your ‘solution’ would turn it into a very boring version of ‘elite dangerous’, without the ability to pilot the ships and aim the guns…

In another answer, I said I support ganking. People complain about CODE and groups like them. A few weeks ago I needed to move about 4 billion worth of merchandise into Jita. Of course there were all the usual gate camps. I could complain on the forums - but that’s not what real EvE players do. We adjust and adapt. I scouted the route, I chose the right ship for the job, I scouted lowsec for alternate routes, eventually I decided on the ‘best’ solution and sailed 4 billion easily through their ‘gatecamp’. In your world, I would hit autopilot and go do something else. They turned what would have been a boring flight, into a challenge. Why on earth would I want to lose that???

Remember this, PVP starts when you log into EvE. PVP is far more than just pressing f1, everything in this game is PvP in one way or another. Remember this and embrace it, EvE is the ONLY game that offers this. EvE is complex, EvE is hard - that’s why it’s so sweet when you succeed.

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