Dev blog: CSM Winter Summit Minutes & changes to election process

There you go, voices like yours were the ones listened to. PVE players generally don’t set being victims for others entertainment as their highest priority. Glad you found some fun in it. Maybe they should listen to those who do the PVE content rather than those who treat PVE players as content.

Anyway, I am just one voice, much of my time is PVP based, and missions are infill for when I have a short time to play, or off time zone for those I play in, as wormhole life is definitely not a solo opportunity. Doing them though does give an insight into life in HS, those who must spend all their time there, really is a subpar experience, those I talk to were quite excited about at last getting some new activities, and were bitterly disappointed when CCP showed zero understanding of either their lifestyle, needs or wishes.

Their needs and wishes are clear and simple, they want a REASON to continue playing, all they keep getting is a reason not to.

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You’re pretty out of touch mate. NPC’s being strong enough to kill players got everyone excited. Players were celebrating burners kill boards as much as, if not more than, ccp. And players loved the drifters as well. It was just the doomsday assuring the loss of a ship that got tedious. But then it was given tracking…

You’re talking to a mission runner and miner.

I really do not remember players celebrating their losses, funny that.

Players WERE excited with the idea of a new challenge, but it wasn’t was it?

It was a mechanic designed to make large losses occur until the only conceivable solution was found and shared. That is not mastery of a situation, that is not engaging gameplay, it is blood sport for others amusement.

My mistake then, I clearly misread your previous posts implying you were a griefer and ganker. :wink:

I don’t grief and i dont gank. I don’t wardec either. Or afk cloak. I don’t bump. Now check all my stances on those subjects.

I mine, mission, haul in freighters, industry and do fw.

I’m just not a self serving prick. I want to keep this game interesting.

Glad to hear that, I must have confused you with someone of almost the same name, or very similar.

Anyway, back to the point, I contend that on the basis of past experiences, players have little to encourage them to trust the developers are acting in their best interests when a new feature is rolled out. When a new feature appears, players engage cautiously, not knowing if they are going to get senselessly slaughtered. So a month or so is far too soon to conclude that new PVE is beyond redemption and to abandon it.

For example resource wars, at its core, it isn’t bad. But there are some critical flaws that let it down.

Firstly the trust issue is always going to ensure a slow take up.
Secondly the wardec system and “EVE” generally has trained people to be extremely cautious of joining with others. But that just needs time to overcome as the mechanics of RW is fairly protective.
Mainly, the reward system was so appallingly designed that it created an active incentive NOT to be involved in it, not only was it a poorer reward than almost any other activity in game, the LP rewards actually punished you for redeeming them.
And finally, there were too many restrictions that meant too much time was wasted trying to actually run them.

I Don’t regard them as irredeemable useless, as CCP appears to have concluded, I do however regard them as a totally missed target, because their goals didn’t match the people who would do them, and yes, I did try.

With the Burners, CCP intentionally created difficult mission content for a portion of the player-base who were asking for greater challenge. This is an admittedly small group. While it may seem tone-deaf, CCP’s making a big deal about the number of player ships destroyed, was their way of proving that the missions were indeed very hard.

But, the mission explanation is pretty clear up front that this will be more challenging, it explains what you will face with greater detail than any other mission type, and lets you decline without penalty. Without those steps, I might be able to accuse CCP of malicious conduct and betraying trust, of luring players into a false sense of security.

You may be entirely correct, It may simply be CCP was insensitive to those who were providing the loss figures and nothing more unpleasant than that.

It does ensure that players are VERY cautious of new PVE content though, and there needs to be a reasonable amount of time pass, until many players have determined they are not there as entertainment for others amusement.

Concluding that new PVE is broken and abandoning it is not necessarily wise, it may need minor iterations, rather than being thrown away, the issues with RW were clearly spoken before it rolled out, and unsurprisingly, they proved correct, keeping it and correcting it MAY be a better answer.

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The problem with this statement @CCP_Guard is that the RW sites themselves are great. Ok it’s anecdotal but everyone I know who has done them has enjoyed doing them, and some have even done them in fleets. I’ve come across a couple of random people doing them also and run the sites together as a result too.
It’s purely on the reward side that people have been discouraged, because most of the ‘rewards’ actually lose you isk compared to simply buying the items off the market, and a limited range of cosmetics where nearly all the price is in isk rather than LP simply aren’t going to attract people.

Iterating purely on the rewards for RW and making them more profitable would do a large amount for RW, and changing the costs of the rewards to be more weighted towards LP, & introducing a wider range of rewards seems like it should be fairly simple.

While throwing out great content simply because the reward side of it got screwed up so it hasn’t been adopted just seems extremely lazy.

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Awww poor you…

You mean you can’t cope with players not playing how YOU want them to, or how YOU expect them to play?

You need them to become willing targets so YOU can enjoy doing what YOU want to do?

Well I have some news for you, nobody whether in real life or in a game willingly becomes the target of the local bullies.

Just as there are ways to easily avoid a wardec, there’s also lots of ways to find targets willing to fight back if you can be bothered…

Yes I have read the minutes. Yes I have thought about this more than twice. No I don’t like crapping on the dev’s I understand they are in a tough place at the moment (more so after reading the minutes).

However given the PvE content that has come out recently (FOB’s / RW / Mining teams) and the failure of that content to connect to the player base (hell the minutes said they are dropping RW and it was only introduced in November) I simply fail to to grasp this refusal CCP has to simply create more of the content the player base enjoys.

The argument of “well we are developing new tools and content at the same time” I do not buy, because the content created by those tools is being ignored, if it is being ignored then it is wasted content, and therefore the dev time to create it is wasted.

I believe that if the same amount of dev time had being used to create missions within the old system there would be far greater player base involvement in that content.

Perhaps my initial post was OTT, perhaps it was harsh but given the almost complete withdrawal of CCP communications over the last year I do not see why I should take any more time to explain myself when it is almost certain that it is not going to be read and definitely going to be ignored.

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You’re wrong, and frankly I’m astonished that this kind of logic prevails given the repeated failures to revitalise both HS content, and the NPE in recent history.

If missions have such a broad - and apparently captive - audience, why aren’t you making use of this to gather information on what those people do and do not like? Similarly, why is this section of your audience being ignored when you’re so concerned about retention?

Adding new missions to the roster doesn’t break the existing system, if that’s your concern. Additionally, you can find out how popular the new missions are by watching which missions are being run regularly and which are being skipped.

You’ve tried to bring narrative and/or force group interactions with little success, because you’ve failed to grasp exactly what it is this group of players wants. Use new missions to trial various approaches to introducing narrative and storytelling elements. Those that stick, improve. Those that don’t, drop. HS gets new content people actually play, and you get a better idea of what is popular within that demographic to aid in attracting new players and retaining old ones, at a relatively low risk.

Honestly, it’s comments like these that concern me more than anything else about how the game is progressing, and I don’t even run missions. If anything highlights a massive disconnect between the playerbase and the devs, it’s this.

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This. Very much this. Before shelving a thing because the data says people aren’t using it… find out why they’re not using it. It’s likely something that can be corrected.

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Exactly.

The thing is we told them about the problem when RW was on the test server. They were warned that the content would be DOA if the rewards did not improve.

They ignored us then and they will / are ignoring us now. It almost feels like they are killing the content because they can’t admit that they were wrong and we were right.

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In the version I’ve been kicking around, the aggressor needs one. Mostly so the defender can force a fight somewhere, and they aggressor has skin in the game. The structure dies, the corp is penalised in some fashion. (could just be financial. There’s a bunch of twiddly design bits though.

I’ve seen other people kicking around the idea that if a corp doesn’t have a structure, it can’t be wardecced.

on that brief summary I have no problem with that idea. You want structure bonuses? Be prepared to defend it. You want to Merc? Don’t expect NPC corps to cover for you.

Makes sense to me.

Wow, you just love to twist reality, don’t you?

Please, tell how “people who like to run agent missions” is not a target group for “agent missions”, a specialyzed product in the EVE Online spectrum?

And please tlee how “they wil be mastered, ignored, yadda yadda yadda” means “CCP can’t add more of them because they would break them”.

You’re making up arguments. The reality is that adding more missions will not break the mission system and will give mission runners something for their money. CCP thinsk that they don’t need to do anything since mission runners are suckers and just love to suck it so why bother, but you’ve been cheating and twisting and spinnign reality for a false argument: No, there is no unavidable reason why expanding the pool of missions will break the mission system.

And reality is that either be cynical disregard for some customer’s preferences or developer egos (level design isn’t as glamurous as all the stuff CCP has been implementing instead), the thing is that mission runners quit because CCP doesn’t does sh*t to retain them and apparently in their view they don’t need to.

This is a solution that would make it even more daunting fighting back. You think the random target of a wardec is capable of going after a structure, when they wont even try to catch one aggressor on his own? This will only benefit the larger groups, not help the newer players or fix anything.

I’ve argued this for years, and even put up a fortizar to prove the point, in 6 months no one even dared to touch it even tho I was at war with much bigger entities than ourself. When finally someone gave it a try it was 2 bigger mercs bringing more people on field than I had in my alliance that thought they could get a easy kill since we only had 3 active people left.

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Thanks for the reply.

I am very interested in where this may go.

https://forums-archive.eveonline.com/topic/452609/

Yes.

The wardeccers keep docking up.

And the targets are avoiding any conflict at any cost.

I was not gonna dignify you with an answer, but really? did you read the rest of my post or just what you quoted?