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

well find out for us please steve

Right, but the defender is generally the people who didn’t want to spend time PvPing. That’s why the other guy attacked them. So in order to win the war, the people who don’t want to PvP have to do the thing they aren’t playing the game to do.

That’s not gonna encourage them to do it. That’s going to have them say ‘so our best strategy is just jump corp or don’t undock still? Ok, we’ll keep doing that’.

I mean, if I tell an Amish guy ‘I’m picking on you because you’re a pacifist. So every time I see you in this store, I’m going to punch you in the nuts, and if you want me to stop, you have to punch me in the nose’, he’s not going to fight back. He’s going to go somewhere else.

So will the non-PvP players. The ones who want to shoot back already do. The ones who don’t want to shoot back will just go elsewhere… just like they do now. Giving them a nice juicy target to shoot at when they don’t want to shoot at it isn’t an incentive.

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CCP cannot build a game that is sustainable without destruction, they simply can’t treadmill enough new content down fast enough to do this. ie every person you are talking about relies on destruction to make the market space to sell whatever it is they are producing, and lots of things they are farming, have value to them only because of pvp related scarcity. You are talking about a bunch of arms dealers and arms collectors hiding behind concord. They have no moral justification for special treatment.

Furthermore, if you do not want to fight, the existence of a war ending structure is of absolutely no relevance to you. You will not find it, you will not shoot it, and it will not make any difference to your behavior. This thing does not matter to the rank coward, the corp hopper, the never undocker.

That is not a computer game about spaceships with guns on them, and the police happily charge people with assault for assaulting an Amish.

They want to be rid of the war, and have safer access to trade routes and pve. Being able to do that saturday morning and then go about your individual business for the rest of the weekend is awesome. That is then fundamentally a point of difference between good and bad highsec corps, and a point of difference that will ultimately lead to recruitment of larger functional highsec corps, and a reduction of the pointless minicorp spam.

No it won’t. It will do utterly nothing for clearly outlined points.
To grow highsec corps you need to give them competitive benefits for being in a corp rather than pre-nerfing everything like Upwell structures have been. CCP didn’t even give them a way to defend their moon mining belts from predation.

… the people it is actually being offered as targeting, because the guys who are already fighting back are already fighting back.

It’s not going to move people from small highsec corps to large highsec corps. It’s not going to make people who are already fighting start fighting. It’s not going to make people who aren’t fighting start fighting. Killing a citadel takes a lot more work and time than getting a bunch of thrashers and blowing up one idiot’s battleship to show you’re not defenseless prey.

Your argument appears to come down to ‘It will lead to more people coming to EVE who want to fight, and we’ll get rid of the people who don’t.’ If this is true (and I could be misreading you), then:

A)Where are these people who want to fight coming from and why do we need this change to get them into EVE?
B)EVE has a notable and acknowledged problem with player retention. I don’t think ‘screw those guys, I hope they quit’ is really the right way to go.

Again, though, I could be misreading you.

Yes it will. It will allow some corps to undec themselves. That is reason then for other players to join them. The decs are public history, the fact that they undec themselves is public history too, which means someone applying to player corps has a viable point to judge whether that corp offers a very useful service to members.

Fundamentally a single fleet action can remove the oppressive part of a wardec. That alone is the kind of thing that would make me consider actually attempting to construct such a corp/alliance.

They pop in your preferred mining time, unless you are really, really bad at calendars, and you can also throw off a determined opponent by cancelling the extraction. You can bump them, outmine them or gank them.

But fundamentally the fact that most highsec miners are too afk to find them, there are thousands of 0.5 moons, and imo the majority of highsec miners are confrontation averse so I expect most people will be able to mine a moon quite successfully if they own the athanor.

I’ve fought against skilled gangs in nullsec, who have fully prepared setups where each person in the setup knows their role intimately. EVE offers a balance to that in that ridiculous temporal local superiority can force those setups to do no more than pick off undisciplined stragglers. When those skills, fit and coordination are applied to a war, its an oppressive week of not being able to do anything.

This feature allows a large corp/alliance to muster a brief period of massive local superiority, win the war and get the rest of the week to themselves.

It also plainly cannot be instantiated in a citadel, because a citadel takes a week to kill. So it will be more vulnerable, and require much shorter timers than a citadel. if you are planning an offensive war, you are plainly planning to be ingame and in space that week and should be able to defend the offensive structure on short notice.

I live with CAS combat guild. We literally specialize in offering people the chance to fight for the first time, and have had a thousand people do it. Furthermore CAS has historically been an indy starter corp, ie we were always drawing from indy players - we all mined. The gateway drug is sometimes CASMA, the highsec boosted mining fleet, where people get used to purple and playing together.

Even then, for those that just decide they don’t want to play online multiplayer game in an online multiplayer game nothing changes, nobody is demanding the end of starter corps, or that indy corps be forced to go fight this structure.

I’ve no idea how you’d think it would cause external recruitment. I certainly have never suggested so. I also have no idea why you’d possibly think providing a better tool for fighting back could possibly cause reduced retention.

This would be a success imo if 1 large scale high sec with benefits corp arose with selective recruiting that caused new pilots to aspire to join it. A clear analogue to PL for 5.0s. A better reason than a shiny ship for pveing in highsec.

Also CCP does not need to retain new players 2 months into the game. It needs to retain players that are a year into the game, by helping them have the tools for meta projects like corp building.

Eve has no problem with player retention. It has one of the longest retentions in the industry. It is however simply an old game in a fresh products market, ie the game market is not what it was in the late 90s when this was conceived, and its not what it was in 2011 when word of mouth / free hype recruitment for eve was at its peak.

The people that aspire to achieve something. Eventually. Which is pretty much everyone playing the game really. Most people are mining to get ships to pvp with even if they have other mental blocks like thinking that losing a ship is bad, or that they need 50m sp to compete. its in the back of many peoples minds that they’ll be more heroic in the future.

None of which addresses the actual point. This is a mechanic being offered as a way to reduce the war dec spam against PvE players who don’t want to PvP. Saying ‘hey, if you don’t want to PvP, here’s a way to avoid it! Just PvP!’ is ridiculous. They’re not going to do timers to do the thing they already don’t want to do.

The fact that it won’t cause external recruitment was kind of my point, yes. It appeared to be what you were suggesting. As for reducing retention… because again, it’s being offered as a way for people who don’t want to fight back… to fight back. They don’t want to.

I don’t care how nice your spinach dip is, I don’t like spinach, I’m not going to eat it. If your solution to ‘I don’t like spinach’ is ‘wait! I have a totally NEW spinach dip!’ that’s not going to get me to come back to your pub.

And yes, CCP needs to retain new players 2 months into the game. CCP’s internal metrics have shown that if you’re still playing 6-7 months in, you’re probably staying a while. It’s the first few months that need to hook you.

You might want to check with CCP Rise’s presentation on player retention at FF 2015, where he said something in excess of 75% of the people who try EVE quit in the first six months. EVE has always had a problem with player retention. I don’t know where you’d get the impression it doesn’t. It’s literally a subject of discussion year after year at FF and among the CSM.

What they don’t want to do is lose. Lets be abundantly ■■■■■■■ clear on this, most people will pvp in EVE if they are going to ■■■■■■■ win. That includes literally half of the people you think of as passive ■■■■■■■ indies. Your point makes tremendous assumptions about the motivations of players that we can recognize are substantially wrong - ie actions based on realism (no money, no sp) once here are not the motivations that caused people to join EVE in the first place.

So yes this feature will divide them into 4 groups based on their natural circumstances.

1- Those that want nothing to do with it
2- those that wish they could but won’t join a group that can
3- those that wish they could but can’t meet some requirement of the groups that can
4- and those that will heads up join a group that can

I personally expect that like every other thing in eve, initially the take up for 4 will be 0, because there will be no proven groups that can, and that over time, as one group arises that can, that thing will be dogpiled into by everyone, and then natural internal tensions will break the knowledge and capabilities out over many highsec entities, and some people in the naturally solo categories will rethink their positions.

and imo, that would be a substantial improvement in progression of eve corporations in highsec than anything that currently exists.

They literally can’t do anything about it because it turns out some people decide they don’t like space games that much. Not only that, there is virtually no feature about highsec they can communicate to new players that make sense until they play. In fact shooting each other is one of the few things that people outside the game understand properly.

75% of every bloody mmo quits within 6 months. In fact I’ve played MMOs where the entire userbase quit within 6 months. Would you like a list of the dead MMOs to help you understand retention stats ?

What benefits?
There are no high sec benefits for a corp. To build this first you have to actually create those benefits, which will cause corps to fight for them to start with without any need for a structure like this. And without the benefits you’ll never get this mythical large highsec corp that can produce such a fleet to fight against third party logistics backed war deccing corps. So again, the whole idea is attempting to find a problem that doesn’t exist.

Also a single PL analogy would be terrible. You really seem utterly ignorant when you propose this, because PL stiffles a lot of activity. Massive super cap fleets are terrible, EVE had better null sec activity (if not as much ‘value’ killed) when alliances were smaller and more local, a single corp dominating highsec would end up becoming the wardec corp and eating everyone else. ‘Join us or die’ is a terrible idea,

Let’s see. I’ve specifically said the ones I’m identifying as passive are the people who don’t want to PvP, to the point of just docking up and logging off for a week solid. The ones you seem to be claiming don’t exist despite a number of different people including members of war dec corps have explicitly said do exist, in this very thread. These are people who could win already. Don’t make any mistake here, they could. The groups that go war dec’ing small mining corps to pad killboards back off after a loss or two. So these are people who could win, but don’t engage in that activity because they don’t want to. That’s specifically the people I’m talking about.

So, no, I think I’m going to disagree with you about whether or not half the people who don’t PvP even though they can currently win would PvP if only they could win.

1- this feature won’t change their behavior. They don’t want to do the thing this wants to get them to do.
2- this feature won’t change their behavior. This isn’t going to convince them to change groups. They’re staying where they are for a reason. I really doubt that reason is ‘the guys dec’ing us don’t have a structure at risk’.
3- If they’re working on improving already, then they’re already working on improving. If they’re not, the odds are there’s a reason for that. This likely won’t change that calculus for most of them, either.
4- don’t you think they’re already doing that? I mean, this isn’t rocket surgery here. Your position would mean that right now, they’re sitting around saying ‘I want a chance to win, I don’t have any reasons keeping me from joining a group that can win, but I’m not joining it because… no reason at all.’ You think that’s a significant number of people? Really?

The people they’re not retaining are, in fact, people who like space games. They’re moving to E:D or Stellaris, they’re sitting around waiting for CIG to finish Vapor Citizen. The ‘Inception’ NPE is, in fact, a step CCP has taken specifically to improve retention, and while it hasn’t solved the problem, it’s definitely proven a good step. So to say ‘they literally can’t do anything about it’ is patently false.

25% retention is actually extremely low. Games of a relatively similar age (WoW, LotRO, GW, etc) show significantly higher retention numbers. Games that don’t? You do know the object here is to avoid being on the list of dead MMOs, right? Because you’re literally arguing ‘we have to aim for the industry average including all the failures!’ And… that means failing. Because the average MMO doesn’t succeed.

Just to address this, because I missed it… do you have any actual idea how PL operates? Do you know, for example, that structural support for industry and PvE efforts within the alliance are rudimentary at best? Or that, for all the press, PL is, at under 3000 people, on the small side of ‘average’ 0.0 alliance sizes?

The benefit of being able to login friday evening, join the alliance wardec killing fleet, and then have the whole weekend to krab or web my freighter about without decs. The ability to own a highsec structure that gets undecced faster than its timers come up. The abiility to look down my monocle at people that can’t even kill 1 puny leetle stucture.

If you have open wars you are a target. ie the whole point to this structure is to close wars, to have freedom to krab. the people that want open wars, do not want a giant pile of vulnerable pve players flying vulnerable pve fits during wars.

This distopia you speak of, appears to be located on the backside of mount improbable. The dec players will reject the pve players from their corps. that is the way it always has been.

edit : I’m not at all impressed by your insult either. pretty poor forum behavior really.

You’ve just confirmed the existence of the pvp groups who only pvp when they think they can win. Thankyou.

Also for any given feature CCP puts forwards, someone will be angry about it, someone will not want to use it, and other people will like it and want to use it. ie the existence of a group of people that don’t want to use it is not in anyway a reason to not build the feature, since they exist for every feature. Particularly when the feature is plainly intended as an assist for people who are wardecced and will plainly assist some.

as is your perogative.

There is no feature you can put forward in eve that someone doesn’t like. You are a perfect example of that.

Many people change eventually - it is often necessary to change to get the most out of EVE. I got my first pvp kill in 2014, after starting in 2007. I am a perfect example of that.

This is rejection for any number of reasons by a group that will kill offensive dec structures. I expect the most common reason for someone being in this category would be elitism by organisations or the individual being unwilling to buy into the task of joining a fleet once a week or whatever. ie the uncooperative leech, the potential spy, the people who can’t figure out how to not look like an awoxer, or the person who is just too hard to get along with.

‘fighting’ a wardec now, requires that you don’t have pve players in space giving up easy kills and probably involves you doing something you really don’t want to do on an ongoing basis like camping, dominating your activities for a whole week, against players who understand the mechanics of highsec perfectly, can move about freely because its highsec and all that will happen at the end of the week is the war might cease or it might not.

I personally find showing up for a decisive battle to be far more along the lines of how I’d like to fight a war, and much more inline with how I envisaged eve to be before I joined. I didn’t see myself as a cloaky camper or an undocking ring specialist.

lotro has gone through a 50% server consolidation since 2011. ie its user population pretty much mimics that of eve, which probably reflects on the release of guildwars 2 during the same period (which probably reflects on the desire to change eve to a more f2p oriented model.

nobody I know actually plays vapourcitizen, even the people that bought spaceships. lol.

I’m perfectly aware of the consequences of selective recruiting. I’m also aware that they don’t need much space, and they have, for a 3000 person organisation a large impact on null politics, large percentage turnouts to activities, and a fairly small vulnerability surface. I expect that a selective highsec organisation would exhibit similar properties.

So I drop corp, and can log in and web my freighter and not worry about decs also.
The only thing your proposal offers is a slight benefit to structure owners. But if they are hitting your structure they are going to be able to defend their own structure timer against you.
If they are unable to defend their own structure in their space you would be perfectly capable of just winning your structure defence and not worry about going hunting them in their territory where you don’t have all your bookmarks, spare ships, support from your own structure etc.

So no, this whole idea adds near enough zero to the game. Because the defenders who could actually benefit from it don’t need it. And it adds a huge nerf to small/lone wolf corps who want to Dec larger groups, because a solo pilot war dec corp isn’t bashing structures, and also isn’t going to be defending structures against a fleet.
On the whole it’s a significant negative.

Did that need confirmation? Good god, I’m in GOONSWARM. 2/3 of nullsec will only PvP when we think we’ll win. The people who will PvP if they think they can win? NOT WHO THE CHANGE IN WARDECS IS AIMED AT.

And did you start PvPing because CCP introduced a new mechanic where you’d need to set timers to fight back?

Fighting a war against the kinds of war dec corps that intentionally pick on no-PvP-record miners in order to pad their killboard usually requires getting a half-dozen destroyers, waiting for one of them to be alone, and jumping him as he’s traveling and thinking he’s safe. As soon as you do that, they tend to find better things to do, because they’re a bunch of cowards and bullies who won’t take a real fight.

I’m well aware. I play on Landroval. LotRO also still has better new player retention.

Not really. They own very little space because they use the rest of PanFam for holding space. Their turnout is actually a little low compared to null average, and by themselves, they don’t have much impact at all on null politics these days. It’s only them in conjunction with the other 17,000 pilots of PanFam (not including NCdot’s minions in GotG and MC) that they really exert an influence in null politics. On their own, PL are about as politically impactful as a bunch of marauding Cossacks or Vikings. They’re a threat to individuals and small, disorganized groups when they come by to be a threat, but they’re only really influential when the rest of the bloc mobilizes.

This effectively comes down to people arguing whether Burner Missions ‘count’ as missions or not, as I know a fair few do not. If you do ~1 year since last changes, if you don’t, a lot more than that.

Summary of the convo:

Coralas : I PLAY THIS WAY, PEOPLE SHOULD PLAY MY WAY OR GO AWAY!
Arrendis: That’s a nice way to kill EVE Online, CCP won’t buy it.

BTW, using older data, CCP stated back in 2011 or earlier that less than 25% of new players came to EVE because of the PvP. Also, EVE Online retention, as per the latest estimates, was 50% after the tutorial and 10% after 2 months. Apparently the NPE worsened the initial retention rate as many players didn’t even finished the tutorial. I should check for the exact data and soruces, but you get the gist, EVE retention is quite poor and IMO the F2P shift might be attracting three monthers, which would drive the retention even lower and would impact long term demographics.

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It isn’t my proposal, and I don’t care if you don’t like it. Like I said in my previous reply, there is no idea that can be put into eve that someone doesn’t like, and I’m not remotely interested in dropping corps, and I’m distinctly enthused by an idea that will be consistently presented as an alternative to drop corp.

Most wardeccers have no interest in destroying structures.

I disagree, its a significant positive.

Its a big benefit to me to be able to end a wardec and thus freely pve, reducing my concerns down to suicide ganks, and imo its an attractive feature for a highsec corp to produce together.

I’m also sure that the lone wolf pvper will be able to find plenty of targets who don’t know to or too afraid / disorganized to destroy the structure / don’t care.

I think we’re done here.

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You are welcome to your opinion, but you’ve singly failed to produce any actual basis for this beyond a ‘I like it’.
If you want to discount all my reasoning without bringing counter reasoning, then there isn’t much more point talking about this, because there are a bunch of bad reasons associated with this idea, and the ‘good’ ones simply aren’t need because they are already dealt with in much easier ways by nearly everyone.
Simply because it fits the mental narrative you have in your head doesn’t mean it will play out like that in reality, I mean for a start you will have to form a fleet for at least the initial attack plus the reinforcement period, because any structure like this 100% will have a reinforcement period. This means it’s not a simple ‘press button and get rid of wardec’ attack, but you’ll have to go up against their fleet on their time zone to contest it. And if you could already do that to start with, you could chew them up without needing this.