So. You would be on board with a use it or lose it approach to tackle where if you don’t kill someone fast enough they can build up warp strength and break free of tackle then right?
That would easily be circumvented by simply more gankers…to the point where it’s not cost effective any longer.
As a specific suggestion, I wouldn’t say that’s ‘unworkable’. However as Runa points out, it seems too small a tweak to have much impact by itself. It looks ripe for workarounds. Maybe the workarounds would be interesting, maybe not.
The EVE system for PvP is fundamentally broken. It would take more than this sort of small tweak/mechanics adjustment to fix it.
The current system strongly supports more attackers over fewer (N+1), bigger ships over smaller, more SP over less SP, more game experience over less, etc. etc. While this can be excused as being ‘more realistic’, the very point of games is that they offer more interesting alternatives to reality.
What the EVE system does is discourage experimentation, discourage newer/curious players, smaller gangs and cheaper ships, casual roams, and casual/accessible wardecs. What it encourages is fights where you know you can either win or escape, fights where all the odds are in your favor, fights where you have backup available to call in, fights where you can afford to lose more than the other guy.
Basically this is a system that says “Fight if you’re an experienced, higher SP player with lots of ISK, 3rd party tools, a highly effective build and the ability to replace any losses you suffer”. While that isn’t ‘wrong’, per se, what it does over time is leave EVE with a population of people who want to fight but won’t unless the odds greatly favor them, and a population who habitually avoids PvP and looks to farm PvE to get some interaction with the game or to fund the occasional PvP splurge. The population of PvP-seekers and potential targets gets way out of balance.
There are counter-examples and people who play differently of course, but this is clearly the way the majority of those who stayed in the game play. The actual majority, of course, in terms of numbers, have simply stopped playing EVE altogether.
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I would actually say that the PvP system is fine in EVE but it’s people expectations that are broken.
RP’ing aside, one cannot expect to make a freighter (IRL or in EVE) safe from evil-do’ers as it has everything going against it; slow, huge, not agile, not great armor and poorly armed. Pirates routinely take-over multi-million dollar ships in the Gulf of Aden with just a few thousands worth of boats/weapons. This is reality and is and should be echoed in EVE.
Any change to the ship fundamentals of this relationship between ganker and hauler goes against logic/reality. Sure it will make some happy but you are moving away from the core idea of which drives EVE; risk vs reward…and people with expectations that this should be the “right” direction Eve should take have, IMO, broken expectations.
This argument also can be extended to miners too…
Disclaimer
There are of course ways to make freighters safer IRL and in EVE but I’m not covering that here as it’s pretty obvious.
I think you make a bad assumption here, followed by a failure to differentiate between what you would like other players to do vs. what other players actually do.
The bad assumption is that ‘reality should be echoed in EVE’. It never fails to strike me as odd that people want a space game with lasers and warp drive and immortal pod clones, but when it comes to justifying their preferences they fall back on ‘because it’s more realistic’. The entire point of games is to be non-realistic in an interesting fashion. If you want realism, go play life. (You won’t even need to download it.)
The behavioural difference is more significant. Yes, small bands of pirates take over expensive freighters in the Gulf of Aden and other areas. And the natural result of that is that everyone who can possibly avoid travelling through those areas with expensive cargo - does so. And insurance rates increase for those who cannot avoid it. And ships install various anti-piracy measures. Etc. ad nauseum.
In real life, if the oil must go from A to B and money is to be made on it, people calculate their risks and take their chances, or they avoid it altogether. Pirates gamble their liberty and their life on the outcome. If you really want to be ‘more realistic’ then feel free to alter the game so that pod pilots engaging in illegal actions find themselves awakened in a holding facility, where they will serve out the full term for their actions before returning to the game.
In game terms, people can and do make the choices that come naturally to them. People avoid loss and avoid risk-taking that is likely to lead to loss. If EVE uses a system that makes loss likely for them, they will avoid it. That is not ‘people’s expectations being broken’. That is poor game design. In real life, you are forced to play, because there is no alternative. In game worlds, you choose the ones that provide entertainment and interesting stimulation. If the game provides loss and negative reinforcement, you stop playing. It’s as simple as that.
Designing game mechanics so as to actively deny and discourage continued participation due to well known and well understood patterns of human behaviour is foolish. EVE had a great overall concept, excellent scope, an early start in the space/sci-fi MMO space, and very nice graphics. It also provided a space for all the misfits and griefers to go and work out their issues by ‘being the bad guy’. Those were enough drivers to make it successful for the first 10 years. It has proven insufficient to carry it for the second ten.
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Since Kezrai didn’t cover it I will.
Where on earth did either of us mention freighters in our recent posts.
I don’t imagine a use it or lose it approach having any impact on high sec at all, CCP have already implemented that in high sec with the warp timer.
What it means is that those fits where they can’t break your tank but lock you down for ages till help logs on no longer can, that help has to actually be online already, not coming online an hour from now.
It won’t be a huge impact but it would be a start to making it less binary as to outcomes.
Hmm alright I see more where you’re going with that idea now. So in that case, either slowly building to warp, or having an ability or a % chance that for some periods their tackle will fail, or some other mechanic to introduce a little variability into the process of “activate warp scrambler, target is stuck here until one of them dies”.
I haven’t thought through the concept a lot yet. I can see that it possibly allows for the elimination of the warp stabilizers/disruptor-scrambler duality. It’s got more potential than I originally gave it, at least.
In general though, I prefer to re-think the whole process of “How should PvP engagement work in EVE?” and do a decent re-design of the basic mechanics (assuming it can be done in an affordable manner). However as one-off bandaid treatments go, this concept has some application in some situations. Primarily though it looks like it would help those who wish to escape combat, rather than engage in it. While that’s a useful function, I’d actually prefer to see more reasons for more people to take part in PvP, rather than more ways to disengage.
Hell no. The result of that isn’t “use it or lose it”, it’s discouraging people from flying solo and providing even more incentive to blob and annihilate a target before it can build up to escape.
People already blob up whenever they can, and most solo fights are over in a few minutes.
Stop being negative nancy whenever an idea gets put forward.
Which means we need incentives not to do that, not even more incentives to create one-sided fights where nobody has any fun.
Stop being negative nancy whenever an idea gets put forward.
Then stop putting forward poorly thought out ideas that have major flaws.
If we believed you any idea which could possibly change anything has major flaws.
Sorry I was just jumping to the warp time of a freighter vs number of gankers needed…freighters just were the easy choice…
I don’t think reality should be echoed but rather common sense. Whether it’s ocean going freighters or armored cars or stage coaches, all of those have similar traits. All I’m saying is that those traits should be echoed in Eve based and what we know of how things work IRL and could be extrapolated into a fictional game. Pods, lasers (as a serious weapon) and warp do not exist yet but we do know that if you want to move large cargo, the vehicle doing will have relative common traits. This is common sense.
I disagree and would point to this as broken expectations. You say it’s poor design where I say, if you expect losses, fleet-up. Do what those ships in the Gulf of Aden do and have armed escorts. Eve isn’t broken because “A” can’t do “B”, it’s broken because “A” has been told that they should be entitled to do “B”.
I will agree that CCP has done a lot over the years to discourage teamwork…heck I’m solo as in HS/LS I am all the help I need thanks to boosts. This is before my time but the stories of blockade running fleets going though LS to get to Null should be what EVE is about…now that’s gone and so is the need for fleeting-up.
Any how…not arguing that you’re wrong just that this is way more complex than just blaming the PvP engine(sic)
Armoured cars often come with weapon systems
Stage coaches were armed once you take ‘crew’ into account.
Spanish main cargo ships were heavily armed with multiple decks of cannon usually.
So no, they don’t have the similar trait of being defenceless that you are trying to state
Escorts don’t work in EVE. For many reasons. Don’t keep bringing up the old tired argument of ‘just get someone else to sacrifice all their time for free’. It was terrible game play.
If you want something like that I will refer you to bomber convoys of WW2 that roughly speaking self escorted. That sort of effect is what we should be aiming for, where industrialists naturally group up for safety, but by doing so might also attract larger hunting packs after them.
No you don’t need.
You try to force a different issue within this one. That’s just off-topic.
Yes, in the general case it’s better to create such incentives. Does not mean EACH discussion must absolutely revolve around that aspect.
I already gave a solution to reduce the tendancy to group up : make concord response time become lower, the more people are criminals on the grid. Something like response = base/sqrt(#criminals)
Never said defenseless as some ships traveling in dangerous waters arm themselves. You also ignored all the other traits that I mentioned…and yes, they have similar traits, relatively speaking. Slower, easy to hit, high reward vs risk, not nimble, poorly armed, etc…
They don’t? Even with all the boosts and reps given now? Odd…also, those “somebody else” should be corp mates or hired mercs or whatever, you know, the whole point of an MMO.
Bombers in WWII were the safest when escorted by fighters and mostly deadmeat prior to that…hence the switch to night bombing missions in early/mid war.
Exactly but indy types generally are not combat types so this is where they need to have corp mates run escorts or whatever…NOT that indi-types’ ships should be able to stand and fight on a near equal footing as a raider/pirate…
Sorry, this is a typical response of those who want things a certain way and choose to ignore all the details that disagree. If you want common sense, then pursue the logic to it’s conclusion: a pilot commits an illegal act, he is flagged for it, he is Concorded or gate-sentry attacked for it. His actions are known and recorded. He doesn’t then get a ‘get out of jail free’ card after 15 minutes. He needs to deal with the consequences. Expiring flags are game-logic, not ‘common sense’ or ‘realism’. You can’t argue that ‘common sense’ must apply to the victim but ‘game-logic’ for the criminal.
More of the same. It’s a game, not a career. People log in to do something for relaxation and entertainment and maybe some excitement. Not everyone can whistle up a fleet every time they want to do something. Not everyone wants to. If you need a fleet, it’s not a sandbox - it’s a ride on rails. Plus, again, you miss the detail that if you can fleet up, so can they. EVE is N+1, bigger is better, design.
You can argue theoretical points all year long. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. CCP has published the numbers. PVP is a minority activity (~15% of the players engage). Most players don’t fleet up, they mostly play solo. Population is declining drastically. Income is down to the point where CCP has cut their team so hard they can’t even handle creating a chat system anymore.
All this is real world, real results, real behaviour. Pointing to years of the same results and saying “That’s just poor player expectations and not adapting” is voluntary blindness. Coding mechanics that only work if people stop acting like people and start acting like some imaginary ‘dedicated hard-core PvP fleeter’ is foolish. Worse, it is short-sighted, because it makes no provision for where the targets of those imagined PvPers are going to come from. They certainly aren’t going to hunt each other (in general, exceptions apply) because tough fights against PvP-ready gangs aren’t, in general, what they’re looking for or what the game mechanics encourage.
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Oh hey, let’s make Indy vessels defenceless…
Oh would you look at that Indy players don’t train combat skills I wonder why…
Get outside the limitations of the current system and the practices and meta it enforces.
@Kezrai_Charzai EVEs team hasn’t been cut in any meaningful manner. The lay offs were the studios attached to games no longer being developed and what… two community devs?
I totally agree that the criminal tag/Concord role needs a massive redo but that doesn’t change my earlier point. It should be WAY harder to operate in HS if you are a criminal…THIS is poor game logic as it both makes for crap game play for everyone and goes against RL common sense.
Then let it die…
Again, never said that…