The problem is that other groups talk too much. Many people in High sec are not talking because that is why they are in High sec: They want to play EVE as a game, not as a hobby or second job. They just want to run their missions, do some exploration, mine a couple of asteroids or trade. They are not interested in the politics and more serious aspects of the game because they would turn EVE from a game into a second job, which is what sov null sec does to your experience. Lots of people are not interested in that kind of forced grind.
On the other hand, there are those who talk too much to shape EVE according to their opinions and force their opinions on others.
For instance structures: They should never have been released for high sec. No one needs them there. They only cause unrewarding, unenjoyable issues. They should have just been for low sec and null sec instead where people can benefit from them, and where you can create a drawing factor that could potentially entice some formerly uninterested people to leave their easy high sec life to try out something new. With structures in high sec, however, they see the grind and tedium they are right away, and have no or only little reason to try them out elsewhere.
As for high sec not speaking up: I speak up about high sec all the time, and not exactly quietly. Not my fault if CCP does not read their forums. I refuse to use Facebook, Twitter or reddit to reach them.
Uhmmm… what? No. I don’t know what you decided to read into my statement, but it’s just a normal breakdown of MMO populations: most of the players in any given MMO don’t go to the gatherings, don’t get involved in the forums, don’t really socialize with the rest of the playerbase past their group/guild… and that’s across all economic strata.
It’s been that way since MMOs were DikuMUDs in the 1980s. Try maybe not specifically looking for ways you can get offended.
Since forever. Go on. Dig back into the posting history of people like me, Aryth, Querns, Baltec1, and others, on these forums and the last two versions. Highsec and lowsec have to be healthy in order to promote a balanced ecosystem across the game. If everything is nullsec, then things stagnate worse than they already are. There’s noplace for people to be coming from.
Purely from the self-serving perspective for null, highsec is where small groups of new players form, and start to find their way. Then they maybe dabble in low for a bit, on the edges of highsec. Maybe it’s mission-running L4s and L5s. Maybe it’s testing the waters of PvP without wardec mechanics. There’s a bunch of different paths to follow that lead from high to low, and potentially from high or low out to null.
But in order for new groups to be able to follow those paths and chart their own course, they need some place where they can operate in relative safety (because it’s not truly safe, we all know that) to get used to things and find their feet. And no, not everyone’s going to come out to null. That’s fine, too. See, if we assume that 0.05% of new players make the move to nullsec after 12 months in high/low… then that means we want a strong and healthy highsec.
And if that doesn’t make sense to you, consider this: If 0.05% of new players will make the move to null after 12 months, do we—who will always need people coming into our groups, and always need new groups coming into nullsec to keep things from stagnating even more than they already do—want that 0.05% to be 0.05% of 10, or 0.05% of 10,000?
Nullsec is only one part of a very complicated social ecosystem. If we want Null to be healthy, we need the whole thing to be healthy. And we know that.
Riiiiight. CCP asks for feedback, so nullsec’s response should be… ‘no, we’re not going to give you feedback that can help the game because highsec people aren’t paying attention and offering you theirs’?
That’s a little ridiculous. Do you also believe that because voter turnout in the US in 2016 was only 61%, then half of that 61% should stay home and vote so all the people who didn’t vote don’t get the voters’ opinions forced on them?
It’s patently ridiculous. If CCP’s constant and open requests for feedback get ignored by a large segment of highsec players, that shouldn’t be grounds to penalize the people who do engage and try to be helpful.
Right. All of my feedback here’s been about nullsec, right? I’ve been talking about procedural mission content… for nullsec. I’ve been giving an estimation of the effort/reward problems in RW… for nullsec. Because that’s totally where I was running the RW sites that only happen in highsec, right?
What’s the next step, telling me that sure, maybe some schmuck nullbear might think about and play in highsec, but the leadership of the really big groups never does?
An example: Feedback for “make everything destructible” is Null sec feedback, that CCP then applied to all areas of space. Ruining high sec with unnecessary, unrewarding tedium, and low sec faction warfare in the process without any need.
Who asked for fleet PVE in high sec? Null sec people did. What did we get? Fleet PVE that no one uses because people in High sec don’t want to fleet up and wait for other people to do things, unlike null sec people.
Who asked for stronger NPCs? Mostly null sec people. Where did we get them? In High sec, where people just want to go by their casual business. Where did we not get them? In Null sec where random miner fleets are scarce and largely ignored, and Ship Yards being farmed with 4 Titans.
No, you’re painting with an overly broad brush. Just because we live in null doesn’t mean we don’t do things in highsec, or have valid suggestions for high and low. When we do, we make it pretty clear we’re talking about high or low. When we’re talking about null, we’re generally pretty clear we’re talking about null. No, not everyone is really good at communicating, but overall, we’re usually pretty clear on that.
Why would people who don’t play in highsec ask for fleet PvE in highsec? I mean, if you want to point at incursions and say ‘look at how many of the HS incursion runners are players who also have character in null’, that’s kind of a shady and dishonest little false dichotomy there, isn’t it? I mean, those are highsec players. How do we know that?
They’re running HS incursions. They’re playing. In highsec. THAT MEANS THEY’RE HIGHSEC PLAYERS.
Who asked for stronger NPCs? Please point me to the threads asking for stronger NPCs. Null PvErs might want higher bounties, but really, if you think any idiot in Delve or Pure Blind or Deklein with 6 AFK Ishtars logged in is thinking ‘Man, I wish the NPCs were harder’, you’re on crack. What does ‘stronger’ NPCs even mean? Does it mean they have more EHP? Better resists? Do more damage? All three? We’ve got those. We don’t even run the ‘harder’ anoms. We run the anoms that give the best isk-for-effort returns. We run the profitable ones. And you should know that, you’re in Mercenary Coalition, fer chrissakes.
Burner missions and the new NPC AI were things that came from people (mostly mission-runners) asking for ‘more engaging’ NPCs. Which is a lovely phrase, because ask 5 people what that means and you’ll get 8 answers. And then CCP’s stuck trying to make a blind guess what that means, and no matter what they go with, someone out there is going to ■■■■■ and moan about it because it’s not what their specific subset of the missioning crowd wanted.
So really, Mr. I-am-the-Champion-of-Highsec-While-a-Member-of-One-of-the-Null-Blocs, no, your assertions are all just patently wrong.
Now with all these issues someone wants to include that we can only shoot people with structures?
Yes its one of the ways to solve that mess. The problem with the current wardec mechanism is that its for highsec carebears essentially game breaking. If you arn’t interested in PvP and have no structures to defend, there is nothing for you to gain by undocking while wardeced. So the result is that those type of players simply stop logging in and after a few wardecs don’t come back.
And given the prices of those packs, it’s not gonna be the new player getting the hurricane or tempest SKINs (or the corresponding ones for the other races).
Because it’s throwing good money after bad. There’s a limited amount of time and effort available from a limited pool of developers, and they’ve already admitted in the past that the tools for building missions didn’t exist for a damned long time. Instead, the old missions were hand-scripted by guys who haven’t been at the company in 10 years.
So if they’re going to be building a good set of tools for building missions, they want to build better missions with that toolkit. It just doesn’t make sense to, in effect, go out and build a brand new factory… to produce beat-up, pre-aged cars. That’s why they’ve been trying to build a better way to PvE, time and time and time again. Sleeper AIs. Incursions. Burner AIs. They’re trying to find the form of engagement that clicks with mission-runners, and the idea that they’re going to go and invest a ton of man-hours and pay-hours into building content that was already getting old when most of their current devs were graduating college is just delusional.
They ask for more engaging content, not more difficult NPCs. You can create plenty of more engaging and more challenging content without any new AI involved. And if CCP really feels stuck between 8 different answers, then you do 3 or 4 different things and see what receives the most praise or most criticism. You can create new missions with varying setups besides Burner Missions and some new exploration approaches. No one asked CCP to bet everything on their New AI, let alone spam mission runners with Burner missions above anything else.
Speak for yourself, I don’t run Havens and only rarely Sanctums. Why would I put myself into a riskier position towards hunters when I can make just as much, more in fact, ISK in other anomalies. And when it comes to that: That’s another area where CCP could make things more challenging for everyone buy turning on the Forlorn/Gas Haven NPC behavior for every single anomaly out there.
Stronger NPC is easy to figure: Slightly tankier, and faster NPCs. They don’t even need to do more damage, they mostly just need to be faster. Faster frigates to tackle more VNIshtars and run from fighters towards the carriers, for instance. Faster BS that spread around quicker. Faster Elite Cruisers that get into neut or jam range quicker and hunt fighters. You don’t need any new AI for now to make the existing NPC more challenging.
That said, better AI can come later. There is just no logical explanation to bet everything on it from the very start of NPC changes when there are many things that are easier to tweak and change.
Are there efforts to do direct user research with specific groups of players? I’m referring to qualitative research that isn’t dependent on large sample sizes, but offers clear insight into player behaviour and wants (user needs). I was under the impression that CCP worked in an agile way? If that’s the case, including user research in your development process is especially relevant. I’ve heard it referred to from CCP, but then it seems to only refer to surveys.
The point of agile, and user research, is to ensure that months of development time aren’t committed to the wrong solution to a problem. Prototype, test, iterate. Could have helped avoid sinking time and money into a feature like RW which seemed to have a limited chance of success.
User research will not help too much here … remember all the folks asking for more group activities and better NPCs in Highsec? There need to be some fundamental changes to the development process, IMO:
CCP must realize that new players must be educated in PvP, active (aggressive) and passive (avoiding), because this is what they need to know to survive and stay. This is not the job of the nullsec newbie corps, but has to be in the NPE.
Every dev and (low level) manager must actively play EvE on a monitored account, from NPE and try out all aspects of the game.
All features have to be created in stages, and with backup/iteration plans, and tested on TQ (not SiSi only). A first iteration of a feature containing the basic mechanics is released as beta, and players can test. In this phase the feature/change can be switched off easily in emergency situations. Based on usage metrics and feedback, it is iterated on (2-3 iterations shall be “priced in”). If it doesn’t work, it is removed after beta and latest after first iteration from the game freeing up resources.
I know there are databases and data conversions, but somehow the development needs to become more flexible / modular, to reduce the risk of being stuck with something not maintainable.
There were things discussed at the summit that are redacted from the minutes because we want to show them to the community at a later time. There are also things we’ve been planning since the summit that obviously wouldn’t be in there.
We do a lot of research through surveys and data digging.
Testing behaviour on TQ is hard. When we have a playable feature to test, it goes on Singularity where players can test it but even when it’s there it doesn’t tell us much about how players will use the feature on TQ. Those tests mostly help us with bugs and exploits.
I see a lot of discussion about why we don’t just make new agent missions to add to the pool.
Something we’ve talked about before is that the system used to create those missions is old and creating new missions within it is slow and difficult work.
Part of the value proposition of different NPC features is that we can work on new tools and tech at the same time.
Then there’s the fact that despite everything…a LOT of people play the old missions every day and a lot of people run them for years and years. Feel free to tell me if you think I’m wrong on this next point, but when we look at the numbers, the value proposition of re-directing resources to add new missions isn’t necessarily that convincing.
They run them because there is nothing else to choose from, lvl4 missions are the end game for hisec, there is nothing else. It’s like you have a data that NS anomalies are being run a lot. Ofc they will be. Players don’t want to re-direct them into something else, just add new types of them, with tools you describe, and make the ability to choose which type you want to run. Whole mission UI need to be revamped but that topic on other discussion.
In the CSM minutes - yes, I did read them - there was a question about Forward Operation Bases and NPC mining fleets.
Your response was: DOES NOT CONCERN US.
Not my fault if CCP does not read their forums. I refuse to use Facebook, Twitter or reddit to reach them.
