This is actually not true. CCP added NPC dreads to high end null anoms. People I play with like them, even to the point of saying “I wish Dreads would spawn more”. This, even though the dreads (which can be a challenge to kill unless you bring cap ships) actually SLOW DOWN isk making.
The addition of NPC dreads to high end anoms is like when CCP added Dread Pirate Scarlet; it expanded on what people were already doing in an interesting way without upsetting the apple cart too much.
I think I know why what we’ve been saying (ie "give PVE players what their ACTIONS dictate they like instead of listening to the utopian “interesting PVE” people) is controversial. The kinds of people who play spaceship games tend to be ‘forward’ looking types that don’t really see the value in things that work well but aren’t ‘sexy’ or new. People like this are predisposed to think that newer is better.
Sometimes, it ain’t, which is why people are doing (mostly pre-2006) anomalies and missions way more than the newer (post 2009) stuff.
That same argument can be made about anything CCP have made that hasn’t met with satisfaction from some part of the player base.
However the reality is that they have managed to make some good engaging PvE lately. Resource wars is great content, as are FOB’s. The Guardian’s Gala sites seem to be working pretty well this time around also.
CCP has fallen down on the risk/reward equation with some of this content though, the initial RW offerings were all negative isk, and FOB’s started with a bug that made them solo farms, then once that bug was fixed the risk was insane compared to the reward (there may have been a recent tweak to make them more doable or may just be a bug).
But failing to balance the reward does not mean that CCP can not make good PvE content. It just means that there is a disconnect between the team making the content and the people who balance rewards. Or at least between the two equations.
Your argument about ‘people mainly do this content’ falls flat on it’s face also, because you are comparing content designed to cater to an infinite or large number of players at once with content which by it’s very nature is limited, because the number of sites are limited far more than anoms are, and missions can have infinite people doing them, subject to tidi in the system obviously, which the SOE stations in highsec started suffering at points on T2 server.
If CCP were designing similar large scale content you might have a point, but taking say incursions and saying ‘more people run anoms than incursions’ when incursions were specifically designed to be a limited resource that people would have to compete over if too many people wanted in on them is comparing apples & veal. Totally different things.
That’s not the point, the point is that magic ore transfer is against EVE’s mechanics. And that it removes a number of aspects a mining fleet normally has to consider.
But it doesn’t. If it did there wouldn’t be any issue because you could handle the tax in some manner inside corp, because everyone would need to be in corp to avoid going suspect anyway. And you could inflict penalties on people who didn’t participate appropriately in the corp system by oh… refining in your corps refineries and instead took it elsewhere.
You mean the RW that no one does and the FOBs that ONE GROUP does?
The events are ok, mainly because they tend to be SIMPLE and accessible. That’s the entire point of what folks like me have been saying; CCP has wasted sooo much time trying to reinvent the PVE wheel when all they had to do was look at what we are doing and just go with that. Missions (like Scarlet), additions like the anoms dread spawns, simple event pve like Crimson Harvest, maybe some more pve oriented gear (the Marauders went over pretty well when they were introduced).
I think CCPs problem matches your own as evidenced by what you typed about “large scale content”. I noticed this in Jin’taan’s last PVE roundtable too; there is this tendency to overthink very simple things to the point of over complication. But it’s not hard, it can be summed up easily as “Drifters, no, missions, yea” (Drifters being the poster child for terribly wasted Developer time).
I’ll ask you again like I asked Corales. How many times does something have to fail (check the CSM minutes, RW, something you just said was great, was an abject failure) before you say “well, that doesn’t work”?
People do RW despite the terrible rewards because the sites themselves are fun.
However people don’t do it in any kind of scale because the REWARDS are terrible.
If Null sec anoms gave no bounties, and overseers effects you could trade with an extra cost of 10 million isk for an item only worth 5 million isk, no-one would do null sec anoms either.
You have to actually look at WHY something fails. If it fails because you put truly pathetic rewards in, then you fix the rewards and give it a second look before you decide that it doesn’t work.
Ditto FOB’s. When the level of entry was not a full pirate BS fleet blingier than needed for the minimum for incursions, a lot of people did them. Ok the level of entry was too low for both the intended challenge and the reward. But they swung it massively the other way into way too much risk, far too little reward, and suddenly the number of people doing them crashed. It’s a clear sign that people do pay attention to risk/reward the way the number of FOB’s dying went from all over the place to a single group, and only very recently has a second group gotten on top of how to handle them.
Ok, I’ll allow you could say the sites were a little hard, because to justify that difficulty they probably needed something like triple the reward at least, and that might have been too much reward. On the other hand offering a big shiny reward for the super hard site would have provoked a lot of interest also.
They’ve either just done another change to them which has dropped the risk, or there is a bug, but if they’ve dropped the risk (As noticed by the second group that runs them who ran them today), then expect the number of people running them to actually go back up again, because the risk/reward balance will be in a much better place.
So, you don’t just give up without actually analysing the problem. And the problem with RW & FOB’s is not the sites themselves. It is the poor or non existent rewards relative to the risk & effort. The site design itself was great for both of them.
I figured out a fit for fobs, people fitted it (because numbers for the subgroup of people interested in them in cas fell outside my timezone), they ran it, got fairly close to finishing in (given they had some alphas and were using an alpha friendly fit, thats ok). They may perhaps have finished it if they’d tried on a fresh fob the second time, not the alerted one.
I imagine it will get done next weekend, and I imagine after we get the wrinkles of using alphas to get past gurista fobs, we’ll do same for bloods.
My main problem with next weekend may be all our usual logi suspects running incursions.
Its been a few hours entertainment for me even though I didn’t run it, and its been various amounts of entertainment and conversation for others too. Even an uni-ista with a cas alt discussing their attempts (they have a similar problem to us, wanting to remain near the alpha / new player capability range).
I’m going to say that they probably can do it, they are probably not great at it, but the player habits of 15 years will take a long time to change.
Compressing with a right-click context menu used to be against the mechanic as well, but if you’d like to see compression return to the days of blueprints in industry at least refinery owners will earn ISK off of folk that only compress and ship to Jita.
What if you are an 31337 PvP corporation and don’t want to mine, yet want to put up refineries on every moon in a system to capture the income of others that do mine, the same as with a customs office on a planet? You could rent the whole moon out for ISK and give one entity exclusive access with the % tax left at 0.
You gain nothing by punishing part of your own corporation except people leaving. Are you really suggesting to sit on everyone’s API and compare the mining ledger to the wallet journal to check everyone is refining ‘in the right place’? The API isn’t very helpful in the wallet journal, when refining takes place you don’t see the where or the what, only who and how much they were charged.
I doubt if a refinery is made publicly accessible there will be much concern where the % tax comes from. If you want corporation only mining, then implicitly create an incentive, make the % less than other areas or configure the ACL appropriately.
Sigh. it is at least better than status quo. The upside is a war free month, I haven’t even seen one suggestion what should happen when you kill the war structure from anyone that support that way of “fixing” wardecs. Are the wardeccer able to just put up another structure and dec you again?
Ehm… Ok I see I should have worded it better for you. I dont mind people opting out of wars, but corp jumping is also used by the aggressor. Stopping people for immediately recreate the corp and jump over, and aggressors option to jump to another war without allies to take down your structure or fleet without allies interfering.
If this would be the case, there would’nt be a problem. But in my 6+ years of doing bashing jobs in highsec I think I can count on my digits how many defending fleets showed up. Everybody wants a fleet fight, but in highsec most good fights are the small ones. Oh and my point with a war structure is that if its easy enough for 5 guys to kill off its gonna be cheap and a cost of operating for the wardeccers. Or its a citadel and the 5 guys dont have a chance against a defensive fleet.
Tbh, I dont care about the stupid. You already get a 24 hour warning that the war IS coming. This should be enough time for the word to spread in a corp. Send some mails, update the motd etc.
Yeh, that tiggered me too. Pretty much spent all my time since 2013 in null-sec. Never saw nullification as a real problem. Sure, the gatecampers were complaining in mumble/ts a lot when another “taxi” went through and later when WWB happened the claw fleets were a painful thing but they all had their counters to them and calling this the “major problem” is simply sad.
I presumed you declare war, they kill your structure in 2 days or whatever, they have 5 days free of your war, ie if you fail to win your structure fight, you only get a couple of days of war for your costs, and the costs will be relatively high, since its going to be large corps that field fleets to win those fights, not small ones… Whether there has to be a longer post war no-redec time I don’t know. This is a discussion after all.
but aren’t you all mass deccers who’d be jumping out of 50 wars ?
Getting a fleet together, flying it to your location and having you dock up for a while and then log off is one thing I can think of that is slightly less exciting than a structure bash without a fleet fight.
We’ve long established that I am not interested in attempting to make war mechanisms to suit 5 man corps, and I imagine we’ve established that you don’t really want fleets preventing you from hunting.
I happen to care that a shiploss can equate to a war loss, even if the ship was private, and the items were private and had no bearing on the corps ability to fight a war or even worse the ship belonged to an alt of the deccers and carried price manipulated stuff.
I don’t think this is workable, nor what the CSM intends. You can’t have loss of a war structure end wars early as it completely screws up the most important function of wars - removing other structures in highsec. Being able to prevent an attacker from showing up at last timer of your structure by destroying a war structure and regaining CONCORD protection is convoluted and provides too much protection to large groups.
It’s also not necessary. If you limit wars to structure-owning groups, you automatically provide protection for small, new and casual groups who can just be safe by not deploying a structure. There is no need to give groups that can fight and protect structures more free NPC protection. Having to defending their structures is the part of the cost of enjoying their benefits.
It also serves to have the aggressors put some of that famous ‘skin in the game’ everyone wants to see and provides a target to counter-attack.
It’s not a magic bullet, and just moves the line when small groups start competing and potentially getting stomped by larger groups a little further along so wardeccers will still be maligned and the mechanic called unfair, but it would make for some more space for new social groups that don’t have to worry about wars for a short while while they gain power and numbers.
If you can’t defend your structure in your timezone, you aren’t removing a structure in the targets timezone.
This gameplay exists already. its literally how a cas character plays the game. We have a pve fleet, a mining fleet, an incursion fleet etc, the nullsec combat guild, all managed by channels.
So the skin in the game will be renting a system in the spire and dumping an astra 20au from the nearest celestial. No matter what happens, the wartarget aint gunna get to it.
You might. Ending a war early completely undermines the whole point of the structure timer system. I guess if you can just resume the war by deploying another beacon then it isn’t a big deal, but handing out safety like candy to the biggest groups who can clear structures is just inane. They aren’t the ones that need protection from wars, it is the little guys.
Of course it does. The NPC corp is the intended way to keep this safety and opt-out of wars. All a structure requirement would do is be one method of creating “social corp”. Given how important forming and being part of social groups is to player retention, I see no reason why it should automatically be coupled to increased risk of attack (via wars). The fact that this game play already exists is why I don’t think it is a very big deal to limit wars to structure-holding corps only. Nothing is really changing given if you don’t own a structure, you pretty much are in the NPC corp already. It just moves those corps that are basically only social in nature into the war-immune category but still allows them a shared identity.
All it does is make the safer shared-chat channel paradigm the default when newly formed. There probably should be some more tweaks around the edges, but the idea of exempting purely social corps from the responsibility of defending from wars I am fully on board with as it doesn’t add anything that doesn’t exist already.
That’s better than nothing. No longer would the big groups be able to whine how wars are broken because the wardeccers just dock up when they show up to fight. They can go show up at the home structure and push their nose in, and if that means going to the back of beyond, so be it.
Whats stopping the wardeccers to just sit out the defense, accept the cost, and redec at next opportunity, like the targets do now… sacrificing their structure and reform?
So you aren’t aware this has been an issue? example, VMG pilots jump out of their wars to an alt corp also at war with you just for the time the bash takes, then joins up in another corp in VMG to circumvent the mechanics in place to prevent this from happening.
I want to restrict THEM (wardeccers) using mechanics like corp jumping and neutral logi to make it easier to fight back.
Yeah, you dont care about the small guys we have established that, but I do.
And no… Being camped down by a fleet bigger than ours is something I know I’m risking when deccing larger groups than myself. Its never been an issue tbh. I welcome the challenge. There’s nothing more satisfactory than winning the isk war against a much bigger force, by just chipping at them. Who in their right mind to head to head with a bigger force and expect to win?
Again, who in their right mind would use isk to dec a corp he has an alt in, then go kill his own ■■■■, to win a war he started? At least if he have to do it to turn the war because of his own loss, then he have to sacrifice something more costly than the ship he already lost.
As I love arguing this, it seems from you answers to Pedro, that your just argue for the sake of arguing. And running out of valid points I might add.
So if the defender takes action, they can end the war quickly. So there is a reason for them to fight. (other than to defend their own stuff in space).
Because right now, ‘log off for a week’ is a used method of dealing with wardecs.
Well, as I posted on your blog many years ago, it is a terrible idea.
Letting people out of wars may make sense if wars serve no purpose but harassment, but if they are the primary mechanism to remove structures in highsec it isn’t workable. It would make anybody other than the largest highsec mercs and the nullsec groups unable to declare wars without permission of the big dogs who could just come and blob their beacon and turn off their ability to declare wars. Their structures would also be 100% safe, protected by CONCORD with no need for an active defence.
This is so glaringly obvious, I am confident such a mechanism will never be implemented. Perhaps, as I said if the war could be immediately resumed with the redeployment of a new beacon to resume a structure bash something could work, but this is still convoluted and silly and massively favours nullsec groups and the large merc organizations.
Use structures as the dividing line to define a social corp immune to all wars, sure. But giving the big corps a way to earn complete safety by blobbing a button? No thanks.
Thx for letting us know.
Without… we players are not able to know what you “intended” and are left to assume or guess.
I tried to ask you what your ideas to get a sense, but you wont even answer my basic questions.
At least if he have to do it to turn the war because of his own loss, then he have to sacrifice something more costly than the ship he already lost.