The AT ships costs between 100B and 200B ISK. Most of those ships have a relatively low industry price, they missing in public contracts and on market, but on zKillboard they have a clear predefined price. I mean how formal and relatively are these prices in every system. Look at SoCT’s ships. The industry price of a Gnosis is 1 Tritanium, but their prices on market are defined by completely other criteria - just because they are rare and in limited edition or, sometimes, because they are hard to catch. You mentioned that JF are not so popular, very protected and hard to catch, so they can deserve a “bonus value” on zKillboard. They can have a high price on EVE markets, but it will not change anything since we can invent JF T2 BPC, where the required materials will cost 3B ISK, and craft 'em. For example, from this point of view, a faction JF can cost 10B ISK. I agree.
Based on your arguments, you are not interested into the ganking warfare itself, nor into quantity and quality of destroyed ships, nor into the overall cost of vessels on zKillboard - you are just interested to ruin somebody’s game play and as much as possible.
The largest group of players in this game has openly professed that this is their goal, and they openly seek ways to espouse this in other games as well.
And we wonder why retention numbers are often a point of contention on these forums, and indeed why MMOs as a genre are no longer pursued.
We don’t wonder. We know retention became a problem after the playstyles you speak of were nerfed beyond a certain point and the game became boring.
Before then even devs were explaining that the corner stone of eve was ruining someone else’s day and the game was much more popular. When it was easier for us to steal from eachother or betray eachother the game was more popular.
Players are best retained when they interact with others and feel they can make an impact on their surroundings (the player agency ccp like to talk about). So it really is no wonder that the more you nerf knocking over other peoples sandcastles (and the need to put effort into not having your castle knocked over), the more freedoms you take away from players to be naughty or nice, the lower the retention rate of the players.
Moddycoddling is responsible for the lack of interactive gameplay and the lack of impact a player can have. And it’s responsible for the lower player count.
I understand what you’re getting at here. One of the reasons why I found EvE to be less enthralling was the fact that I literally couldn’t get anyone to interact with me at all, aside from being silently blown up.
And yes I’m aware. The developers released a study, that indicated or implied that retention was higher when people had their “whole day ruined”.
But I’ll be honest with you chief. I kind of have a hard time believing that. And let’s be for real here. It isn’t even getting blown up. As I have said many times, in many threads in the past… People can stand to lose. People can accept that their progress has been reset. What they probably find a lot harder to accept is the inane, gleeful mockery that comes alongside it.
I also have a hard time believing that CCP saw such explosive growth, considering that nobody can really seem to pinpoint exactly when in this games life cycle we had this apparently mythical period of time where the majority of people who killed you, would suddenly decide to become your friends if you showed a good attitude about it.
I’ve been killed something like five or six times on this character I think. I have reached out to offer congratulations on each person who caught my stupid pod flying through their space. Not a single one of them could be assed to respond in any way.
I’ve been in the code chat room dozens of times. They barely talk too.
In order for me to buy into this narrative that getting ganked is still increasing retention, Vice it being a Cherry Picked era in the life of this game that gets trotted out for argumentative purposes, you’re going to have to convince me that it was a good thing to put the Power entirely in the hands of the people doing the gank, and that their whimsical, ephemeral decision on whether or not they were going to be friend and teach their victims was ever utilized to do that.
I’m trying some solo pvp on my alpha alt. Picked a fight with a rifter that I didn’t realise was artie fit and after a very brief exchange he saluted and sent me the value of my ship in isk.
I went up against a vigil fleet issue. Got it into 5% structure but had to back off or die. We kicked the ■■■■ afterwards. And got a congrats for doing so with an alpha.
When I’ve been ganked the gankers have contacted me. One to mock how i was lecturing bears on how to avoid ganks on the forums minutes before being ganked myself. It wasn’t malicious, it was jokes.
I myself have advised wartargets when they contact me and want to know what happened or, in one case, got a recipe for a pie.
Perhaps something is missing here. Maybe in the days of “people would stay in the game when they got blown up more” there were other factors. Something about causality. You point out, as an example, that you cannot get anybody to interact with you. I remember Eve back when there was always interaction and there were more explosions for sure. But the interactions were as good as they were bad.
The beginning of the end, I think, started back when players began to create their own websites and blogs and bandy about “tears” as part of the trophies they put on display. A KM was not enough, apparently. Hence your “bonus room” comment. It’s one thing to play a game, it’s another to be put on blast as somebody’s entertainment. CCP should have used copyright laws to put a stop to that but the train has left the station and the damage is done. After around that time, came the “if the victim talks, it’s tears! If the victim does not talk, he’s so upset, he can’t! Therefore, MORE TEARS!”
And it’s likely that Eve is not the only game with this taint of degeneracy and societal rot where “the kind of people” who would be entertained by a bonus room have pretty much ensured it’s unsafe to communicate with anybody. It’s like those “vibrant” cities with high crime and low trust where eye contact with the wrong person can get you killed.
And yes, it’s true. I"m sorry you don’t see it. I do remember a time when the “pirates” could be talked to and I remember a time when they did befriend their opponents and teach them the ropes. I have had some very good pirates and gankers I would call friends and learned a lot from.
I can give you reasons why the player base has degenerated but it’ll take the threads into paths generally not allowed around here because it strikes too many nerves.
You do realize most AT ships are heavily under priced on zkill?
What? I never ever said that. I didn’t even mention them in regard to how much they cost on zkill. I said their cost to their economic impact and safety is fair. Don’t make ■■■■ up.
It’s a game. I like destroying spaceships. How is that griefing? Don’t be such a fuckwit.
The problem with this thoery is that there was an entire alliance called tears dedicated to farming tears and teaching new players how to farm tears, minerbumping was also created and a section of the forum called crime and punishment where players could display their stories of ‘crime’. But the game still grew in subscription base every year despite all this.
You had to nerf the alliance tears into inexistance before subs started to go down. Crime and punishment is now quieter, and so too is minerbumping. But despite that, subs are not going back up. It suggests the opposite is more likely. Preventing players from creating such stories and sharing them is hurting the growth of the game.
This would make sense. High profile pvp events have given ccp and eve online press attention in the past. Big battles. Big thefts. Big scams. And then sharing these experiences with the outside world in professional news mediums.
It’d probably be a very bad idea to stop people from story telling to eachother and the world outside of eve the kind of freedoms (to be the villain) you have in eve. We all know it’s where a lot of interest in eve comes from, and probably the opposite of the game killer you think it is.
I hope for your sake that you are correct. And I’m not saying that I think you are not. What I am saying is…
Increasing the amount of one-upmanship in the field of acting like a dick hole to other people would seem to be bad optics for the vast overwhelming majority of potential players.
Or you know, social conditions have changed since EVE started, and that sort of behaviour has become less acceptable in general society, so…
You are trying to find a single cause for a complex issue, and mistaking correlation and causation here.
Some people respond to a loss with the most vile and reprehensible behavior. Minerbumping illustrates this. The source is biased, of course, but even as someone who is peaceful in game, I see this kind of bad behavior and lack of sportsmanship.
It’s natural, I think, that players would come to dislike that kind of player. They don’t shoot you, but they exude a passive aggression with an unjustifiably high intensity. You simply can not play your game without having to deal with it.
Natural selection then kicks in. Players either deal with it, or like it, or they quit doing it. Getting people to quit playing, or at least quit playing the way they want to, is the tearful player’s goal, but if they drive away the more sensitive players, that only the more insensitive ones would be left is a matter of course.
There’s an immense double standard that seems to exist where shooting people in Hisec is terrible, but writing nasty notes to wish them and their family death and suffering is okay when it really should be the other way around. There’s also an incredible bias to believe all new players are automatically carebears who don’t want PvP, and so I don’t think PvP rookies are considered or provided for as well as they should be.
I know there’s a lot of speculation and complexity here. It’s a general trend that the more you shield people from consequences, the more brazen and arrogant they behave. I think that PvP is a useful balance to hold people to account, and that some of what people call griefing is holding players to account for violating societal guidelines like that you shouldn’t wish someone else’s mom gets cancer.
We’re in this strange juxtaposition where the criminals are the good guys in a way because they are accountable and adhere to good social behavior, while the coddled and protected don’t feel the need to adhere to basic decency because of things that occur only in a fictional context.
Depends what a potential player is. What a REAL potential player is.
For example (perhaps a bad one but I’m just hinting at a point), 80% of players that ‘level up their raven’ and never get shot at quit within two months anyways, and should probably be discounted as potential players…unless we fix that particular issue. But before people point the finger at gankers and wardeccers, these players tended to not join corps and not be ganked.
And the most promising potential players would most likely be the ones we nerfed in 2012/13 and forever since caused a downward trend of retention.
Social conditions certainly have changed. The average eve player has changed.
But what came first; the chicken or the egg?
Did playstyles change and then ccp adapted the game around that? or did ccp make changes that caused the kinds of players who would stick around to leave/stop joining and be replaced by more kinds of players that don’t stick around.
I personally believe the latter. It wasn’t a gradual slow down like a general shift in peoples perception. There was a big change to several fundamental mechanics situated with the most populated area of the game folllowed by a significant shift in player activity.
Minerbumping does not illustrate this.
Minerbumping gleefully, excitedly, doggedly encourages this.
Every word that is communicated to those that are ganked by code is specifically designed to engender as much anger and irritation as possible.
So let’s not gild the Lily here.
And before the army of pedants shows up and tries the age-old counter-argument, no I don’t think the players behind the keyboard are necessarily nasty people. They’re playing a game, and enjoying themselves. They’re following the rules, and Performing actions explicitly allowed in the game. More power to them.
But let’s quit acting like they aren’t doing it for that very reason.
I’m referring to, primarily, the ‘miner grab bag’. As far as I can tell, there is no comparable ‘ganker grab bag’ where the attacker displays like behavior. I know of some isolated incidents like the ‘bonus room’, but those incidents don’t have continuous historical continuity.
No doubt, Minerbumping is biased and aims to push its side of the story above all others, but I don’t think it goes so far as to falsify anything it reports, so I believe these incidents are real, and I have seen like events take place while I’ve been in an area.
I think the reaction to blowing up space pixels is disproportionately high or the reaction to people lashing out with bad behavior we certainly would not tolerate in real life is disproportionately low.
I’ve had a few interactions with CODE. agents, and they span a gamut. Some are better and some are worse, but not a single one has harassed me. I have no doubt that if caught, I will be killed. Probably get an eve-mail about it, too. A hate filled diatribe iterating all the misfortunes they hope I and all my family suffer? No.
We also wouldn’t tolerate blowing up stuff in real life. Nor would we tolerate robbing someone then sending them passive aggressive mails victim blaming either. Lets not get carried away on one side and ignore the other.
As for Code, members within code certainly have engaged in sustained campaigns of harassment on people, on a continuous historical basis.
The bonus room was not an isolated incident, that was six or more months of bonus rooms all the same. With large audiences of code players none of whom ever thought it was anything other than acceptable behaviour. Trying to pretend it was some one off occurrence is an attempt at white washing the whole thing and playing the victim card. It’s simply not going to fly.
Sure, that doesn’t excuse the behaviour of the particular ganked players who fly off the handle on their own, but many of them are goaded into doing so deliberately.
Let me be clear. I absolutely believe every single story that minerbumping puts out about how shity their victims can be in the face of exploding pixels.
I also 100% believe that the gankers are deliberately trying to push buttons in order to get exactly that sort of response.
I’m deliberately trying not to take a stance on that group, other than what I believe to be a universal fact that all reasonable people would accept. I don’t mean to praise the group, nor disparage it, given that it’s a hot topic and this is about general safety in hisec.
That there’s a link between more safety and that kind of bad behavior is what I’m aiming to point out, and they just happen to have evidence that I feel is relevant to the topic, and that it would be silly to exclude it no matter my personal bias for or against the organization.